How can I make SP challenging?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Marid Audran
All of Blake's talk of Switching Faction challenge setups have made me frisky, now I'm going to have to start a game as one for the first time! Wonder how long I'll last.

switching twice and then winning is very doable. Tougher is to set the goal of switching 3 times, especially if you require yourself to get your faction to #1 in the powergraph before switching each time.

[Blake]

The difficulty depends largely on map types too. Smaller maps are a lot more brutal. Larger maps with high erosion and considerable water can result in many isolated factions that sit patiently for you to switch to them and bootstrap their pathetic economies...

[Blake]

I'm DEAD. Switched to the spartans (who happened to be right next to the Gaians), got 5K in loans from various factions and started building...

Then my Pactmate, Brother Rat of the Peacekeepers probed and framed me against like every other faction (but especially my neighbours the gaians and angels), with my reputation nicely shot the big AI's started attacking me. It's a huge map and I've got 3 nut orbitals up and lots of sea colony pods heading out but I think it'll be more of a spartan extermination campaign than anything...

Oh yah the other really nice bit was I built the gaians bases up to 50+ minerals and once I switched to Spartans rising sea levels kicked in... and I was being attacked by the Angels. I couldn't get Env.Eco, and lost several bases, including Sparta Command to rising seas .

[Kirov]

IMHO switching sides is the best way to make SP challenging. Plus it's the most interesting. I remember that when I started playing SMAC, each game was a story in itself ("that was the game where Gaians allied with Hive and busted everyone else" etc.). After some time however, SP became so boring that I could easily forget what are the factions playing, who fights with whom and so on. Those games were just so easy that they demanded no serious attention. Later, when I discovered switching sides, stories came back once again ("that was the game where I had 2 sea bases while Hive had several PBs - built previously by me playing Hive").

Usually, when I play switching, I also add one condition - never to allow anyone die. If I see a faction on the verge of dying, I immediately switch to it and start a rescue mission - building transport foils and CPs and setting bases on remote islands. It makes global situation a bit more interesting.

I've also noticed one thing - when you play your first action, even for 20 or 25 turns, it's likely to get an edge and be competitive for a long time. This made me realise why AI sometimes sucks so utterly - it lacks tight base spacing and good terraforming, forests in the first place. Sometimes you can switch to Hive in like 2180, only to see it has 2 bases, 6 CPs placed "on hold" in the middle of fungus, and several 2-2-1 units... Forget about formers, it doesn't even have Centauri Ecology. Small wonder its graph has been far from impressive.

Right now, providing I have time and am not tired, what I do is I start a game, save its map, open it in scenario editor and give each AI "a core": 3 bases close to each other, with perimeter defenses and tachyon fields. Then I add 2 or 3 boreholes and a patch of forest in the middle, big enough to expand by itself. While it doesn't really make AIs challenging, it does ensure that none of them is ridiculously pathetic, and is not so easy to wipe out.

[Darsnan]

I'm toying with a variant of the OCC Challenge currently where you are then permanently pacted with an AI, and you, with your single city, are then charged with guiding your perma-pacted AI ally to victory. Lots of gifting units to the AI, lots of trying to steer the AI into beneficial research paths, etc.
So, in the hands of a Creator (who can manipulate the AI's, set up the map, set up an extremely intense gaming experience, etc...) does this sound like an interesting scenario?


D