15-04-2001 09:14									#1
	Effect on the AI Support Apolyton

I like to play with no Secret Projects, so I edited the appropriate text file to make them unattainable. However, I am wondering if anybody knows if that damages the AI's stategy.

	19-04-2001 02:56									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

I can't say for certain, but it seems to me that the AI does an extremely poor job of exploiting its SPs. In fact, I have begun to wonder if its main tactic is denial; so if you are shooting for a particular SP the AI is more concerned with trying to block you from getting it by getting there first. But perhaps the AI ranks the various SPs very similar to how I value them.

How are you finding the games playing out? I assume that you leave the Voice and the Ascent in.

I confess I enjoy the SP feature of the game and tend to build a lot in solo games. My only temptation has been to edit out clearly overpowered SPs, namely the Air Academy and the HSA. (Funny, I've never been probed by a souped-up spy in SMACX after I've gotten the HSA) So far I have resisted this temptation.

With the double blind tech research I often find myself building SPs of dubious value just because I like to always have a base or three working on an SP in case a good one comes up. So I am speculating that the lack of SPs would not slow down my time to transcend by more than 30 to 50 years.

	19-04-2001 06:10									#3
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RedFred, Dubious SP's? Keeping three cities working "just in case?"

What SP's are dubious?

Why keep any cities working on SP's? Just build lots of crawlers around selected cities and cash them when you need to builds an SP. If you use the crawler upgrade cheat, you usually need only two.

Bye the bye, further evidence that the crawler upgrade is a cheat is the fact that the AI automatically adds a higher reactor to crawlers every time one researches a new technology - even with autodesign off. (This is really annoying!) This it does not do so with any other type of unit - to my observation.

Ned

	19-04-2001 11:09									#4
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On the crawlers issue...they are great once you get them. Double blind research means that you often don't get Ind Auto until long after you get needlejets.

Dubious SPs? (With the obvious exceptions of the HSA, Vats and the Cloudbase Academy) their utility tends to decline as the game progresses because of the opportunity cost. All those crawlers used to build SPs could just be homed to your science cities to speed up the path to Ascending.

The examples of most useless SPs I usually cite are the Nethack and the Manifold Harmonics. Great as they are, you often don't see them until a few turns before transcending.

Special curcumstances will make any SP valuable, but for the average game I am not upset about missing: Bulk Matter Transmitter, Citizens Defense Force, Cyborg Factory, Dream Twister, Neural Amplifier, Pholus Mutagen, Planetary Datalinks, Self Aware Colony, Singularity Inductor, Space Elevator, Telepathic Matrix & Xenoempathy Dome. There are about half a dozen others that are only mildly disappointing to miss out on.

Before everyone rushes in to nitpick with this list, consider how close many of them come to the end of the game and some of the others are only handy to augment a Green style game.

	20-04-2001 07:34									#5
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Ok, If you don't have crawlers, stockpiling as SP is something I occaisionally do. However I must admit, that I get burned more often than not doing it. Often, I have 500+ minerals accumulated before I get an SP to build.

Also, I agree, the late SP's are not as valuable as are the earlier. I also tend to agree with your list as to the least valuable SP's. However, I beg to differ on the Datalinks. If the AI gets this, it can really hamstring your game if you try to keep your submissives up-to-date on technology. I think it is one of the more important SP's.

Ned

	23-04-2001 07:22									#9
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Misotu,

Why would the game designers bother to make it cheaper to pay for SPs with cash only for those players who;

1) Have crawlers.

2) Go through a bizarre ritual of upgrading them with the most expensive features possible only to..

3) Dump them into an SP.

?????????

This is an unintended and unrepaired 'feature'. Because crawlers were designed to retain their mineral value to serve as the smac equivalent of caravans you can turn them in for 100% of the mineral cost of producing the unit. Because of the unit workshop's ability to retrofit existing units with more advanced weapons, armor and abilities, and the fact that this is done with energy rather than minerals means that you can effectively buy minerals at a set cost for the purpose of upgrading. The true intention of the designers to make the purchase of SPs more expensive than the purchase of many other things like unit upgrades is obvious (as it costs more per mineral to purchase an SP). The unintentional aspect is that the crawler returns 100% of it's cost in minerals as though it was produced at a base, even though it can take advantage of this upgrade anomaly and obtain a 2 to 1 ratio or so of energy to minerals.

Of course nothing is a cheat in a single player game, and anything mutually agreeable in multi-player or challenge games is equally fine. So this 'feature' is only a cheat if someone uses it in contradiction of an agreement to not do so. Players should add this to the long list of things which should be worked out ahead of time.

	23-04-2001 14:34									#10
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IIRC, the upgrade cost formula for crawlers is different to that for all other units, as it takes into account your mineral rating at the time of the upgrade. I don't think Firaxis would have tampered with crawler-upgrade costs unless they intended people to upgrade crawlers, and would probably not have linked it to their mineral cost unless they intended people to cash in upgraded crawlers. So, IMO, it's clearly an intentional feature. Whether it's good for game balance or not is something else..
[This message has been edited by Simpson II (edited April 23, 2001).]

	30-04-2001 09:42									#13
	Browse Apolyton AD-FREE

Misotu, The AI never upgrades the reactors on my 1-1-1 + special ability scouts. Also, IIRC, it leaves my Fusion former units unmolested if I create that unit after the automatic reactor upgrade. In contrast, even if I design a lower reactor crawler after a researching a new reactor tech, the AI will still upgrade it at the first opportunity, which seems to be a lot more often that discovering a new reactor tech.

It is quite clear that the designers never anticipated a lower-reactor crawler to be of any value in the game.

By the way, have you ever monitored how the AI builds an SP? It will use crawlers to "rush-build" the SP. It does so by rush-building crawlers and moving them to the SP site. However, and this is amazing!, it never builds an "expensive" crawler, just a plain jane crawler, even though at times it has many times the cost of the crawler in minerals that it can use during the rush build, i.e., 5 or 6 lines of "red" minerals after switching to the crawler from some other project.

As to using unintended "features" of the game in single-player to easily win, I still call this a cheat. For example, in CIV, one could instruct the equivalent of a former to "terraform," cancel, and reinstruct as many times as one pleased in a turn. Each time an instruction was issued, the "former" would execute one turn's worth of forming. By doing this, one could construct any terraforming feature in one turn, regardless of how many turns it would normally require. Any player using this technique could easily win the game, but why bother even to play?