"Some civilian workers got in among the research patients today and became so hysterical I felt compelled to have them nerve stapled. The consequence, of course, will be another public relations nightmare, but I was severely shaken by the extent of their revulsion towards a project so vital to our survival." - CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Personal Diaries
Yeah, I really appreciate deeper (and more competent) guides - them being for Thinker is a bonus! I find so much SMAC content is casual let's plays or relies on massive gaps in the AI's play. I'd also be curious about SMAC-in-SMAX playthroughs. I'm in that camp of people who dislike SMAX. Really, though, I'm thrilled to see any good content!
@@michaelbird9148 Yeah, 90% let's plays. Honestly, as a UA-camr I'm fed up with full game playthroughs. I'd rather make 6-15 minute video essays and tutorials. More fun to make, and they get more views too. And I can do longer form content on stream.
To be fair, it doesn't seem to do much on the surface. In truth, however, having a high score is the early game is a massive boon, because the main thing it does is weaken and reduce the spawn rate of mind worms attacking your empire. If you dump planet early on, before you've got a decent military, the mind worms can wreck you. Keep it high, however, and they'll spend their time attacking the other players.
Please be that guy. You've already earned my trust as identifying Civ III as a great game and tips that I've used to great effect. I will gladly and happily vacuum up AC content.
Sadly the videos don't do nearly as well! I still have one more video essay in me on Alpha Centauri, but I think I'll lean more towards including them as examples in broader video essays about 4X games. Use subterfuge to get people hooked hahah. And, although people were very patient with me, it was frustrating making mistakes when making videos about Alpha Centauri. The programming in that game is so bizarre sometimes!
I cannot sub again, but I think we would all love some AC content. Before the guides though, a simple tutorial and later an over-explain game would prove really helpful. The game's UI is difficult to say the least, and a lot of the mechanics dated. Even if we played the game a long time ago, having gotten used to modern UIs and mechanics makes it difficult to get back.
I started replaying SMAC a couple weeks ago with Thinker and had the 0% labs brainwave while playing Miriam. As soon as I got probes, I went from last place to first place in about ten turns. It had me convinced that 0% labs (at least after probe teams) is the ideal way to play. But I was still playing suboptimally, with 60-70% psych, trying to keep drone riots out of all my conquered bases, and under the delusion that pop booms are more important than they really are.
I would add: 1) Use planes to bomb enemy sensors, units, and destroy the roads that will allow their probe teams to mess with the city that you just captured. 2) The Weather Paradigm is the best secret project. It unlocks all terrain enhancements including boreholes, drilling to aquifers to create rivers, and raising and lowering terrain (clearing rocky terrain is available from the beginning I recently learned!). 3) The Isle of the Deep is the best unit in the game. It's a transport that attacks and defends. You can also put it in a base and use it to attack an adjacent ground unit. The best way to get them are to build cheap ships (basically hand weapons or lasers with no armor) and send them out to capture the Isles once you have green economy (or are Gaians, Planet Cult, or settled near the Manifold Nexus). Once you have an Isle use it to pop pods and attack with your laser boat to capture the next one and repeat.
I remember once reading a Wiki page or something that trashed Recycling Tanks, telling you to build a Former instead. This is probably an example of some sort of "novice" -logic: -Formers use up Supply slots (particularly hurting Morgan, as showcased in the video.) -It will eventually run out of tiles (especially useful ones) to improve. -Options for investing the minerals are scarce in the early game. Obviously, if a new base is founded later in the game, there are other buildings available for construction. Also there's less turns left to get return on investment.
Yeah, one of the players who coached me told me recycling tanks were low priority. I'm going with my gut here. Generally, flat yields = good in weak cities, multipliers = good in developed cities. And Alpha Centauri is loaded with weak cities early on. Recycling tanks pay themselves off after ~16 turns, (less if you're Domai due to his industry score) that's an insanely fast turnover time. Rushing buildings is at a cheaper rate, as noted here. I will say that formers are likely relatively better on lower difficulties, because food is better, you can grow without running into happiness issues. And formers are obviously great too. But if you're running lean, I'd move towards trying to get away with fewer formers early on.
This is contextual. Formers are generally better if you have the Weather Paradigm or have Ecological Engineering. At this point, you can convert Former Turns into advanced improvements. It requires building a lot of Formers to run out of land to improve with advanced improvements. It is however, extremely tedious to make so many Formers and so many advanced terrain improvements. And if you can't build Condensers yet you can only really benefit from 1-2 Formers per base. For something like speed Transcendence (minimum turns), Recycling Tanks are an extremely marginal build, their return on investment just isn't very good, this is not to say they are never built at a high level of play, they're marginal, not useless. Formers however are built in vast numbers.
@@blakewalsh9489 "This is contextual" -best way to phrase it. If the context is "start of the game" and "knowing the game will run many, many turns" then obviously Recycling Tanks make sense, if for nothing else that there aren't enough alternative investments available for the first handful of cities. Also, you could argue that this would also make sense "in the lore." The whole point of the tanks is that the early settlements are so starved for resources that (at least according to the Yang quote that plays) the dead people are "recycled" instead of buried. (Presumably other things are recycled as well in the tanks.) It's not explicitly stated if Hive is the only faction recycling people, but most other factions would have reasonable ideological justification for it. -Deidre is all about sustainability and harmony with the planet. -Morganites could have a system where you have to pay for the privilege of "proper burial" or at least your cadaver would be considered something that could be (literally) liquidated to help pay any outstanding debts. -University and Spartans would probably consider this basic pragmatism. I could easily imagine a military funeral where dress-uniformed Spartans gather at Tanks Facility to accompany their fallen comrade on their "final mission." -Peacekeepers would likely find the practice unsavory, but necessary for survival. -Believers would presumably have most qualms about this practice. Religious funeral practices, "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."
@@suedeciviii7142 Recycling Tanks are much better for Morgan than for any other faction and for him making them over formers at times makes sense. Almost any other faction formers > Recycling Tanks is usually true.
A broken strategy is to reload the start until you spam close enough to the monolith and/or the volcano central tile (non rocky) to plant your capital in the center of those. Especially the monolith as you won’t even need to terraform them and any unit coming out will automatically receive an experience upgrade
It would indeed be interesting to hear more strategy guides, although I'm a player who'd never be remotely near Transcend difficulty. But, considering you mentioned a money-focused strategy, it makes me wonder, whether there's a good eco-focused strategy (spam mindworms), or a tech-focused strategy, or something similar :)
Getting RR Slugger jumpscared in the comments of a Suede Civ 3 video of all things lol. Love to see that crossover between two of my favourite niche channels.
@@mangomation3945youtube recs you channels based on (among other things) the channels you watch, including the channels the channels you watch are watching (and vice versa) so it’s not as coincidental as it can feel it is
This is genius but I'd probably only play through that way once, to see it work. Most of the time I play trying to build a utopian society as much as to win, and nerve stapling everyone kind of doesn't do that, so.
Rushing Merchant exchange with an artifact is a huge waste, especially with Morgan. It gives you 0-4 energy/turn (remember that you will already get +1 to all tiles with Morgan pretty quickly, and you might not have the tech to go over the 2 yield limit, so it might actually do nothing for a while), so at maximum +2 research in the early game. It will take at least 20-ish turns before you break even compared to just grabbing a free tech (could be 50-60 turns worth depending on when you link up the artifact). I know the theme is to not do research at all, but you still want some network nodes to not fall behind early, they are very cheap to buy (a single NN will probably give you more research than the Merchant exchange early on).
I'd have to check the VOD but IIRC the length between finishing the wonder and uncapping commerce isn't that long. Typically you get the Hab Complex tech while the wonder is half done. It's more a scaling thing anyway (early you wouldn't get the multipliers), and half the issue is there's nothing else to build. The only other realistic option is command centre + unit spam, but you might not have the tech for rovers when you first start the tech. Although I recently learned about backwards engineering rovers, maybe not knowing that was my mistake.
@@suedeciviii7142 Dunno, I avoid merch. exchange like the plague, it's one of the worst wonders by far. Putting minerals into it is fine if you don't have anything else to do, but it's much better to switch to human genome or something as soon as you get the tech. Rushing it with an artifact not only means you give up a tech for a very mediocre boost, but you actually make getting one of the good wonders (there are some completely insane ones unlocked by lvl 1-2 techs) harder because there are less things for AI to go for now. I get that it scales well into the late game, but by the time you have banks and tree farms everywhere, you also have 10+ bases and boreholes, so 11 extra base energy is nothing relatively speaking. If you want an early wonder that scales into the late game for some reason, it's better to go for empath guild.
@@omgopet I have to disagree. Not only do you get all the multipliers on Merchant Exchange, but it also applies to crawled tiles too! It can easily add up 55+ commerce per turn, and the AI neglect it, so you don't have to sacrifice too much to get it. Also, I don't know if you do the same, but I typically play with random tech. Other wonders are good, but either the AI prioritize them or I don't end up with those techs. I also play with the thinker mod, and AI refuses to trade a lot of the secret project techs That being said, I haven't played enough to know well how the game "feels" with or without it. I might just be flat wrong on this issue.
Dude We should set up some online games together. If we can I used to have a Gaian strategy where I could win at the hardest level. But not with the mods you talked about For me it was all about catching a few mind worms then creating a mindworm mega army Then I would rush for green research creating huge areas of forest which gave me high high yields. And the great thing about it. I would barely terraform my area. So the planet, in the endgame when it starts to spam huge mind worms dependent on how many times you negatively effected the planet would have little effect on me.
"Some civilian workers got in among the research patients today and became so hysterical I felt compelled to have them nerve stapled. The consequence, of course, will be another public relations nightmare, but I was severely shaken by the extent of their revulsion towards a project so vital to our survival."
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Personal Diaries
They knew nerve stapling was a flavour jackpot and they milked it for all it was worth, god bless them
Please do be that guy. This is a marvel of maliciousness, an exemplar of evil!
Yeah, I really appreciate deeper (and more competent) guides - them being for Thinker is a bonus! I find so much SMAC content is casual let's plays or relies on massive gaps in the AI's play.
I'd also be curious about SMAC-in-SMAX playthroughs. I'm in that camp of people who dislike SMAX. Really, though, I'm thrilled to see any good content!
@@michaelbird9148 Yeah, 90% let's plays. Honestly, as a UA-camr I'm fed up with full game playthroughs. I'd rather make 6-15 minute video essays and tutorials. More fun to make, and they get more views too. And I can do longer form content on stream.
@@suedeciviii7142 Yeah, that's a fair way to split the types of content. I'd take summaries of playthroughs as well!
@@suedeciviii7142be that guy. Subbed.
I agree with this guy, please do be that guy.
"Planet doesn't seem that important to me"
-Suede quotes (out of context) 2024
Shhhh, don't tell Deirdre
To be fair, it doesn't seem to do much on the surface. In truth, however, having a high score is the early game is a massive boon, because the main thing it does is weaken and reduce the spawn rate of mind worms attacking your empire. If you dump planet early on, before you've got a decent military, the mind worms can wreck you. Keep it high, however, and they'll spend their time attacking the other players.
@@Quantumironturtle Yes. It's also nice to be able to capture worms to scout more efficiently early on.
Please, I beg of you, create more Alpha Centauri Content. This was a delight to see in my subscribers inbox and even more fun to watch!
Please be that guy. You've already earned my trust as identifying Civ III as a great game and tips that I've used to great effect. I will gladly and happily vacuum up AC content.
Sadly the videos don't do nearly as well! I still have one more video essay in me on Alpha Centauri, but I think I'll lean more towards including them as examples in broader video essays about 4X games. Use subterfuge to get people hooked hahah. And, although people were very patient with me, it was frustrating making mistakes when making videos about Alpha Centauri. The programming in that game is so bizarre sometimes!
I cannot sub again, but I think we would all love some AC content. Before the guides though, a simple tutorial and later an over-explain game would prove really helpful. The game's UI is difficult to say the least, and a lot of the mechanics dated. Even if we played the game a long time ago, having gotten used to modern UIs and mechanics makes it difficult to get back.
I’ve tried to get into SMAC but it’s difficult for me to get past all the keyboard shortcuts and the confusing UI. Love watching suede play tho.
Eventually that's a good idea, but at the moment my knowledge is still a little patchy and I want to build it up first.
We need more people to come back to this game and based on your youtube videos you might just do it. Have our support holder of THAT GUY title.
I started replaying SMAC a couple weeks ago with Thinker and had the 0% labs brainwave while playing Miriam. As soon as I got probes, I went from last place to first place in about ten turns. It had me convinced that 0% labs (at least after probe teams) is the ideal way to play.
But I was still playing suboptimally, with 60-70% psych, trying to keep drone riots out of all my conquered bases, and under the delusion that pop booms are more important than they really are.
Sheng-Ji Yang would be proud, this is some seriously enlightened stuff!
I would add: 1) Use planes to bomb enemy sensors, units, and destroy the roads that will allow their probe teams to mess with the city that you just captured. 2) The Weather Paradigm is the best secret project. It unlocks all terrain enhancements including boreholes, drilling to aquifers to create rivers, and raising and lowering terrain (clearing rocky terrain is available from the beginning I recently learned!). 3) The Isle of the Deep is the best unit in the game. It's a transport that attacks and defends. You can also put it in a base and use it to attack an adjacent ground unit. The best way to get them are to build cheap ships (basically hand weapons or lasers with no armor) and send them out to capture the Isles once you have green economy (or are Gaians, Planet Cult, or settled near the Manifold Nexus). Once you have an Isle use it to pop pods and attack with your laser boat to capture the next one and repeat.
I remember once reading a Wiki page or something that trashed Recycling Tanks, telling you to build a Former instead. This is probably an example of some sort of "novice" -logic:
-Formers use up Supply slots (particularly hurting Morgan, as showcased in the video.)
-It will eventually run out of tiles (especially useful ones) to improve.
-Options for investing the minerals are scarce in the early game.
Obviously, if a new base is founded later in the game, there are other buildings available for construction. Also there's less turns left to get return on investment.
Yeah, one of the players who coached me told me recycling tanks were low priority. I'm going with my gut here. Generally, flat yields = good in weak cities, multipliers = good in developed cities. And Alpha Centauri is loaded with weak cities early on. Recycling tanks pay themselves off after ~16 turns, (less if you're Domai due to his industry score) that's an insanely fast turnover time. Rushing buildings is at a cheaper rate, as noted here.
I will say that formers are likely relatively better on lower difficulties, because food is better, you can grow without running into happiness issues. And formers are obviously great too. But if you're running lean, I'd move towards trying to get away with fewer formers early on.
This is contextual. Formers are generally better if you have the Weather Paradigm or have Ecological Engineering. At this point, you can convert Former Turns into advanced improvements. It requires building a lot of Formers to run out of land to improve with advanced improvements. It is however, extremely tedious to make so many Formers and so many advanced terrain improvements. And if you can't build Condensers yet you can only really benefit from 1-2 Formers per base. For something like speed Transcendence (minimum turns), Recycling Tanks are an extremely marginal build, their return on investment just isn't very good, this is not to say they are never built at a high level of play, they're marginal, not useless. Formers however are built in vast numbers.
@@blakewalsh9489Interesting. Where is does the community for speed transcendence organize?
@@blakewalsh9489 "This is contextual" -best way to phrase it. If the context is "start of the game" and "knowing the game will run many, many turns" then obviously Recycling Tanks make sense, if for nothing else that there aren't enough alternative investments available for the first handful of cities.
Also, you could argue that this would also make sense "in the lore." The whole point of the tanks is that the early settlements are so starved for resources that (at least according to the Yang quote that plays) the dead people are "recycled" instead of buried. (Presumably other things are recycled as well in the tanks.) It's not explicitly stated if Hive is the only faction recycling people, but most other factions would have reasonable ideological justification for it.
-Deidre is all about sustainability and harmony with the planet.
-Morganites could have a system where you have to pay for the privilege of "proper burial" or at least your cadaver would be considered something that could be (literally) liquidated to help pay any outstanding debts.
-University and Spartans would probably consider this basic pragmatism. I could easily imagine a military funeral where dress-uniformed Spartans gather at Tanks Facility to accompany their fallen comrade on their "final mission."
-Peacekeepers would likely find the practice unsavory, but necessary for survival.
-Believers would presumably have most qualms about this practice. Religious funeral practices, "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."
@@suedeciviii7142 Recycling Tanks are much better for Morgan than for any other faction and for him making them over formers at times makes sense. Almost any other faction formers > Recycling Tanks is usually true.
Please be that guy. I love Alpha Centauri but have never been very good at it. Also, it's fun to see it played like this.
Not the kind of world I want to live in,
but the kind of world I want to build in-game.
- W40k players
A broken strategy is to reload the start until you spam close enough to the monolith and/or the volcano central tile (non rocky) to plant your capital in the center of those. Especially the monolith as you won’t even need to terraform them and any unit coming out will automatically receive an experience upgrade
Please do more alpha centauri videos
Libertarian ecoanarchy gulag empire strat
"We want to avoid building happiness buildings since they are useless when we get punishment spheres" 😂 Imagine this coming from a politician
Dystopian Capitalist Hellscape: runs democratic green
Greenwashing their atrocities :P
Yes, i subscribed for Alpha Centauri content :)
It would indeed be interesting to hear more strategy guides, although I'm a player who'd never be remotely near Transcend difficulty. But, considering you mentioned a money-focused strategy, it makes me wonder, whether there's a good eco-focused strategy (spam mindworms), or a tech-focused strategy, or something similar :)
I want you to be THAT GUY! ❤
Getting RR Slugger jumpscared in the comments of a Suede Civ 3 video of all things lol. Love to see that crossover between two of my favourite niche channels.
@@mangomation3945youtube recs you channels based on (among other things) the channels you watch, including the channels the channels you watch are watching (and vice versa) so it’s not as coincidental as it can feel it is
@@mangomation3945 Civ III and SMAC are two of my favourite games ever. Love seeing them covered by such a skilled player here! 😊
This is genius but I'd probably only play through that way once, to see it work. Most of the time I play trying to build a utopian society as much as to win, and nerve stapling everyone kind of doesn't do that, so.
Rushing Merchant exchange with an artifact is a huge waste, especially with Morgan. It gives you 0-4 energy/turn (remember that you will already get +1 to all tiles with Morgan pretty quickly, and you might not have the tech to go over the 2 yield limit, so it might actually do nothing for a while), so at maximum +2 research in the early game. It will take at least 20-ish turns before you break even compared to just grabbing a free tech (could be 50-60 turns worth depending on when you link up the artifact). I know the theme is to not do research at all, but you still want some network nodes to not fall behind early, they are very cheap to buy (a single NN will probably give you more research than the Merchant exchange early on).
I'd have to check the VOD but IIRC the length between finishing the wonder and uncapping commerce isn't that long. Typically you get the Hab Complex tech while the wonder is half done. It's more a scaling thing anyway (early you wouldn't get the multipliers), and half the issue is there's nothing else to build. The only other realistic option is command centre + unit spam, but you might not have the tech for rovers when you first start the tech. Although I recently learned about backwards engineering rovers, maybe not knowing that was my mistake.
@@suedeciviii7142 Dunno, I avoid merch. exchange like the plague, it's one of the worst wonders by far. Putting minerals into it is fine if you don't have anything else to do, but it's much better to switch to human genome or something as soon as you get the tech. Rushing it with an artifact not only means you give up a tech for a very mediocre boost, but you actually make getting one of the good wonders (there are some completely insane ones unlocked by lvl 1-2 techs) harder because there are less things for AI to go for now.
I get that it scales well into the late game, but by the time you have banks and tree farms everywhere, you also have 10+ bases and boreholes, so 11 extra base energy is nothing relatively speaking. If you want an early wonder that scales into the late game for some reason, it's better to go for empath guild.
@@omgopet I have to disagree. Not only do you get all the multipliers on Merchant Exchange, but it also applies to crawled tiles too! It can easily add up 55+ commerce per turn, and the AI neglect it, so you don't have to sacrifice too much to get it.
Also, I don't know if you do the same, but I typically play with random tech. Other wonders are good, but either the AI prioritize them or I don't end up with those techs. I also play with the thinker mod, and AI refuses to trade a lot of the secret project techs
That being said, I haven't played enough to know well how the game "feels" with or without it. I might just be flat wrong on this issue.
Please be that guy.
Next video is an Alpha Centauri Tutorial
@@suedeciviii7142 Noice!
More SMAC videos :)
Do be That Guy of Superior Video Craftong
Dude
We should set up some online games together. If we can
I used to have a Gaian strategy where I could win at the hardest level. But not with the mods you talked about
For me it was all about catching a few mind worms then creating a mindworm mega army
Then I would rush for green research creating huge areas of forest which gave me high high yields.
And the great thing about it. I would barely terraform my area. So the planet, in the endgame when it starts to spam huge mind worms dependent on how many times you negatively effected the planet would have little effect on me.
Are you on the discord server? I'd be interested in multiplayer
How to install thinker mod I need help
Where are you getting stuck?
this is yang propaganda posting. WE MUST DISSENT!