Difficulty Levels

[dnzrx]

I don't have the manual and the Internet failed to produce me fruit in my search so far.

What are some changes in gameplay and/or characteristics wen you advance from Talent to Librarian, etc?

[vyeh]

Prima's Strategy Guide, pp 18-26 contain your answer.

Assign a value from 0 = Citizen to 5 = Transcend to DIFF

Drones - if you are under the bureaucracy limit, you get 6 - DIFF workers and the rest are drones before considering facilities, secret projects, factional characteristics, police garrisions, etc.

Secret Projects - At Talent and below, the AI cannot start a secret project until the human player has the prerequisite tech.

Colony pod - At Citizen and Specialist levels, building a colony pod at size 1 base does not eliminate the base.

No Early Research - At Citizen and Specialist levels, all research points accumulated during the first 5 turns are ignored.

Command Center Maintenance - At Citizen level, maintenance is always 0. At Specialist and Talent level, it is always 1. At Librarian and Thinker it starts at 1 and rises to 2 with discovery of fusion power. At Transcend level it starts at 1, goes to 2 with Fusion Power and to 3 with Quantum Power.

No Power Overloads. At Citizen and Specialist levels, Base Facilities do not experience power overloads when you run out of energy to pay maintenance.

No Pop Lost to Attack. At Citizen level, your bases never lose population points when they are attacked.

Random Events do not occur before Turn [75 - (DIFF x 10)].

No Prototype Cost. At Citizen and Specialist levels, you do not have to pay for prototypes of units.

No Production Penalty. At Citizen and Specialist levels, there is no penalty for switching production "in midstream" at a base.

Cost to Change Society. The cost to change social engineering is CHANGE^3 x DIFF, where CHANGE = (the number of areas changed in a turn) + 1.

Production and Population. See the FAQ, question 52

Technology Discovery Rate. The higher the difficulty the more labs it takes to discover at tech.

Ecological Damage. The higher the difficulty, the greater the percentage chance of damage.

Combat Effects. The human player gets a combat handicap at Citizen and Specialist levels and a handicap defending against native life units at Talent.

[dnzrx]

The Transcend Difficulty does not seem hard.

But then again, I never played a game above talent difficulty before...

[vyeh]

The transcend level isn't impossible. 99% of multiplayer games are played at the transcend level.

There are tactics that are known to experienced players that decisively beat the AI, e.g. supply crawlers.

[Mart]

There was a discussion about manual, and they are for legal download (as far as I understand) in replacementdocs site, read about it here:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?t=185511

Also, there is Vel's strategy guide 4.0 on the net (link to Vyeh post):

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?t=185279

Replacement docs have both vanila and expansion manuals. Vel's guide is for smax (expansion), not sure if old versions are still available if you play vanila game.

[gwillybj]

Vel's Strat Guide - Version 2.0 (for SMAC) is still here at Apolyton.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7944

There is some good material in it that is not in Version 3 and 4.