A question to marketeers

[Sikander]

You might also be suffering from terraforming pollution. You get that when you have a high level of terraforming (boreholes being prime contributors). Tree Farms reduce this pollution by 50%, as do Hybrid forests. Can you see that your bases are polluting, or are these pops totally out of the blue?

[Leon Trotsky]

Most of my worked tiles were forests (which if I remember correctly reduce this factor), I only crawl condensors as a rule and I had no echelon mirrors. The six boreholes I had at my HQ might have been an important factor, but I had Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests built there as soon as possible.

...just checked a savegame. With Tree Farm and Hybrid Forest, my HQ was my only polluting base with fifty points of ecodamage. Is that enough to melt the polar icecaps?

[Blake]

Remember that planet rating has nothing to do with whether or not you get Ecodamage, it only multiplies existing ED. So, if you are getting ED, your clean mineral limit is too low and need tro be raised by spam+sell CentPreserves.

The easy thing to do is just keep your minerals/base to about 30 - that's a base of 20 minerals with a Genejack. It's pretty easy to get a CM limit of 30. When i used to play I'd usually have a 60 mineral target (base of 30, two +50% buildings) which typically involved reselling of CP's to raise the CM limit.
If you have ecodamage problems it's usually from mineral multiplier builds, you might want to avoid building the more expensive ones, or even sell them to get rid of ED.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Originally posted by Leon Trotsky
I'm sorry, that's the one I meant. I mistook the term, but trust me that I meant fungal pop. I should only post here sober...

Hold on right thar boy, that's crazy talk! Only fools and horses post here sober. (Including "Alexander's Horse".)

[Darrell01]

Have you infiltrated other factions? Check their eco damage. If they have a lot of eco damage as well, it probably them as well. Some of my games, one will go planned democracy and pop boom their cities. Then the computer won't build tree farms and hybrid forests. Then all thier cities will have 5 or 8 eco damage. Problem is that 30 cities will have that much. That's what will make sea levels rise.

[Blake]

another thing which occurs to me is raise land strategy. I never experienced any trouble keeping my land high and dry, the key always being to raise peaks to 3500, since that raises a whole 5x5 block to above 1000. Since 25 tiles can be raised with a single raise land action, it's obviously really quite cheap in formers turns to keep all your land dry. I also believe that the game, when maintaining the gradient (ie >3000, >2000, >1000, >0) prefers to "pull up" low lying land moreso than "pull down" higher land - so the peaks, once made peaks, tend to stay peaks for quite a while, acting as a "sky anchor" for the whole 25 tile block of land. In any case I didn't have trouble with just my leftover formers from the old terraforming efforts.

I seem to recall that my favorite city spacing* also made it easy to tile the 5x5 blocks, I would make sure to keep all of my land above 1000. The trick I recall with a rigid grid of maximum density boreholes was simply to raise land on existing boreholes - that makes that borehole at 3500, the next layer out at 2000+, and the outer ring of boreholes at 1000. A city could never be founded on a borehole and thus would never block a raise land spot.


*My city placement was a "natural cyborg" style, it was ordered but not rigid. The algorithm was to view the map like a chess board, every other black tile gets a borehole (so a rigid grid of boreholes), while cities can be founded on any white tile (the cities thus interlock visually in some way, but without being gridded), I always did this by placing the cursor on an existing city and then using diagonal numpad keys to find new city locations (using the chess anology, moving the cursor like a bishop, so it's always on the same color tile).

[vyeh]

Originally posted by Blake
another thing which occurs to me is raise land strategy. I never experienced any trouble keeping my land high and dry, the key always being to raise peaks to 3500, since that raises a whole 5x5 block to above 1000. Since 25 tiles can be raised with a single raise land action, it's obviously really quite cheap in formers turns to keep all your land dry.

If we assume that the starting point was <1000, didn't it take 3 raise land actions to affect the entire 25 tiles (the first land action to 1000 and affecting only the starting point, the second 2000 and affecting 9 tiles, the third 3000 and affecting all 25 tiles)?

Did it get more expensive the more tiles that were affected?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by vyeh


If we assume that the starting point was <1000, didn't it take 3 raise land actions to affect the entire 25 tiles (the first land action to 1000 and affecting only the starting point, the second 2000 and affecting 9 tiles, the third 3000 and affecting all 25 tiles)?

Did it get more expensive the more tiles that were affected?

Yes the costs get higher for the higher pulls AND it seems to get higher as you get more distant from your nearest base.

But it can be pretty quick. I usually gang-former this issue and with teams of say 8 formers, you can accomplish a land raise in a turn

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Blake
another thing which occurs to me is raise land strategy. I never experienced any trouble keeping my land high and dry, the key always being to raise peaks to 3500, since that raises a whole 5x5 block to above 1000. Since 25 tiles can be raised with a single raise land action, it's obviously really quite cheap in formers turns to keep all your land dry. I also believe that the game, when maintaining the gradient (ie >3000, >2000, >1000, >0) prefers to "pull up" low lying land moreso than "pull down" higher land - so the peaks, once made peaks, tend to stay peaks for quite a while, acting as a "sky anchor" for the whole 25 tile block of land. In any case I didn't have trouble with just my leftover formers from the old terraforming efforts.

To effectively sky anchor, you would need to keep everything above 1000. I just wanted to mention the dangers of lower "sky anchoring "

Lets just say you have a tile at 1300 adjacent to a tile at 100 with a 200 m searise imminent. The resulting elevations of 1100 and minus 100 are not permitted by the game so the lower tile would have a positibe elevation -- So you may be thinking no harm right ?

Wrong !!! THis is were the concept of washing occurrs and that tile would lose all improvements or special feature status and even any unit that was sitting there. I know Blake knows about this but I thought it was a good place to mention it. Its a good reason to continue the pull up of land instead of just stopping

[Darrell01]

Boy, if you have one city popping fungus every turn, that's at least 500 credits if you run an elite 6res empath rover or destroyer in there to clean up.

[Blake]

Yeah Flubber is correct. That's why I raise ALL land to above 1000 in blocks of 5x5, rather than settling with above 0 in blocks of 7x7. Altough if the sea level rises are just transient you can go with 7x7 blocks.

If we assume that the starting point was <1000, didn't it take 3 raise land actions to affect the entire 25 tiles (the first land action to 1000 and affecting only the starting point, the second 2000 and affecting 9 tiles, the third 3000 and affecting all 25 tiles)?

It's true that the FIRST time you pull the land up it takes more than one raise land action (altough boreholes can be drilled at any elevation if the land is shaped right), but to refresh the peaks it only takes a single raise land action.

The energy cost is NEVER a factor because the distance to city factor pretty much eliminates the cost. In fact the only possible obstacle is the borders of allies.

[Kataphraktoi]

What are clean minerals?

Besides that red stuff gives good EC just dont wear out the ] key along the way

[T-hawk]

I didn't mean that Morgan was the cause of my problems, it is just a coincidence that I decided to play my first 100% Free Market game with that faction.

Here's a little secret: Morgan's real strength is when running Wealth, not Free Market. The magic number for a faction economy rating is +2, which is when you get the +1 energy per square. Morgan can get that entirely with his natural +1 economy and +1 more from Wealth. Adding Free Market on top of that is just superfluous; +3 or +4 economy does give you more energy in each base square, but that's small compared to having a bonus from every square, unless you're ICSing to the max.

Morgan's real strength is getting the +2 economy bonus with only Wealth, thus not having to suffer the drastic police and planet drawbacks of Free Market. In fact, Green economy is often Morgan's best overall choice; the Efficiency bonus works nicely with the +2 economy.

Free Market is actually better exploited by the University. The +2 economy is multiplicative with the faction's natural bonus, their free Network Node, and their propensity for running Knowledge.

[Blake]

I nearly always played Morgan as a real free marketeer to get the truely insane energy per city. And if you're going to have more money than god, you may as well do it properly.

The other bonus of Free Market Morgan is the ability to GA pop-boom.

Of course if you want to have a REAL war and don't want to mass punishment spheres then green might be better....
I seem to recall I usually went with Fundie/Free Market/Wealth and massed punishment spheres in the frontier cities. My SE choices for Morgan probably reflect my view of capitalism "You Will Be Assimilated" "Death To Nature" etc etc... I had a lot of fun with that SE+Fun spheres combo, used it with Peacekeepers and Miriam too. Altough trying to fit fun spheres and fundie into PK ideology was a bit trickzy.

[Senethro]

Rubbish, Free Market is absolutely essential for Morgan. It means that any new base I place will make 8 energy with a forest square and a hurried recycling tanks so that 20%psych will give enough effect to quell one drone. Thus, my expansion can continue through the first and most of the second bureaucracy limits without riots.

I've not found a way to make Uni ICS expansion go so smoothly, but then I've always had a blind spot for how to play the Uni.