New player, advice needed.

[Morgan Everett]

Greetings from France!

I've started to play SMAX recently and I have a few questions awaiting your answers that hopefully will help me get started, please remember that I barely understand the game's basics so I need detailed but simplistic explanations.

I've briefly tried all factions to figure that I'm a builder with the occasional desire to launch massive assaults.

Two factions have made a good impression on me: The Morganites and The Free Drones.

I can't seem to choose between these two as they seem very close if I ponder their respective pros and cons.

The Free Drones have a +2 bonus in Industry, now most people seem to think it's exceptional but I fail to see why. Sure, you can build faster ( anything is less expensive by 20% if I got that correctly ) but isn't that what Morganites do anyway by rushing production with their huge cash bonuses?

Anyway, with these two factions I have an edge over my enemies in terms of production and building infrastructures although the Morganites seem stronger because they can also bribe enemies, make loans, and produce incredible amounts of energy per square so it boosts their research too - I think - correct me if I'm wrong.

Now that we've established that, let's take a look at their flaws:


Free Drones:

First and oh boy... the research penalty! It seems so bad I can only see the Free Drones as a must-rush-to-war kind of faction, sort of like Miriam who has an offensive bonus but almost non-existent research abilities.

So building faster is nice, but building faster outdated units doesn't seem interesting though. I must be missing something because everyone seems to like the Free Drones and yet no one refers to them as a warlike faction that needs to attack ASAP to steal tech or die. I read they're builders.

But how can you turtle with such a crippling research disadvantage?

The way I see it the more energy produced by bases the less it takes to make new discoveries, so doesn't that make the Morganites - again - much superior to the Free Drones, especially since they don't suffer from a -2 RESEARCH penalty?

Are there other ways to increase lab efficacy and compensate for the research penalty? I don't see how I could play the Free Drones otherwise.


Morganites:

It seems inconceivable to play the Morganites without Wealth and Free Market to get +4 ECONOMY, that leaves me with a -1 to support, -2 to moral, -3 to planet and -5 to police!! How am I supposed to cope with that?!

It makes their combat units unbelievably crappy in addition to being expensive, not to mention that riots occur on a frequent basis because of the police penalty.

In the games I've played against the computer I do well with the Morganites until I come across another faction on the map, then hostilities begin and I'm torn to pieces in no time. I guess my advanced but undefended facilities are an ideal target for my enemies even though I force myself to create at least one defense unit per base.

I tend to avoid making more because I want to expand fast and there are so many things to do other than building more defense units... Is this wrong? Should I always build more troops from the start or wait clean reactor to initiate a massive production?

I've noticed I can use probe units in the workshop as a defense unit ( with the cyan armor incorporated ) but how much of those should I build per base? I tend to stick to one or two at most per base.



In the end I sort of hoped I'd be able to defend myself better with the Free Drones but their penalty in research only changes my problem from troops being too expensive and weak ( -2 MORAL ) to obsolete troops, so I get my buttocks kicked no matter what I do.

I'm confused as to what I should to make things work, you should know that I play the librarian level.


Finally, I'm pretty sure I want to play one of these two factions so don't tell me I should pick another faction please, I prefer the Morganites over the Free Drones because their ideology attracts me more ( and their bases look great unlike the Drones' ) but they seem really unplayable as soon as hostiles step in so I might go with the Free Drones but I don't know how to play them either...

Please help me get my mind around these two factions.

PS: English is not my mother tongue because I'm French, I really have no problem understanding and writing common English as you surely have noticed but please avoid abbreviations and unnecessary technical words, thank you very much.

[gwillybj]

Re: New player, advice needed.

Greetings from France!

I've started to play SMAX recently and I have a few questions awaiting answers that hopefully will help me get started, please remember that I barely understand the game's basics so I need detailed but simplistic explanations.

I've briefly tried all factions to figure that I'm a builder with the occasional desire to launch assaults.

Two factions have made a good impression on me: The Morganites and The Free Drones.

I can't seem to choose between these two as they seem very close if I ponder their respective pros and cons.

...

I'm pretty sure I want to play one of these two factions so don't tell me I should pick another faction please, I also much prefer the Morganites over the drones but they seem really hard to play as soon as hostiles step in so I might go with the Free Drones but I don't know how to play them either...

Please help me get my mind around these two factions, preferably the Morganites because I much rather their ideology.

PS: English is not my mother tongue because I'm French, I really have no problem understanding and writing common English as you surely have noticed but please avoid abbreviations and unnecessary technical words, thank you very much.

Greetings from the Adirondacks (New York)!

You've picked a couple of tough nuts. I can help only a little bit.

Free Drones: use the "E" key to access the Energy Allocation Screen, and adjust the Economy, Psych, and Research sliders so you have minimal positive Economy and as much Research as you can get while allowing whatever is required to Psych to keep the Drones quiet. I think you're right about the fast production of units. If you decide to go to war, do it early, before your enemy gets too far ahead of your weapons.

Morgan: Build. Defend. You pretty much have to "turn turtle" and build an army of warriors with good defensive tactics, and an army of Probes for out-of-bounds operations. You can forego armor on Probes; just be careful that they don't stop adjacent to an enemy, so they won't be attacked immediately, and so you can advance and attack next turn. Psych-increasing facilities are a must, along with what you can manage in the "E" Screen.

I hope CEOAaron sees your post; he's the Morganite and much better at explaining the nuances of these two factions. He might even tell you my ideas are way off. That's fine, he knows more and better.

[Morgan Everett]

Greetings from the Adirondacks (New York)!

You've picked a couple of tough nuts. I can help only a little bit.

Free Drones: use the "E" key to access the Energy Allocation Screen, and adjust the Economy, Psych, and Research sliders so you have minimal positive Economy and as much Research as you can get while allowing whatever is required to Psych to keep the Drones quiet. I think you're right about the fast production of units. If you decide to go to war, do it early, before your enemy gets too far ahead of your weapons.

Morgan: Build. Defend. You pretty much have to "turn turtle" and build an army of warriors with good defensive tactics, and an army of Probes for out-of-bounds operations. You can forego armor on Probes; just be careful that they don't stop adjacent to an enemy, so they won't be attacked immediately, and so you can advance and attack next turn. Psych-increasing facilities are a must, along with what you can manage in the "E" Screen.

I hope CEOAaron sees your post; he's the Morganite and much better at explaining the nuances of these two factions. He might even tell you my ideas are way off. That's fine, he knows more and better.

Hi there,

First and foremost, thank you for your quick reply.

I've been fiddling with the Energy Allocation Screen but the best result is always the default model. As soon as I try to increase Research - or any other value for that matter - I must endure ridiculous downsides so I always end up putting it back the way it was.

About defending myself upon imminent attack, logical sense would lead me remove WEALTH during war but doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the Morganites? If I can't make tons of cash and build fast for the most part of the game because I'm at war then what's the point?

I did consider bribing my enemies but in the end they get greedy and it costs me too much to keep them away from my borders.

What's the best strategy then?

Also, one thing I'm not sure is whether the game takes into account weapons for defense or not.. Is armor the only thing that matters? Can I safely defend bases with units that are like 1-4? Is that what you meant by defensive tactics?

[Lord Avalon]

Bonjour, FrenchDrone. Are you playing on at least a large map? That will most likely give you more time before meeting other factions, so you can grow and research and be better prepared. After beelining Industrial Automation, you can beeline Bioengineering for clean reactors. Clean police scouts will help with drones.

If you start near someone who is threatening, you might have to appease them until you can gain a military advantage. If someone declares vendetta and invades, use your cash and probe teams to steal their units.

Children's Creches will help with morale, and if you really need to, you can build the Command Nexus. Once you're ready to invade, then switch out of Free Market to Green (or if not unlocked, Simple), so you don't have the Police penalty. You could even switch to Fundamentalism, though you'd want to have enough force to keep your war brief, so you can switch back to Democracy.

[vv221]

Hello FrenchDrone!
I think you night be interested on the tranlsation archive I've done.
It does translate everything including texts, voices and movies to French, and you can find it there:
alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=8446.0

(sorry for the incomplete link, but I can't post any for my first post. just put the usual http in front of it)
If an administrator comes here and find my link interesting, could you please edit my message to provide a functional link?
Thank you!

Yeah, it's a bit sad to post a link to another forum for my first post, but it is easier for me to have a centralized place for feedback.
Anyway, I may start a thread about this translation here too if you feel some interest in having it here

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I think that's a good idea. If you post it here, too, more people will find it and it grows the online SMACX community. We want that.

[vv221]

Don't rush me
It's coming tonight or tomorrow.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

[551262]

I have played the Drones once or twice.

First of all, yes the research is a serious hit. This means you need lots of probes running around getting it from everybody else. Foil probes help pilfer tech from outlying weakly guarded bases. Miriam suffers from the same research penalty, particularly in the first 10 moves as she can do NOTHING, while everybody else can get a former going and a second scout patrol built to roam around popping pods. Effectively, alone, she won't get Centauri Ecology until like 2120 -- Domai will be a little bit earlier but those first 30 turns do hurt a lot. (Larger maps, it appears, have slower rates of research versus smaller ones, on a global scale. This is part of the reason for that transcendence in less than 100 turns deal.)

Domai can be a formidable warmonger. Indeed, pacted with a University mate to cook up the research (and consequently, set your own sliders to 50% economy and 50% psych, like what Miriam does once she has enough tech to run around with a fire-tipped sword), he can be unmatched. Assuming you run a compatible faction model, of which the precise settings have evaded me, you can pull +5 Industry (all later game stuff with Eudamonia), +4 Support (so build big bases and have 20-ish units support for free, per base), talents all over the place,

Why don't you have a look at Vel's SMAC-X Guide, which I'm sure you've seen before, most people have, and it's fairly good. Basically the Drones are middle-game or late-game powerhouse which is starved of tech. Get it from someone else -- and let Zakharov (assuming you're playing with him) prosper for your benefit. Sure you'll be enemies, but he's usually suffering from the Chronic Researcher's Syndrome anyways.

[Morgan Everett]

I've just read the Morganites dedicated section of Vel's SMAC-X Guide and it did help me understand the gist of what I should do. Thanks for the reference.

So what faction do you guys play? And why?

[551262]

As far as I know, most SMAC and SMAC-X players are Builders or Hybrids, with some inclination towards the building part of Hybrid.

I'm also a Hybrid, but with inclination towards the warmongering part. War is expensive, but I crave the action and the finality of it. No messy politics, tech leads, transcendence plans, economic charts to look at if you've got forty-three Impact Rovers rummaging over to your territory.

I usually (~80%) play the Spartans, because I think they're the easiest faction to play. All factions have a preferable ethos and method of strategy or goals, but some are distinctly harder to play (Morgan, Fungboy to a certain degree, Diedre, ...) so you have to try them all to find out which one fits your playstyle and preferences. I don't play SMAC-X on a regular bases because I'm satisfied with the original seven, although for an occasional break I'll try a faction or two. An example of this is I tried a game on Librarian level (I usually play on Talent) with Fungboy with Abundant Lifeforms. Got the Manifold Nexus and was kicking a +4 Planet rating and built up a somewhat formidable (as in, could have been beaten easily with trance infantry and empath rovers) worm army. I've also done the Pirates and learned some interesting things. Try a little bit of everything in this game -- there's plenty to experiment with and test out.


The Morgans seek to overpower everybody else in the late-middle game with superior economic principles. In the early game, they'll run Free Market, but a flexible Morganite will switch to Green once he gets his economy spooled up in preparation for global energy market domination (and should that fail, buy yourself an entire army via rush-building). Efficiency is very good and you don't get the chronic drone problems and nagging (but beneficial if used properly) Planet ecodamage retaliation. The Diedrian seeks to build a nice stable empire which is very efficient and hopes to run a stable middle ground somewhere between the micromanaging Morganite with the technological prowess of the Zakharovs, looking to transcend eventually. She's very good in the very early game, having formers from the beginning (but Zak can get that anyways in like six turns: just get Social Psych for your free tech, followed by Biogenetics, then Secrets of the Human Brain, and with that bonus tech you get Centauri Ecology) and whose worms are ideal for pod popping. Enemy (alien, native, hostile, Planet, colored red, all the same) lifeforms will not attack your own mind worms unless you have something sitting on the same square of value, which is usually a Alien Artifact.

The Peacekeepette (hah) tries to maintain a solid, massive empire which can withstand the poking of Santiago's halberds and pikes while curating bases in such a fashion that practically every base is in a golden age, and his goal is to be elected planetary governer. The way this is accomplished with via steady, solid troops (as in, average) and a colossal empire -- if executed properly, Lal can be quite solid and quite difficult to dislodge, much the same way with an entrenched Yangian. Speaking of the Chairman, he indeed has many detesters, mainly because of his rapid growth, cheap units, free perimeter defenses, and can handily deal with drone problems with a strong Police rating and Police garrison units. He alone is my direct nemisis and I make sure to keep him in check because he's very much qualified, tech permitting, to stamp over everybody else, even if he's practically broke the entire time. A strongly irritable and easily enraged chap, he can be kept in check with -- loads of probe teams and direct warfare with superior units delievered in crushing blows to the core of his empire. Usually I invade at three separate locations with highly trained (usually Commando, depends on the timeframe, if I'm running Fundamentalist - Planned - Knowledge with both the Command Nexus and Cyborg Factory SPs, they're all elite) units and make strong advances towards core production powerhouses.

Santiago tries to establish a foothold with highly trained units. Indeed, nobody else can have an elite unit as early as she can. The practice is a simple one, even in the early game with no new faction settings to be available: build a Command Center at the base (the Command Nexus SP is a very high priority for her, but it does benefit everybody else), a nearby monolith, and coupled with the fact that the first built unit (prototype) gets an extra morale bonus, it's an easy proposition. Although you don't have to pay extra for prototypes, which is nice, you don't get to build Skunkworks, which a base equipped with one can switch production of any element without incurring any losses for doing so. At least when it's time to build Planet's First Planet Buster you'll need fewer supply crawlers...or not...

In the late-middle-game, it is not hard to build up a hardened core of elite units. Elite units get one extra movement point over the regular design, and this allows a strong 8-3-1*2 Chaos Infantry unit to keep up with a standard rover, and 8-1-1*2 SAM rover to take out three aircraft in a single turn. In contrast to this, the Believers will try to make use of their excellent Probe rating to make subversion attempts useless, at least in the early and early-middle-game, while offering a considerable bonus to their own Probe Teams which make Zakharov nervous and Morgan jealous buy pilfering wandering units for low cost and milking tech without too much chance of loss. Coupled with a strong Support rating, which if used properly, can be quite useful for a dedicated offensive faction, but she is squashed handily if a heavy foot is kept on her, leaving her way behind in the tech tree. Definitely can be a hard faction to play.

Another hard faction to play is Zakharov. The other Builder favorite, this one tries to get a core empire built to protect himself from Miriam's incessant probing while making use of his labs to push far ahead of everybody else in the tech tree. So while you may be just looking at your boring old impact rovers and Plasma Sentinels he probably already has Doctrine: Air Power, Fusion Power (makes units cheaper) and might be prototyping some 10-4-1*2 ground pounders for you to admire. He's pretty excitable though, being an irritable fellow, and his tech makes him a regular target for everybody else coveting tree farms, Fusion Power and other critical developments like Doctrine: Air Power (but Impact Penetrators aren't very impressive). His principle goal is transcendence, but if you make him your servant, he usually doesn't go very far. This is easily accomplished with dominating military force (courtesy of his own tech) as he suffers from chronic drone problems and the Chronic Researcher's Syndrome.

Probably the best faction to run around like a big bad bully is Yang. As for SMAC-X, I'll say that Prime Function (Aki-Zeta) I've never played, same for Roze (...I wouldn't know how to play her) and the Usurpers. Caretakers I've played once just to try out the Subspace Generators victory condition, Drones I've played a couple of times without trying him out for real (but I probably will soon on a larger map), the Pirates can be fun but the water world isn't very suitable for many reasons (but that's the best faction to play around in the water), Fungboy I have only played once and found him rather uninteresting and weak in many departments.

I'll start a game some time with a big map with Domai and see if I can make Planet a rough place to live: I'll put Yang, Usurpers, Lal, Santiago, and whoever else I think I can get into the business of warfare and see what happens. I've never really played him much, but I believe he can be terrific in the late game. I'll put the report on alphacentauri2.info forums.

[gwillybj]

If I'm using the SMAC factions, I usually play Santiago for the challenge, as I'm generally a builder and not too good at warring. If I'm using the SMAX factions, I usually play Roze, also for the challenge as I usually play as a defensive situation.

[Morgan Everett]

Wow, thanks a lot for your inspiring answers.

I think I'm going to stick to the Morganites, they really are my favorite faction.

I'll get at least a +4 to ECONOMY and as much EFFICIENCY as possible.

Could someone explain me if I need an armed unit to defend a base? Or can I just equip my troops solely for defense as in 1-4 instead of 4-4 as I've been doing until now?

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

As far as worm defense goes, the 1-4. NL isn't impressed by singularity weapons when all their combat is psionic.

[Lord Avalon]

... Could someone explain me if I need an armed unit to defend a base? Or can I just equip my troops solely for defense as in 1-4 instead of 4-4 as I've been doing until now?

Well, you don't necessarily need to, but the advantage of having a defensive unit with some firepower is an active defense. Meaning you don't wait for them to attack, but you attack them first.

I might have a few 1-d infantry units that get upgraded weapons (especially if in a base near the front, or where troops have landed - also maybe I don't have rovers yet), but mostly they stay 1-d, as I tend to prefer rovers as my mobile defense. Early garrison infantry units will get trance, until clean + police becomes preferable.