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Author Topic:   So...is this game worth the cash?

Queequeg posted 05-09-99 02:04 AM ET
What are your thoughts? I only have 45 bucks to spend...don't want to make a mistake.
Evk posted 05-09-99 02:08 AM ET
Better this than Call to Power. Of course, I can also say that about a swift kick in the ass.
Submachinegun posted 05-09-99 02:41 AM ET
Never had the "pleasure" of trying CtP...
doesn't have Sid Meiers name in it,
Microprose's logo on it, any magazine recommendations on the box.
Probably sucks.
Bell posted 05-09-99 03:07 AM ET
Buy it . . . just be careful, because you may need some extra cash for ProSMAC once you're addicted....
Smeagol posted 05-09-99 03:10 AM ET
Personally, a game like this completely satisfies my gaming needs, so yes, I have to recommend it. I haven't played anything else since I got it, and I don't expect to for a good while, until a strategy game comes out that is better than this one. The best thing is that if you get tired of the factions you can make all new ones, and the game takes on a different form. If you liked Civ, then this has everything that had and a great deal more.
LackOfKnack posted 05-09-99 07:54 AM ET
Don't buy it until they fix it and can sell you the fixed version (probably Patch 112,456, in the year 2234). The game's base is all right but everything else is terrible and full of holes. Save your money.
Lack
OldWarrior_42 posted 05-09-99 08:00 AM ET
I would spend the money for it. It is stillworth it but then this coming from someone who also bought CTP. Seriously it is an excellent TBS game if that is what you like
TheHelperMonkey posted 05-09-99 09:31 AM ET
Funny, SMAC never crashes on my computer, and I have never ever seen that pesky missle range "bug". LackofNack must be having a bad day...
Valtyr posted 05-09-99 07:26 PM ET
Submachinegun: On my box of CtP there is a recommendation from PC Gamer: "Game of the Month" and 92%. 92%!!! For such a mediocre game. I wonder what their criteria were. I guess it's just impossible to agree on taste. 92%...go figure.
cousLee posted 05-09-99 07:44 PM ET
I have both SMAC and CtP. for the money, SMAC is the better choice. If you question if your going to like it, you can DL the demo and try it first. unfortunatly, the same can not be said for CtP (no demo yet).
LackOfKnack posted 05-09-99 08:15 PM ET
Mr. HelperMonkey: Actaully, neither have I. And the only time SMAC crashes is when I try to generate a map bigger than 300x300. Wehn I said bugs I meant design holes and general stupid flaws, it's just all-round mediocracy. But there *are* bugs, such as the diplomacy city trade bug, and others which don't come to mind right at the moment.
Lack
LackOfKnack posted 05-09-99 08:18 PM ET
Oh, and though SMAC may be the better of the two, it is in no way a top-notch or nice-looking or polished or well-tested or balanced game. I thought some company might actaully try to push the envelope, but it seems that instead they just made the envelope really small so it'd look stuffed (ooh - it's got a VOTING SCHEME! Damn! This game rules!). Sorry, I am just thoroughly dissappointed in the lack of quality in all products, but especially games, as of late. Everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
Lack
Submachinegun posted 05-09-99 08:31 PM ET
Valtyr: The CtP boxes in my country (Norway) don't have that mark on it.
I think. If it does, it must have been extremely small. Usually it's not that hard
to spot a reccomendation mark. Besides, very few people in these forums seem to
enjoy the game they spent their money on.
Havent seen too many happy owners of Ctp here...
Labatt 50 posted 05-09-99 09:28 PM ET
This is a good game, but if I only had forty-five bucks to spend I'd go with Imperialism II first, then SMAC.
trippin daily posted 05-09-99 09:45 PM ET
Oh Boy! I get to burn another one. Lack, how can you say this is not a well balanced, well polished game. The bugs which are left are pretty minor. It is now a well balanced and polished game. Are you still pissed off because you couldn't get the 1/2 votes for your faction? Poor thing Here's some advice. Grow the **** up. How can SMAC be any better balanced than it is. I find each faction fairly well balanced with the others. Some of the factions are a little stronger or weaker than others at certian levels and map sizes. But it is common knowledge that the AI doesn't work well for large maps because it was not optimized for it. Just because you can't run your damn 300x300 map, and make some pissy little special faction, doesn't mean they did a poor job on the game. It just means that idiots like you want absoluet perfection, and there is no such thing. Point out ONE game in this genre that is absolutely bug free and of SMAC's complexity. I don't think you would be able to. FIRAXIS has released 3 patches already, and those three patches fixed all the major bugs. Patch 4 is just coming do to a few errant problems on the upper difficulty levels. Like missile ranges and such. Never has so few braincells done so little for someone.
Trippin Daily
-"Hi, I'm LackofKnack. I want things to be perfect. I can't have one flaw in my game. Forget loading patches, that would be a hassle, all that clicking I would have to do. That would be a strain on my brain."-
P.S. Buy SMAC
Koshko posted 05-09-99 09:58 PM ET
SMAC
Best Buy
on sale for $35
+ Tax
Get it
Leftover change
Treat yourself to MickeyD's

BusterMan posted 05-09-99 10:14 PM ET
To Queequeg:
Read these forums. The decision is simple. YES
-Parker
Urban Ranger posted 05-10-99 12:24 AM ET
Queequeg:
It depends on whether you have played Civ or Civ 2 before. If not, I recommend you to go get a copy of Civ 2 and play that first. SMAC is very similar in many ways and Civ 2 should be a lot cheaper at bargain bins.
As to CtP, forget it. It's half baked. The user interface is extremely frustating. You have to fight it constantly and it is so easy to make mistakes, not because of you but the way the game is !@#%& designed.
Bad Explanation posted 05-10-99 02:53 AM ET
Ummmmm, trippin, unless I missed a post by Lack, I think it was *me* that was trying to do the 1/2 votes thing. I guess that really annoyed you, eh? And here I *love* SMAC...
Queequeg, absolutely play the demo first. I got hooked through it. You'll know quickly whether or not it's for you.
trippin daily posted 05-10-99 10:40 AM ET
Yeah, so what Bad Explanation. LackofKnack is still a ****ing moron by any standards. Just cause his overprivledged lard ass self can't play his 300x300 map he gets pissed. Lack, please tell me you don't say you play TI if you only play it on those large maps. The AI turns into a bumbling idiot (well some may debate that it already is one). LackofKnack, doesn't make sense for you. LackofKnowledge, thats the one that fits you.
Trippin Daily
-Who cares if I'm wrong, this ****s funny to read anyway-
Valtyr posted 05-10-99 05:22 PM ET
Submachinegun: You're from Norway too? Well, fancy that. I'm from Bergen. What a remarkable turn of events.
Submachinegun posted 05-10-99 05:47 PM ET
Trondheim...
Og jeg saa faktisk ikke noe anbefalings-merke. Men det virker ikke som om det er spesielt bra spill.
I didn't see any recommendation mark on the box. But still, it doesn't seem to bee a game.
(translated for those who don't understand Norwegian.)
Submachinegun posted 05-10-99 05:48 PM ET
It doesn't seem to be a GOOD game!
Damn typo. lack of coffee...
Valtyr posted 05-10-99 05:58 PM ET
Nederst til h�yre.
Det forteller noe om spillets kvalitet at en av enhetene heter Cyber Ninja. Jeg mener...HALLO!
Down to the right.
It says something about the quality of the game when one of the units is called Cyber Ninja. I mean...HELLO!
Wolf Dreamer posted 05-10-99 06:36 PM ET
I bought it at Sam's wholesale club for about $39, and got my $10 mail in rebate for the game today. You only get the rebate if you buy it at Sam's or one of the other stores listed.
Once you get over the poorly written manual, the crappy tutorial, and the fact that any automated units of your's that you place under computer control will suck, it is a good game. There are problems with every game now a days, and although it would be nice for a programming team to admit that something sucks and explain to you what, if anything, they plan on doing to fix it, unfortunately that never happens.
LackOfKnack posted 05-10-99 06:50 PM ET
Whoa! I'm already charbroiled, thanks trip, now it's Chicago style. I do have a lack of knack, for saying things the way I mean to. Sorry if I offended you to the point where you felt you had to swear at me. My computer does run a 300x300. What are you talking about? I am sorry, but I am not impressed with many products, especially games, that have come out recently. Sure, no game is perfect, but SMAC does not look polished at all (that's what the little bugs ARE by the way...unpolishedness) and it (as others have said before) is quite comparable to Civ II with the 'Moon Mod Pack'. Civ II is much older. Why is it NOT that much worse? SMAC should beat the crap out of any game that is 4 or 5 years older than it, but it doesn't. As others have again said, "It's just a cheap rip-off Civ clone." I have not played CtP, but I have heard that it has almost as many things wrong with it as SMAC does. SMAC looks like an alpha version, IM(apparantly)HO. And as you have stated yourself, the AI is arguably VERY CRAPPY. I have yet to see someone show me the Terraformer AI actually not wander in circles and do dumb thing like that, for human or AI players.
I hope this has cleared things up a bit.
Perhaps I should add some s to lighten you up a bit. . That should do it.
Now, please have yourself a great evening.
Lack
PS: Back to the original topic, if you have Civ or Civ II, wait for a better game to come out. If not, buy SMAC as a starting point, or save your money.
trippin daily posted 05-10-99 07:42 PM ET
I rarely have seen the terrafroming AI run circles. I have seen this maybe a total of three times. I do not play on super huge maps simply because that 1 hour wait between turns would kill me. They have minor bugs in every game. Even after the upteenth patch. It is impoosible to make an umblemished game. Those few imperfections which are left do not mar the whole game.
Trippin Daily
-where the hell did the flame go? Lack, I think your smiles took it.. damn you and your cunning plan -
Submachinegun posted 05-10-99 08:28 PM ET
Valtyr: Jeg trodde ikke det var lov � bruke norske bokstaver p� internet... Utenlandske
surfere ser vel bare semikolon eller noe s�nt.
Det merket m�tte v�rt f... s� lite!
I didn't think they allowed norwegian letters on the internet... Foreign surfers probably see
semicolon or something.
The mark must have been damn small!
I'm gonna stop writing in norwegian now. writing the same thing twice in different languages
is pretty useless.
Evk posted 05-10-99 08:35 PM ET
Hello. Eu falo o sexo. Limpe minha carne do homem voc� whore feio!
Valtyr posted 05-10-99 08:43 PM ET
Evk: I know that that was Portuguese, but what does it mean?
wtiger posted 05-10-99 11:06 PM ET
LackOfKnack:
When you deal with a game (or software product) the size of SMAC, it's simply impossible to have a complete(read: unbuggy) program. Try dabbling in programming; you'll find that for anything bigger than toy programs, you're going to need some serious planning and some dilligent coding if you don't want to have headaches come testing time. Worse, programming demands absolute perfectnism(sp). Analogy: Programming is like building a skyscraper, but a few cracks here and there won't tarnish your skyscraper, while a single wrong instruction can seriously throw your game out of whack (and finding it is like finding a needle in a haystack... )
As for AI, computers have only recently beaten humans in chess (which isn't a very detailed game). You expect them to kick our *** in something as complex as SMAC??! It'll probably be sometime in year 2234. That's why there's a lot of AI cheats (like hovering needlejets) and that's why I don't expect them to be patched in the next patch. (Come on, give the AI a break.... )
I'll admit that I don't find SMAC very appealing, but then that's because I miss Earth....sob....sob. I'll probably check out CTP, but having to manually tinker with the UI (as stated in Apolyton's most recent column) does not give me a good impression of Activision's latest work (yes, I think it's a rush job).
Cheerio, mates. See you around.
--wtiger
"Report.....Bunker ready.....Oh no! It's yin26!! "
Urban Ranger posted 05-10-99 11:20 PM ET
I wouldn't say it is impossible to write a bug free program. After all, there are correctness theorems and software engineering principles that one can apply. However, it seems commercial software companies don't use them, which is a pity.
mooman posted 05-11-99 02:41 AM ET
I have seen the the former ai do some wacky things. I have seen the loops, and they seem to do everything as inefficiently as possible. Oh well. Automation ain't perfect. As for the game itself...I really never took to it. I think it must be the sci-fi theme. I absolutely loved civII. Weird I guess. Haven't played smac in over a month, just not very entertaining. I am still trying to figure out why
LackOfKnack posted 05-11-99 06:17 AM ET
Urban Ranger: yes, it's a pity.
wtiger: I guess we are drawing the line on the scale differently. I see SMAC as(if this comes out right):

alpha beta final
|-----------|---|--------------------------|
SMAC
Or somewhere nearby, but you see it as:

alpha beta final
|---------------|-----------------------|--|
SMAC
I suppose. I dunno, try asking me when it's not 6:15 a.m.
Lack
MikeH II posted 05-11-99 07:27 AM ET
I think it's a fantastic game and personally I've never experienced any bugs. It's not perfect but no game is.
I'd say buy it, best TBS I've ever played.
trippin daily posted 05-11-99 08:41 AM ET
Wtiger, if you are referring to Deep Blue, the IBM abomination, that beat a grand master, that is not AI. That thing had what was it, 128 pentium processors in it. It calculated EVERY possible series of moves that could happen for every turn after it would hypothetically move a peice. It did that for every piece. While a human brain can only calculate several moves a second, the computer could calculate whole series of possible moves for several pieces in that time frame. It wasn't the humans were beat by AI. It was just that the computer had a cheat. It wasn't AI, it was simple instruction that games like chessmaster have, it was just vamped up a LIL bit to take advantage of the "AI's," if you still wish to call it that, ability to calculate every possible move from turn 1 to turn whenever.
Trippin Daily
- Unless I'm playing SMAC on Deep Blue, I do not expect the AI to kick my ass without cheating -
wtiger posted 05-11-99 09:47 PM ET
Urban Ranger: That stuff is like religion. You know it's good for you, but you can't just drag yourself into doing it (especially when the deadline is next month).
LackOfKnack: I think you lost some spaces in your post, but I'll presume you meant that SMAC is not finished (It's still in beta). Sorry, but I believe you'll have to lower your expectations. IMHO, SMAC is more finished than many other games of its scale, especially when you can't practically employ thousands of beta testers.
I can't tell you exactly where I am right now (It's classified ), but it's somewhere on the other side of the globe.
--wtiger
Ghost in the Machine
Zardoz posted 05-11-99 11:01 PM ET
SMAC is one of the best TBS games out there. That said there are a few things like the wandering formers ect. that are more of an annoyance than anything else. Auto formers are too stupid to use in on my core citys anyway and outside of that if I see one circling or what ever I just take control of that one. Usually not more than one or two a game.
Europa posted 05-16-99 09:14 PM ET
God...this game is soooooooo close to being totally groundbreaking!!!!
But it's not. It is a fantastic game that makes you think both about that game and on a higher level about humanity in general.
But let's be honest, there are too many annoying little bits and bobs that can spoil it.
Don't get me wrong, the game rules! It's just not at the threshold of transcendance, let alone beyond it!
Singularity posted 05-16-99 10:05 PM ET
Just send me the money and I'll buy the game for you. You should have it in about 5 to 10 years.
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Author	Topic: So...is this game worth the cash?
Queequeg	posted 05-09-99 02:04 AM ET What are your thoughts? I only have 45 bucks to spend...don't want to make a mistake.
Evk	posted 05-09-99 02:08 AM ET Better this than Call to Power. Of course, I can also say that about a swift kick in the ass.
Submachinegun	posted 05-09-99 02:41 AM ET Never had the "pleasure" of trying CtP... doesn't have Sid Meiers name in it, Microprose's logo on it, any magazine recommendations on the box. Probably sucks.
Bell	posted 05-09-99 03:07 AM ET Buy it . . . just be careful, because you may need some extra cash for ProSMAC once you're addicted....
Smeagol	posted 05-09-99 03:10 AM ET Personally, a game like this completely satisfies my gaming needs, so yes, I have to recommend it. I haven't played anything else since I got it, and I don't expect to for a good while, until a strategy game comes out that is better than this one. The best thing is that if you get tired of the factions you can make all new ones, and the game takes on a different form. If you liked Civ, then this has everything that had and a great deal more.
LackOfKnack	posted 05-09-99 07:54 AM ET Don't buy it until they fix it and can sell you the fixed version (probably Patch 112,456, in the year 2234). The game's base is all right but everything else is terrible and full of holes. Save your money. Lack
OldWarrior_42	posted 05-09-99 08:00 AM ET I would spend the money for it. It is stillworth it but then this coming from someone who also bought CTP. Seriously it is an excellent TBS game if that is what you like
TheHelperMonkey	posted 05-09-99 09:31 AM ET Funny, SMAC never crashes on my computer, and I have never ever seen that pesky missle range "bug". LackofNack must be having a bad day...
Valtyr	posted 05-09-99 07:26 PM ET Submachinegun: On my box of CtP there is a recommendation from PC Gamer: "Game of the Month" and 92%. 92%!!! For such a mediocre game. I wonder what their criteria were. I guess it's just impossible to agree on taste. 92%...go figure.
cousLee	posted 05-09-99 07:44 PM ET I have both SMAC and CtP. for the money, SMAC is the better choice. If you question if your going to like it, you can DL the demo and try it first. unfortunatly, the same can not be said for CtP (no demo yet).
LackOfKnack	posted 05-09-99 08:15 PM ET Mr. HelperMonkey: Actaully, neither have I. And the only time SMAC crashes is when I try to generate a map bigger than 300x300. Wehn I said bugs I meant design holes and general stupid flaws, it's just all-round mediocracy. But there are bugs, such as the diplomacy city trade bug, and others which don't come to mind right at the moment. Lack
LackOfKnack	posted 05-09-99 08:18 PM ET Oh, and though SMAC may be the better of the two, it is in no way a top-notch or nice-looking or polished or well-tested or balanced game. I thought some company might actaully try to push the envelope, but it seems that instead they just made the envelope really small so it'd look stuffed (ooh - it's got a VOTING SCHEME! Damn! This game rules!). Sorry, I am just thoroughly dissappointed in the lack of quality in all products, but especially games, as of late. Everything is going to hell in a handbasket. Lack
Submachinegun	posted 05-09-99 08:31 PM ET Valtyr: The CtP boxes in my country (Norway) don't have that mark on it. I think. If it does, it must have been extremely small. Usually it's not that hard to spot a reccomendation mark. Besides, very few people in these forums seem to enjoy the game they spent their money on. Havent seen too many happy owners of Ctp here...
Labatt 50	posted 05-09-99 09:28 PM ET This is a good game, but if I only had forty-five bucks to spend I'd go with Imperialism II first, then SMAC.
trippin daily	posted 05-09-99 09:45 PM ET Oh Boy! I get to burn another one. Lack, how can you say this is not a well balanced, well polished game. The bugs which are left are pretty minor. It is now a well balanced and polished game. Are you still pissed off because you couldn't get the 1/2 votes for your faction? Poor thing Here's some advice. Grow the **** up. How can SMAC be any better balanced than it is. I find each faction fairly well balanced with the others. Some of the factions are a little stronger or weaker than others at certian levels and map sizes. But it is common knowledge that the AI doesn't work well for large maps because it was not optimized for it. Just because you can't run your damn 300x300 map, and make some pissy little special faction, doesn't mean they did a poor job on the game. It just means that idiots like you want absoluet perfection, and there is no such thing. Point out ONE game in this genre that is absolutely bug free and of SMAC's complexity. I don't think you would be able to. FIRAXIS has released 3 patches already, and those three patches fixed all the major bugs. Patch 4 is just coming do to a few errant problems on the upper difficulty levels. Like missile ranges and such. Never has so few braincells done so little for someone. Trippin Daily -"Hi, I'm LackofKnack. I want things to be perfect. I can't have one flaw in my game. Forget loading patches, that would be a hassle, all that clicking I would have to do. That would be a strain on my brain."- P.S. Buy SMAC
Koshko	posted 05-09-99 09:58 PM ET SMAC Best Buy on sale for $35 + Tax Get it Leftover change Treat yourself to MickeyD's
BusterMan	posted 05-09-99 10:14 PM ET To Queequeg: Read these forums. The decision is simple. YES -Parker
Urban Ranger	posted 05-10-99 12:24 AM ET Queequeg: It depends on whether you have played Civ or Civ 2 before. If not, I recommend you to go get a copy of Civ 2 and play that first. SMAC is very similar in many ways and Civ 2 should be a lot cheaper at bargain bins. As to CtP, forget it. It's half baked. The user interface is extremely frustating. You have to fight it constantly and it is so easy to make mistakes, not because of you but the way the game is !@#%& designed.
Bad Explanation	posted 05-10-99 02:53 AM ET Ummmmm, trippin, unless I missed a post by Lack, I think it was me that was trying to do the 1/2 votes thing. I guess that really annoyed you, eh? And here I love SMAC... Queequeg, absolutely play the demo first. I got hooked through it. You'll know quickly whether or not it's for you.
trippin daily	posted 05-10-99 10:40 AM ET Yeah, so what Bad Explanation. LackofKnack is still a **ing moron by any standards. Just cause his overprivledged lard ass self can't play his 300x300 map he gets pissed. Lack, please tell me you don't say you play TI if you only play it on those large maps. The AI turns into a bumbling idiot (well some may debate that it already is one). LackofKnack, doesn't make sense for you. LackofKnowledge, thats the one that fits you. Trippin Daily -Who cares if I'm wrong, this **s funny to read anyway-
Valtyr	posted 05-10-99 05:22 PM ET Submachinegun: You're from Norway too? Well, fancy that. I'm from Bergen. What a remarkable turn of events.
Submachinegun	posted 05-10-99 05:47 PM ET Trondheim... Og jeg saa faktisk ikke noe anbefalings-merke. Men det virker ikke som om det er spesielt bra spill. I didn't see any recommendation mark on the box. But still, it doesn't seem to bee a game. (translated for those who don't understand Norwegian.)
Submachinegun	posted 05-10-99 05:48 PM ET It doesn't seem to be a GOOD game! Damn typo. lack of coffee...
Valtyr	posted 05-10-99 05:58 PM ET Nederst til h�yre. Det forteller noe om spillets kvalitet at en av enhetene heter Cyber Ninja. Jeg mener...HALLO! Down to the right. It says something about the quality of the game when one of the units is called Cyber Ninja. I mean...HELLO!
Wolf Dreamer	posted 05-10-99 06:36 PM ET I bought it at Sam's wholesale club for about $39, and got my $10 mail in rebate for the game today. You only get the rebate if you buy it at Sam's or one of the other stores listed. Once you get over the poorly written manual, the crappy tutorial, and the fact that any automated units of your's that you place under computer control will suck, it is a good game. There are problems with every game now a days, and although it would be nice for a programming team to admit that something sucks and explain to you what, if anything, they plan on doing to fix it, unfortunately that never happens.
LackOfKnack	posted 05-10-99 06:50 PM ET Whoa! I'm already charbroiled, thanks trip, now it's Chicago style. I do have a lack of knack, for saying things the way I mean to. Sorry if I offended you to the point where you felt you had to swear at me. My computer does run a 300x300. What are you talking about? I am sorry, but I am not impressed with many products, especially games, that have come out recently. Sure, no game is perfect, but SMAC does not look polished at all (that's what the little bugs ARE by the way...unpolishedness) and it (as others have said before) is quite comparable to Civ II with the 'Moon Mod Pack'. Civ II is much older. Why is it NOT that much worse? SMAC should beat the crap out of any game that is 4 or 5 years older than it, but it doesn't. As others have again said, "It's just a cheap rip-off Civ clone." I have not played CtP, but I have heard that it has almost as many things wrong with it as SMAC does. SMAC looks like an alpha version, IM(apparantly)HO. And as you have stated yourself, the AI is arguably VERY CRAPPY. I have yet to see someone show me the Terraformer AI actually not wander in circles and do dumb thing like that, for human or AI players. I hope this has cleared things up a bit. Perhaps I should add some s to lighten you up a bit. . That should do it. Now, please have yourself a great evening. Lack PS: Back to the original topic, if you have Civ or Civ II, wait for a better game to come out. If not, buy SMAC as a starting point, or save your money.
trippin daily	posted 05-10-99 07:42 PM ET I rarely have seen the terrafroming AI run circles. I have seen this maybe a total of three times. I do not play on super huge maps simply because that 1 hour wait between turns would kill me. They have minor bugs in every game. Even after the upteenth patch. It is impoosible to make an umblemished game. Those few imperfections which are left do not mar the whole game. Trippin Daily -where the hell did the flame go? Lack, I think your smiles took it.. damn you and your cunning plan -
Submachinegun	posted 05-10-99 08:28 PM ET Valtyr: Jeg trodde ikke det var lov � bruke norske bokstaver p� internet... Utenlandske surfere ser vel bare semikolon eller noe s�nt. Det merket m�tte v�rt f... s� lite! I didn't think they allowed norwegian letters on the internet... Foreign surfers probably see semicolon or something. The mark must have been damn small! I'm gonna stop writing in norwegian now. writing the same thing twice in different languages is pretty useless.
Evk	posted 05-10-99 08:35 PM ET Hello. Eu falo o sexo. Limpe minha carne do homem voc� whore feio!
Valtyr	posted 05-10-99 08:43 PM ET Evk: I know that that was Portuguese, but what does it mean?
wtiger	posted 05-10-99 11:06 PM ET LackOfKnack: When you deal with a game (or software product) the size of SMAC, it's simply impossible to have a complete(read: unbuggy) program. Try dabbling in programming; you'll find that for anything bigger than toy programs, you're going to need some serious planning and some dilligent coding if you don't want to have headaches come testing time. Worse, programming demands absolute perfectnism(sp). Analogy: Programming is like building a skyscraper, but a few cracks here and there won't tarnish your skyscraper, while a single wrong instruction can seriously throw your game out of whack (and finding it is like finding a needle in a haystack... ) As for AI, computers have only recently beaten humans in chess (which isn't a very detailed game). You expect them to kick our *** in something as complex as SMAC??! It'll probably be sometime in year 2234. That's why there's a lot of AI cheats (like hovering needlejets) and that's why I don't expect them to be patched in the next patch. (Come on, give the AI a break.... ) I'll admit that I don't find SMAC very appealing, but then that's because I miss Earth....sob....sob. I'll probably check out CTP, but having to manually tinker with the UI (as stated in Apolyton's most recent column) does not give me a good impression of Activision's latest work (yes, I think it's a rush job). Cheerio, mates. See you around. --wtiger "Report.....Bunker ready.....Oh no! It's yin26!! "
Urban Ranger	posted 05-10-99 11:20 PM ET I wouldn't say it is impossible to write a bug free program. After all, there are correctness theorems and software engineering principles that one can apply. However, it seems commercial software companies don't use them, which is a pity.
mooman	posted 05-11-99 02:41 AM ET I have seen the the former ai do some wacky things. I have seen the loops, and they seem to do everything as inefficiently as possible. Oh well. Automation ain't perfect. As for the game itself...I really never took to it. I think it must be the sci-fi theme. I absolutely loved civII. Weird I guess. Haven't played smac in over a month, just not very entertaining. I am still trying to figure out why
LackOfKnack	posted 05-11-99 06:17 AM ET Urban Ranger: yes, it's a pity. wtiger: I guess we are drawing the line on the scale differently. I see SMAC as(if this comes out right): alpha beta final \|-----------\|---\|--------------------------\| SMAC Or somewhere nearby, but you see it as: alpha beta final \|---------------\|-----------------------\|--\| SMAC I suppose. I dunno, try asking me when it's not 6:15 a.m. Lack
MikeH II	posted 05-11-99 07:27 AM ET I think it's a fantastic game and personally I've never experienced any bugs. It's not perfect but no game is. I'd say buy it, best TBS I've ever played.
trippin daily	posted 05-11-99 08:41 AM ET Wtiger, if you are referring to Deep Blue, the IBM abomination, that beat a grand master, that is not AI. That thing had what was it, 128 pentium processors in it. It calculated EVERY possible series of moves that could happen for every turn after it would hypothetically move a peice. It did that for every piece. While a human brain can only calculate several moves a second, the computer could calculate whole series of possible moves for several pieces in that time frame. It wasn't the humans were beat by AI. It was just that the computer had a cheat. It wasn't AI, it was simple instruction that games like chessmaster have, it was just vamped up a LIL bit to take advantage of the "AI's," if you still wish to call it that, ability to calculate every possible move from turn 1 to turn whenever. Trippin Daily - Unless I'm playing SMAC on Deep Blue, I do not expect the AI to kick my ass without cheating -
wtiger	posted 05-11-99 09:47 PM ET Urban Ranger: That stuff is like religion. You know it's good for you, but you can't just drag yourself into doing it (especially when the deadline is next month). LackOfKnack: I think you lost some spaces in your post, but I'll presume you meant that SMAC is not finished (It's still in beta). Sorry, but I believe you'll have to lower your expectations. IMHO, SMAC is more finished than many other games of its scale, especially when you can't practically employ thousands of beta testers. I can't tell you exactly where I am right now (It's classified ), but it's somewhere on the other side of the globe. --wtiger Ghost in the Machine
Zardoz	posted 05-11-99 11:01 PM ET SMAC is one of the best TBS games out there. That said there are a few things like the wandering formers ect. that are more of an annoyance than anything else. Auto formers are too stupid to use in on my core citys anyway and outside of that if I see one circling or what ever I just take control of that one. Usually not more than one or two a game.
Europa	posted 05-16-99 09:14 PM ET God...this game is soooooooo close to being totally groundbreaking!!!! But it's not. It is a fantastic game that makes you think both about that game and on a higher level about humanity in general. But let's be honest, there are too many annoying little bits and bobs that can spoil it. Don't get me wrong, the game rules! It's just not at the threshold of transcendance, let alone beyond it!
Singularity	posted 05-16-99 10:05 PM ET Just send me the money and I'll buy the game for you. You should have it in about 5 to 10 years.