Avoiding unnecessary techs on the trancendence trail

[Capt Dizle]

I read a post from someone saying the with SMAX you could avoid about eight unnecessary techs by not researching Unified Field Theory.

Is this possible? Any tips on this subject would be welcome. Zak's honor is at stake in the Hendrick's Bane game and I want to pull out all the stops to put Morgan in his place (as the second best builder faction).

[MariOne]

JT, I saw many post the most bizarre theories about techs withholding at research picking time.
At first sight, easily I could think of some situation I experienced which denied them.
Like yours about the beeline to IndAuto that you don't normally get to pick B1-B2 or B2-B3 techs in sequence, there I started a half-assed attempt and with Zak first I picked PlaNets as bonus, then IIRC got IndBase-IndEcon-IndAuto in a row.
As I told you this may change depending on the slot# in which you load your faction.

IIRC one theory had the catch that at each pick you get on random tech withheld and one random granted astray from the regular underlying pattern - nice excuse to allow and expalin almost everything...

So, my position is that a prove, working theory is FAR from being found.
You can tho, as I several times did with 100% success (and also posted here), is to PREVIEW your picks with a test scenario.
Key to it is to load all the 7 factions in the same slots as the game you're simulating.
At that point, the techs you get to pick from are ONLY determined by those you have at pick time. The techs known to the other 6 factions are irrelevant, you just need to have the right factions in the right place.
Then the Ctrl+F2 command allows you to toggle all your techs to reproduce the situation you want to simualte and study. Shift+F2 simulates a breakthrough.
F2 and Shift+R command work as usual.

Try that most bizarre UFT claim that way, if you want.
It might work, as other research paths might as well do.

One thing that I don't know, but that I would bet money on, is that UTF theory might be working for one faction in one slot, but might not work for another faction OR another slot, so it would not be a universal recipe.

Anyway I think that Mongoose, started by my suggestion on such techtest scenarios (when we were pacted in the CW1 game...), did some recent investigation about the influence of the game factions mix and placing on tech pick offers.

[Sikander]

IIRC I saw something similar to what JT is talking about in a post by David Byron, when he was doing fast Transcend games. He was trying to break ZsoZso's record with a custom extra tiny map.

[zsozso]

I'm not sure how general it is, but David Byron stated it and it worked for me in my recent Gaian - Citizen - huge map fast transcend game. One thing is sure: the game will not let you research a tech if prerequisites are missing, and if you look at the tech tree, you can see, that Unified Field Theory is indeed the root of a lot of unnecessary techs. So if you don't research that, then you'll certainly avoid a lot of the other side-tracks as well.

[MariOne]

UFT is the root of the unnecessary techs, but is nevertheless required for transcendence.
By your statement, you'll only be guaranteed to avoid those as long as you are not forced to discover UFT. After which, and unwise pick order might force you into Quantum branch anyway.

Remember, the problem is not avoiding being offered the side-track techs. The problem is ensuring that you have at least one useful tech to choose at every pick.

[Capt Dizle]

If my thinking is correct UFT is required for transcendence in SMAC, but not in SMAX.

Going for a fast game in SMAX one goal is applied relativity in order to get your SSC boiling, another is monopole so that you can quickly get formers and crawlers to your energy park, and these are the prereqs for UFT. Which means that it will show up on the tech list. As Mose says, ensuring that you have a required tech to choose at every pick is the key.

If we can find out which slot/faction combinations would do that it would probably have some impact on the effort to find the fastest transcend times. I believe in SMAX there are up to 11 techs that are not required. That's a lot of time even if you are researching 2 techs or more a turn at the end.

[Capt Dizle]

Now if you don't build UFT you lose the use of the TOE and Quantum Labs, plus one secrets tech I think. Of course quantum labs come so late....

Interestingly, in Hendrick's Morgan Builder game he researched UFT and Quantum Power but did not build the TOE or quantum labs. He didn't even get nanohospitals built in all his bases but, still, was researching over two techs per turn at the end and got done in 136 turns.

[johndmuller]

For some time, I have been trying to keep track of the choices offered for research targets in PBEMs (not that I think that PBEMs are different, just that I play a much more deliberate game and it is just a matter of remembering to add it to my notes file). This project is for testing the theory that (notwithstanding certain special circumstances) a tech for which you have the prereq's will be offered 2 times out of 3 in a strict rotation (i.e. Yes, Yes, No, Yes, Yes, No, Yes, Yes, No, etc) and that the techs are divided into 3 groups and they take turns beinig the "No" group in that strict rotation. Acquiring techs in some other fashion, like trading, stealing, etc, counts the same as an offering in advancing the rotation. Additionally, one of the techs offered and any moment is not subject to being withheld and so is always offered despite its "No" cycle coming up; this has been called a 'wild card' or 'joker' in the theory and I suspect that its purpose is to guarantee that there is always at least one tech offered. The sequence of jokers is rumored to be connected to your faction, but it could just as easily be related to the slot number your faction inhabits.

I am pretty confident that the 2 out of 3 rotation cycle holds true, which means that if you are not offered a particular tech this time, you will definitely be offered it the next (assuming that you do not acquire exactly 2 more techs from outside sources in the mieantime). This in itself is valuable information and can be put to good use, especially if you are working with an ally to get particular techs (like Industrial Auto, Doc:AP, Fusion, etc.) - if you are not offered a desired tech, just research something your partner already has, have him give it to you the next turn and viola, you will be offered what you want.

I don't really know exactly what makes up each group, although I probably have the data to figure that out, but I think that it is likely to be something straightforward, like the sequenc number of the tech in Alpha(x).txt, probably 'mod(3)'ed (assuming that is the one that gives you the remainder of dividing something by 3). I don't have a theory on the wild card determination as I haven't even really tried to check that one out, but it would make sense for that to be something straightforward too, but nothing really simple suggests itself to me, so I guess I'll leave that one out there.

Going beyond the 'gonna get it next time if you don't this time' rule, I imagine that one could use this method to figure out bee-line paths that would work so long as there wasn't some unfortunate choke-point where all the techs you wanted at a particular point were in the same group. If there was such a configuration, then the arcane workings of the wild card could come into play and spare you that choke point if you were the right faction or whatever the controlling variable is.

[Plan9]

Originally posted by johndmuller
I am pretty confident that the 2 out of 3 rotation cycle holds true, which means that if you are not offered a particular tech this time, you will definitely be offered it the next (assuming that you do not acquire exactly 2 more techs from outside sources in the mieantime).

In a game I played recently as the drones something occurred that would prove this theory wrong.

I normally pick Centauri Ecology for my 1st technology, but whenever I aquire a tech within the 10 research-free turns of the drones, Cent.Ec is not a choice.

This game i popped Inf.Nets. My beeline from there was as follows and Cent.Ec was never a choice:

Biogenetics - Industrial Ec - Planetary Nets - Ind.Auto and finally Cent.Ec.