techs in smac

[Whoha]

Originally posted by vmxa1


They are meaningless if you have no easy way to determine their value. If one is better than the other, but I don't know why or how much, it loses it value.

In response to this, First off many techs are the same as in civ. Second, their values relative to each other largely depends on what you need at the moment.

do you head straight for republic, or do you get bronze working first?(civ)

do you head straight for democracy under ethical calculus, or do you get industrial base and the spiffy +2 defensive armor?(exact same scenario in smac)

[vmxa1]

I think the reference to the gov techs really points out what I am tring to say. You have all these gov techs, but if I just gave you the game and the manuals, you would be hard press to know which ones to use under what conditions.

Once you understand the game (SMAC or CivIII) you know some what how to choose. This is my complaint. It should be made very clear what they do and when and how you should use them.

Sure I figured out the when and how in both games, but I played them over and over. when I handed them to my firends, they were lost.

[Whoha]

Civ does have an advantage over Smac being somewhat related to history, but I'll concede point.

All games take a while to get used to, it depends on how much time people are willing to spend.

[Croesus]

Once you understand the game (SMAC or CivIII) you know some what how to choose. This is my complaint. It should be made very clear what they do and when and how you should use them.

I can't ever remember what is 'good' in SMAC. Therefore I right click alot. The ingame help is actually quite useful. Also, when you go to social engineering, you can see how it will affect you before you make a decision.

After reading the manual, I felt like the game did a pretty good job of explaining the affects of most things. As for what goverments to use, that is impossible to answer. There are several ways to decide what governement to use. Sometimes having a better economy and efficeincy will boost your science more than using "knowledge" value. Sometimes having a better industry can make up for support ie. if you are generating 11 mineral and are spending about 2 mineral per turn on support, having +2 industry is the same as having +2 support in terms of production.

What I feel like made the least sense was why armor was essentially how well your units could counter attack.