The Automation Challenge/Nightmare!

[smacksim]

Nice rhyme Santiago

Has anyone else given this a go?

-Smack

[Commy]

Well, Zeiter, if only the governor actually did what you wanted him to do, it might be worth a try. Another way you can tell the AI is good at hurrying things is that it rarely has more than 200 ECs. It is constantly using them.

[SynthetGod8]

I started this challenge as the Gaians. It wasn't until late in the game when I got the serious heavy weaponry that the tide started to change. Since my governers stopped making colony pods fairly quick (I didn't bother changing what the AI could and could not build). Of course, not having directed research sucks because I can't go straight for Transcendance and it's becoming very hard to curb all the pollution my bases generate.

There have also been a lot of Busters thrown around, although mine was the first. The Consciousness had both Psi Combat projects (Amp and Twister), which made mind-worm combat pretty much pointless. Fortunately, they were both in one base, so I took it out. Everyone was at war with me anyway for social reasons. I mean, if the governer makes a Buster, might as well use it.

Domai also used 3 Busters on me on his own captured territory. Silly AI.

[Whoha]

In moo3 you could atleast trick the AI into doing what you want it to do. Don't know if thats possible here.

[Zeiter]

I'm sorry, could someone please explain what moo3 is/was?

[SynthetGod8]

MoO3 was the third game in the Galactic Cow series. The player sent teams of Space Cows out in search of life and lost Bovine colonies. Beware the dreaded Interdimensional Farmer who would obliterate your colonies out of spite and for food!

Seriously... It's Master of Orion 3. A headache of a game in my opinion. Every planet has a governer that is almost entirely free to act without the player. The player can only assign Design Plans that apply to whole empire. Various Plans, designed for each type of planet with three different priorities, overlap to give the AI gov an idea of what the player expects.

The player can still build what he wants, but that's a lot of micromanagement, plus the AI gov can't be turned of *anyway*. The thing that most bothered me was that the build queue for each type (Military and Infrastructure) were only 3 long, so you never have a chance to set long-term build plans. So you either trust the Gov, or constantly update the queue.

It's a nightmare for those who like to micromanage.

[Zeiter]

Ah, sounds like a cool concept for a game, but just executed poorly. Perhaps something like that could be the basis for SMAC 2 - where you branch out and colonize different galaxies, only to meet other civilizations.

[Santiago_Claus]

MoO 3 was garbage. It had some cool ideas, but gameplay was so cumbersome and riddled with bugs it was roughly as much fun as filling out a tax return then discovering you've failed to account for the alternative minimum tax.

Here's a MoO 3 Trivia Question:
"How many mouseclicks does it take to find out which star systems are suffering from piracy?"

The answer is somewhere between the number of penstrokes required to fill out a 1040 and the number of dollars in the national debt.

[Enigma_Nova]

Yeah, it's no point in playing a game where you can't micro.
Then it's just AI battling one another while you watch.