SMACU: Alpha Centauri utilities

[the barber]

I am sharing a tool that I find useful when playing Alpha Centauri. It has a rush calculator, a bureaucracy-drone threshold calculator, and a tech viewer that shows all the prerequisites of techs for beelining purposes. You can find these utilities which I am calling SMACU at www(dot)joshuagraffman(dot)com/smacu.

Replace the (dot)s with periods. I can't post links until my post count is 20+.


Warning: I expect that you will need an up-to-date browser for everything to work properly.

[Kataphraktoi]

I think something is off with this calculator;a 30 mineral unit with 0\mins per turn and no minerals stockpiled towards production would cost 210 EC to rush to completion;at the 10 mineral 'barrier' that cost drops to 60 EC. You may wish to consult this comprehensive thread on Rush buying and double check the numbers being produced. Not to overlook Maniacs Excellent article as well.

[the barber]

I think something is off with this calculator;a 30 mineral unit with 0\mins per turn and no minerals stockpiled towards production would cost 210 EC to rush to completion;at the 10 mineral 'barrier' that cost drops to 60 EC. You may wish to consult this comprehensive thread on and double check the numbers being produced. Not to overlook Maniacs as well.

You are quite right. I should have mentioned that the rush calc intentionally does not take into account the 10 mineral barrier since to do so would require more information such as the number of minerals the build costs. Because inputing another number is another annoyance on an iDevice and another possibility of mistyping I did without it. In practice I find that the rush calc works accurately and I just double the stated rush cost in the rare event that I rush with less than 10 minerals. But I admit that other people will have different rush strategies than me.

Thanks for the article links, I'll look through them when I get the chance and try to come up with a way to make the calculator more technically accurate without making it more difficult to use.

[the barber]

I updated the rush calculator so that you may enter in the build cost in minerals of the build you are trying to rush. If you don't provide a build cost, it assumes that you have enough minerals to avoid any rush penalty. I also put in a few tweaks because of ios 7.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Do you mind if I repost your link elsewhere?

[the barber]

Go ahead. Please do.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Done. Quoted, and I added a link-back to this thread and encouraged people to come give you feedback.

(the barber's utility link, since I can post it working, is http://www.joshuagraffman.com/smacu/)

[Kirov]

The B-calculator is simple and useful, for I'm always forgetting the exact numbers for limits and need to recreate that in the editor every now and then, duh.

But the tech thingy is somewhat limited in its application by going without expansion technologies. Care to add SMAX features?

[the barber]

The B-calculator is simple and useful, for I'm always forgetting the exact numbers for limits and need to recreate that in the editor every now and then, duh.

But the tech thingy is somewhat limited in its application by going without expansion technologies. Care to add SMAX features?

That's already been done. You can click on the gear on the bottom right hand corner to open a settings page that lets you switch between SMAC and SMACX techs.

[the barber]

I just added a few features to the tech list. This is probably my last update. In the settings panel can now load in the alpha.txt for custom scenarios to import custom tech trees. Double clicking on a prerequisite tech selects that tech so you can easily traverse up the tech tree. Also double clicking on a researched tech marks all it's prerequisite techs as researched.