What's your "favorite" exploit.

[smacksim]

There are a lot of crawler 'tricks', but the upgrade to cash in one is what I think you mean. Simply, crawlers can be upgraded with armor/abilities, which increases their mineral value. Since it's generally always cheaper to upgrade a unit than it is to rush-buy something, especially a SP, one can simply upgrade a regular crawler to armored and then cash it in for the new improved mineral value. This is certainly an exploit, though it's not really a problem of game mechanics. It's perfectly legitimate to upgrade units, and it's legitimate to cash in crawlers (which is what the AI uses them for, mostly). However, I don't think the game designers intended this work around for cheapening the price of rush-building.

-Smack

[Qwerty88]

I said instant elites, but I don't realy use any exploits, maybe reverse engineering probe teams into rovers when I start as the Jazz, but rarely even that.

[Commy]

I see why this thread was started by telling all posters to not ask about exploits they don't know. I suppose to some it is tempting, but I don't do exploits or cheat. I'm to lazy, to stupid, and don't need handicaps to beat the AI. I'm not saying that I too good for exploits. It's just that, if they're not necessary, I don't waste my time and limited thinking skills doing them...

But thanks for the crawler trick. I probably won't use it, but I always wanted to know what it was...

[Enigma_Nova]

Doublepost. >_<''

[Enigma_Nova]

Originally posted by Commy
I'm to lazy, to stupid, and don't need handicaps to beat the AI.

Contradiction.

[Santiago_Claus]

smacksim, I'm not referring to the crawler upgrade trick but the SE change trick.

You can build crawlers at a low industry cost rating and dismantle them at a high-cost rating by manipulating your SE settings. One method of doing this is considered cheating, the other is not.

[smacksim]

Santiago_Claus, Yes you are right. I was only replying to Commie's post without re-reading yours. Sorry to confuse anyone. Both exploits work for cheating your way to cheap mineral production.

-Smack

[Snowflake]

Ok let me see if I understand the SE crawler SP scenario. Say if you just have enough money to switch to wealth when you get your IA, but you wouldn't be able to hurry your crawlers. And you don't want to cheat so won't be able to take advantage of the SE change for SP.

Now would this work better? Say you don't switch to wealth. You hurry your crawlers so you get them quicker. And at the same time you got more money in these few turns so you are able to switch to wealth. Now you start a SP, cash in the crawlers till 2 turns complete. Then you switch to wealth and you get your SP next turn. Will it gain you any advantages?

[Enigma_Nova]

Yep. I often do this with AAs - delay Wealth for a bit so I can get the extra 10 minerals.

[Chaos Theory]

Experiment with this. No matter what the Datalinks say, my experience with artifacts is that they provide 50 mins regardless of SE settings.

[binTravkin]

Experiment with this. No matter what the Datalinks say, my experience with artifacts is that they provide 50 mins regardless of SE settings.

If someone tries to prove different-> this is SMAC/X forum!
SMAC/X allows to cash 50 mins for an AA and this doesn't change under any circumstances!

[binTravkin]

Automated Interceptors

Could someone explain this exploit?

[Chaos Theory]

Automated units, whether the AI's or your own, have full knowledge of the map and will zip out to kill units out of your sight.

[binTravkin]

Good one!

[Santiago_Claus]

HH:
Ahh, I see what you're saying: we've been working under the assumption that we all want to run Wealth all the time, and just change SE to get more value from crawlers.

You're suggesting instead the opposite: a temporary switch to Wealth to grab an SP.

Your question, as I understand it, is whether the equivalent cash spent switching to Wealth could be spent hurrying crawlers just as efficiently.

If you don't run Wealth as a matter of course then you'll also have to pay to switch back after the SP is completed, so the cost for a "Wealth hop" is 80 ec's (120 for Progenitor).

That means, assuming you finagle 2.5 ec's per mineral from crawler rush-buys and upgrades, the SP would need to cost 32 rows for you to break even. 32 * 2.5 = 80. If you're paying retail (4 ec's / mineral for an SP) you break even at 20 rows.

(For my calculations let's define a "row" as a block of 10 minerals at industry rating 0. Some SP's show multiple "rows" on a single line, so I want to avoid confusion there.)

I haven't mentioned the other effects of Wealth SE because of the presumption you'd rather be running something else and have already weighed the consequences; however, I should mention that if you're running Power then by all means switch to Wealth: you make a profit at a mere 11 rows.

To really make a short Wealth run profitable you'd want to complete as many other builds as possible while Wealth was in effect, preferably expensive stuff like Tree Farms.

The one thing you wouldn't want to do is switch to Wealth before cashing in your crawlers.