Help! I can't win

[Traumahawk]

Hey,

I've been playing this game since release. Mostly SP and some MP with my friends.

I've always played conquer-style, and I'm great at conquering the world quickly. Although, sometimes I'll conquer almost everyone, and then buy the rest out.

Anyways, I've been trying to learn how to play "builder-style" and Transcending to win the game (at Transcend level). But, I always run out of time! I don't see how you guys can Transcend by 2300, while I'm still here at 2500 wondering WTF?

I've tried 3 games, 2 as Gaia and 1 as Morgan. And, maybe it's just me, but I can't seem to get tech fast enough. That, and I'm not sure if I'm taking the right path with my research.

I do use crawlers (only for their intended purpose), I run Demo/Free/Wealth or Demo/(Planned|Green)/Knowl, and I usually have between 10-15 cities.

What can I do to get tech faster earlier?? Also, how should I climb the tech tree to win the fastest? I usually shoot for Industrial Auto first so I can build Hab Complexes, but after that it's usually a toss-up for me.

Also, how do you keep peace with the other factions? When I play conquer, I never give them tech or $$ because I want them to die. But, it seems thats the only way to keep them happy. But even then, sometimes I'll bribe them, and they'll still be seething.

Thanks for any insight...

trauma@itropolis.net

[bondetamp]

It is hard to give specific answers to a rather general question, but have you tried the super-science-city? The ssc is a base that you assign to do the brunt of your research. You give that base all science advancements, tons of crawlers (some mineral and nutrients, but tons of energy) and all science specific secret projects. You should also try to experiment with specialists, and not only in the ssc. Specialists give resources that are not affected by innefficiency, so you can use those useless conquered bases to turn out quite a revenue.

A really fool proof method is to crank up the number of bases to at least 50, but preferably 150. This will give insane revenue, but also insane micromanagement.

[spartak]

I HATE micromanagement

[Avenoct]

Lets see, you've got 15 cities, running Dem/FM/Wealth and you use crawlers. What size map? Do you trade tech?
I can't see how you can't transcend with that setup. Personally I'm a hybrid player but I've won builder type games with a similar arrangement.

It would seem the cause of non-transcendence must be not getting tech fast enough. In 400 years you must get approximately 64 techs, which works out to 1 tech every 6 years or so. At the beginning that can be hard to do, but in the late game you should be getting 1 tech every 4 turns if you're just going to squeeze in under the wire. Many players can get a tech every turn, or even 2 techs a turn in the late game, and probably with a similar setup. Perhaps your cities: aren't booming-growing to maximum capacity? aren't crawling in energy or making tree-farms? aren't building research-enhancing facilities? Lets hear more about how your game is set up.

-Smack

[mark13]

First of all, check your alpha.txt fle in the main section of the game directory, and check that the

; technology discovery rate as percentage of standard

string is set to 100. If it set to anything less than 100, tech will cost a lot more

So, assuming that's OK, what are you doing wrong? Well - I'm not sure, from what you've described. To give you some sort of inkling as to what a typical builder would do, here's a quick walkthrough of a typical builder game:

1) First technology you discover has to be Centauri Ecology. This gives you formers, and as soon as you discover the tech, you should build at least one per base. Plant forests anywhere you like - you'll need the production.

2) Beeline straight for IndAuto. If you need to take a quick detour, go for Biogenetics - but getting to IndAuto is #1 priority at that stage. Biogenetics will give you Recycling Tanks - build them everywhere. When you get IndAuto, begin churning out crawlers - send each one on to a forest square and harvest minerals - typically until that base is producing 14-15 minerals. If you like, you can cash a few in for an early SP.

3) Go toward restrictions. Your typical tech discovery order will be - Social Psych, Eth Calculus, Gene Splicing, EcoEng and EnvEcon, in that order. When you hit EthCalc, you should be at a dozen bases or more - a switch to Demo could be profitable, and keep the drones off your back. When you finally hit EnvEcon (typically 2150s with the University, 2170s with anyone else) throw creches and tree farms up in your main bases. When you've done that, go to Demo/Planned and watch your bases sprout.

That should see you through the early game - after that, you have options. Either head toward air power if you're having trouble controlling the AI, or hit Fusion and Applied Relativity if not. Make sure you build the Supercollider in your best base, and start crawlering energy - see threads on energy parks for the most effective way to do this. Free Market tends to take a back seat at this point, and a switch to green, for efficiency purposes, might be profitable.

As the others have said, no. of bases and map size can play a large part. I'll admit to getting very bored very quickly past about 30 bases though

[Zakharov VII]

As people have said, the fool-proof meathod is just to have tons of bases. It comes at the price of having to micromanage them, though...in the one game where I got 100 bases, each turn was taking 15 minutes (hurrying facilities at about half of them each turn), but I was getting 6-7 transcendent thoughts each turn (50,000 research points or so!) at 100% labs (though I was mostly on 100% economy for the hurrying cash)

At Trascend, I'm surprised the computer hasn't gotten to all the techs. For awhile my fastest transcendence was around 2300 because Deidre had all the techs when I had about 2/3...but the AI isn't smart enough to build up cash to hurry the Ascent and to disband the troops, so I easily finished first .

Maybe you're destroying the AI builder factions instead of letting them do some research for you. If you can get Empath Guild (sometimes I get Centauri Empathy before I get to Environmental Engineering) or get elected planetary governer, you'll have infiltrators in all factions and can see what tech they have. Be sure to get anyting you don't have before wiping them completely off the planet (either with probe teams, or letting them surrender and the betraying them )

Z

[Blake]

Dollars to Donuts he automates his formers and/or bases. That's the easiest explaination for a low resource output.

The easiest way to play a builder game is:
(1)
Take Cent.Eco for first tech, build about one former for every base. Use these formers to plant forests and build mines on rocky tiles (but forests are higher priority)

Expand to 10-15 bases, ASAP.

Bee-line to ind.Auto, build heaps of crawlers to crawl minerals, first from forests and later from mines. Switch to wealth and Free Market (you may want to switch to FM earlier, if you have time to build rec commons in your bases, or are Peacekeepers/drones)

Then bee-line to Enviromental Economics and build tree farms in all your bases, tree farms are very very important because they double the nutrient output from forests, and have heaps of other beneficial effects too.

This gives very solid terraforming, production base and economy.

(Optional, at this stage you can easily pop-boom)

Next bee-line to Pre-sentient. Algorithms (this is quite a long bee-line)

Then bee-line to Fusion Power, and build heaps of fusion labs, and make use of the fusion reactor. If you can tolerate the MM set heaps of workers as fusion engineers.

Then Bio-engineering, upgrade all your formers and garrisons to Clean.

Then Orbital Spaceflight and launch some hydrosatellites.

(Note, the Fusion/Clean/Spaceflight doesn't have to be done in that order, but all are fairly key builder techs)

Once you have spaceflight and fusion power the game is pretty much won.
For defense mostly use probe teams to subvert enemy units.

Give the AI whatever they want to keep the peace, altough you may want to avoid given away weapons. Also if they ask for a tech, ask for a tech in return, and 99% of the time the AI wont declare war over it. (works much better than downright refusing)

(2)
Read Vel's Strategy guide!

[Traumahawk]

Ok, thanks much for the advice...

A couple of questions:

(i) I hear a lot of "build forests." Where should I build them? Should I build them in my base-squares and work them? Or, should I build them in the middle of nowhere and crawl the minerals home? Or both?

(ii) Crawlers: where do you send them? Do you crawl the base-squares? Or, should I send the crawlers to remote places to work?

(iii) Drones! In "bee-lining" straight to IA, I skip over Social Psych and Rec Commons. I can only use 1 unit as police, so how can I keep people orderly? I'll usually convert a worker to a doctor, but then I starve my cities out . Any suggestions?

[Blake]

Originally posted by Traumahawk
Ok, thanks much for the advice...

A couple of questions:

(i) I hear a lot of "build forests." Where should I build them? Should I build them in my base-squares and work them? Or, should I build them in the middle of nowhere and crawl the minerals home? Or both?

Build them *everywhere*, rainy, arid, rolling, it doesn't matter. Plant a forest on it. The only place you cant plant forests is rocky tiles, either level it and plant a forest, or mine it. The forest everywhere strategy really does work.

(ii) Crawlers: where do you send them? Do you crawl the base-squares? Or, should I send the crawlers to remote places to work?

Once again, send them everywhere , build 2-5 crawlers per base and have them extract minerals from forests. Later, when you get mineral restrictions lifted move them onto working mines. Because bases dont grow very fast on forest there will be plenty of spare tiles to crawl in the base radius.

(iii) Drones! In "bee-lining" straight to IA, I skip over Social Psych and Rec Commons. I can only use 1 unit as police, so how can I keep people orderly? I'll usually convert a worker to a doctor, but then I starve my cities out . Any suggestions?

Again forests come to the rescue, you see forests only produce 1 nutrient, so a base working only forests doesn't grow very fast (indeed, wont grow above size 2, which can be controlled one scout patrol). You wont be able to bee-line straight to Ind.Auto, so take Social Pysch when you dont have the option to research a pre-req to IndAuto.
Also, once you have a few crawlers out harvesting minerals start building more crawlers and use them to hurry construction of the Human Genome Project.
Once you have the HGP you should be able to switch to Free Market, which will provide the cash to rushbuy rec commons.
Do not switch to Free Market too early!, you'll be crippled by drone riots.

Btw, ignore those people which say "build heaps of bases", you should temporarly stop expanding when it brings up the "too many bases" warning, building more bases will produce more drones.
Only continue expanding when you can afford to control those drones, in general this means you have either built the HGP, or can afford to rushbuy rec commons. But once you have a tidy income feel free to cover all of Chiron in bases.

Later in the game once you have tree farms and your bases are growing rapidly it's not a bad idea to set 10 or 20% pysch for drone control, but before treefarms this tends to be uneconomical and ineffective.

[Avenoct]

Ditto. No wonder we get along Blake.

There is some issue around the where and when of crawlers. You'll notice, if you follow Vel's advice and pack your bases in fairly tightly that once you start pop-booming your crawlers are possibly in the way of your workers. There are many ways to handle this, just keep it in mind. Otherwise, only use crawlers on your base squares untill you can defend them in crawler-parks. By terraforming your base-radius squares for crawlers (forest) and then later moving them out to crawler-parks or trading them in for SP's, you are terraforming the squares you will later use for workers. That is, unless you are making an all-specialist base.

-Smack

[Traumahawk]

Ok, I think I'm getting the picture .

So, in the early game, get Centauri Eco and plant forests everywhere. Rockies should be mined (eventually boreholed) and everything else is forest.

I build crawlers and place them on the forest. This will work for a while as my cities will not grow fast. At what point should I do something else?

I suppose when I get tree farms, my cities will start to (really) grow. So, do I just keep it all forest for ever? What about energy? If I'm not mistaken, forest squares only produce 1 energy until Hybrid forest. So, what's my source of energy early in the game? Specialists? But, then food is an issue.

About the drones, I was switching to Free Market ASAP, which was screwing me over . So, I won't do that .

I've seen mention of this strategy guide, is there a link to it? Or, is it a book I would have to purchase?

Thanks...

[Blake]

Originally posted by Traumahawk
I suppose when I get tree farms, my cities will start to (really) grow. So, do I just keep it all forest for ever? What about energy? If I'm not mistaken, forest squares only produce 1 energy until Hybrid forest. So, what's my source of energy early in the game? Specialists? But, then food is an issue.

Oh right, you do still want to switch to Free Market, just dont do it too soon, and one energy from forest is still one energy, multiplied by 6-10 bases (and their base square) that is plenty to get you to indAuto, a switch to wealth makes it cheaper to build crawlers and rec commons (and much easier to build SP's) in no time you should have the drone control required for Freemarket, at which stage you switch to it, increasing energy to 2 per tile. You could even switch to free market earlier, if you come across some unity pod cash and can afford to buy rec commons.

The Peacekeepers (easy drone control) and Morganites (more energy, starting cash for quick infrastructure) are great for learning the ins and outs of the builder strategy, without having to tackle the full problems incurred with Free Market.

I've seen mention of this strategy guide, is there a link to it? Or, is it a book I would have to purchase?

There is a link to it.... unfortunately not in an obvious place, you can try finding it from the thread "Signed, sealed and delivered" or hopefully someone else will post a link

[Alex]

I've seen mention of this strategy guide, is there a link to it? Or, is it a book I would have to purchase?

There is a link to it.... unfortunately not in an obvious place, you can try finding it from the thread "Signed, sealed and delivered" or hopefully someone else will post a link

Check this link...

http://guild.ask-klan.net.pl/eng/dat...s/velguide.htm

There you'll be able to see Velocyrix's guide in HTML format, or, if you prefer, you can also download it as a zipped RTF text file (which is what I did, by the way ).

Of course, there's also the option to look up on the mentioned thread, "Signed, sealed and delivered". But I think I made things easier for you, somehow...

Good luck.

[Googlie]

You can also get Vel's Strategy Guide, v3.0 in word format from the Spartan Chronicles website:

http://googlie2.tripod.com/spartanchronicles/id10.html

G.

[Avenoct]

I suppose when I get tree farms, my cities will start to (really) grow. So, do I just keep it all forest for ever? What about energy?

True, but another thing to keep in mind is that once you get the tech to build farm-condenser's, you'll want to build 1 or 2 of these at every base. This is also why the WP is such a great project in slow games, by allowing advanced terraforming earlier. Just make sure you have drone-control in place.

An early base: 2 workers, on 2 forest : 2-4-2 production, a scout, a former.

Industrial Auto: 2 workers, 5 crawlers 2-14-2 production, a scout, 2-3 formers. Get some rec-commons, tanks, HGP and WP if possible.

Condensers: 2-? workers, 7 crawlers 10-14-2 production, same.

Tree Farms: many workers, 7 crawlers, tons of nuts, tons of minerals, tons of energy.

You'll grow like mad with condenser-farms and a crawler, so make sure to build the proper infrastructure to handle drones. Once you get decent specialists (engineers-empaths), specialists make everything flexible. Switching to Dem/Planned/x for pop-booms also becomes viable (this varies a lot by faction).

Good luck with the builder strategy. It can be simply amazing when done survivably.

-Smack

[big_canuk]

Originally posted by Traumahawk

(iii) Drones! In "bee-lining" straight to IA, I skip over Social Psych and Rec Commons. I can only use 1 unit as police, so how can I keep people orderly? I'll usually convert a worker to a doctor, but then I starve my cities out . Any suggestions?

This is the route I go with many factions. It is very difficult with all but the drones and PKs. I also like to go FM, as soon as I get Ind Econ. So... How to control the drones?

The first worker is no problem.

The second worker is a drone. How to control him:

1. Allocate some psych. That extra worker on a forest in FM will generate 2 energy. If that is allocated to psych, and no energy is lost to inefficiency, and/or misallocation(3 energies, or 1 energies to psych), then you have a net gain of 1 nut and 2 mins. (The loss of 1 ec or rp for this 3 FOP gain is usually worth it as well)

2. Make the extra worker a doctor. This solves the problem temporarily. It is fine if only a small percentage of your bases are size 2. It does *require* that you have at least one 2 nut square in the base radius, and for that reason, I build some farms at a few bases early on if I have to.

As you decide between and in fact switch back and forth between the above two methods, build CPs to bring bases back to size 1, or keep them at size 2, as the situation requires. By the time you have to stop building CPs, you should have crawlers, and then shortly thereafter rec comms. The crawlers can crawl nuts to help temporarily support extra doctors. Then when your comms is built, switch back to mins.

The decision to go FM early for the extra ecs and rps, or Planned early for the extra growth, and production is a tough decision. Remember, tech for its own sake is useless. You have to be able to do something with it, once you get it. Also, if you lead in tech, it costs more, and if you are slightly behind, it costs less. Therefore, sacrificing a few rps, to get more mins, production, ecs, and/or growth often leads to a more robust future prospects.

[Velociryx]

Not much I can add to that! And btw, thanks Blake, for the plug for the strategy guide!

-=Vel=-

[Scipio Centaurus]

Didn't even attempt to read all the responses... so everything I say here is probably already in there somewhere.

After crawlers, the next paradigm shift in my own play, came from learning the 'correct' use of advanced terraforming techniques - i.e. drill to acquifer, thermal boreholes, condensors, and echelon mirror/solar collector farms (energy parks). You'll also need to simultaneously acquire the 3 techs that release the resource restrictions (can't remember their names) to tap the full potential of your countryside.

After you've got all that handled, raise additional land in the interior of your landmass and start expanding the energy park area for the late game.

In the early game, the trick seems to be getting some combination of at least 2 nutrients and 2 minerals coming out of a single square at each base. A monument does this automatically, otherwise a quick forest build in a rolling square will suffice for the minerals. If you are lucky enough to have a nutrient resource bonus on non-rocky ground in your base's production radius, plant a forest right there right away. If a base starts with a monument, I'll usually immediately send its former off to prep a new base site with a forest and optional sensor array. Bases can be built on such a square and the forest acts like a substitute recycling tank facility to give your new base a little boost.

- Scipio