Challenge Scenario: Things that go Thump in the night.

[Lazerus]

Played a few more turns, its about 2170 now and i've got the cyborg factory and cloudbase academy and the air force is slaughtering dozens of her helpless ground troops. Getting lazy and putting most formers on hold now, can probably just pump out choppers and capture africa and australia no problem.
Santi and Miriam combined to kill morgan, Lal is being squished by miriam and zak. I'm still unsure what to do about my little Uni buddy since my colony pods have managed to work their way around him and set up along the eastern side towards that landbridge near canada for crossing into former gaian territory so i dont have to kill him ... just do i want to

[Lazerus]

2317 (was 2201 the scen started? lol memory gone in 5mins) conquest acheived with the Hive Can prob be done 5-10 turns quicker since i got really tired of the management and put alot of stuff on hold.

Now to retry with the Gaians sometime

[Kirov]

At last pulled it off with Gaians, without escaping to Siberia!

I downloaded your scenario last Saturday, with an intention of “just to take a look at it, sure I’m very busy these days”… then wasted two full nights locked into it.

At first I lost several times in a row, learning the hard way that I need to b-line to Impact Rovers (I hadn’t read this thread before). After I knew more or less how to prepare for a first invasion, I played a longer game, but lost again, this time around 50s or 60s, when Miriam dropped by with air power. So I thought to myself that she’s “one hell of a woman who sells her body for money” - and started again. Although I played for a long time, the game kept me on my toes almost till the end. Well, it’s not quite exactly the end, I just stopped when I took over New Jerusalem with HGP, CDF, PEG, HSA and a few other juicy SPs; I figure she’s not getting any stronger, while in a few turns the game would start boring me. Miriam is not in the position to mass produce PBs (so far she built one, which I destroyed).

Few things good to keep in mind when playing it out with Gaians:

- after getting impact rovers I found it necessary to b-line to D:AP; much more than in other games
- air power, however, doesn’t make it a cakewalk; because of the constant influx of Miriam’s units (she can send from 5 to 10 units per turn), to take her bases it was very important to carefully use jets’ ZOC and surround besieged bases to stop re-enforcements; only after that it’s possible to attack bases themselves (I’m not sure if the scenario would be doable at all if not for air ZOC)
- once you get her base, you can play cat and mouse with her and allow her to take it back; repeat until the base shrinks to size 2 (you won’t probably want to destroy her bases, they often have some nice facs) or until you get all her techs (which is not going to happen too soon)
- SE wise, I run Demo/Planned/Wealth until I knocked off enough planes to attack; after that, only Power allowed me to actually invade bases with any success (by that time Miriam will already have CDF, aero complexes and AAA tracking); I run Power almost till the end, when I wanted to build Nanofactory (switched back to Wealth for a couple of turns); in the Politics section, there isn’t any reason to switch from Demo – PS is too weak (you get support from Power), and Fundie is completely useless for Gaians (because of their inherent Morale penalty); I tried Green for a moment, but Planned is definitely better, otherwise industry suffers way too much
- I tried not to damage bases and their areas too much, but soon it turned out that if I want to stop Miriam build PBs and SPs, I have to defer to carpet bombing… I really wanted to spare New Jerusalem’s boreholes and mines, but when she decided to build Nanofactory there, at last I lost my patience; when I started she had 50+ min per turn, when I finished she was in the red with support; now when I think of it – I really needed that…J
- it’s very important to keep track of her building PBs, but accidentally, only in North America; during the game she had started to build PBs more than ten times in Africa and Australia, where I couldn’t reach, but always switched production to something else after some time; she finished only one nuke in Africa, and then sent it to a water base (Port Grace) in the Mexican Bay, where, needless to say, I took care of it
- there is no eco-damage (at first I was really scared of ranges of mountains popping up from under the water), so you can gas Miriam as freely as you want to; I was doing it so fervently that it started to be considered a major atrocity J; besides, it’s considerably cheaper to build 4X-1-2 that 6-1-2 units
- the most difficult part for me seemed to be conquering New Jerusalem; the defence was so strong (Photon wall with Fusion reactor and AAA tracking, aero complex, tachyon field and sensor), that my elite 13-12*2 jets with nerve gas had great problems penetrating it; I tried to send PTs with Algorithmic Enhancements, but of course it was clutching at straws, they had almost no chance of reaching tachyon field; I tried to build some missiles, but (I saw it first time in my life) it was impossible to kill the garrison units with only one missile; Finally I built Nanofactory, upgraded all my old units, gathered more than twenty 13X-12*2 jets, only to see that at that moment Miriam decided to almost empty her base… All of sudden in New Jerusalem stayed only several fission 1-3-1 units, all the rest, including several 1-5-1*2 AAA units, were moved into the field… I couldn’t believe my eyes; another story of this kind was that Miriam was only 2 votes short (!) of being elected the Supreme Leader (904 to 303). Now, that was close.

Blake, all in all your scenario is fabulous and many thanks to you for preparing it. I haven’t had such a great time in SP since I started to play on Transcend, which is like 4 or 5 years now. The game was nail-biting all the time until I finally reached New Jerusalem. There was a lot of moments when I was completely sure I was gonna be fried, but always just barely managed to run it out… Playing on Earth against zealous right-wingers had also a great deal of background flavour, a ‘story’ (striking from Chicago to Washington, helping Zakharov defend Moscow, you know what I mean…)

Is there any more scenarios with such a plot and difficulty level? Not that I want to play them, no, I’m even more busy nowadays, but sure taking a look wouldn’t hurt…J

[Mart]

started Gaians. driving cp now.
and took advice about impact weapons...

[Sikander]

Nice AAR Kirov.

[Micha]

Hm, stupid question from someone who never played a SMAX scenario... How do I get this to work? Extracted it into the SMAC/Scenarios folder, started game, "play scenario", chose title, chose difficulty and *ZAPP* got thrown back to desktop with a neat "Send error report" message...

[Googlie]

Micha - sounds like it's SMAC and not SMAX

Did you try to start with terran.exe or with terranx.exe? (That's the message I get when I rtry to open a smac game with smax)

[Googlie]

Hmm - I can't get that .rar file to unzip with anything I have - any ideas anyone?

[Kataphraktoi]

install winrar?

ill have to try this one again later

[Micha]

Originally posted by Googlie
Micha - sounds like it's SMAC and not SMAX

Did you try to start with terran.exe or with terranx.exe? (That's the message I get when I rtry to open a smac game with smax)

Hm, have tried with terranx.exe only... However, I finally got it to work. Chose "edit scenario" instead of play, then menu->activate scenario editor and voila, I´m the Hive

Originally posted by Googlie
Hmm - I can't get that .rar file to unzip with anything I have - any ideas anyone?

Worked fine for me, but you can still try the zipped version he posted on the first page (somewhere further down)...

[Micha]

Hm, my first try didn´t go too well... Played the Hive, colonized all of China, Southeast Asia (without the Islands) and India, went on to Iran (wow there´s a hell of a lot rain there...) and Mesopotamia, where I finally met Miriam. Zhak entered a pact with me early on, gifting me good units and techs, while the peacekeepers declared war on me after a while. So it´s me and Zhak versus Miriam and Peacekeepers. Now here´s the unfair part: Miriam uses Mind Control to take over my bases, then moves in like a trillion troops and goes on to the next city. I don´t know how to counter the menace now, it seems I have F'ed Up pretty early by neglecting probe builds.

Now she stole my only attempt at SP building, the PTS. I was like four turns from completion, while she needs about three turns total to complete it. Lacking money and just having started the crawler game, I was unable to rush it.

Well, after Mongolia and Mesopotamia got mindcontrolled by Miriam and after I lost the crucial race to the PTS, I got so frustrated that I had to stop for now. You´ll find the map attached. I know Yang is the easiest to play in this scenario, but I somehow cannot concentrate on more than one game aspect at once. Maybe I´m rushing through the turns too much, never using more than two minutes per turn...?

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Googlie
Hmm - I can't get that .rar file to unzip with anything I have - any ideas anyone?

There is a zip in post # 14

[Kirov]

Originally posted by Micha
Well, after Mongolia and Mesopotamia got mindcontrolled by Miriam and after I lost the crucial race to the PTS, I got so frustrated that I had to stop for now. You´ll find the map attached. I know Yang is the easiest to play in this scenario, but I somehow cannot concentrate on more than one game aspect at once. Maybe I´m rushing through the turns too much, never using more than two minutes per turn...?

In my experience even two probe teams per base do not make it safe, esp later when Miriam churns out elite probes which can easily reach from far behind sensors. To stay on the safe side I would stack 4 PTs in each frontier base, esp those that you conquer.

But I know what you mean, micha. I was so anxious to see what Miriam was going to do that I almost completely ignored checking every turn for expected drones and did very lame terraforming. Just didn't have time for such trivial matters...

[Mart]

looks like when playing Gaians, defenders on rocky tiles are must.

[Kirov]

Originally posted by mart7x5
looks like when playing Gaians, defenders on rocky tiles are must.

Actually, quite the contrary. As in any game with Believers, one should not let them use the Fanatics bonus. What worked best for me was a two-tile wide belt of playground for my Impact Rovers.

If you set your frontier bases like:

base - flat/rolling with a sensor - flat/rolling - rocky - enemy territory,

then she'll always have to stop on that rocky and never reach you in the next turn (except for elite rovers, I'm afraid), while you will always see her incoming units and be in position to destroy them.