New player, advice needed.

[CEO Aaron]

I've played for a while and I've decided to quit my game, I overestimated the AI.. I've started anew moving up from librarian to thinker, I expect not to be so far ahead after less than a hundred years.

I guess your advices worked too well..

Yeah, that's why I keep harping on Transcend as the only proper difficulty. With solid strategy, any lower difficulty is a cakewalk, and even at Transcend, a skilled player should be able to beat the AI consistently. The AI just has too many poor habits: Bad terraforming, overbuilding units and under-developing their infrastructure.

Here's an instructive story: At one point, I tried a single-player hotseat game, where the rules were to play one faction for 100 turns, then switch places with the lowest-ranked faction. I started with Morgan, built him up to insane power. Lots of bases, condeners with crawlers for food, and plenty of boreholes for energy and minerals. Turn 100 came around and I switched to a very poorly positioned Sparta. After a few turns of remedial Spartan development, I had the opportunity to buy the world-map of my former Morgan Industries.

It was awful. They had paved over all my boreholes and condenser farms, cashed in all the crawlers, and had reverted to the usual tired farm/mine/road garbage the AI evidently prefers.

[Lord Avalon]

Yitzi's unofficial patch includes Kyrub's AI enhancements (though maybe not from the latest version) as well as building on Scient's work and including more bug fixes - and options for additional changes in alphax.txt. Doesn't necessarily make the AI smart, just somewhat better than it was.

[551262]

I had the Human Hive send 30 units to my front door right near a border base. Because I didn't have any real threats at the moment I was in building mode, but I still had about 10 impact rovers in various areas. Three or four rovers were stationed at the border base, but I saw the threat as he moved his units out of the fungus into the open. I quickly drew two more impact rovers from the HQ base which was about 5 squares away and ordered two more from further bases. Then I struck first against his impact infantry and boring old plasma sentinels. The border base had a perimeter defense and a sensor with two police plasma garrisons but I wanted to strike first anyways. Also had a command center.

First impact rover attack was successful, I think it was an elite rover. +25% mobile in the open bonus FTW. Second attack was even better and the third weakened the whole stack to ~95% damage. The last rover took out 26 units alone. New record.

So yeah, the A.I. can't fight well, can't build well, can't terraform well, can't manage bases well, can't strategize, but rather depends more on dumb luck than anything else. How they got that far through the A.I. testing phase without realizing that farm+mine+road and endless plasma sentinels is a good strategy I have no idea. Farm + mine on a flat arid square is just beyond stupid.

[CEO Aaron]

Because, as far as I can tell, the AI was ported more or less whole-cloth from Civ 2. Also, from a 'raw yield per former turn', farm/mine/road probably worked okay in Civ2.

[Lord Avalon]

...farm/mine/road ... in Civ2.

There was no such thing, IIRC. You could irrigate (farm) and put a road in grasslands (which either provided 1 shield [mineral] or not) or plains (1 less food but always 1 shield), but the 'm' command planted a forest.

[CEO Aaron]

You're right, you can't do quite the same combination of improvements, but my point is that the basic improvement AI was not profoundly expanded to include the possibilities offered by Alpha Centauri terraforming. To put it bluntly, there are terraforming choices in SMAC that are made obsolete by technology. Mines and Solar Panels are completely superseded by condenser farms and boreholes by the time you've researched Fusion reactor. These are concepts that the AI programming completely failed to take on board. I don't blame the designers, they made a game whose complexity and synergy outpaced the ability of a computer to play in a reasonable time-frame in 1999.

Where I get frustrated is when, in later iterations of the game, rather than tackle the challenges of teaching the computer how to be a better opponent, the designers instead introduced see-saw mechanics to simply hamstring an intelligent player to keep them from running away from the game, and removed zones of control to sidestep the problems of having to write robust pathing algorithms. In short, rather than make the AI smarter, they just dumbed down the game.

[Morgan Everett]

Hey,

I'm doing well on my transcend party, getting caught up by Yang at an alarming rate, I have no idea what he's doing to go up so fast while he was so far behind a decade ago.

I have a question. If your integrity goes down from loyal to scrupulous, does it ever go up or is it permanent?

[gwillybj]

The manual talks only about integrity going down. Thinking back on my games, I don't think I've ever seen mine go up.

[CEO Aaron]

Hey,

I'm doing well on my transcend party, getting caught up by Yang at an alarming rate, I have no idea what he's doing to go up so fast while he was so far behind a decade ago.

I have a question. If your integrity goes down from loyal to scrupulous, does it ever go up or is it permanent?

Yes, it's permanent, so if you're determined to keep your reputation, I'd advise you to do a few things:

1) Use probe teams to manufacture an incident.
2) Bait the AI into attacking sacrificial units.
3) NEVER talk to an AI opponent you're not ready to ceace-fire with.
4) Worst comes to worst, you can always subvert enemy bases, unless it's their capital.

[Morgan Everett]

Thanks for the intel.

I think I know why Yang is skyrocketing.. the bastard has found the monsoon jungle. I can see it on a corner of the map on his territory. It doesn't matter how many discoveries I make, how many units or settlements I produce, I just can't keep up with him..

[Morgan Everett]

Huh? I've produced my first series of aircrafts but they don't count as a present unit, I'm running Free Market and the aircrafts appear as if they were away ( the red peace and love icon ) and as a result drone riots are appearing everywhere!!

What the hell? Could someone provide an explanation?

[gwillybj]

They must be Bombers (aircraft without the SAM ability). Bombers are always considered "away" and thus create pacifism drones.
Interceptors and Fighters (aircraft with the SAM ability) are considered "home" (and do not make pacifism drones) unless they are actually away.

[Morgan Everett]

What's SAM?

[gwillybj]

There are two anti-aircraft Special Abilities:

AAA = Anti-Aircraft Artillery, which gives a defending unit a bonus against aircraft that are attacking it.

SAM = Surface-to-Air Missiles, which gives an attacking unit the ability to attack aircraft.

In order for an aircraft to be considered an Interceptor or Fighter it must have this SAM Special Ability. Without it, the aircraft is considered to be a Bomber, and adds your Pacifism Drones.

[CEO Aaron]

As Gwillybj points out, you want to build interceptors, not bombers. They're also better units, from a tactical perspective, IMO. They'll still be able to defend your airspace and interdict enemy ground troops, which is mostly what you want air power for. For actually pounding the stuffing out of your enemies, you want artillery, rovers, and later, choppers.