Free Market...is it a neccessity?

[Commy]

Until recently, I always played with free market...University, Morgan, or sometimes Angels, but always with the free market...

And until recently, I looked down on planned and green economy...they seemed so..unpractical...

However, I have just played a game as the Gaians doing green, and have found it much different from free market, but not like I thought I would...I thought I would fall so far behind in tech it would even be funny...and I was just waiting for somebody to beat my industry and wipe my coast...and it never happened...

So I'm just wondering...does everyone do free market, is it a neccessity to be competitive, or is it simply another strategy?

[BlackCat]

I have just recently tried FM as the drones where it worked fine, but CyCon with Demo, Plan and Wealth (well leave thias as soon as possible, those darn "very green" units is a pestilence) beats all other.

[GeoModder]

Running green or planned let's you make good use of the police ability, which in turn saves on or psych allocation, or on happiness facilities.

[Chaos Theory]

Free Market is a very nice setting, but has some nasty drawbacks. Planned is very attractive if you can tolerate the low efficiency (Gaians, CyCon, Hive, Democracy, early game). As the Drones, I run Planned/Wealth much of the time for the ridiculous +4 Industry, and FM/Wealth the rest of the time for a still nice +3 Industry and almost more energy than I can use. Unfortunately, if you want to mix Planned with FM, you can't become dependent on police.

I'm not a big fan of Green, since Planned and FM offer so much more. Having high efficiency (as opposed to not having low efficiency) isn't a big deal until later in the game, and I'm not big on hunting for worms with factions that don't already have positive Planet.

Wealth is a wonderful SE setting! Low morale is a nuisance, and nothing more. +1 Industry means more units to more than make up for any losses incurred by low morale. Wealth makes both FM and Planned more powerful, the former because +3 economy adds +2 energy/base compared to +2 economy, and the latter because going from +1 Industry to +2 Industry is more of an improvement than going from +0 to +1.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
Low morale is a nuisance, and nothing more.

Low morale sucks a little when Marr is your neighbour and he has a grudge against you

[Chaos Theory]

Not really. When you attack, you should win most of the time, whether your morale is green or very green. When you defend, you should lose most of the time, unless you're in a base, where low morale is an advantage when combined with a Children's Creche.

[Mongoose]

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
... where low morale is an advantage when combined with a Children's Creche.

Poppycock! Low morale is never an advantage.

It is fair to say that the disadvantage is largely offset when defending in a base that has a creche. No more than that.

[Urban Ranger]

That just means you should try winning with some SE combos you have never used before

[Dis]

has anyone ever beat this game without changing SE settings at all? Using frontier etc. I suppose you could do it on the easy level...

[Chaos Theory]

Bizarrely, low morale is a bona fide advantage when combined with a Children's Creche. You can have defenders (and, under the right circumstances, attackers) with morale levels higher than normally allowed. I've had as high as Elite (++++) for +100% from morale! Even if the +s from a Children's Creche only cancel the lowered morale on your units, they will gain morale levels faster, still yielding an advantage.

[binTravkin]

has anyone ever beat this game without changing SE settings at all? Using frontier etc. I suppose you could do it on the easy level...

I know a player whom I tought how to use SE after he was not at the best performance at a PBEM.

But his performance was enough to win a SP Transcend game and MP newbies.

[Sikander]

FM is largely an early game advantage, though it can be maintained if you use a lot of moderate energy terraforming like forests. The early game advantage is largely from the base square energy that you get from having a high economy rating and to a lesser extent from the additional energy you earn from worked tiles. Later in the game it can still be a big factor if you have a lot of worked tiles that produce moderate to low amounts of energy natively (0-2), which a +2 economy will cause to have a large percentage increase. Someone who is only working boreholes or enhanced solar energy won't see much of an improvement in their energy production, and in some cases will see a net loss vs Green due to inefficiency.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Dissident
has anyone ever beat this game without changing SE settings at all? Using frontier etc. I suppose you could do it on the easy level...

Certainly. It took me a couple of years before I bothered to figure out what to do with SE unless, of course, you also count in how energy is spend (econ/soc/res sliders), those I quickly learned to use .

[Ouro_827]

*Raises hand* I'm not a great player..... I'm rather unique in my playstyle. As in for my first three years or so of SMAC, I never used crawlers!!! That being said, I still don't use FM much. I've played through once as Morgan with FM, but my.... standard factions are Uni, Gaia, and Cyborgs. I run with simple, etc. for much of the game, until my primary expansion is done, when I kick Demo in. Knowledge is a must, but on the rare cases I use economy, its almost always Green, unless I can get away with Planned without compromising my research - not likely. So not everyone uses FM, no.

[Julinoleum]

My easiest game is when I played all green and on the gaia's side. It is so easy to win when the planet is on your side, it is almost ridiculous.