Terraforming for dummies

[Myrth]

Reading bunch of old threads on this forum lately and having definitely too much free time on my hands right now, I've realised I never really put much thinking into terraforming aside certain basics. So I've started digging the forum and net in general and turns out there is no comprehensive, advanced/very advanced "publication" on terraforming. Just bunch of basic ideas on different pages and a handful of advanced material.

So the idea is to either get a thread moving with "highly advanced" stuff or at least die trying.

My biggest issue as a SMAC player is inability to properly decide how to use field optimally and how to build in general.
I know there are at least two main approaches to building (lots of minerals vs lots of energy), each of them has their pros and cons, each of them is almost mutually exclussive.
I know late game food is the king, but I don't really graps it or see the point of pumping bases over 40 pops.
I know supply crawlers are super-useful, but I myself rarely use them at all or even consider using them.
I know fields with bonus are great, but I'm never sure how to get maximum profit out of them
I know mines can be useful, but unless they are in very specific circumstances (outside any base range, with mineral bonus, crawled), I can't utilise them at all.
I know base-crawling is a thing and it is supposedly super efficient, but I can't get it moving or working.
I know eventually fungus is the best all-around improvement, but it shows up so late I can't bother to even try using them
And so on and forth.

Things that I figured out by myself (and they weren't really that hard):
1) Long-term it is better to cover every single square below 2000m with forest
My logic is simple: it provides 3/2/2 with Tree Farm and Hybrid Forest and you want to buid both of those anyway. Below 2000m you just can't get more energy out of square, while by building farm/solar combo, you only get 1 minerals AND to get more food you need to build soil-enricher or have rainy/jungle/both. Even if the square comes with river, you get the same final result. Further, if the field happens to be arid, it's a no-brainer.

2) Anything above 2000m should have solars
Which usually means farms and enrichers, too. The logic, again, is simple - at this altitude, you get more energy from solars than you could get from forest. That 1 energy more is enough to outweight the lower mineral production. And if you plan things well, those are going to be rainy fields, meaning more food, meaning faster growth. Combined with echelons, it only snowballs from there.

3) There is no real point to have more than 80 minerals per turn produced by a base aka why boreholes are useless
While you can easily have more than that, there is barely anything costing this much that you can't at this point just rush with energy. Theoretically all you need is 11 minerals/turn per base and rush everything else with energy, but go figure. Either way this means boreholes are inefficient if you plan to use satellites. A single borehole provides 0/6/6. It takes one pop to use it, eating up 2 nutrient while producing none. Assuming you use satellites, to get 0/6/6 you simply need three pops and three satellites of both types. Since satellites snowball over all your bases, it's not just one-off investment, as they pay back very fast. Three pops eat 6 nutrient, BUT you get 3 from satellites and you just need one of them dedicated now to a square with a tree farm to pay for them all. Two of them can be even turned into any special pop and you will still make more.
Comparison:
Borehole
1 pop
0/6/6
-2 nutrient
Nothing else provided
Final productivity is -2/6/6
No borehole with satellites
3 pops
3/3/3
-3 nutrient
One pop tied to food production on forest square (3/2/2), two free pops to do anything else
Final productivity is 0/5/5 just to sustain it AND then there are 2 pops doing anything else, either using other 2 fields or being any specialist you want

4) Rising/lowering elevation is too risky to bother
You can easily destroy rainfall over entire continent by using this (highly questionable in the first place option). Instead, you are MUCH safer by warming/cooling the climate of the entire planet. The rainfall patterns won't change (unless you will perform the global action few times in a row in the same direction), while you will be able to benefit from the changed elevation. Granted, so will the other factions, but the risk related with changing rainfall patterns in some place that doesn't bother you now, but would make you a perfect spot for 3 or 5 new colonies in 70 turns is too high. Save-scumming is not always allowed, so this is another consideration here

[CEO Aaron]

Interesting, though I'm not sure I agree with all your conclusions. While eventually, satellites will make nutrients and specialists by far the most productive resource possible, most of the game is decided before that point. Long-term, what's really best for your empire is growing quickly. That means reaching 2 times your base-limit in bases, and then capping your population at habitation limits as quickly as you can.

Your mindset seems to be hinged around worked tiles. That will limit you. The use of a few supply crawlers to crawl in nutrients will afford you the ability to work boreholes and other high-yield tiles when your habitation limits won't permit you to grow to maximum population. Also, boreholes combined with crawling minerals are great for bootstrapping a low population base early on, so you can quickly rush out improvements. A 2 population base working 2 boreholes has 13 mineral production. As for feeding your population, that's what supply crawlers are for. A couple condenser farms worked by crawlers will more than compensate for a couple boreholes in your base radius.

Your assertion that mega-mineral bases are wasteful, I agree with. For the most part, you only want enough mineral income to support your military, and still have enough production to produce 10 minerals per turn. However, there will be times you want to have a base produce massive mineral income, namely when you want to produce fungal pops. This raises your clean mineral limit, and also spawns native life you can farm with planet pearls.

[CEO Aaron]

Reading bunch of old threads on this forum lately and having definitely too much free time on my hands right now, I've realised I never really put much thinking into terraforming aside certain basics. So I've started digging the forum and net in general and turns out there is no comprehensive, advanced/very advanced "publication" on terraforming. Just bunch of basic ideas on different pages and a handful of advanced material.

So the idea is to either get a thread moving with "highly advanced" stuff or at least die trying.

A noble plan, but don't die. ;P

My biggest issue as a SMAC player is inability to properly decide how to use field optimally and how to build in general.
I know there are at least two main approaches to building (lots of minerals vs lots of energy), each of them has their pros and cons, each of them is almost mutually exclussive.
I know late game food is the king, but I don't really graps it or see the point of pumping bases over 40 pops.
I know supply crawlers are super-useful, but I myself rarely use them at all or even consider using them.
I know fields with bonus are great, but I'm never sure how to get maximum profit out of them
I know mines can be useful, but unless they are in very specific circumstances (outside any base range, with mineral bonus, crawled), I can't utilise them at all.
I know base-crawling is a thing and it is supposedly super efficient, but I can't get it moving or working.
I know eventually fungus is the best all-around improvement, but it shows up so late I can't bother to even try using them
And so on and forth.

Okay, let's take this one. Food is king late game because the real limiting factor of your empire's output is two-fold: 1) Your number of bases. A base can produce a maximum of one item per turn. 2) The population of each base. Why population? Because population limits the number of worked tiles early, and the number of resources you gain from specialists late. The one factor keeping food from being king the entire game long is habitation limits. Simply put, you can only have 14 population (plus or minus for SPs and faction bonuses/penalties) until you unlock Super-Tensile Solids. However, once you have hab domes and satellites, each population produces one food, one mineral, and one energy, plus whatever they're generating by themselves for working a tile or being a specialist. One crawler working a 6 food tile supports 6 engineers, for a total of 18 econ and 12 labs, plus the 6 minerals and energy. Not bad for one tile.

Things that I figured out by myself (and they weren't really that hard):
1) Long-term it is better to cover every single square below 2000m with forest
My logic is simple: it provides 3/2/2 with Tree Farm and Hybrid Forest and you want to buid both of those anyway. Below 2000m you just can't get more energy out of square, while by building farm/solar combo, you only get 1 minerals AND to get more food you need to build soil-enricher or have rainy/jungle/both. Even if the square comes with river, you get the same final result. Further, if the field happens to be arid, it's a no-brainer.

Let me help you out here. Solar panels aren't worth building below 2000m. However, farms, and in particular, condenser farms can absolutely be worth building on low-lying tiles.

2) Anything above 2000m should have solars
Which usually means farms and enrichers, too. The logic, again, is simple - at this altitude, you get more energy from solars than you could get from forest. That 1 energy more is enough to outweight the lower mineral production. And if you plan things well, those are going to be rainy fields, meaning more food, meaning faster growth. Combined with echelons, it only snowballs from there.

I'm not a big fan of echelon mirrors, for reasons pointed out above. I'll make solars early, to boost my energy income, but I know that the end-game is about getting resources out of your specialists, not out of worked tiles.

3) There is no real point to have more than 80 minerals per turn produced by a base aka why boreholes are useless
While you can easily have more than that, there is barely anything costing this much that you can't at this point just rush with energy. Theoretically all you need is 11 minerals/turn per base and rush everything else with energy, but go figure. Either way this means boreholes are inefficient if you plan to use satellites. A single borehole provides 0/6/6. It takes one pop to use it, eating up 2 nutrient while producing none. Assuming you use satellites, to get 0/6/6 you simply need three pops and three satellites of both types. Since satellites snowball over all your bases, it's not just one-off investment, as they pay back very fast. Three pops eat 6 nutrient, BUT you get 3 from satellites and you just need one of them dedicated now to a square with a tree farm to pay for them all. Two of them can be even turned into any special pop and you will still make more.
Comparison:
Borehole
1 pop
0/6/6
-2 nutrient
Nothing else provided
Final productivity is -2/6/6
No borehole with satellites
3 pops
3/3/3
-3 nutrient
One pop tied to food production on forest square (3/2/2), two free pops to do anything else
Final productivity is 0/5/5 just to sustain it AND then there are 2 pops doing anything else, either using other 2 fields or being any specialist you want

Let me offer a counterpoint: Boreholes are the cornerstone of a high-nutrient strategy, and are ruthlessly efficient if your objective is to get maximum productivity out of a base. Prior to Nessus mining satellites, your opportunities to get minerals are pretty limited. As you point out, mines kind of suck, without a rocky/mineral bonus. Forests are fine, but 2 minerals and one energy isn't so hot. Yes, you can boost it with tree farms and hybrid forests, but new bases don't have those improvements, so you'll spend a lot of time mucking about before that stuff comes online. If you crawl nutrients with your supply crawlers for a new base, it has six food to immediately start growing, and can support its one worker on a borehole. Congratulations: You've got a one-population base producing 7 minerals and 8 energy, with NO base facilities. Can you do that with forests?

When you're going for a specialist-focused strategy, you still have a handful of citizens who can only become psych-producing specialists (4 per base, iirc). If those 4 workers are putting boreholes to work, they're actually producing more resources in the mid-game than any other alternative, and more importantly, are the backbone of your industry, providing the lion's share of minerals and energy for your faction.

4) Rising/lowering elevation is too risky to bother
You can easily destroy rainfall over entire continent by using this (highly questionable in the first place option). Instead, you are MUCH safer by warming/cooling the climate of the entire planet. The rainfall patterns won't change (unless you will perform the global action few times in a row in the same direction), while you will be able to benefit from the changed elevation. Granted, so will the other factions, but the risk related with changing rainfall patterns in some place that doesn't bother you now, but would make you a perfect spot for 3 or 5 new colonies in 70 turns is too high. Save-scumming is not always allowed, so this is another consideration here

If you're the sort of person who wants to make a solar energy farm, it can be worth it, but I'm not a fan, either. But, since I will eventually put condensers in just about every unoccupied square, rainfall is the least of my worries. But so is elevation.

There's no one 'right' terraforming strategy, each faction has their own strengths and weaknesses. For a faction like Morgan who has support limits putting minerals at a premium, without being able to support a ton of crawlers, forest and forget is a good plan, as is a forest and borehole strat. For the University, with easy access to high tech, going more high-intensity with condenser-farms and boreholes can work. And for Deedee, you can always go fungus crazy, which is surprisingly effective. For the momentum factions, your focus is going to be on aggression, so you're less worried about energy (though you'll want enough to get weapon tech and planetary networks to steal enemy techs), and more focused on supporting a big military. And a hybrid faction can choose one of many possible strategies.

For a very good example of builder terraforming strategies, I have consistently recommended this thread, from the Old Gods of SMAC: Sikander's Builder Game. In it, you'll see Sik's University nutrient strat, and Hendrik does a very impressive Morgan game with forests and bores. You can even see naive scrub-self posting in that thread, before I got schooled by folks who knew the game better than me.

[CEO Aaron]

Reading bunch of old threads on this forum lately and having definitely too much free time on my hands right now, I've realised I never really put much thinking into terraforming aside certain basics. So I've started digging the forum and net in general and turns out there is no comprehensive, advanced/very advanced "publication" on terraforming. Just bunch of basic ideas on different pages and a handful of advanced material.

Let me help you out: https://apolyton.net/forum/miscellan...s-builder-game

This thread is the thread on builder strategy and terraforming which opened my eyes as to the potential of advanced terraforming methods. I can try to condense what I've learned, but I recommend you learn as I did.

So the idea is to either get a thread moving with "highly advanced" stuff or at least die trying.

My biggest issue as a SMAC player is inability to properly decide how to use field optimally and how to build in general.
I know there are at least two main approaches to building (lots of minerals vs lots of energy), each of them has their pros and cons, each of them is almost mutually exclussive.

Not necessarily. Remember, once you get research 'Self-Aware Machines', you can start launching Nessus Mining Stations, which will provide 1 mineral each, up to the population of your base. You should also get 2 minerals from the base square (one automatically, plus one for a recycling tank). Plus most nutrient-heavy terraforming strategies also leverage mines or boreholes, to make up the lack of minerals before you unlock later techs.

I know late game food is the king, but I don't really graps it or see the point of pumping bases over 40 pops

Specialist and Satellites. The end-game nutrient king is stacking specialist citizens with a large supply of orbital satellites. The more bases you control, the more resources you will collect, so the only limit to your income from this strategy is your population.

I know supply crawlers are super-useful, but I myself rarely use them at all or even consider using them.

What really makes supply crawlers outstanding is their ability to leverage your minerals to increase your future income, instead of only your nutrients. Put a crawler on a un-worked forest square, it will pay for itself in 15 turns (less if you have a positive industry rating). Anything after that is profit. The yield is even better if you can work a farm+condenser (4 nutrients), and you use your citizens to harvest squares that yield multiple types of resources, like forests or boreholes.

I know fields with bonus are great, but I'm never sure how to get maximum profit out of them

The only terrain I make special terraforming to accommodate is a mineral bonus on a rocky square. A mine/road on such a square will produce 7 minerals. Every other type of terrain or bonus should be terraformed in a manner that's consistent with your overall strategy.

I know mines can be useful, but unless they are in very specific circumstances (outside any base range, with mineral bonus, crawled), I can't utilise them at all.

As a rule, I only put mines on rocky squares with with a mineral bonus. I don't generally find mines to be very profitable.

I know base-crawling is a thing and it is supposedly super efficient, but I can't get it moving or working.

The main idea is to crawl squares that aren't currently being worked. So if you use a very tight spacing, like bases separated diagonally by 1 square, that's 7 workable squares per base. If your base pop is below 7, there's squares you could make productive in the meantime.

I know eventually fungus is the best all-around improvement, but it shows up so late I can't bother to even try using them

Yes, in practice, only Dierdre or Dawn can make mid-game or early-game use of fungus. Otherwise, it's too great a trade off, and by the time you unlock all the techs, the game is more or less over.

Things that I figured out by myself (and they weren't really that hard):
1) Long-term it is better to cover every single square below 2000m with forest
My logic is simple: it provides 3/2/2 with Tree Farm and Hybrid Forest and you want to buid both of those anyway. Below 2000m you just can't get more energy out of square, while by building farm/solar combo, you only get 1 minerals AND to get more food you need to build soil-enricher or have rainy/jungle/both. Even if the square comes with river, you get the same final result. Further, if the field happens to be arid, it's a no-brainer.

As you can see from Sikander's University game, you can skip Tree Farms, going straight for farms/condensers/soil enrichers, for 6 nutrients per square. Also, remember that your base growth increase is a function of your EXTRA resources. If you're only collecting farms, that's going to be pretty slow. You may have a slower rate of mineral income if you go for rolling farms, but your bases will get high population qjuicker, and you can soon compensate for the lack of minerals with energy.

2) Anything above 2000m should have solars
Which usually means farms and enrichers, too. The logic, again, is simple - at this altitude, you get more energy from solars than you could get from forest. That 1 energy more is enough to outweight the lower mineral production. And if you plan things well, those are going to be rainy fields, meaning more food, meaning faster growth. Combined with echelons, it only snowballs from there.

Again, it depends on your strategy. If you don't want to field a large number of terraformers (like when you're playing Morgan and have a less support), going for more tree farms may be a better plan. An improved square is almost invariably better than an unproved square.

3) There is no real point to have more than 80 minerals per turn produced by a base aka why boreholes are useless
While you can easily have more than that, there is barely anything costing this much that you can't at this point just rush with energy. Theoretically all you need is 11 minerals/turn per base and rush everything else with energy, but go figure. Either way this means boreholes are inefficient if you plan to use satellites. A single borehole provides 0/6/6. It takes one pop to use it, eating up 2 nutrient while producing none. Assuming you use satellites, to get 0/6/6 you simply need three pops and three satellites of both types. Since satellites snowball over all your bases, it's not just one-off investment, as they pay back very fast. Three pops eat 6 nutrient, BUT you get 3 from satellites and you just need one of them dedicated now to a square with a tree farm to pay for them all. Two of them can be even turned into any special pop and you will still make more.
Comparison:
Borehole
1 pop
0/6/6
-2 nutrient
Nothing else provided
Final productivity is -2/6/6
No borehole with satellites
3 pops
3/3/3
-3 nutrient
One pop tied to food production on forest square (3/2/2), two free pops to do anything else
Final productivity is 0/5/5 just to sustain it AND then there are 2 pops doing anything else, either using other 2 fields or being any specialist you want

Yes and no. In the long game, sure, you'll eventually want to fill up every borehole and put farms in their place. But you don't reach 40 population with 40 satellites of each type in orbit on turn 3. Boreholes can provide a huge leg up on early base productivity in the early and mid-game and especially when you first found a base. A population 1 base working a borehole and crawling 1 3-food farm will collect 7 minerals, which will hurry up a LOT of that early facility building.

4) Rising/lowering elevation is too risky to bother
You can easily destroy rainfall over entire continent by using this (highly questionable in the first place option). Instead, you are MUCH safer by warming/cooling the climate of the entire planet. The rainfall patterns won't change (unless you will perform the global action few times in a row in the same direction), while you will be able to benefit from the changed elevation. Granted, so will the other factions, but the risk related with changing rainfall patterns in some place that doesn't bother you now, but would make you a perfect spot for 3 or 5 new colonies in 70 turns is too high. Save-scumming is not always allowed, so this is another consideration here

Generally, I agree, but sometimes you're not in control of the planet's climate, and at other times, you are, and you just want to drown everyone else. Plus raising a land-bridge to an adjoining island can be very helpful, certainly preferable to maintaining a large fleet of transports.

[Myrth]

Holy ****, I actually got reply and extensive one and I didn't even notice for all those years... I feel like an extra-dense tool now.

Thanks A LOT for all the points and counter-points, I re-evaluate my own stance to the original logic somewhat in the meantime, too (mostly about extensive experimentation with supply crawlers and thus their application).

There is however a new issue for me, for about a year now:
How to properly use both crawlers and formerr?
My go-to strategy is to have two types of formers: regular ones and at least a pair of wheeled ASAP. Wheeled roll in into a tile and turn it into a road, then regular crawlers follow. Eventually, as the game progresses, I disband non-wheeled variety and switch entirely to wheeled ones, having economy capable of supprting that. I always have however an issue when to even start going for wheeled (should it really be ASAP? should it wait until gene splicing? should I wait until fusion?)
And with crawlers is the eternal struggle if to use wheeled at all. A crawler that's capable of moving just a single tile per turn isn't exactly useful, since you will waste bunch of turns to even get to the good spot, while putting wheels on it early on is prohibitively expensive. Thus I end up using my formers to at least build a road, but that means formers being busy doing nothing in particular, rather than improving tiles for good stuff. And for the road to be build efficiently, I again need wheeled formers, so the vicious circle of costs-vs-profits closes.

[Myrth]

For a very good example of builder terraforming strategies, I have consistently recommended this thread, from the Old Gods of SMAC: Sikander's Builder Game. In it, you'll see Sik's University nutrient strat, and Hendrik does a very impressive Morgan game with forests and bores. You can even see naive scrub-self posting in that thread, before I got schooled by folks who knew the game better than me.

Gonna check this out

[CEO Aaron]

Holy ****, I actually got reply and extensive one and I didn't even notice for all those years... I feel like an extra-dense tool now.

Thanks A LOT for all the points and counter-points, I re-evaluate my own stance to the original logic somewhat in the meantime, too (mostly about extensive experimentation with supply crawlers and thus their application).

There is however a new issue for me, for about a year now:
How to properly use both crawlers and formerr?
My go-to strategy is to have two types of formers: regular ones and at least a pair of wheeled ASAP. Wheeled roll in into a tile and turn it into a road, then regular crawlers follow. Eventually, as the game progresses, I disband non-wheeled variety and switch entirely to wheeled ones, having economy capable of supprting that. I always have however an issue when to even start going for wheeled (should it really be ASAP? should it wait until gene splicing? should I wait until fusion?)
And with crawlers is the eternal struggle if to use wheeled at all. A crawler that's capable of moving just a single tile per turn isn't exactly useful, since you will waste bunch of turns to even get to the good spot, while putting wheels on it early on is prohibitively expensive. Thus I end up using my formers to at least build a road, but that means formers being busy doing nothing in particular, rather than improving tiles for good stuff. And for the road to be build efficiently, I again need wheeled formers, so the vicious circle of costs-vs-profits closes.

No problem, it's a quiet forum for an ancient game. These things happen.

I don't build rover formers until fusion, because the resource I care most about conserving is mineral income from my bases. As a general rule, I find my terraforming generally exceeds my base growth pretty quickly. In point of fact, I'd say optimizing my former force so that my support overhead and my base growth are more or less coordinated is probably the part of my game that can use the most work. Too many formers, and you're feeding minerals into paving un-worked tiles, and too few, and your population are working un-upgraded tiles.

I also generally have started building fewer roads, on the undertaking that dropping roads in every tile is also tying up support minerals which could be more optimally distributed. So yeah, I don't sweat the movement costs of entering un-roaded tiles, I'm making the judgment that fewer overall formers doing more optimal work is going to be more efficient in the long run. This is especially because often you're entering tiles which would eat both of a rover's moves anyhow.

It's not that I can't see the utility of pre-roading, but I think simply spreading out your former workload (once high-priority work is complete) is going to be more efficient, because while each individual tile will get done more slowly, the ratio of terraforming to movement each former does should rise.