Most maligned/underused SE choice?

[CEO Aaron]

Hey, Franky.

Yeah, if you know what you're doing and focus on making the absolute most of police, it can be very effective. Plus going specialist heavy once your population gets high completely bypasses efficiency.

[Commy]

I'm surprised that thought control wasn't on the list...

I can't imagine anyone doing it unless you had the clonin vats...

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Commy
I'm surprised that thought control wasn't on the list...

I can't imagine anyone doing it unless you had the clonin vats...

Well the future choices are so late game usually that they aren't really even that relevant.

That said I like thought control if in a tough late game war

[Jac de Molay]

[noob question] I just picked up a copy of the game last week, and I'm playing Yang with the usual PS/Planned combo, but it's counting all efficiency penalties (-4, economic paralysis), and I thought Yang was immune to all inefficiency. Was this a bug to begin with? Is this a bug of a bug? Any advice/answers are welcome. [/noob question].

And for the record, I can't understand why I've always heard people say run Wealth with Yang. Power all the way! The morale boost, and support up to base size for free.

[Petek]

Originally posted by Jac de Molay
[noob question] I just picked up a copy of the game last week, and I'm playing Yang with the usual PS/Planned combo, but it's counting all efficiency penalties (-4, economic paralysis), and I thought Yang was immune to all inefficiency. Was this a bug to begin with? Is this a bug of a bug? Any advice/answers are welcome. [/noob question].

It sounds like you need to apply the SMAC patch. Yang did suffer ineffiency in the orginal game, but one of the patches removed this.

[Kirov]

Originally posted by Jac de Molay
[noob question] I just picked up a copy of the game last week, and I'm playing Yang with the usual PS/Planned combo, but it's counting all efficiency penalties (-4, economic paralysis), and I thought Yang was immune to all inefficiency. Was this a bug to begin with? Is this a bug of a bug? Any advice/answers are welcome. [/noob question].

You're playing SMAC 1.0 now. Get yourself a patch or better yet, get Alien Crossfire (SMAX), an add-on for SMAC, with a lot of new features and bug fixes.

And for the record, I can't understand why I've always heard people say run Wealth with Yang. Power all the way! The morale boost, and support up to base size for free.

Yang with Wealth (+3 Industry) is one of the strongest factions in any game, Yang with Power (0 industry) loses one of his most important advantage and shrinks in a moment.

In general, you should never get rid of your advantages to get sth else or to compensate for your handicaps. Rather than that, try to boost your good points as much as you can - For example, Yang and Morgan benefit from Wealth more than others, Gaians - from Green, Spartans - from Command Centers etc.

And welcome aboard! It is fascinating how people are coming over to this 7 year old game...

EDIT: typos

[Lazerus]

Yeah you need a patch to counter that efficiency bug.

Wealth is waaayy better then power

Support - your bases are going to be small for along time, +2 from PS lets your bases each handle 4 units, 1 police garrison, 3 formers normally. That extra support from power makes no difference until you've got bases size 5+ and by this time you should be crawling alot of minerals or have clean reactors, both of which counter the effects of having to support a large air force.

Morale - Granted power wins this hands down but .. big but .. who wants a 0 industry rating when they can have +3 ? You can build rapidly and constantly in wealth and if a war happens you'll have a massive numerical superiority over the enemy with your cheap units. Who cares if they start out as green, shoot a few of the other guys formers and they're disciplined in no time and if there's nothing to shoot, kamikaze them into his defenses and replace your losses quicker then him.

Wealth also has the massive advantage of when you're in the early game and sprawling everywhere of removing that evil -1energy from all bases bonus.


Nearly all of the above are big aversions to me lol, i've never ran fundy, green, knowledge or power in any serious game with any faction.
It's either PS/planned/wealth or demo/FM/wealth

[Jac de Molay]

Ok, I just checked the FAQ and downloaded patch 4.0 from the Firaxis link, this should cover the inefficiency thing? Also, in a game with Gaians, I noticed that crawlers are still harvesting 1/2/1 from forests after farms and hybrids when I thougt you could harvest 2/2/1 and 3/2/2 respectively after the facilities were built.

Lazerus, you're probably an expert and I am not, but bases are definitely not small by the time Power SE rolls around. I always build the Command Nexus and with Creches and monoliths, I don't want an SE choice that hinders Yang's natural inclination. Granted, clean reactors are close at hand, but you also have that extra workshop slot for lots of other goodies, too. Just strikes me as counterintuitve for Yangs style.

[Lazerus]

I noticed that crawlers are still harvesting 1/2/1 from forests after farms and hybrids when I thougt you could harvest 2/2/1 and 3/2/2 respectively after the facilities were built

Do you mean they're only harvesting 1 nutrient even when you have hybrid tree farms ? Because they should be gathering 3 iirc (maybe another bug, yes theres quite a few sadly)
However if it's say minerals you're crawling then nothing will change as crawlers only collect 1 resource.

Nah i'm not an expert but I'm an avid Hiver, wealth promotes the Hives industry bonus to such an extent i don't see how you can view it as counter to alot of their natural builder abilities.

Granted, clean reactors are close at hand, but you also have that extra workshop slot for lots of other goodies, too

I don't understand what you mean here ... generally theres more workshop slots then you're ever going to use if you mean that clean reactor units are going to take up valuable space

[Petek]

Originally posted by Jac de Molay
Also, in a game with Gaians, I noticed that crawlers are still harvesting 1/2/1 from forests after farms and hybrids when I thougt you could harvest 2/2/1 and 3/2/2 respectively after the facilities were built.

That's right, with a Tree Farm (say), a crawler should be able to harvest either 2 nuts, or 2 mins or 1 EC from a forest tile. However, the crawler's home base must have built the Tree Farm.

[Jac de Molay]

Originally posted by Lazerus


Do you mean they're only harvesting 1 nutrient even when you have hybrid tree farms ? Because they should be gathering 3 iirc (maybe another bug, yes theres quite a few sadly)
However if it's say minerals you're crawling then nothing will change as crawlers only collect 1 resource.

Yes, that's what was happening. It was a late game with all-forest terraforming and even with farms/hybrids it was only 1/2/1. Fortunately, it appears the patch fixed it because I went back and loaded it, and crawlers now do 3/2/2.

Also, the patch fixed the efficiency thing with Hive when I started a new game, but I have a sweet saved game where I'm next to Gaia on the Monsoon Forest, and it's still giving me the efficiency penalty for PS/Planned Anyway, thanks for your help. Jac

[Leon Trotsky]

That's because you are playing with the ancient HIVE.TXT, which doesn't include immunity to inefficency. Once you start a game, you could do anything to your faction files (even delete them) and still play on, since the faction information is alrealdy loaded "in the game". Consider reloading the faction, thought it would stigmatize you as CHEATER! in the score screen.

[Leon Trotsky]

Originally posted by CEO Aaron
With all the Yang players on these boards, I'd never really describe Police as maligned or underplayed, and if it IS maligned, I feel it is justly so. Police is the cocaine SE choice. First it feels great, then you find yourself needing it more and more, and finally you can't stop. Once you become dependent on the high police rating to quell your drones in police state, you start diverting more and more units to garrison duty. You could start building more facilities to help quelling drones, but you're lagging in tech and cash from the efficiency problems that planned gives you, and are typically also engaged in a war with your non-garrison troops, and don't want to divert production of reinforcements toward making your populace less disgruntled. The moral of the story is that if you really want to support more troops, just go crawl some more minerals.

Nice post Aaron. The main problem I see with police is its lack of flexibility; to get the most of it you must build three units per base (usually two of them being 1-1-1 police) which only eat up support if you change your social enigneering set. Once you've made the investment, you don't want it to go down the drain... its a sick relationship.

When I run police state, mostly I do so thinking of it as a one way trip. So I usually leave it for, as you said, Yang and Santiago, or the case in which I grabbed the Ascetic Virtues. It might be useful to reduce the effects of Free Market under war, but the inefficency erases its benefits as well. I'd rather just switch to Green (and get the chance of netting some mindworms) or Planned (if already in democracy, get pop boom -would that be the famous post war baby boom?-).

[d=me]

I think it's knowledge.

[Commy]

Originally posted by d=me
I think it's knowledge.

As far as I know, few strategies actually incorporate knowledge...many players either do wealth, or war-time switches to power (although rarely)...

However, I will say that I'm a diehard for knowledge...not because it's the best choice, but I just like it...