Early Terraforming/Build order questions

[dfy]

Finally I've decided to give SMAC/X another try. I have already 'played' it a year ago, but 'playing' meant some quite boring games on third easiest level back then, and I'd like to change that now, i.e. start playing on Transcend and using advanced techniques like ICS and so on.

I have already read Vel's Guide 3.1 and some other FAQs, but I can't say I fully understand everything yet. So, I have lots of questions:

-Early Terraforming for 1-space ICS: I tried some very basic 1-space ICS with Yang yesterday and found myself getting the WP asap, then starting to build boreholes while not having lifted the restrictions yet, rendering all those terraforming effort quite useless. So, what kind of terraforming do I use in the first decades when I'm trying to build a 1-space ICS?

-All-Forest approaches: I've seen a few screenshots where people have just planted forests everywhere. If you do so, do you crawl the forests inside the base area? How do you supply nutrients before getting Tree Farms?

-Terraforming for 2-space ICS: One thing I particularly disliked about the 1-space ICS I tested was being limited to 6 minerals/base (borehole). So I'd like to try not-so-tight ICS, too - what are good terraforming approaches for that?

-Build order at early bases: I guess the first thing to build at a new base would be RecTanks if available, a former otherwise, then a colony pod, then a former if you built RecTanks before? Is that the right approach? Should I continue producing ColPods after that? When do I need garrisons? I always read about "With Zak, you can have IndAuto by 2114", but I can't even manage that at second easiest difficulty level... so, how in detail will I do such tricks? How many crawlers do you produce?

-Factions: One thing I loved about Yang was the incredible army of formers I was able to support at no mineral cost. Now this is something I definitely won't have when playing other Factions like Morgans or Uni, how will I pay for the former support then? I like the builder approach, I hate war as in having to build an move around an army, so Miriam and Santiago are quite out of question for me. I like fast research, Uni has always been one of my favourites, although I realise they should be quite difficult to play at transcend level because of the Drones. I guess Lal would make a nice choice to start a Transcend game with, no?

Be prepared for even more questions after I will have played a bit.

I look forward to any help/suggestions


dfy

[smacksim]

Lal is good for a player making the switch to Transcend, but he really is geared more towards a few large bases rather than many small (although many-large bases at 3x3 spacing works great for anyone!).

Build Order: This will also depend on your ability to rush-buy effectively. If 9 bases all produce CPs you'll have 9 new bases to consider rush-buying Rec Commons (1st citizen a drone after b-drone limits reached), and also the costs of Rec Tanks and Former rushes as well. All this gets very expensive very quickly, moreso the closer your bases are together.

@ 3x3 ICS (what you call 2-space) I do often pause between expansions to both prepare base sites and get a few crawlers ready to go along with the CPs to the new sites. Build order for that is then:

@ a base getting ready to produce a CP for expansion: build 1 crawler first, have it harvest each turn that it escorts the CP to the base site. Pair this base with a non-CP building base which also produces a crawler to meet at the base site.

Travel to base site, build base, production: Rec Commons. Disband escorting crawler to cheapen the rush, re-home the second crawler to aid in harvesting and getting formers/Rec Tanks up more quickly (can disband to make the Rec Tanks as well if you choose).

Garrisons: Unless you are playing a Police-rich faction or MP, or its a very dangerous world, you can often use 1 garrison to cover 3+ bases. When clean units become available, obviously 1-1-1 Clean/Police units are attractive! But early on the best strategy is the least garrisons actually needed. No, you don't know what you might need ahead of time, so its a game of weighing the risks. A 3x3 grid can quickly have internal bases 'safe' by the sheer mass of bases and formers around. Since most factions will be running FM earlier rather than later, garrisons do nothing for you but mitigate the risks of attack.

Often I see people summarize build orders as: "I always build x,y, then z." This is simply not true. People tend to build in certain orders, but anyone who does so absolutely won't be getting any SPs, will they?

With 3x3 spacing you'll have ~7 base squares available for working. It can be frustrating if you're used to wider spacing to realize that you have either: Nowhere for your crawlers to work, or nowhere for your workers to work. This just takes getting used to really. 3x3 is a Specialist-heavy layout unless you are not going to use crawlers at all. Because of this its good to have 1-2-3 condensor farms for each base: 1 early, a second as you are considering hab complexes, and a 3rd to push to size ~14 bases/max before domes. So you'll still find a lack of minerals compared with looser arrangements, but its far more flexible than 2x2! I refuse to play 2x2 as its basically coloring the map with a blunt crayon and has no flexibility per base.

With 3x3 you'll find that the average base can work 2 boreholes, perhaps 3 or 4 for outlying bases. But the nice thing is that with 2 boreholes, 3 condensors, and ~2 forests you can switch around workers between bases to keep pop-booms going and to maximize a few bases for mineral production by adding an extra condensor and working 4+ boreholes. Another nice thing is that later on you'll be wanting to get rid of a few crawlers to allow workers so you can keep booming or take advantage of Hybrids. Those crawlers slowly eek out of the center of the empire towards the edges where you can keep growing. With 2x2 once you're set up you may make new crawlers for the outliers but the initial crawlers stay put. 3x3 is more organic that way.......

Support: As Morgan you have to bite the bullet and have some supported units early. But, like Zak, you should get to Clean Reactors fairly quickly at which point support becomes a non-issue. Does depend on map speed though of course. As any of the builders its often wise, if you don't have looming wars, to dedicate a couple of bases to formers. Like so many things in Smac, turn advantage is paramount and the sooner you terraform a square that can be immediately worked, the larger the benefits from that square in the long term. The difference between 9 bases building evenly and 10 bases with 1 as a former-support base is pretty immense. Since you'll be building a lot of bases anyways most likely, whats 1 or 2 specialty bases to eat the support hit?

Zak is still #1 at Transcend, despite drone problems. In fact, if you like his advantages I'd suggest going ahead and playing him. Getting used to all the drones will help develop skills that will make other factions something of a breeze, drone-wise.

Small-spacing: Specialists and Nutrients are the game winners. B-lines to getting better specialists are also important (Thinkers are especially nice for pop-booming).

Good Luck!

[Blake]

Morgan can benefit greatly from using armored infantry probes for defense. There is a number of reasons why they are great, they have better morale than normal units (especially when running Wealth), are inately clean, can mind control attackers, and can defend against other probes / are immune to mind control.

Usually you'll want to use trance with them, as their main job is defending against mindworms - they just mind control normal units. They also make great ZoC blockers.

[Sikander]

Base Spacing

I play a lot of University in a pseudo-ICS style so perhaps I can help you out a bit. I use several different spacing styles, but two of them might be useful to you. The first is 2 on the diagonal spacing (aka Yang or Sikander spacing) where every base is two tiles away (one intervening tile) from every other base on the diagonal axis (NSEW). Interior bases in this system will have at a minimum a total of 8 tiles, 1 for the base itself and 7 to work / crawl. This is enough to power a full base through all phases of the game.

The second style of spacing I'll describe is not as useful imo, but it does allow for one more tile per base. It is a three spacing system (two intervening tiles between bases) where there is a base 3 tiles away from another base in every direction (N,NW,NE, E,W,SE,SW,S). A good way to visualize this system is to imagine that every base works / crawls the 8 tiles immediately surrounding it, making each base a block of 9 tiles total.

The main advantage of the 2x over the 3x system is that it is closer together which greatly improves the speed with which you can lay down those early colony pods while providing only one less tile per base compared to the 3x system. One road on each of the 4 diagonal tiles connects you to four bases / base sites, which is really efficient in terms of former time and colony pod transit time. This turn advantage really adds up.

Early Forming

As the University my free tech choice is always Formers and my first builds (unless I have a nutrient special) are always formers. They build mostly two things, roads and forests. I send them immediately to the diagonal tiles and build roads there, then forests. The only exceptions are when I don't have a tile that can produce 2 nutrients in the base radius to work or a really juicy special (like a mineral bonus on a rocky tile). But mostly I use forests. The reason is that they are cheap and produce what I need the most, which are energy and minerals.

Early Tech Beeline

Centauri Ecology (Formers)
Industrial Base
Industrial Economics (FM)
Planetary Networks (Planned)
Industrial Automation (Crawlers,Wealth)

Bootstrapping Your Industry

By the time you get crawlers you should have a fair amount of forest planted around your bases. Now you are going to build crawlers like crazy and set them to crawling minerals from any unworked forest you can find. If you choose to go whole hog with forestation (and there are some good reasons to do so) then even your interior bases should have at least 6 forest tiles to work / crawl. This will provide enough minerals so that every base will have a minimum of 15 (16 with tanks).

Just keep building crawlers. When one base hasn't enough room or for more keep building crawlers and send them to other bases which aren't as far advanced. In fairly short order you can get a core of bases all producing crawlers in 1-2 turns, which is just what you'll need in order to snag several of those lovely early game Secret Projects.

Early Social Engineering

I typically wait until I get to Industrial Automation and then switch to Wealth, then switch to FM when I can afford it (both monetarily and in terms of efficiently managing the psych). Sometimes I'll get some cash from a pod or something and can switch to FM earlier, but I don't always do so. It takes a fair bit of confidence that you are safe from outside attack and aren't crippling yourself by changing too many workers into doctors early on. That said FM / Wealth really ramps up you energy production. It's easy to see that you get an extra energy on worked tiles, but the biggest difference in the early game is the huge boost you get to base tile energy production.

Looking into the midgame

From here on out the world is your oyster. From this common base you can go a lot of different ways. You can go with a "forest and forget" forming style and beeline for Treefarms and then Hybrid Forests for instance. You'll need to build some drone countering SPs or facilities for this approach, especially if you build bases beyond the first bureacracy warning, as forest is best worked rather than crawled. Useful here are the HGP and the VW. With both you should be able to build large bases of workers even beyond the 1st bureaucracy warning. This is probably the most efficient style, particularly if you mind your beelines and waste no time getting those Tree Farms & Hybrid Forests. Once they are in place try to do a GA pop boom to fill out those bases. Send your crawlers to the frontier or use them to build SPs. Once you get nutrient satellites up your nutrient production will effectively double (from 24 in a 2x base with all forest and TF, HF and Tanks). This allows you to supplement your forming by laying in boreholes to maximum density while still having more than enough nuts to max out your population (pre-hab domes of course).

Another forming style is the boreholes & condensor / farms forming style. Simply lay out a maximum density borehole pattern and make every non-borehole tile into a condensor / farm tile. Crawl the 4 nutrients and work the boreholes. Every base will have a minimum of 2 boreholes (those on the edges will have 3) and 5 condensor / farms. This provides enough nuts to support 11-12 pop. To use this style you'll have to have at a minimum Environmental Economics (to lift restrictions) and Tree Farms in every base (to counteract all of that forming). As you max out your terraforming you will also need Hybrid Forests to completely alleviate the ecodamage that such heavy forming will bring. The beautiful part of this style is that you won't need as much drone control, as only 2-3 of a base's population will be workers (avoiding Zacs malus regarding drones). This will allow you to put down a lot of bases before those bureaucracy drones start to hurt. One drawback is that you'll need an army of formers to do all of that work. Clean reactors and a decade of building formers should take care of that problem.

As the game progresses crawling nutrients and specialists both become more efficient, condensor farms go from 4 nuts to 6 nuts with the addition of soil enrichers while specialists improve in several steps to the very productive transcendi. A 2x (diagonal) base will produce 33 nuts (with tanks and boreholes & condensor / farm / soil enricher forming, which is enough to fill a Uni base to the max even if you have the AV. Nutrient Satellites don't help this style much until you get hab domes.

[Blake]

Just one minor note, if you promptly force a pop you wont need to build hybrid forests for the terraforming ecodamage negation, with a good number of bases the treefarms alone should bring the clean mineral limit to 40+ which should be plenty, basically if you do force a pop asap ecodamage will take care of itself...

I often like to get 4 boreholes per base. This can work well with any spacing, you just have some bases with 4 boreholes that pump out military units, and other bases work 1 or no boreholes (they rely on rushbuy to get the needed facilities). You only need to put military facilities in the bases that work boreholes.
4 boreholes + 5 forests = 36 production, with a genejack that's 54 production. Getting 50+ production in bases allows you to pop out a 5 row unit every turn, for example a clean shard infantry or a shard chopper.

It's also possible to get 54 minerals pre-genejacks, that's from building a dirty stinking size 14 base that works 6 boreholes and a heap of forest. It's best for these bases to be on the fringe of the empire (because they have a huge footprint) and also to have a punishment sphere, to allow for lots of workers without specialist drone control and since they'll be the primary unit factories the sphere allows for easily waging war under FM.

The stinker base upgraded with a genejack produces an awesome 81 minerals, for such fearsome things as 4 turn planetbusters. Heavy mineral strats have their perks, especially when it comes to getting expensive offensive units cheaply .

Planet tends to get a little hot under the collar but the pearl farming is all good. The hardest thing can be keeping planet mad, this is where the 4 turn planetbusters help.

[dfy]

Thank you so much ! I have started a transcend game now and got IndAuto by 2121. Here's what I came up with so far (by 2123). Would be really cool if someone had a spare minute to take a look at it and tell me if there's something significantly wrong with what I've done so far. I guess my worst problems are not having coordinated the production of ColPods well enough and those darn rocky squares blocking the tiles I'd need for my base grid.


dfy

[Sikander]

Originally posted by dfy
Thank you so much ! I have started a transcend game now and got IndAuto by 2121. Here's what I came up with so far (by 2123). Would be really cool if someone had a spare minute to take a look at it and tell me if there's something significantly wrong with what I've done so far. I guess my worst problems are not having coordinated the production of ColPods well enough and those darn rocky squares blocking the tiles I'd need for my base grid.


dfy

I'm at work so I can't look at your save, but I did want to mention that many base layout styles don't require rigid base placement. For instance 2x diagonal spacing and 3x spacing can work any adjacent tile with no need to worry about anything but the borehole pattern. You'll still be able to work all of the tiles normally associated with the base. Btw, good work getting IA, it's probably the best tech in the game.

[dfy]

Thanks .
Just started a new game since in the savegame above, Lal and Yang decided to hate me. Yang even signed a treaty and then made a surprise attack.

Had a very good start in the new game though: lots of nut/min boni, found the Jungle around 2130, IndAuto by 2120, it's now 2153, I got the WP and the VW (well, I badly needed it, no?), but Deirde got the HGP and it looks like she'll get the Empath Guild too since I don't even have the techs for it yet. I'm running Dem/FM/Wealth now (which is godlike, because I'm able to rushbuild quite a lot). Now, a couple of questions:

-What techs should be my next goals? Should I take the sidestep to Secrets of Human Brain and Centauri Empathy and try to instabuild the Empath Guild? I'm quite sure Deirde will have it by that time though. What about Intell. Integrity/Cyberethics? I can build treefarms and have lifted all restrictions, but I didn't have a pop yet, so I won't build any of those expensive tree farms yet.

-What terraforming should I do to the jungle? I guess forests (and having them worked, not crawled) will be alright, since I don't want to have that much nutrients yet?

-What base facilities should I build? Do I need Creches? I think I won't build any Energy Banks yet but try and get the PEG, is that a good idea?


dfy

[Blake]

Oh, don't delay building treefarms until you've got a pop. Build them asap, hopefully you'll get a pop while building them, but if not, it's not a huge deal.

Generally speaking it's best to head to Bioengeering after Env.Eco, for clean reactors. Then head to MMI (2 SP's.. choppers... thinkers...), after that Fusion Power and Orbital Spaceflight, then Advanced Spaceflight. Grab Monopole magnets at some point too, and try to get Retroviral Engineering for genejacks, and also the Cloning Vats (which are a tech or two down the line from Retroviral).

Generally speaking any time after MMI is good for waging some serious war. Choppers are hard to beat. Also elite shard infantry are very good combined with laying magtube up to enemy bases.

Terraforming: forest everywhere. Once you have spare former time, boreholes.

Facilities. All of them except the mostly useless ones (like Skunkworks). Highest priorities are Rec.Tanks, Rec.Commons, Creche, Treefarm, Genejack. The creche is huge, it's an amazingly good facility. Once you've got those growth-enabling facilities build Fusion Lab, Net Node, Research Hospital, Energy Bank and so on. Hybrid forests are extremely good but expensive. They take too long to build unless you have 30+ minerals, so just rushbuy them.

[Kataphraktoi]

I think I won't build any Energy Banks yet but try and get the PEG, is that a good idea?

compare the cost in minerals for building energy banks(and the turns spent) in every single base to the cost in building the PEG once. anytime you can build the PEG-do so!

although if you do this every game in SP where the AI cannot compete over projects really you may run into trouble when you cant get it in MP,so you might play better without it.dont forgo projects based on this, but just something to keep in mind.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by dfy
Thanks .
Just started a new game since in the savegame above, Lal and Yang decided to hate me. Yang even signed a treaty and then made a surprise attack.

Had a very good start in the new game though: lots of nut/min boni, found the Jungle around 2130, IndAuto by 2120, it's now 2153, I got the WP and the VW (well, I badly needed it, no?), but Deirde got the HGP and it looks like she'll get the Empath Guild too since I don't even have the techs for it yet. I'm running Dem/FM/Wealth now (which is godlike, because I'm able to rushbuild quite a lot). Now, a couple of questions:

-What techs should be my next goals? Should I take the sidestep to Secrets of Human Brain and Centauri Empathy and try to instabuild the Empath Guild? I'm quite sure Deirde will have it by that time though. What about Intell. Integrity/Cyberethics? I can build treefarms and have lifted all restrictions, but I didn't have a pop yet, so I won't build any of those expensive tree farms yet.

-What terraforming should I do to the jungle? I guess forests (and having them worked, not crawled) will be alright, since I don't want to have that much nutrients yet?

-What base facilities should I build? Do I need Creches? I think I won't build any Energy Banks yet but try and get the PEG, is that a good idea?


dfy

I'd run for Tree Farms (and restriction lifting) next and then perhaps pop boom. You can run a GA pop boom in FM once you get your Tree Farms in. Use your crawlers to boost nuts if you get too many drones. Alternatively you could wait until you also get hybrid forests, as you can grow larger and more easily with the extra nuts and energy.

[dfy]

Wow. Transcend _is_ a new experience. After a good start, I got a bit lazy considering expansion, but I was leading the power charts and was elected governor. Then, everyone on the whole map declared Vendetta on me. That's sick. Morgan was on my continent, I decided to finish him off with a fleet of Missile Needlejets/Choppers, and what did I find? After conquering his first base, Morgan upgraded all his garrisons to AAA.

I was scared. I have never before seen the AI actually reacting to what I did. My air fleet was quite useless, even when I upgraded some of them to Chaos Gun. I had to switch and build Rovers. Morgans Empire was really small, but it was a good bit of work to get him down. Needless to say I lost the next elections. Well, I had Satellites and the Cloning Vats by then, so now I'm stuck with a decent empire with Pop 16-Bases, but all other factions are quite far away and keep bugging me with Needlejets flying in and attacking my Crawlers - I guess I will have to upgrade them to Neutronium Armor soon. (I won't tell you by which year I got Fusion/Satellites. Quite late, but I think it wasn't too bad for my first transcend game.) I'm not sure whether I'll finish that game since it's really annoying at that stage.

I learned lots of things while playing though, I think it was my first game where I made extensive use of crawlers (mostly for mins). Well, I think I'll try Svensgaard or Domai next, although I love research and would probably hate getting IndAuto as late as I'd get it when playing Domai... Aki would be interesting, too, but I think she's very similar to Zak, maybe a bit easier (?, I think Zak's NetNodes are a HUGE bonus, add the Virtual World and Rec Commons and a small Psych Allocation and Zak's drone problems are no problems any longer).

PS: Any comments on my English would be nice, too. I think I'm not that bad, but it's hard to decide with no native speakers around at the place I live, you know...

[#endgame]

PS: Any comments on my English would be nice, too. I think I'm not that bad, but it's hard to decide with no native speakers around at the place I live, you know...

Most people who say that tend to write really well. You are no exception.

[BlackCat]

I don't think giving you crawlers armour will help that much - they will either be killed by the first or the second attack - at least you kneed to upgrade engine too.

Anyway, and now I'm going to be beaten seriously by other posters here, I guess that if you don't have the Empath Guild, then you at least have infiltration - if you don't, then get it as fast as possible - you don't go to war blindfolded ! Well, now the shooting at me starts - if Ic find a AAA unit in a base I wan't to attack I send missiles to get rid of the critter(s) and let my choppers do the rest. Another good thing is to take bases that supports many units - if you do it right you can force the opponent to discard units just because the base that inherit the units can't support them. That actually is the easiest way to reduce the enemy power - they do it for you .

Aki is quite good for training but her lack of growth does make her "not that easy".

Don't worry about your english - even those evil brits and yanks have their trouble spelling things correctly or for that matter, express themself in an understandable way

[Chaos Theory]

Despite Vel's enthusiasm for them, I rarely find armored crawlers to be worthwhile. If your opponents are near enough to pick them off with needlejets, they're near enough to Planet Buster you, and also near enough for you to needlejet or Planet Buster them.
Exterminate them.