Random event destroys my Orb Def Pods & Yang PB's my 4 best Bases

  Alpha Centauri Forums
  The Game
  Random event destroys my Orb Def Pods & Yang PB's my 4 best Bases

profile | register | prefs | faq | search

Author Topic:   Random event destroys my Orb Def Pods & Yang PB's my 4 best Bases

Mcerion posted 06-04-99 01:48 AM ET
I was playing the PK's. I had the northern continent completely developed and all to myself. Deidre and Santiago were defeated and serving me. Yang had the larger southern continent and was lagging way behind in technology, but way ahead in military strength, number of bases and territory. We had just discovered Singularity Mechanics. I had five orbital defense pods deployed to protect me from Yang's pre-fusion planet busters and more were under construction. We had not produced any planet busters. We were attempting to reach transcendence.
Suddenly a meteor shower (?) wiped out all, not just a few, of my satellites leaving my people defenseless to Yang's planet busters. The next turn Yang destroyed 4 of my best bases leaving tiny lakes where thousands of my people used to live their tiny little binary lives.
It is with great regret that I now have uninstalled SMAC and will never play it again. I will go back to Civ2 until something better comes along to replace it. SMAC has some major playability problems. I am a purist and I don't like to customize the .ini files and I don't like to turn off the random events, but I must say the random events seem to be extremely punishing and without good reason. I suffered from at least 4 hail storms which destroyed all of my solar collectors at different bases. The Believers got hit by one and Yang who had the most bases and territory never got hit once. I never had these kind of problems with Civ2. Oh well.

MichaeltheGreat posted 06-04-99 02:05 AM ET
CivII is set on earth. SMAC ain't. If you ignore the technological issues of interstellar travel in ther first place, the most likely realistic scenario would be that the poor SOB's arrive at Planet to find it totally unsuitable for human life, and they all die from the outset. THE END
You can't be a "purist" in a very open results. Asteroids hit the earth too. If one particular one hadn't, we would not have evolved to play CivII or SMAC, and mammals would still be little useless rodents hopin not to get massaged between big reptile toes, unless another random event came along.
I play at transcend/ironman, and neither Yang nor anyone else has ever been allowed to get to the point of being able to deploy planet busters, or much else of note, against me. If you let him get that strong, it's your fault.
I like CivII, but SMAC is way more challenging (but still too easy) and has a lot more paths to victory. Hail storms shmail storms - so you have to do some more terraforming. Hardly compares to the regular disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes that plague earth all the time.
Dealing with the unplanned is one of the challenges of the game, as it is with real life. I like to play for transcend victory and am essentially a builder in play style, but if you are weaker militarily than an agressive rival like Yang, do you really expect him to just sit there and not take advantage of the superiority he does have?
Not to rag on you too hard, but it sounds far more like a player strategy problem than a playability problem. SMAC ain't Barney's big adventure.
MichaeltheGreat posted 06-04-99 02:06 AM ET
above should be "open results game"
Mcerion posted 06-04-99 02:22 AM ET
I think my beef is that it destroyed ALL of my satellites. What kind of crap is that? A special anti-satellite storm? This kind of gameplay forces me to go against my faction's own ideology. In this case, peace. If I'm the UN Peacekeeper, I shouldn't have a sh*tload of PB's stocked up to hit the other factions in the event my defenses go down. I don't bother the other factions if they don't bother me. That is the way I played Civ2 and it worked great. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way in SMAC. In SMAC I have to ruthlessly destroy all other ideologies. I find that style of play brutal and stupid.
MichaeltheGreat posted 06-04-99 02:45 AM ET
You don't have to destroy them - just contain their growth and prevent them from doing you with PKs, etc. I've only destroyed one faction, ever, in a game where I wasn't specifically trying to conquer, and that was that dumb bitch Santiago, with one city left and no military, demanding tech from me and telling me she was looking forward to executing me - so I just got sick of her unwillingness to make peace. In a non-conquest game, that's the only time I've wiped out a faction. Don't tell me that Genghis Khan with nukes in CivII is much easier to deal with - you have the same problem if you let him get that far.
As far as "realism" goes, a planet without a significant magnetosphere would be unsuitable for any orbital platforms, ever, because the normal level of UV radiation from stellar storms would zorch the electronics. Even with the earth's magnetosphere, it's a potential problem, and in a bad event, a huge number of earth satellites could get zapped. Most of the recent ones, especially coms, are designed that they can change attitude so their more sensitive components can be reoriented away from the solar wind. But zapping all your space improvements is a possibility. If you had some PK's lying around, Yang would be a little more circumspect, and if you disrupted him just enough - or didn't give him room to expand, he wouldn't be such a problem. You can also make it a point to bombard his improvements to limit his productivity against you.
But agressive nutbag leaders are also realistic - look at Hitler and Stalin for the most obvious examples.
MichaeltheGreat posted 06-04-99 03:22 AM ET
BTW, I also usually play Peacekeepers, always in SP games. If you are in Democracy under your social engineering choices, Yang tweeks because he's a despot. You may find better (more kissy) diplomacy to be effective - regular tribute in the form of cash or techs, etc. There are a lot of ways around the problem, but if you expect to be the most advanced and developed faction, and underpowered militarily, the CivII AI wouldn't let you do that, at least not at Emperor/Deity, and the SMAC AI - which is the same engine tweaked for play details, won't let you do it either. A militaristic, totalitarian regime is not going to let you become the dominant faction just because you're nice. Remember on earth, the League of Nations came out of WW I, and the real UN came out of WW II, and immediately flopped in Korea, and is still ineffective. You may have to fight for peace - that's often been the case on earth, but SMAC gives you many less lethal ways to achieve the results you want.
Mcerion posted 06-04-99 04:01 AM ET
You're right about Ghengis Khan in Civ2, but you are forgetting one thing. That is the SDI defense. It works 100% of the time and is only a short technological leap past the development of nuclear weapons. The damn orbital defense pods can't be researched for many years after PB's have been developed. In SMAC and Civ2, once I have established myself I can repel any invaders. I simply think this technological gap between developing PB's and their defense is severely unbalancing to the game play. I guess that is all I meant to say in the first place.
LoD posted 06-04-99 06:21 AM ET
Mcerion: That's why the atrocities have been introduced on SMAC. To prevent the abuse of theoretically unbalancing issues - like PBs.
Random events are not that bad. E.g The solar storm (which hit you), aside from destroying all Power Transmitters and Defense Pods, gives triple energy for all bases for one turn.

LoD
PS. There went my 100th post
To close this thread, click here (moderator or admin only).


Hop to:

Contact Us | Alpha Centauri Home

Powered by: Ultimate Bulletin Board, Version 5.18
© Madrona Park, Inc., 1998.

Author	Topic: Random event destroys my Orb Def Pods & Yang PB's my 4 best Bases
Mcerion	posted 06-04-99 01:48 AM ET I was playing the PK's. I had the northern continent completely developed and all to myself. Deidre and Santiago were defeated and serving me. Yang had the larger southern continent and was lagging way behind in technology, but way ahead in military strength, number of bases and territory. We had just discovered Singularity Mechanics. I had five orbital defense pods deployed to protect me from Yang's pre-fusion planet busters and more were under construction. We had not produced any planet busters. We were attempting to reach transcendence. Suddenly a meteor shower (?) wiped out all, not just a few, of my satellites leaving my people defenseless to Yang's planet busters. The next turn Yang destroyed 4 of my best bases leaving tiny lakes where thousands of my people used to live their tiny little binary lives. It is with great regret that I now have uninstalled SMAC and will never play it again. I will go back to Civ2 until something better comes along to replace it. SMAC has some major playability problems. I am a purist and I don't like to customize the .ini files and I don't like to turn off the random events, but I must say the random events seem to be extremely punishing and without good reason. I suffered from at least 4 hail storms which destroyed all of my solar collectors at different bases. The Believers got hit by one and Yang who had the most bases and territory never got hit once. I never had these kind of problems with Civ2. Oh well.
MichaeltheGreat	posted 06-04-99 02:05 AM ET CivII is set on earth. SMAC ain't. If you ignore the technological issues of interstellar travel in ther first place, the most likely realistic scenario would be that the poor SOB's arrive at Planet to find it totally unsuitable for human life, and they all die from the outset. THE END You can't be a "purist" in a very open results. Asteroids hit the earth too. If one particular one hadn't, we would not have evolved to play CivII or SMAC, and mammals would still be little useless rodents hopin not to get massaged between big reptile toes, unless another random event came along. I play at transcend/ironman, and neither Yang nor anyone else has ever been allowed to get to the point of being able to deploy planet busters, or much else of note, against me. If you let him get that strong, it's your fault. I like CivII, but SMAC is way more challenging (but still too easy) and has a lot more paths to victory. Hail storms shmail storms - so you have to do some more terraforming. Hardly compares to the regular disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes that plague earth all the time. Dealing with the unplanned is one of the challenges of the game, as it is with real life. I like to play for transcend victory and am essentially a builder in play style, but if you are weaker militarily than an agressive rival like Yang, do you really expect him to just sit there and not take advantage of the superiority he does have? Not to rag on you too hard, but it sounds far more like a player strategy problem than a playability problem. SMAC ain't Barney's big adventure.
MichaeltheGreat	posted 06-04-99 02:06 AM ET above should be "open results game"
Mcerion	posted 06-04-99 02:22 AM ET I think my beef is that it destroyed ALL of my satellites. What kind of crap is that? A special anti-satellite storm? This kind of gameplay forces me to go against my faction's own ideology. In this case, peace. If I'm the UN Peacekeeper, I shouldn't have a sh*tload of PB's stocked up to hit the other factions in the event my defenses go down. I don't bother the other factions if they don't bother me. That is the way I played Civ2 and it worked great. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way in SMAC. In SMAC I have to ruthlessly destroy all other ideologies. I find that style of play brutal and stupid.
MichaeltheGreat	posted 06-04-99 02:45 AM ET You don't have to destroy them - just contain their growth and prevent them from doing you with PKs, etc. I've only destroyed one faction, ever, in a game where I wasn't specifically trying to conquer, and that was that dumb bitch Santiago, with one city left and no military, demanding tech from me and telling me she was looking forward to executing me - so I just got sick of her unwillingness to make peace. In a non-conquest game, that's the only time I've wiped out a faction. Don't tell me that Genghis Khan with nukes in CivII is much easier to deal with - you have the same problem if you let him get that far. As far as "realism" goes, a planet without a significant magnetosphere would be unsuitable for any orbital platforms, ever, because the normal level of UV radiation from stellar storms would zorch the electronics. Even with the earth's magnetosphere, it's a potential problem, and in a bad event, a huge number of earth satellites could get zapped. Most of the recent ones, especially coms, are designed that they can change attitude so their more sensitive components can be reoriented away from the solar wind. But zapping all your space improvements is a possibility. If you had some PK's lying around, Yang would be a little more circumspect, and if you disrupted him just enough - or didn't give him room to expand, he wouldn't be such a problem. You can also make it a point to bombard his improvements to limit his productivity against you. But agressive nutbag leaders are also realistic - look at Hitler and Stalin for the most obvious examples.
MichaeltheGreat	posted 06-04-99 03:22 AM ET BTW, I also usually play Peacekeepers, always in SP games. If you are in Democracy under your social engineering choices, Yang tweeks because he's a despot. You may find better (more kissy) diplomacy to be effective - regular tribute in the form of cash or techs, etc. There are a lot of ways around the problem, but if you expect to be the most advanced and developed faction, and underpowered militarily, the CivII AI wouldn't let you do that, at least not at Emperor/Deity, and the SMAC AI - which is the same engine tweaked for play details, won't let you do it either. A militaristic, totalitarian regime is not going to let you become the dominant faction just because you're nice. Remember on earth, the League of Nations came out of WW I, and the real UN came out of WW II, and immediately flopped in Korea, and is still ineffective. You may have to fight for peace - that's often been the case on earth, but SMAC gives you many less lethal ways to achieve the results you want.
Mcerion	posted 06-04-99 04:01 AM ET You're right about Ghengis Khan in Civ2, but you are forgetting one thing. That is the SDI defense. It works 100% of the time and is only a short technological leap past the development of nuclear weapons. The damn orbital defense pods can't be researched for many years after PB's have been developed. In SMAC and Civ2, once I have established myself I can repel any invaders. I simply think this technological gap between developing PB's and their defense is severely unbalancing to the game play. I guess that is all I meant to say in the first place.
LoD	posted 06-04-99 06:21 AM ET Mcerion: That's why the atrocities have been introduced on SMAC. To prevent the abuse of theoretically unbalancing issues - like PBs. Random events are not that bad. E.g The solar storm (which hit you), aside from destroying all Power Transmitters and Defense Pods, gives triple energy for all bases for one turn. LoD PS. There went my 100th post