Meta-Strategy: How to get a beating at the level above Transcend

[Avenoct]

I think my favorite meta-strategy for SMAC is to always have a game going in which I just might lose, and lose badly. It's o.k. to play through a game that's 'In the bag' once in awhile, but I'd rather maintain some level of tension untill the final events have been written in the history books. Our recent 'No-Crawler' challenge succession game turned out to be a real nail-biter in this sense, and I think we learned a lot in that game.

To further along this Meta-strategy of challenge I uploaded the supercharged versions of the 'Starting Seven' that I've been playing with on my own. If you just can't enjoy SP for the lack of challenge, they might be worth a try. Here's the Level above Transcend thread.

How do you maintain challenging games?

-S-

[T-hawk]

Re: Meta-Strategy: How to get a beating at the level above Transcend

How do you maintain challenging games?

Get rid of the unbalanced stuff that the computer can't or won't use.

Population booming is the worst offender. As AIs, the Hive, Believers, Morgans, and Gaians cannot pop-boom because their agenda conflicts with the required settings, and in any event the AI doesn't do anywhere near enough of the proper terraforming (hybrid forests or condensers) to have the food to exploit it.

So I junk it from the game. I do this by changing Democracy and Planned to +1 growth instead of +2 (and Green is -1 instead of -2.) Neither me nor the AI ever has enough psych at a base larger than size 4 to trigger a Golden Age, so therefore population-booms won't happen. If the game goes as far as Eudaimonic, I scrap all the Children's Creches. The adjustments to growth do put the game in better balance even without regard to pop-booms, I think.

The other huge human advantage is supply crawlers. I could just not use them, but that feels a tad too crippling, so I treat them as facilities: each base gets one. It's comparable to Recycling Tanks, with a build cost of 30 granting 4-6 resources per turn. This also means no energy park of course, which is horrendously unbalancing.

The last big human advantage is Fusion Power. If a human player is running a military campaign, we know to SPRINT straight for that and immediately use it in all units. 8-1-2*2 rovers, jets, and copters each cost a disgustingly low 30 minerals and are brutally effective. I usually play with Blind Research, which greatly reduces the human's ability to beeline here (and the other flashpoints of Ind-Auto, Eco Eng, MMI) but is hardly a complete solution.

Moving Fusion later in the game makes the problem _worse_ because the human player will more often get it before the AI. For now, I've been giving it away to all my allies as soon as I get it, and they usually lose it to my enemies pretty quickly. I plan to experiment with moving it to very early in the game (recall that in Civilization II, Fusion does usually come before you launch your Alpha Centauri ship). I also want to try giving the reactors power values of 2/3/4/5, which greatly decreases the power/cost ratio gap between Fission and Fusion. But that means you can't make a unit costing less than three rows (police, empath rover, etc) because of the reactor minimum-cost limitations.


Take out these three unfair human advantages, and the AI's production advantages come pretty close to matching the human's superior strategic planning. Play on maps with a lot of land to reduce the impact of the AI's ineptness with combined-arms tactics, and you'll get some very close, enjoyable games on Transcend difficulty.

[Vale Lurk]

I like the idea of this thread!

And I especially like T-hawk's ideas- thanks for sharing them with us. I'll try those growths settings right away! - making these game unbalancing strategies difficult/impossible has to the the right way to go to keep the game interesting. The crawler-as-facility idea is just perfect since my ideal base location strategy involves leaving one tile per base outside of any base radius.
(That is, all bases have four neighbours 3 tiles E, W, S and N, leaving the tiles 3 away at NE, SE, NW and SW oustide any base)

[TeknoMerc]

actually, many of these changes were mentioned as part of the Torture Mod mentioned in this and the Creation forums about 4-5 weeks ago. please search for those threads for more discussion.

you are correct tho, crawlers and Pop-Booming are a large human advantage and also shorten the game considerably. another that is easy to change is rush-building (RB). consistent RB generates (over time) a huge turn advantage. however, the AI will use it to a limited extent in Thinker and Transcend difficulty games.

one thing I do is enhance the unit choices, since the AI is none too good at creating new units from discovered abilities. example: Foil Probe, Hover Probe. once I put these in the units list, the AI uses them with zeal! anyway, look up the Torture Mod threads.

[Blake]

I dont use pop-booming or crawlers - havn't for quite a while.
At one stage I used the rule "2 crawlers per base, crawlers can only work mines, condensors, or specials". Now I only use them for SP rushing, and no upgrade bug either .

I eventually determined the best bonus to give ++Transcend AI's is +++POLICE, really makes the AI drone control problems a thing of the past

[Avenoct]

Blake, like the new Avatar...is it a SMAX baseball cap? That would be nifty, though I'm not sure I want to see what the SMAX Frathouse looks like...

Great list so far. I forgot to mention that I often play on quick-start and huge maps. These give the AI a seemingly 'natural' advantage.

-Smack