Hm. Not sure if want or not, to put it in nChanistani. (Funny thing is I used to have SMAX, but apparently I cant remember a thing). Probably not want, since this really seems to overpower sea bases...
Eh, I wouldn't think it matters much since ocean bases are still strictly worse than land bases due to their terrible lack of minerals. Really, I only ever build sea bases if I'm the Pirates (who are overpowered, I admit), need an airbase near the enemy, or if I'm doing that trick with an endless expanse of zero-infrastructure specialist bases. (which isn't as overpowered as you might think, since you do have to defend them)
As for victory conditions, arent those set in the selectable game rules before the game starts? And I also thought that maximally three factions can share victory, period...
Yeah, that's true, though the normal question is whether players are allowed to share victories at all. It's more fun if only one player can win, since then you don't see 2 permanent blocs form (since you almost never have a full 7 human players anyway), and so there's the constant risk of being backstabbed to keep you on your toes.
Well, I would say its rather that xchen seems like a relative pro. As said, those who look for every... well, loophole is to extreme, but for every hook and angle to exploit in the game
Im just a casual player, too!
Hey, I don't exploit!!
At least I don't take advantage of actual loopholes, like switching around SEs to please the AI or maximize the mineral input from crawlers (thus cashing in crawlers for
more than they cost to build), then switch back at the end of the turn for a refund. As for the rest, crawler use, advanced terraforming, and popbooming were fully intended. It's just that the developers underestimated
just how important they would turn out to be. And while I admit that Specialists never becoming drones and being immune to inefficiency probably wasn't exactly intended in that way, making use of it is sufficiently difficult that it's not at all overpowered except under very limited circumstances.
To be honest, building gazillions of customized crawlers for the win sounds kind of dull and laborious (and managing bases in AC is repetitive enough already once you have enough of them). The furthest I've ever gone in terms of crawler hax (aside from using them to build Secret Projects fast, which I was already familiar with from Civ2) is creating a giant solar farm on a high plateau and channeling huge amounts of energy from it to a super-science base (i.e. one with all the science improvements, the Supercollider and eventually the Theory of Everything...at best, I found this base ended up producing about 50% as much research as the rest of my bases put together).
The trick is to combine that with podbooming to get your SSC really big (ie popboom it up to size 14, then use pods keep pumping up its population. Generally the goal is to get it up to size 36, so it can work a full 20 tiles and run 16 engineers/thinkers. That way, you don't waste cash raising terrain up. You only energy crawl tiles that are already high altitude, while lower tiles get turned into condenser farms to feed specialists. One condenser farm crawler can feed 2 specialists, which in the case of engineers, means 12 energy equivalents, a lot more than an energy crawler is likely to bring in. Also remember that trawling a tidal harness is often a valid substitute for crawling a solar collector. You are not limited by available high terrain, and while it's more expensive, it's also less vulnerable since armor is dirt cheap on ships and foils are fast. It's a rare thing where your huge HQ/SSC is responsible for less than half your total energy output.
For people who've played multiplayer, does a Cold War type standoff ever develop where everyone has planetbusters pointed at each other and lots of Orbital Defence Pods to give themselves a chance of survival? Or a space war where everyone competes to shoot down everyone else's satellites as fast as possible? I always hoped something like that would happen against the AI at higher difficulty levels (because the satellites are an entirely new feature that wasn't in Civ2), until I realized that the AI barely bothers with satellites.
Sadly no. Multiplayer games generally end before reaching satellites more advanced than skyfarms, and planetbusters are too expensive for a real MAD situation. There's a pretty narrow window for planetbusters, since they are too expensive to use once flechette centers become common and ODPs start popping up. For that matter, they are too expensive to use against anything less than a well developed and powerful city or a tightly spaced cluster of cities. Which is why games which aren't already decided, tend to be decided not long after planetbusters get developed. Some players (especially Spartans due to their free prototyping and thus getting that first planetbuster faster) invest in 2 or 3 busters. They then try to identify the enemy's core bases, and seeking a way to get the buster in to hit them. If they succeed, the game is decided, as it is near impossible to quickly recover from losing both your HQ and the majority of your energy output and a good chunk of your industry. If they fail, the game is also decided, since after pumping in that much industry into the busters, they are too badly behind in conventional units to win.
Though if planetbusters are banned by agreement, you do see the occasional space war. However, the Space Elevator gives sufficient advantage that normally whoever has it will decisively win the Space War, and the other nonallied factions just write off whatever orbital assets they have. The most common exception is if one faction is already heavily invested in space, normally the one that got the Cloudbase Academy and is going satellite based ICS, and even then it's most often better to launch a conventional assault against the Space Elevator base rather than trade ODP for ODP when theirs only cost half as much.
