Slowing Down SMAC

[gwillybj]

Maniac reminds me that...
The effect of factional and SE adjustments can sometimes be annoying though...

Oh, goody! I like annoying

...mess up your whole social engineering system and wreck the balance completely...

balance, schmalance as long as it's fun (I play some really screwed up stuff in my SP games.)

Seriously, though, I do understand your point, Maniac, that the math does, indeed, get royally weird if the multiplier is not a "ten" (10, 20, 30, ...). I was thinking maybe of trying the little steps before making the huge jumps?

[Travelerstein]

IMO, the best Settings for a slow, measured game are..

Tech Stag
Undirected Research

And, custom map size 256x256.

Thinker or Transcend

How these can work out depends. Sometimes your close to another faction (invariably Yang) who usually makes some outrageous demand forceing you to spend to the next 1-200 years laying the smackdown on him. (Yang never knows when to quit). However if the factions are reasoanably well seperated, two things seem to happen. Several factions never really seem to progress much in the tech race(they really do stagnate and there factions are usually not very well managed and are often very easy to conquer) when there isolated. By 2500 some factions will have at best 12-13 level weapons. The other thing that can happen is one faction, usually the tech leader conquers another nearby faction and (more or less) properly develops both the conquered faction AND its own. So by the time you take out your nearest enemy faction and repair the infastruture, your can be left with yourself and A very large and very effective Enemy faction. They usually have a very large army(usually massive amouts of worms) and if you can fight them head on, you will need a massive force commitment to take them on.

On the games where this situation does develop, if you try to attack these type factions the fighting is usually very brutal and every type of nasty occurs-massive use of PB's (AI)-nerve gas, attrocities, massive attrition battles, endless counterattacks by swarms of Worms and 24str conventional units, base obliteration(me), Fun stuff but better bring a lot of firepower to the party. Last game I did this I went up against Lal's superfaction. My inital goal was to capture the old Morgan rump and, Dig in, and then rebuild for a massive push against his considerable core area. -(all 40-50 pop cities) I only achived about...75% of my goals and My advance stalled about 6 7 cites short of my objectiives. After that it was several decades of see-saw figting for 2 or 3 cites, eventually, out came Lal's PB's and pretty soon between me obliterating bases to prevent Lals useing them against me(I could barely hold him off as it was) and his PB strikes, pretty soon most of his North East continent was cratered back the stone age. After which I retreated and scorced everything I could. Fun stuff, Wish AI would put up a fight like that more than often than 'rarely'

All in all-a nice long game-epic in scale