A quickie

[doctorfrog]

I've played exactly one SMAC (vanilla) game, with Yang. I'd like to play again, but I'd like to disable Crawlers for both me and the AI. I suspect that the only reason I won my first game was because I exploited crawlers, and the AI did not. I didn't go nuts with them or anything, but whenever I was in trouble, I simply created a bunch. I'd like to remove the temptation and disallow either myself or the AI the ability to construct these little game-imbalancers.

I've done some searching on this forum, but wasn't able to find a simple, direct way to do this, only hints about former conversations. I'm sure the answer is somewhere out there, but I haven't been able to find it with my searches.

Thanks for your help,

frog

[Leon Trotsky]

Trust me, the AI will never build a supply crawler. Ever. So you only need to overcome your temptations.

Still, if you want to disable supply crawlers, you can open the alpha.txt file and change

Supply Transport, Supply, 0,10, 8, -1, IndAuto,

to

Supply Transport, Supply, 0,10, 8, -1, Disable,

You MAY need to change this other:

Supply Crawler, Infantry, Supply, Scout, 10, 0, 0, IndAuto, -1, 000000000000000000000000

into

Supply Crawler, Infantry, Supply, Scout, 10, 0, 0, Disable, -1, 000000000000000000000000

And remember, always backup your files.

[Sikander]

Better to simply not build them yourself.

[CEO Aaron]

Don't disable crawlers, just raise the difficulty and shrink the map. They're not so great when you actually need to defend yourself.

[Verrucosus]

Welcome doctorfrog,

recognizing the power of crawlers in your very first game is quite impressive. It took me a dozen of games to see how much these little guys can actually do. If you can't resist the temptation to use them, disabling them is an option that will allow you to concentrate more on the rest of the game. It is a way (the "Civ3 way" to use a derogatory term) to make the game more balanced, but it removes one of the features that makes SMAC unique.

If you don't mind, I'd like to ask a follow-up question: Is there a way to make crawlers pay support or is their "clean" ability an integral part of the supply module itself?

Verrucosus

[Hydro]

Howdy,

Actually, the AI will rarely build crawlers. I saw a Cyborg crawler busy harvesting from a forest in MP game. It stopped me in my tracks! Shortly thereafter my Morgan absorbed the Cyborgs so we could teach them how to do it right!

Regardless, it is probably better simply to not build them. That is a lot easier than modifying source files.

Hydro

[doctorfrog]

Thanks for the help, everyone! I'm going to disable the crawlers for now and try my hand at a new game.