posted 03-22-99 06:32 PM ET     

CrayonX
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"Taraquin:
In reply to your post on your war with the Hive (I'm skipping the nonsense posts that are trying to divert this discussion down the toilet). I had a similar experience with MOO. I played a couple of games to get the game mechanics down, then embarked on an easy campaign. I obliterated the opponents, thinking "this game ain't too tough" (I always think in bad grammer).

I moved the difficulty up, and had one of "those" sort of games. Here I was, minding my own business, building up my technology in my 6 or 7 comfortable little planets, when some bozo starts bullying me. I give him what he wants (some technology), but he starts demanding star systems. Hey, keep your grubby hands off my systems! I say. Naturally, the ill mannered brute declares war, and proceeds to hammer me with the biggest armada I think has ever existed in the universe of MOO (remember, MOO allowed up to 32K ships of a type in a squadron).

Well, I'd been around the block enough to know that the only way I was going to clip his wings was with the dreaded Black Hole Generator (a dominant strategy technology that unfortunately was not available in MOO2). Problem was, my lazy scientests were still a couple of technologies away from getting there. So, I cranked up the research, and prayed I would last.

Next turn, he obliterated another system. Two down! I was down to 5 systems, and now the remaining scientests had to work even harder! Desperate, I called a conference with my foe. I gave him three great technologies as gifts, thinking that would appease the ignorant brute.

Little did I know! He (it?) definitely smelled blood in the ether. Couple of turns later, he wacks another system. I'm REALLY desperate now. I check with my scientests; sorry, they say, we're still about 10 years away from a solution. You morons, we won't BE around in 10 years!! They sulk away.

So, I do the only thing a self respecting soverign could do: I call in the spies. Go steal the Black Hole technology, or don't come back. They slink off without a sound.

I wait a couple of turns, anxiously awaiting word. Suddenly, another star system is swarmed by the invading locusts. You merciless scum; don't you see the millions you are slaughtering. My remaining subjects are in a panic; when will we be next!

Miraculously, word from our courageous spies. They have the Black Hole technology! But is it too late! Design a new ship to hold the dreaded weapon, and quickly manufacture it. We put the 'Savior' project into place, our last hope. Each of the remaining three planets works on ships, which I call Tom, Dick, and Harry.

The monsterous invaders are quiet for a few turns. Could they be readying their final assault? Has the taste of the blood of so many millions finally sated their demonic lusts? NO! Again, the attack, taking out Tom and one third of our hope for survival!

We wait tensely. Finally, the day arrives with Dick and Harry are ready. The sensors pick up a huge blip: invaders! Rushing Harry to meet the threat with Dick, we hope and pray. The hordes descend. Could it be that they are even larger than before?! The vast expanse of space is literally filled with thousands of the flea-like invaders. Each ship in itself is inconsequential; together they form a voracious host.

The game is afoot! Our two brave ships valiantly blast away at the enemy, reducing the hordes by sucking their crews into omnipotent black holes. We have surprised them! Can we decimate their numbers before their inevitable counterattack obliterates our last chance?

Our first attack wipes out thousands of the minion, but there are more thousands to replace them. They counterattack! Will we hold? Harry's shields are buckling...then, disaster! Harry and its brave crew are imploded into space dust. All is lost!

But wait! There is still Dick. Can he hold and save our race from extinction? Dick charges up the Black Hole generator and attacks! Citizens watching from monitors on the planet weep at the seemingly foolharded bravery of the crew, as they accept the inevitable fate awaiting them. But what of the children who never had a chance to live, to grow, to experience their own lives?

The final assault is on! The black holes suck away the soleless enemy to their rightful place in oblivion. One last charge remains in the tubes...

Do you believe in miracles!!! The enemy is thwarted! The evil that was upon us is no more! The children are saved! Long live the...

At this point I actually yelled out "Die, you scum sucking green headed space trash" or something to that effect. My wife thought I had finally lost it, and was reaching for 911 before I got it under control.

Now, THAT was a game.

This is the best requirements specification that I can give for building a classic strategy game. With the usual apologies for the length and corniness...

posted 03-23-99 08:11 AM ET            

thats true. this post is one of those you wont forget so fast, but unfortunately you forget the topic.

posted 03-24-99 09:57 AM ET         

But could we moderate the language please ? We don't want to hear any more about "Dick charging up the Black Hole"

posted 03-24-99 01:12 PM ET         

I agreed with the poster who said that MOO2 was good but not quite the same experience. I think this shows the incredibly thin line between a really good game and a 'classic'. It's that 'takes you to the edge and back' feeling that is so hard to get. I see it in some of the SMAC posts, so I think SMAC has at least the potential (although I must admit I haven't had one of 'those' games with SMAC, yet).

posted 03-25-99 09:54 PM ET            

The great strategy games give you one of "those moments" -- like, driving my old pickup truck to my girlfriend's house, brooding about my humans losing a colony to a sneak attack by a marauding horde of high-tech Psilons, I shook my fist in the air and said, "I will make them PAY for what they've done!" ... fully four years before the same thing was said about the Borg in the movie "First Contact". (Is shaking your fist at an imaginary alien invader considered Road Rage?)

Or when my hopelessly backward, besieged, hideously biologically bombed Klackons got the Repulsor Beam, and in honor of my nemesis the Alkari I christened it the "Plucker". You have to have some serious emotion going to name a ship the "Plucker".

And, of course, we must never forget the tiny, fusion engined, inertial stabilized, attack level 6, mass driver-armed "Orionator". What did you name yours?

posted 03-25-99 10:18 PM ET            

1. All this does is make me want to load MOO again and delete SMAC. Bad idea on a SMAC forum.

2. Though few people probably are aware of the context of this thread, LLGamer's comment

"I'm skipping the nonsense posts that are trying to divert this discussion down the toilet"

was in reference to my and other people's comments that the originator of this thread made an unacceptable racist statement about Korean people. He later was coerced into an apology, though LLGamer himself never called for one.

Instead, this ANTI-racist "nonsense" was casually overlooked by LLGamer and replaced by his out-of-nowhere discussion of a game few or none of us play anymore.

Thus, though you give him the SMAC-Down award, he clearly deserves the coveted,

Yin's "SMAC-OFF!" Kiss of Death.

Congratulations.

posted 03-25-99 10:48 PM ET         

I, too, played Caesar3 and followed the issues and forums. I agree that there were a lot of severe and sometimes frustrating design issues with Caesar3. But you are right, there seemed to be much more constructive discussion of the issues and possible resolutions. There were the Yahoos, but the majority of the comments were either pleas for help/tips or helpful responses to those.
Unfortunately, these forums seem to be dominated by a few individuals bent on being heard. I see that you've already been flamed once. My advice: don't get into a tit-for-tat with them; you'll end up like them or driven off. These people have no credibility, and just seem to want to debate endlessly about things completely unrelated to this game. It is amusing to see posts that started out as SMAC posts degenerate into name calling, debates on American jingoism, the history of North Korea, and whether the US should have dropped the bomb. I try to stick to the SMAC discussions and filter out the nonsense.

Good luck.
--------------------

Here was Yin's response:

Good try, LLGamer, but if you can't see the racism in:
"And, is there a way on this forum to filter out posts by certain people (who are often of Korean descent)."

you're contributing to the problem.

Oh, and let's see:

Idiot: Dude! He replied in 4 mins. Whao, man, Ize gots to gives da' props 4 dat axtion! [you CAN sound intelligent, of course, you just think it's cool to sound like a "hip" little middle class girl who thinks watching MTV makes her an inner-city victim]

Yin to Idiot: Maybe we are posting messages at the same time!

Sit down. Take a breath. Try to stretch your brain around the complexity of it all.

And remember everybody else who plans to respond to this thread, who went looking for trouble?

Remember? I've achieved SMACceptance. True, I have yet to SMACend, but give me a little time (and patch 3.0--please God, be good to us).

General Yin
-----------------

Obviously an attempt at baiting an argument. Tarquin unfortunately fell for it:

--------------------
The Korean remark just referred to you. No one else. When I mention "idiot" or "moron" those words also just apply to you. No one else. Got it? Good.
I figure you're about 13 or 14 years old. Am I correct? Either I am, or you're unemployed and lonely.

---------
Later, Tarquin posted:

And, my apologies to any Korean I might have offended by lumping a 10 year old nitwit in with you, I must have misread a previous post of his. As I only skim over flame posts, the mistake is entirely believable, but still mine.

---------

Now, my 2 cents:
My belief is that the world is divided into normal people, and trouble makers. Normal people spend the majority of their time avoiding trouble makers, and only occasionally confronting them head on. Well, if my mistake was avoiding the trouble maker (clearly Yin in this case), I apologize. I will now rectify my mistake with this statement:

Yin, get off it. You are a trouble maker. What you don't realize (I hope) is that acting this way (i.e. like a tack on a chair) is such a waste of life. You've rebuilt a little credibility with your mea culpa after Brian's post, but you're in danger of losing it with more baiting. Please increase the enjoyment of those around you by posting constructively and not by constantly looking for a battle. I'm sorry you missed the '60's, or have no better windmills to battle; please understand that most of us are not interested in providing you with a great cause to battle.

I apologize if your post was meant in jest, but I think that's what gets people in trouble in cyberspace.

This is the last I have to say about this topic. I don't like to expend time and energy arguing with folk who like to bait and bicker. Don't know about everyone else, but I'm here to discuss the merits and pleasures of gaming in general and SMAC in particular.

posted 03-25-99 11:44 PM ET            

Had you not gone out of your way with the holier-than-thou "I'm not getting involved in this thread so let me try to de-rail it" crap, I wouldn't have brought that up either.

Next time, don't give the false illusion that you posted the whole thread, either. You left out the part where I was being ridiculed for responding quickly to that person's posts. Sounds to me like your being unfair on purpose. Hey, I don't mind that. Just admit it.

The way I see "your" world, there's people who agree with you (the Constructive people) and the people who dare point out your bull**** (the Trouble Makers).

I don't mind agreeing with you when I think you're right. I think I have, in fact, on several occasions agreed with your comments. I will again in the event you say anything else that's intelligent.

If you can't handle a give-and-take discussion, then quit the forum business. Or stay. What would I do without people attacking me with irrational criticism?

But this nomination deserved a crtitique. So I gave it. Don't cry now because you might not "win" the SMAC-Down award. I already gave you a consolation prize.

posted 03-26-99 06:11 AM ET            

"SnowFire posted 03-23-99 11:42 PM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I do believe I've had the worst luck ever in my TI games so far. Standard size map, lots of water, as the Gaians. I start on a medium sized island- except it's shared by the University and the Believers. Think of it as an upside down T with me as the short left branch, the Believers with the longer right branch, and the University on the upper branch. Full house. Oh well, no problem, I just better conquer some Lebensraum quickly. I'm lucky enough to capture a mindworm and I burn down Zakharov's first expansion city and I lay siege to it with my mindworms and Unity rovers, letting no units escape. Around this point I finally decide to contact the Believers (who I had noticed the base mysteriously appearing on my map), who are surprisingly amenable to me. We sign a treaty, and trade about 3 techs back and forth, and in a special spree of niceness I get her World map for Centauri Empathy. She has about half the island, and Sunny Mesa too. No wonder she had some technology. In any case, I expand into "University territory" despite the fact the only University units are holed up in University Base. Eventually, I overwhelm them, and watch as Zakharov escapes.
Up to this point, things have been going pretty well. I'm building some infrastructure to prepare to build more mindworms. I check with Miriam to see if we can trade some more technology, but now that I'm stronger the relationship has gone south it seems. She wants a one-way street. Oh well. I explore the seas now, and I find two island suitable for colonization. As I approach Mount Planet, there's a sea Unity pod. It has an isle of the deep, but my Unity rover and captured mindworms manage to disembark before the transport is sunk. I trade some technologies with Brother Lal, who I find on the Mount, but my army has no ride back home, so they sit there and annoy him instead. I build a new transport, and one city arae I want to found on has a Unity pod. Given no choice, I open it with the colony pod... and mindworms pop out. Of course. Well, I found the other city and collect my troops, and everything seems to be going just peachy. Then Chairman Yang pops up and demands massive amounts of money for appeasement. I realize in horror that since my conquests, I have barely inched into second place. And Yang is about twice as strong as any faction, as he started in Monsoon Jungle on a decent sized continent, so he now, as #1, wants my blood. Well, no problem. He lands his impact infantry in fungus to fool me, the sneaky guy- except I had just completed some sensors on a hill that spotted them immediately, and with my mindworm's bonus in fungus fighting, their carcasses made an enjoyable snack. Then, one turn before it completed its trance synthemetal garrison, mindworms land on that other island I colonized. Sure enough, no more colony the next turn. Arghh! Memo to self: No matter how silly, always always buy the garrison of mindworm food colonies, or drop off some troops to guard it initally. Now, the Hive decides to make a play for University Base with two 4-2-1 Impact Infantry. I had moved some Boil mindworms as well as a Unity rover up there and a Trance Synthemetal Garrison already stood there. I now (foolishly, I later found out) moved my mindworms through the fungus out to meet them and attacked them. However, the victims put up surprisingly good resistance and my mindworms had a mere 2 hitpoints left after that battle. And since I hadn't waited for them to come to me, my mindworm wasn't protected by the garrisons and other defenses of the city. The other impact infantry chewed it up the next turn, and it was down to 6 hitpoints now (3 from collateral damage on attack, 1 from kiling my mindworm). This time I decided to let them come to me before unleashing the fist of death. Just to be safe, I even switched the production from formers to another garrison, and patted myself on the back for my preparations. Well, the infantry attacked, and only took a mere 2 damage killing my garrison. Time for revenge. I attacked with my Unity rover now, which should have one by all rights- hardened, and attacking in the open for roughly 1.4 against a straight 2 with half hitpoints. Well, it almost works... except it doesn't. The infantry still has 1 hit point left. Not one to let it escape, I have my garrison hit it now, and much to my surprise... it loses every single "battle" and is killed off. I felt like the computer playing a save-and-reload human- no matter how good the odds seemed, they went against me. Now I had left a lovely size 3 base undefended at the cost of 2 garrisons and some experienced mindworms and equally experienced Unity rover. Well, I could do a pawn defense by moving my enarby formers into the base and quickly buying a new garrison... but I had already moved my formers earlier in the turn. Noooooooo!

posted 03-26-99 08:43 AM ET            

Yin: I used to think that you were doing a lot of good by expressing your displeasure about SMAC and sometimes about the way that some problems about the game were being addressed, but now, I'm starting to believe that you're one of those people who would prefer to cause trouble just for the sake of causing trouble. That post about MOO is a really great post because it demonstrates to the designer at Firaxis what makes a TBS game great. It Firaxis was able to create a gaming universe that can make a person feel like he's really governing an empire, SMAC would have been increadible (I'm one of those people who was very disappointed in SMAC --sorry).

I think that you're giving into the seductive temptations of arguing for arguement's sake. You loose creadibility everytime you battle for something that isn't worth battling. It's too bad, because I defended you at one time, and I know that you're very intelligent and you've made some great arguements. Now, I regret backing you up because I know that you'd drag your few allies down with you, even though your not making any sense.

The guy who said the phrase "certain people of Korean decent" should have said certain people who's alias starts with a "Y". I know what he was trying to do (he was trying to point you out), but he wasn't necessarily trying to pick out your ethnic background. He was saying that you are pissing him off, not that Koreans piss him off. I don't think he thought of any other way to describe you other than your ethnic background. If he was taking about me, he could have said "certain French Canadians", and that would not have bothered me at all. I think you're a little to sensitive about your ethnicity. Technically, he said nothing wrong, so why don't you just let it go? What do you want him to say?

posted 03-26-99 01:27 PM ET         

Actually, my own nomination for the best post was the tongue-in-cheek Brian Reynolds 'interview'. His responses showed class, an ability to laugh at oneself, and to enjoy life. It would have been so easy to respond with a rant about how hard they had worked on this, how unfair the criticism was, etc. Brian definitely took the high road, and the tone on the forum changed immediately. I think we all (me included) can learn from that.

posted 03-26-99 05:38 PM ET            

1. I'm not Korean.

2. I'm not ten years old.

3. A forum is not a popularity contest, so your talk about my "losing" points just makes me laugh.

4. I think it's pretty much a no brainer that the nomination for the best SMAC post should actually go to posts that have directly to do with SMAC--if you disagree, no problem.

And for the record, I'm not ANTI-SMAC. I enjoy the game immensely. I'm ANTI-bugs, crashes and idiotic game implementation. I'm ANTI patch-me-'til-it-works.

I'm more vocal about it, that's all. My tactics are usually not designed to blend in--for better or worse, my comments usually stand out. Some people like that, others find it grating.

And I don't think a forum is about making allies, supporting one person and not another based on one comment here and one comment there.

I operate on a post-by-post basis. Many people have offended and slandered me in one post just to make a great comment or a funny joke in another. I strike back in the post I hate and support the one I find interesting.

I've made a lot of friends of people who easily could have stayed my enemy that way. So, if you're sitting on the sidelines tallying up the Yin-o-Score to determine whether you think I'm a good person or not, why waste your time?

If you agree with something I say, or think something I say is funny--great. Enjoy it. If you think, as in this case, that pointing out that a nomination for a SMAC award should go to a SMAC post is degrading the forum--great. You're entitled. If you think I'm too sensitive about racist comments--great. You're right.

Finally, if you just think I'm a waste of time, why are you responding to me anyway?

P.S. What's my Forum Score now?

posted 03-26-99 06:05 PM ET            

LLGamer's nomination for the Brian Reynolds interview is dead on!

And I'm not just saying that because I setup the interview. Honest. I'm not. I don't really want that post to win. Really (Oh please win!) I'm serious (I could finally put something on my resume). It's a silly thought to begin with and probably some kind of sick reverse psychology that LLGamer is using to destroy me.

posted 03-26-99 10:35 PM ET            

SMAC however is more a quantative game. Winning against all odds doesn't happen in SMAC. In Go (learn go if you don't know it) you can make big mistakes, but still you're going to win if you're the superior player. Same for basketball.

I don't know much about MOO, but if what LLGamer described happened in reverse, I think the human player would be furious. It would be very unfair.

Personally, I'd like to see more asymmetrical games. My favorite Starcraft mission was when you had got to hold out 10 minutes against a horde of zerglings. The first time I played it, I was extremely nervous. I build tons of bunkers and turrets, and kept scouting for enemies all the time.
Well, if you know Starcraft, you know I was in for a big anti-climax...

I also liked Across the Gjoll, in Myth. You've got some dwarves and archers, and 10 warriors, and you're attacked by hundreds of zombies. But you've got the highground, so you can do incredible amounts of damage. Until it starts to rain...

SMAC is not like that. It's great, but it's very different. Although, sometimes... Disbanding formers to hurry that Impact Rovers you need to protect your capital. Sending your only probe team into enemy UoP territory, hoping to steal Air Power, or pre-sentient algoritms 2 turns before he's going to finish the HS-algoritm.