Playing as a hermit

[Sarxis]

No Faction is an island unto themselves.

Just felt like saying it.

[Xian]

thanks for the help ill try this stuff out

[Capt Dizle]

jt's current house rules for SP:

1. Must use initial colony pods to found two separate bases.
2. Conquest/diplomatic win only.
3. Double blind tech stag.
4. Can't build colony pods until 100 turns have passed AND industrial auto is in hand.
5. Any bases captured before the above must be gifted or starved. Improvements may be sold. Bases captured after the above may be kept but no non-military base improvements, formers or crawlers may be built.
6. Any bases established after the requirements of rule 4 are met can only build military improvements or military units. You can rehome formers and or crawlers to these new bases however.
7. Can never sneak attack, declare vendetta, accept truce or peace, nor enter into a pact that would cause vendetta. Exception: Submission pact.

[Googlie]

To balance the playing field (as the AI rarely, if ever, builds crawlers, set the cost to, say, 8 - this makes them as expensive as an energy bank or network node - with the added advantage that greater engined don't reduce the cost, as it's not autocalculated

So the temptation to build them disappears, and certainly they become useless for SP building.

Just disbling the tech needed puts them in the colony pod class - they appear right from the game start.

(Course you'd need to copy the entire smac directory over to a new one - say "funsmac" otherwise you'd be screwing yourself in PBEMs if you forgot to edit the cost before each turn after playing your single-player game)

G.

[Hendrik]

I just have a hard time giving myself a handicap in SMAX, but that really seems to be the only way to make losing possible. I recently played the CGN challenge where all the other factions are pacted together, start with pre-founded bases (in positions difficult to probe) with lots of terraforming (boreholes) done. Each faction started with several bases, Morgan had two continents, two HQ bases, and was pacted with every AI faction. He had several bases producing more than 100 energy, and was raking in tech at 2 turns/tech or 3 turns/ tech up to transcendance. Even with these massive AI bonuses I still had a relatively easy time winning, I lost most of my crawlers, but I just played a hermit game and build up to the point where I had enough energy production and labs to do reasonably well, and enough mineral production to crank out probe foils. I finally caught up to Morgan in tech while he was about 5 years from discovering everything, and easily transcended.

I just have a hard time giving myself handicaps, I usually don't find playing with a handicap enjoyable. Miriam double blind sounds interesting... but I remember the UBC with loathing. I have not done the OCC but it seems to be mostly luck, if you start between Yang, Miriam, and Santiago on a relatively small map even the most skillfull of players would not survive under OCC, if you play on a huge map with lots of water the AI is incapable of launching a sea attack supported by a navy, so it would just seem to lead to a long boring game. Anyone here have a particular handicap or scenario to recommend?

[vitamin j]

It's interesting to see how people limit themselves vs the AI. I don't think it's possible to lose, though...

I've been playing a lot of SP lately, ( ok, too much...) with my own "SP house rules".

* Huge Map, minimum oceans, average everything. Transcend.
* No Unity Pods or Random Events. (yes, no alien artifacts...)
* No Secret Projects.
* No Crawlers. (just an option, you fiends...)
* No Choppers.
* No Probe Teams with greater than fission reactors.

I've also been using tweaked faction and alpha/alphax files.

AI factions get +2 police and +2 support (added to their base values in these areas), and all AI units come with non-lethal methods with Int Integ. Polymorphic encryption might be a cool one, too.

I almost always play as Deirdre, vs Uni, Morgan, Angels, PKs, Drones, and Hive.

More significant rules changes include:

* No nutrient reduction for mined squares. (important for the AI.)
* Clean reactors moved to Nanominiaturization.
* Genejacks moved to Bio-Engineering, Longevity Vaccine to Retroviral Engineering.

Many "little" things have been changed in the rules. I'll go into more of them if anyone is interested.

I've just recently started using crawlers again and found myself to be very rusty!

Edit: Forgot to add Transcend difficulty...

[johndmuller]

Originally posted by Googlie
To balance the playing field (as the AI rarely, if ever, builds crawlers, set the cost to, say, 8 - this . . .
. . . (Course you'd need to copy the entire smac directory over to a new one - say "funsmac" otherwise you'd be screwing yourself in PBEMs if you forgot to edit the cost before each turn after playing your single-player game)
G.

Don't PBEMs lock in the initial setup conditions somehow? If not, someone could do the opposite kind of thing, like make PB's cost the same as scouts (for themselves only); I would have thought a glitch like that would have gotten some press, even if not too many people mess with the files.

[Capt Dizle]

No, PBEM games use whatever alpha.txt rules are in place when the turn is opened. This is the reason that we don't see more creative scenarios with SMAC, you would have to switch the alpha.txt or just create a new directory.

[vitamin j]

Something else you can do, that I actually haven't done that much, is to make a point of giving the AI some of the more essential units used in the game, by using the ctrl+shift+U command. Foil probes, sam rovers, clean formers, etc., are all excellent candidates. They will build them.