Transcendence in 60 turns

[T-hawk]

Some folks here might know of my old report for a speed-run to transcendence victory in 76 turns.  I did a new run and writeup to improve on that, and got it all the way down to 60.  Base unmodded SMAC, transcend difficulty.  It's posted on my site here: http://dos486.com/alpha/speed2/

[Buster's Uncle]

Impressive; I fancy myself quite the SP exploit master, but you used at least two cheats that are new by me.    (I know one that makes Transcendence on the second turn possible, but few have the patience.  I, myself, have never actually bothered.)

-Note your custom title just granted...

[Induktio]

"But muh exploits, REEEEE"

Intuitively it's easy to see various loopholes in the game, but it seems a lot harder to picture how they will affect the game progression when you combine all of them into a single run. I'd guess it's the linear vs. exponential distinction. With multiple exploits, you gain a "multiplicative" benefit of all the effects they are individually able to produce.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh, the time warp cheat isn't even playing the game.  Respect for these speed runs.

[bvanevery]

Small phenomena are impressive!  It makes me wonder if anything applies to a much larger map though.

[T-hawk]

There's another report on the site, 82 turns to transcendence on a standard size map also with the University.

The approach would scale to a big map just fine.  As long as there's more land, the Planetary Transit System will keep new bases expanding at a constant pace forever.  The limiting factor would be the distance at which all energy is lost to inefficiency (that formula does not scale up or down with map size), which would ultimately cap how fast you could reach the Cloning Vats.  There would exist some map size above which it would be faster to build creches and boom via SE methods instead of the Vats, or even just build crawlers for food and grow normally, either of which takes minimal tech.  Once you're at size 5 by any means, you have the good specialists and they aren't subject to inefficiency losses, so then there's no limiting factor related to map size, unless you hit whatever is the limit the program allows for number of bases or units (formers).

A huge map is 1.6x the tech cost of standard size, so the time is no more than that much above standard size, I could reach the Cloning Vats in 100 turns and then transcendence in 30ish from there.  A beyond huge map might at the most double those numbers.  I'd love to demonstrate all that, but it'd take me like a year to play a huge map's worth of micromanagement...

[Petek]

This thread might be of interest to the "fast transcenders." Only 36 turns. Massive use of exploits, jury-rigged settings and maps, though.

[T-hawk]

Yeah, the differences from that to mine are difficulty level and reloading for luck abuse.  Besides that, we're doing basically the same thing of a micro size map and most exploits.