Borehole Cluster SUCKS

[bvanevery]

It's the most fragile goddamn thing that ever existed in the game.  You can't make real use of it until you've got a pile of techs.  Especially as Domai, I had been trying to get Environmental Economics the whole [intercourse gerund] game and the slow research just wouldn't give it up.  I did have Ecological Engineering already but eh, so what.  The Borehole Cluster wasn't terribly near me when I started.  It was on a small island somewhat southwest of me, halfway to my enemies, and totally covered in fungus.

I had a strange start where I got trapped in a little tiny spit of peninsula by Zhakarov, but ultimately dug in, built up, and got him to surrender.  This made my starting cities unusually close to each other, and I didn't want to put a long term "scientific capitol" there.  So I thought, hey, I'll take over the Borehole Complex and build The Supercollider there!  Great plan huh?

Well of course not.  Because mindworms come.  And human faction enemies come.  It only takes 1 *****r with a pathetic ship to blow one of those Borehole Clusters up.  It takes forever to clear that fungus off.  Even with fungicidal formers, the realities of running out of money and production in a Free Market economy means it just takes a long time to get done.  So of course I didn't have sensor arrays deployed to see anything.  I don't even know if the Spartans destroyed it by land or sea.

I quit the game, tired of this [poop].  Graphs say I was doing just fine, pretty much a Caretaker / Usurper / Cha Dawn / Myself as Drones competition.  I was allied with the Usurpers but he was probably going to quit on me any time now.  My whole project was to get The Maritime Control Center and some invasion weapons, do the "here come the Marines" drill.  Got the MCC, got the weapons tech, but taking forever to get a stable enough economy to abandon Free Market and go back to Planned.  Really needed Environmental Economics to lift the energy per tile restriction.  Couldn't get it, and then my great plan got torpedoed.  [fuddle-duddle] these people!

To add insult to injury, my initial "combat" expansion off my tiny spit peninsula, was to take The Manifold Nexus.  It was juuust far enough away to be really really irritating trying to get colony pods over there, with Zhakarov trying to murder me at close range.  Yeah I finally got the thing, got my +1 Planet rating... and never captured a Mindworm at all.  Uuuh, belatedly remembering I went Free Market so I guess that put me at -2 Planet.  Coulda given me a [intercourse gerund] mindworm when I was still Planned though.

I keep forgetting: the Borehole Cluster is a worthless piece of [poop].  It will look valuable and completely mislead you.  By the time you can actually protect it effectively, you could make piles of your own thermal boreholes.  I've played that sort of game before, but it's been awhile.  I've even maximized the number of boreholes I could shove into a continent.  I don't rememeber it buying me any great progress over other means of winning the game, most notably Hybrid Forests.  Maybe I will try Make Your Own Borehole again for ****s and giggles though.

[Buster's Uncle]

Language, man.

[bvanevery]

@#$!#$@##@@#!#!!!! FREE MARKET!!

I play a new game on a Huge map, with a much more "normal", somewhat isolated large island spread.  Do fine, but have a curious lack of minerals, so don't get around to building any Secret Projects.  Lotta fungus in my way too.  Once I go seaborne I contact people, get various Artifacts, etc.  Eventually someone else builds The Virtual World and I get my hands on Planetary Networks.  I go Planned and grow for a bit.  My population quickly gets to be more than I can keep happy, so I go Free Market. 

I've got maybe 2 military units out and about, a scout and a ship, from different cities.  I can't Elvis the cities and keep them fed, and I don't like the sanctions for nerve stapling, so I crank Psych to 40% to make it work.  The scout gets summarily killed by the mindworms in the pod it pops, so that's "solved".  I still want the ship to keep going because I know where the Spartans are, I'm almost there, but haven't managed to contact them yet.

Next turn some mindworms land on the shore of that city.  Because they covered a solar collector, it triggers a drone riot.  I kill the mindworms and think this should be going back to normal now, since I had it stable before.  The mindworms didn't have time to pillage anything, I killed them as soon as they landed.

Next turn that city !#$@#$@#$!!! JOINS THE DATATECHS!!!  Who are far away.  Who I'm not at war with, so I can't just retake the city.  I have played hundreds upon hundreds of games of SMAC.  Rarely have I seen this happen.  Like, not since the stone ages.  I know it's within the realm of the possible, but of all the super irritating play mechanics that could possibly be in this game, I haven't seen this one in forever.

I quit the !@#$@#$!#!@!!@@!@@!!!! game.  The other thing that irritates me, is I had a pretty big pile of cash, and just let certain Secret Projects go by me anyways.  Didn't think I cared, but as the turns dragged on and I didn't get the new techs I thought I would, it began to piss me off.

I vaguely recall something about the Drones being more prone to join other factions, that that's a faction weakness of theirs.  Well screw me.  I guess I won't be doing Free Market early in the game again any time soon.  Just have to go back to Simple economy, when Planned gets to be too much.  Typically I need Democratic for the +2 Efficiency bonus to keep my expanding empire more happy.  The Drones can't go Green, so can't gain efficiency that way.  Takes awhile for the Drones to get ahold of Knowledge, unless Aki Zeta is in the game and giving away Cyberethics like it's Oprah cars.  Had a game where she gave me that and Industrial Automation, before either had their Secret Projects built.  Pretty weird of her.  Also even if Knowledge is available to the Drones, Wealth is often preferred, to belt out Secret Projects as fast as possible.

Perhaps Free Market is very close to the spawn of Satan.

And I had The Manifold Nexus yet again, and didn't get a single captured indigenous life form, again.  Even though I was only Free Market for like 2 turns.  WT*?

[bvanevery]

Why do I act like the Hive is trustworthy?

Yeah, my ally a couple turns before.  He hit me with what, EIGHT probe teams?  I quit.  I hate that s***.

We were supposed to wipe out the Caretakers together.  I had the means.  But again, my economy was making me groan and I juuust couldn't seem to get my ass down there to do it.  It was like crossing the English Channel.

And then Miriam wants war.  Which my wonderful ally the Hive should be happy with.  But he's a d***.

How do I make this game not irritating?  Is playing with the Drones just basically irritating?  Always feel hemmed in somehow.  For all their productivity, they don't actually seem that powerful.

I couldn't please anyone.  I'm not going Police State when that's going to get me a -2 Efficiency and I can't go Green.  I can't go Green to make Deirdre happy.  She was the leading power, sitting blithely far away getting rich.  Can't go Democratic because I'm next to Yang.  And Miriam.  Data Angels might have liked that, I might have liked that.  Morgan likes Free Market, hates Planned.  So I did nothing.  Eventually I went Knowledge because it didn't offend anyone.  I wonder if that's why Yang hit me with EIGHT PROBE TEAMS.

F****** game.

[PvtHudson]

Great game. Flames passion at end of 2017, so old and so classic! It wouldn't be interesting if you win every time, isn't it? To me, finding a balance of difficulty to sustain 50/50 win/loss is essential part of romance with every strategy game. And SMAC has impressive arsenal of mean dirty vileness(es?) to give you these "I'm doomed" moments, with equal amount of joy if you still prevail.

[bvanevery]

I think it's more like, the game has enough picky details in it, that it's not easy to remember all the ways you can get griefed.  Until you've played a bunch of games to "warm up".  Which can take a long time, and won't necessarily warm you up on that 1 kind of grief that finally comes along in game 16.  At which point you may be getting tired of the various misfeatures of the game, so you may stop playing for another 6 months.  Which gives you time to forget a lot of whatever you were practiced at avoiding.  Wet, lather, rinse, repeat.

The game is slightly large enough that it's somewhat difficult to hold in one's mind and concentration, and translate into correct action.

In my current game opening I'm doing well so far.  I am the Drones yet again.  I started on a sizeable island with Mt. Planet.  I've got a Secret Projects worthy base there, and a lot of awfully good agricultural land thanks to climate and some robot agriculture pods.  Morgan shows up on my island with 1 city.  Rather than crush him, I allied with him, as experience shows Morgan can be politically compatible with me.  Free Market is often a stage I go through as the Drones.  I've squeezed him so he can't expand further on the island, it's pretty much all mine.

I managed to build The Weather Paradigm.  I had to juggle expansion and a Secret Project, there wasn't time to do more.  Oddly I didn't get any Artifacts.  Morgan is likely going to get The Merchant Exchange, but someone else may get it.  Human Genome Project has already been done by Aki Zeta.  Deirdre is in the game and currently allied to me, although that will never last because I can't be Green.  Cha Dawn is near Deirdre and they were at war, but for some reason I had them make peace.  I think so that Cha Dawn won't complain at me for now, although war is inevitable with [pronoun] too.  Neither are in a position to attack me at present, but I'll be doing ocean exploration soon.  Maybe I'm just a peacenick and have a bit of the Rodney King in me.  Can't we all just get along?

Haven't run into Aki Zeta, Miriam, or Santiago yet.  I expect war with the latter 2.

I'm researching Discover and Conquer, on the hope of getting either The Virtual World or The Command Nexus, as nobody has started them yet.  I've got Doctrine:Flexibility, but still settling my island, for instance building Recycling Tanks.  Got a lot of fungus to clear out in some places too.

Well... Sparta was next door and nearly wiped out Morgan.  I buffered him.  Kept needing to build up my island.  It got old.  I didn't really make any mistakes, but I just found the game to be a drag, especially after several strong beers in me.  Why bother?  I didn't just quit the game, I deleted the game.  Now we'll see if it stays deleted for awhile lol.

Well I guess I did make 1 mistake.  I got Adaptive Economics somehow, after Deirdre had started on The Planetary Energy Grid.  I was getting fairly close to finishing it by buying the remainder.  Deidre just up and finished it unexpectedly.  I wasn't really paying attention to her progress, and I don't think "babysitting" that sort of thing is fun anyways.  This really annoyed me.  Domai is always behind on research and it seems the way I can guarantee getting things like that, is to be a real super dick and just steal from my allies and so forth.  I really don't like doing that, as it renders the concept of having allies pretty meaningless.

Also I researched Conquer for a very long time, but could not get The Command Nexus.  Aki Zeta finished it and I never even got Doctrine:Loyalty.  Again, I could steal.  I don't like this whole "complete dick" way of playing.  I could do it against real human players just fine, but against an AI where it's just my mind, my 'meditation' on what the future of the planet looks like... I don't like the "everybody has to be a super dick" idea of human non-cooperation.