Newbie Help and Strategies wanted!

[StealthKab]

I ended up starting a new game and I think I'm doing fairly well. I keep for getting about setting my Lab/Psych-stuff. Anyway, I'll upload it if anyone wants to check it out. I lucked out and had the Peacekeepers start on an island, and away from me. Also, I've noticed a 0-2-1 Probe Team does a good job of base defense instead of a Synthmetal Garrison. Mainly because it frees up one of my mineral supports. So I can have a defender and a Former out without taking up support. My free Scout died though . Anyway, this game is the one I think I'll try to stick through the whole way.

BTW, the name is the same as the other save because I just overwrote the first one.

[StealthKab]

Here's something I haven't asked before that I probably should have. The ratios for Economy, Psych, and Labs in the Social Engineering screen. I get the general idea of what they do. Econ makes you earn more money each turn, Psych makes people happy, and Labs makes you learn techs faster. Problem I'm having is that when I move the Labs bar I get red numbers saying something like 16%, that happens even when I move it up OR down.

Can someone better explain the system to me. I pretty much get the government types. As Morgan I generally stick with Free Market/Weath...and maybe Democratic if I'm not really having any trouble with people.

Oh, I wanted to ask what's generally agreed upon as the amount of bases you want to have by end game? I don't include the ones that were conquered, just the ones you've built. I understand it's different for different size maps, so let's assume I'm talking about a standard map size with about 30%-50% water (I don't like waterlogged maps...I find ocean bases stupid for some reason).

BlackCat - I bet I could take most here in Call of Duty 4

[vyeh]

(1) The red numbers reflect inefficiency (unless you have +3 efficiency) that is caused whenever economy and labs are not equal. This may have been put in to stop the common Civ 2 tactic of cranking science up to 100%. You shouldn't have red numbers when economy = labs (no matter what psych is).

(2) The desirable number of bases is a function of your playing style. The ICS fanatics probably have over 100 bases at the end of the game. With boreholes, orbital minerals and mineral enhancing facilities and special projects, even bases spaced only 2 squares apart can produce 10 minerals per turn (and with Morgan, once a base has produced 10 minerals toward a facility or unit, the rest can be hurried with all that energy).

My goal is to have every square, land and sea, used. On a standard 30-50% map, I'd have built roughly 25 bases at the end of a game I was winning by transcendence. Note that I build sea bases (use sea formers to raise ocean to ocean shelf everywhere).

A player who wins by conquest could build only a few bases and conquered the rest.

(3) I hope you aren't feeling intimidated by BlackCat. When he said he had won his games in six turns, he only meant that he would have choppers in six turns, and that with choppers he knew he could easily beat the AI, who doesn't know how to defend against choppers.

[vyeh]

Originally posted by StealthKab
Can someone better explain the system to me. I pretty much get the government types. As Morgan I generally stick with Free Market/Weath...and maybe Democratic if I'm not really having any trouble with people.

Social Engineering is a big topic. Civ II has civics, e.g. Monarchy, Communism, Democracy. This was basically one-dimensional and generally the more advanced the civic the more desirable.

AC is more of a four-dimensional (for most games, three-dimensional) matrix with axes of Politics, Economics, Values and (if the game goes on long enough) Future Society and the desirability of a social engineering choice depends on the game situation.

There are 10 social factors: economy, efficiency, support, morale, police, growth, planet, probe, industry and research.

Each social engineering choice affects three (in the case of Future Society, four) social factors. Two (three, in the case of Future Society, and one, in the case of Free Market) social factors are positively affected and one (two, in the case of Free Market) social factor is negatively affected.

AC is about trade-offs. Which social factor is important depends on the game situation.

Morgan starts with a positive for Economy (+1, a commerce bonus and 100 extra energy credits), a negative for Support (-1) and for Growth (bases are limited to 4 without Hab Complex).

Morgan cannot use Planned Economics.

While some social factors are more or less linear (efficiency, growth, industry and research), some have sweet spots (economy, support, police and probe). +2 economy yields +1 extra energy per square. While additional levels of economy can reap benefits, as BlackCat has said, for the middle and late games, +3 economy isn't as big a jump from +2 as +2 is from +1 economy.

Similarly, -3 support (each unit costs 1 mineral to support) is a whole lot better than -4 support (each unit costs 2 minerals to support). From -2 to -1, we go from no free minerals for a new base to +10 minerals for a new base.

For police, -3 and below make waging offensive war more difficult (extra drones for military units outside the territory).

For probe, +3 probe means your units and bases can't be subverted.

If you are waging a vendetta, you would care about support, police and probe and hitting these sweet spots. You would also care about morale.

If you've hit your population limit (this happens early for Morgan) and you don't have the tech to build the facility to remove the limit, you wouldn't care about growth.

So social engineering is combining the politics, economics, values and (late in the game) future society choices available to you to maximize the social factors. Because of the sweet spots and the variable importance of some social factors depending on your situation, the way you combine these social engineering choices may change as your game situation changes.

As you learn different tactics, e.g. pop booming, certain combinations may become more important to you at certain stages of the game. For pop booming, you must get growth to +6. In the early game for factions other than Hive or Morgan, this requires democracy, planned economics and children's creche.

Note that once you've boomed to your current population limit or to the limit of the nutrients available, +6 growth contributes nothing.

There is a cost to social engineering. The cost is more than doubled if you change more than one axis.

Besides the cost, there can be other effects to changing your social engineering. If you were using military units to control drones, switching to free market can require building facilities or turning workers to doctors.

[StealthKab]

Yeah, I think I accidentally figured out how to pop boom. I was playing a Morgan game and when I tinkered with the Econ/Psych/Lab some all of my bases when into a Golden Age. The problem was that I was making a -5 energy output. It made me go broke. I think it was something like 30% Econ, 20% Psych, and 50% Labs.

Anyway, so those red numbers are ineffeciency. Which basically means it's eating up more money that's no doing anything in each of my bases?

So I guess the best thing to do is keep my Econ/Lab even and don't make my Psych go up unless I want to pop boom or if I'm having troubles with my lazy, commie loving, drones.

[vyeh]

(1) If you pop boom until your bases reach maximum size and then go to another setting, you would find that you can have more income than you had before pop booming. So think of the negative energy output as an investment. Assuming effective drone control, greater population means more workers which is a good thing.

(2) The red numbers means that some of the energy that survives the normal inefficiency of a base is being lost. This is done on a faction wide basis.

(3) Keeping your econ/lab even is not necessarily a good thing. There may be times when you need more labs or more econ and you are willing to sacrifice to get it. Morgan has so much energy he can afford to be inefficient.

[StealthKab]

Yeah, I figured it out now. I recently started another game and I think I'm doing fairly well. So much so, that the Formers I built in my bases are pretty much done terraforming, and a couple are on auto until I can figure out what to do with them. As usual Yang and Miriam are pissed and I've been at war with them seperate times. Probe Team stole a base from Yang and just straight up conquered another from Miriam. Also got elected Governor when Miriam called for a council. I had lots of money for bribes and it pays to be the king.

Here's the save if you wanna check it out and have any ideas on where I should go from here.

[QuixotesGhost]

I decided to mess around with Morgan on Specialist as well. Fairly small number of bases at the end (only 8) due to the fact that I had Miriam start very close to me. I bribed her to keep her peaceful then traded for applied physics and researched up to Nonlinear Mathematics to kill her with Chaos Troops.

Dropped out of Free Market for the few turns it took to get her bases then dropped back in. Went Wealth/Free Market/Demo and expanded vertically by rush buying as much as possible. Once I hit Planetary Economics I checked "Corner Global Energy Market" and noticed that it was at a mere 1000 energy credits at a time when my income was ~75 credits. Pumped Economy to 100% which gave me around 140 credits per turn and had enough to start the Economic Victory countdown in M.Y. 2206.

Trust in the Power of the Market.

[QuixotesGhost]

Here's the save if you wanna check it out and have any ideas on where I should go from here.

Check your "Corner Global Energy Market" tab, Stealthkab. It might be something to do with specialist difficulty but it seems like you only need a mere grand to start the economic victory countdown as well. Switch to Demo, and pump everything into Economy.

You'll have enough in 2 turns.

[StealthKab]

I don't even know where that tab is. I've been so busy with building and expanding that I forgot I could win other ways. Though, if I played it out more I bet I could win with Supreme Ruler...even though I don't know how. But I know it involves the Planet Council, which I'm the George W. Bush of now. Heh heh, I'm doin' it fer 'merica.

For some reason it seems AC goes a lot faster than Civ2 did. Maybe it was because I was a lot younger and didn't really know WTF I was doing, or that AC is just a faster game. Either way, that saved game I uploaded, I'm 70% sure that I'm going to win. Barring any unforseen disaster. I've been getting voices and fungus has been popping up in some of my squares.

[vyeh]

Re matt1.sav, here are some things to think about:

(1) There are two bases within 1 turn of Hunter Seeker Algorithm. I assume you will switch one of them to Ascetic Virtues.

(2) You should consider going to Democracy. This will increase your income by 11 energy credits and reduce the time to research by 1 turn. This only cost 8 energy credits, so if you are in Democracy for 2 turns, you will more than recoup the cost of switching to Democracy and switching back. Note that you will pay an additional mineral per base in support cost and you will not have any free minerals if you found a base (but you don't have any colony pods in existence or production.

(3) You are building hybrid forests in two bases. If you go the tree farm/hybrid forest route, you should be planting forests everywhere. Outside Morgan Collection, you have a farm/mine combination on a bonus mineral square. That is yielding 1-4-1. If you planted a forest there, it would yield 2-4-2 and produce less pollution!

(4) With your miserable support and the fact that you have truces with everybody except the Peacekeepers, consider sending out probe teams as land scouts and probe foils as sea scouts. Infiltrate everybody (just in case you lose the governorship).

(5) Plenty more crawlers. The plasma armored crawlers would have a dual purpose of giving you additional defenders if vendetta breaks out, but you could make the simple crawlers and upgrade if the eventuality occurs. Use crawlers first to boost the mineral production of every base to the maximum without pollution. At that point, you'll be rolling crawlers out quickly. Then you can use crawlers to pull in energy. The Garland Crater is a nice place since it has an energy bonus.

(6) Currently your research priority is build. If you can keep trading with other factions for advance weapons (I think two factions have missiles - attack 6) and you can trade with the Gaians for the Centauri ecologies, you might want to consider adding discover as a research priority. Keeping a tech lead is important. With University gone, this would be a natural place to gain significant advantage over the other factions.

(7) Have you tried getting treaties or pacts with other factions? If you could do it without having to declare vendetta, that would be great. This will boost your commerce income (especially if you could do it with the Believers who have a lot of bases).

(8) Since you have foils, have you considered a significant way AC differs from Civ 2, i.e. the sea game? How about sea colony pods, sea formers, sea crawlers? While sea bases can't reach the mineral potential of a land base, they have the potential to generate lots of energy.

(9) For Corner Global Energy Market, go to Menu on the left of the games console, select HQ and Corner Global Energy Market. While you could win quickly (or you might trigger a vendetta with the Believers as they invade with their missile rovers -- think about whether you can keep them from taking your HQ for twenty turns), there is still a lot of other things you can learn from this game.

[QuixotesGhost]

Once you research "Planetary Economics", it appears as the last item under the HQ menu. If you select it, a text overlay will appear at the bottom of the screen telling you how many credits are required to corner it. Get the required amount of credits, select it again, and a pop-up will appear asking you if you want to corner the market. Once you do, you have to hold on to your capital for 20 turns - do so and you win an Economic Victory.

Normally the amount of required is based upon how developed your opponents are, basically you need enough to mind control every other city on Planet. However on Specialist difficulty it seems as if the amount is capped at 1000 credits which is a easy amount to amass.

[StealthKab]

Yeah, I see it now. I never noticed it because I don't think I had that tech before. Anyway, I WIN! Miriam went all jihad on me and ended up taking that city all the way to the east near her territory. I kept her in check for awhile by bolstering the Spartans and Peacekeepers, who were both at war with her. That helped split her forces some and I started making some 6-4-1, a Needlejet, and 3 choppers. With that I started chipping away at her units in the open. Turns out that was the majority of her forces. The air units helped a lot by keeping her units away from my bases. Finally after taking 5 bases she wanted a truce and I agreed. By then it was took late for anyone to do anything because like 3 turns later I finished cornering the energy market.

Now I'm thinking of playing as either The Hive, or Peacekeepers. But they seem radically different to Morgan, so I'll have to do a bit of research on how to play them effectively. It's going to suck not being able to rush things whenever I wanted.

About the navy stuff...I never did much of that in Civ2 either. Just never thought it important.

One question I've been meaning to ask but always forgot is this...What do you do with bases you've captured but didn't want. You just wanted to get rid of it for whatever reason. The problem I'm having was in that saved game when I was attacking the Believers I was capturing the bases, but they were way to close to each other. It wasn't a problem because I was just doing a counteroffensive. Playing defense by going on offense to defend myself long enough to get the Ecnomic victory. I thought about handing some over to the Spartans, because they only had one base left. But that still didn't move the bases out of the squares my other bases were working. If I had played the game out longer I think it would've been a big problem. HELPS MES!

[Pandir]

You can starve out a base if you don't want to give it away or obliterate it. By making it have negative food income(make all workers into talents and destroy recycling tanks if it has them)if a bases nutrition box runs out they will lose a population every turn. You can also rush colony pods every turn, just rush a colony pod then disband it and rush build the next one.

[vyeh]

(1) The point is that all you could do in Civ 2 was travel across the ocean. In AC, you can terraform the ocean, colonize it and crawl it. You can even turn ocean into land and vice versa.

(2) Reducing a Look at Questions and Answers 23 and 24 of this post. Note you can't starve the last population point unless you convoy the last two nutrients generated per turn as well as stockpiled nutrients to another base using crawlers. At the specialist level, you can't abandon a size 1 base by building a colony pod.

You can obliterate bases, but that is an atrocity and can cause some AI factions to declare vendetta on you.

I prefer to set the bases to produce colony pods and send the colony pods to the bases I want to keep and add to their population (by hitting "b" while they are in the other base). At the same time, I'm selling off the bases facilities every turn.

So in your game, your choices are:

(a) starve or build colony pods until the base was size 1. Then build or re-home three or more crawlers, send those crawlers to another base and convoy nutrients until the base starves.

(b) obliterate the base with a combat unit inside the base.

(3) For research into the Hive or PK, I suggest you look at the first post of the thread gwillybj suggested in the tenth post of this thread.

The Hive's -2 Economy will be a sharp contrast to Morgan's +1 Economy. The Hive's +1 Growth and +1 Industry will be a nice change to Morgan's -1 Support. The Hive can't use Democratic, but it can use Planned. And the Hive's free built-in Perimeter Defense helps in a defensive war.

The biggest difference between Morgan and the Peacekeepers is population. Morgan is limited to 4 pop points before Hab Complexes. The Peacekeepers are limited to 9 pop points. Peacekeepers can't use Police State, but can use Planned.