Spoils of War

[chuft]

Do you play with Spoils of War on?

If so, do you think it helps or hurts the AI overall?

Thanks.

[CEO Aaron]

Spoils definitely favors the human player. It also helps the momentum factions like Miriam and Yang, but unless you're playing a purely defensive game, you'll get more techs than the AIs will. For one thing, at a certain point, the AI will team up on you and share all tech anyway.

[McLaine]

I never use spoils of war. I know the option from the original CIV game (the one on DOS), but in SMAC I never needed this.

If I need to gain tech, typically I:

• Trade as much as I can with others (except perhaps with Yang/Myriam).
  Buy it if I can't trade.
  Go chase pods to discover alien artifacts that I connect to my network nodes and gain tech this way.
  Steal it using probe teams - usually a variant where I build a probe skimship rather than the regular probe team.