Who here has the best SMAC score and rating?

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Author Topic:   Who here has the best SMAC score and rating?

Singularity posted 06-13-99 08:34 AM ET
My best was with the Gaians. I was getting 5 techs a turn until I transcended. My rating was 301% and my score was 6534.
jimmytrick posted 06-13-99 09:46 AM ET
What level? Ironman?
I had a 506% and 8100 on Librarian, Ironman, tech stag, but heck that is nothing.....
I am going to be interested to see what the HOF has. I suspect we will all go nuts trying to beat the best posted scores!
Please tell how the heck you managed the 5 techs per turn? (this may be easy without the tech stag?)
MichaeltheGreat posted 06-13-99 10:06 AM ET
I'm working on a TI game as the PK where I'm trying to break 10,000 pts. I'm in year 2285 so have a long time to go, have my opponents beaten down to protoplasm, no major problems with planet, and I'm over 6000 pts now, but bored to tears with all the micromanagement - I want to see what the max number of cities and units are. If I live long enough (don't die from boredom), I'll post in the HOF - what's the link to it?
The truth is, I rarely finish the game as SP - you reach a point with the AI where it's like the Indy 500, but you've got the only Indy car, and everyone else is these arthritic little old ladies pushing a baby stroller. Now I'm only doing PBEMs and some IP games, and playing around with different approaches to the game. I play maybe 2-3 turns per week with my high score game.
LoD posted 06-13-99 12:07 PM ET
My best score was 12738/1194% on TI with the UoP. I don't think I'm the best here, 'though. I still have a lot to learn about SMAC.
LoD
jimmytrick posted 06-13-99 01:52 PM ET
LoD, did you intentionally run up the score?
In my game I went for transcendance ASAP. I never thought to try to strecth it out to see if I could increase the score. Anyway, do you take pupils? Great score.
LoD posted 06-13-99 03:46 PM ET
Well, I didn't rush the projects with those little glowing thingies called energy credits. On the other hand, I ordered two cities to build the VoP, hurried the production in the one with a lower mineral output, and switched to AtT after the Voice was finished. Anyway, I don't find my score to be very hard to attain: Oversize map (190X80 AFAIR), colonies everywhere once I got the CV and Space Elev. combo. On top of that, I got the Threshold to Transcendence a little earlier than M.Y 2400. Imagine - as the UoP ! I think *I* need a mentor.
LoD
Krushala posted 06-13-99 05:14 PM ET
Mine would be 683% and 9110 score. I guess I could have tried for 10000 but I got tired of building sky hydorponics labs, and I had an energy market crash from 320000 to 80000. This was on thinker. I had the most amount of bases this game, unbelievable micromanagent. I conquered every enemy base except for one then occupied every square on his city radious until he was size one then trancended.
DilithiumDad posted 06-13-99 06:29 PM ET
I have scored over 10,000 several times (but never over 11,000 oddly enough) and over 600% as Thinker with PK's, UofP and Hive. My only conquest win was with the Gaians, but the score was much lower. I have tried saving and retrying several games, and definitely staving off transendence raises your score. You need to have all the SP's (they count 25 points). You also get points for commerce at the end of the game, so it is important to have suriving pact brothers. The biggest factor is transcendent thoughts, which give you 10 points (versus 1 point for all other techs). So waiting for your cities to max out with 40 sky hydroponics and slowly building the Voice and the Ascent give syou the best score.
But watch out. In one game where Morgan was strong, he almost had enough to buy the ascent! I had to rush it to completion to avoid (oh, the ignomity!) losing to an AI player.
My fastest Ascent was 2311 as UofP --Huge AMpa of Planet and I landed on Garland Crater and had the middel continent to myself. But my score was only 6,000.
Krushala posted 06-13-99 06:51 PM ET
Have to agree with you on those suggestions. It seems conquest victory isn't worthwile. Same with fastest trancendence. In civ2 my % score seemed to go up the earlier my spaceship hit alpha centauri even if my score didn't go up. In smac you get penalized when trancending really fast. My fastest would have to 2330. I could have gotten faster but I always make sure I have all the other secret projects completed or conquered.
jimmytrick posted 06-13-99 07:04 PM ET
What about the book you write? Who has the best book? Does it vary in someway from the score and percentage?
Krushala posted 06-13-99 07:28 PM ET
Lately it's always been Stairway to transcendence. Except for my recent fastest transcendence score which I think was a couple levels below stairway. I think anything above 300% gets the stairway book.
googlie posted 06-13-99 07:53 PM ET
Transcendence gives the highest base score at 2,000 points, followed by diplomatic and economic at 1,200, then conquest at 1,000, all reduced by the number of turns. Half the value if co-operative (or pop adjusted value if pact transcend)
Add on pop bonuses, SPs, commerce, native life forms bonuses and standing, then subtract ecology penalties. Finally apply the worldsize, climate and game difficulty modifiers (+100% for Ironman)
Thus you can see that prolonging the game (more turns) is only worthwhile if you are increasing the pop or getting the thoughts bonuses.
I could be wrong, but I don't think the energy credits you finish the game with has any bearing.
But MichaeltheGreat is right. Unless you are into boredom or record setting, prolonging the game to up the score seems like a waste of good SMACing time
Koshko posted 06-13-99 09:20 PM ET
The energy credits don't. Use them to instabuy stuff on your newer cities.
Apocalypse posted 06-14-99 12:02 PM ET
My best is 4352%. It was on Transendence and Ironman with natives on the highest setting. The map size I had (I forget how big) use up almost all my HD space free (which was over 100MB) so I dropped a whole bunch of colony pods all over the map before I transended at the last possible moment.
quizara tafwid posted 06-14-99 02:35 PM ET
MichaeltheGreat: the max number of units is 2^10 (I can send you the save file if you want) I would imagine that that is the upper limit for bases too (but you'd need a large HD to test it out!)
aceplayer posted 06-14-99 07:21 PM ET
Its easy and silly to run up the score.
I have a website with scenarios -
Get the best Alpha Centauri score in the
lowest year! Send me the result.
This is a true challenge.
Prove your ability. Go to:
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Dome/3802/
Shining1 posted 06-14-99 10:35 PM ET
Wow. An actual apocalyse post - rarest of rarities. How goes it, legend of the old forums?
I can't remember my best score - I think it was 218% or something as the Gaians and a diplomatic victory. It takes real patience and dedication to run up the score on this game, though you can get some amazing results. But it doesn't really mean anything particularly, save that you have great stamina when it comes to micromanagement and you don't cheat all the time. Not a particularly big deal.
Earliest victory is a better gauge of pure skill. Games that last longer than 200 turns seem to be a rarity for me - anyone else find this?
MichaeltheGreat posted 06-14-99 11:41 PM ET
Shining 1 - except for the one bored to tears run up the score game, I never play 200 turns. Even on TI, by 2250 I can always opt for a diplomatic victory by myself - it's not even funny. And that's assuming I'm playing Miriam and starting in the dunes.
With the PK, there's something wrong with my play if I can't do the diplomatic victory by 2225.
In conquest games, I find it's usually a matter of how quickly I can find and reach their colonies, not how long it takes me once I'm there, but again, I can't go over 200 turns without trying to slow down.
Even to transcend, by 2275 or so, I've always got it nailed down. I even transcended as Miriam by 200 turns - the 20 percent tech handicap is no big deal, especially once you start harvesting pods and getting all those energy credits and alien artifacts.
ARES 7 posted 07-02-99 10:52 AM ET
Hi folks,
this was my last game:
Standard-sized random planet with standard settings (middle, average). Standard rules. Everthing just default, beside:
Iron Man, TI
blind research off / on (up to you  Off of course, if you are clever.
30-50% ocean.
Just easy to put. No special settings to special strategies or faction-choices.
The possible variations of settings are nearly countless. One can make a contest for every one of this.
This is for everybody, for every strategie and faction and playstile. No restrictions and so on. Just the easy way, how the game was likely planned to be played. Easy and fair to compare.

Ad in the faction.TXT �files of AI-players (backup old files):
TALENT, 4 (PK: TALENT, 2 ; UoP: leave out DRONE, 4)
SOCIAL, +INDUSTRY
SOCIAL, ++RESEARCH
That�s all.
The goal is:
- Fastest Transcendence with
- 50 transc. thought-techs and
- all SP (build or conquered)
You see the extraordinary challenge? Believers without reseach-penalty, UoP with ++++RESEARCH, no drone-problems and quicker building SP�s (and everything else). Also there is no way to escape into transcendence, while AI is busy to fight each other. You really have to build an army, defend AND attack. With the highest possible tech! I personally never was challenged to do this before in a builder-stile game won by transcendence.

Big-sized maps and lots of water favour human players. If you do not want to have much problems with AI-opponents, its ok to play like this (with huge, you also need a huge amount of time, if you do the necessary micromanagement). On 30-50% ocean, the AI plays much less inefficient. So you have a hard competition and still enough opportunities to use water-vessels intelligently on most maps.
The conditiones for the contest, may be they sound too hard for you. That was exactly I was looking for: Something (possibly too) hard to beat, even with a silly AI as opponents, so that it is a challenge for an experienced player.
.
I started a game with PK. Just a mediocre starting place. No rainy. No bonus. Only one pod and a little river. (The save-file, I gave to aceplayer for his scenario-page). When I realized, UoP is my next neighbour, I was excited. Being behind in tech is not too bad with UoP next door. Send over some probes ... ! Make him surrender and he will be your research-slave. But it came in another way.
First attack came from believers with transports. They surprised me with 422-rovers, when I had 212-ones. Later, they posessed half the world, eating up huge hive-imperium.
Fighting back Miriam and still force the building challenged me 100%, but I succeded. Then I was ready to take care for Zak. I faded when I realized his power. He had the parameter-defence-SP and many others, going to finish hunter seeker! Chaos (A8) and air-power against my A4, D3. Out of the first 15 SP�s I got only two.
This was a really unknown feeling for me (may be since the old days of CIV1, emperor level).
After about 100 turns, I wanted to resign. Thought: I made it too hard. ++reseach is just to much. They will kill me like a fresh mindworm, as they please. I�m good, but not as good to be able to handle this.
Zak had still a treaty with me, but his attitude in the communikation-window showed: agressive. Before restarting, I wanted to demolish this game just for fun and sent over two probes, one turn before Zak got hunter. I got 2 techs. Both times he declared, that he does not like this, and that I should do this not again. At that point, I realized that he didn�t think of me as an opponent to take serious, and that he is a peaceloving person against weak factions like me poor little underdog.
So I continued. Zak had 45 techs compared to my 35. Through intense micromanagement, I was able to at least keep this difference of 10 techs for a while.
This phase was most thrilling. Every moment Zak could come over.
When Miriam had a full-size power-column, UoP was 66% and mine was 45%. Later, when my column got even with Miriam, Zak declared vendetta on me. Then a high-tech-war started, what I never had before in SMAC like this.
Ok, every game comes out different. With other neighbours, may be some games are not to win. If you play my save-game, you know it is possible to win. Because, I am on the way to it. It is just a question of time to conquere UoP, the missing SP�s and to research 50 tr.thinker-techs (in the end, they will come in a bunch every turn).
.
just finished my game on TI+level (aceplayer referres to it on his page as: T50_Lal_2101).
Lot of fun and action. Normally, when i went for trancendence on odinary TI, I rushed through the science-tree, had a tech an more every turn, didn�t care for military-units, for AI-opponents didn�t care much about me. Mostly 111 scouts as defenders were enough. Many games I finished already after 90 to 150 moves, because the winner seemed to be settled. What I missed most was, that I never had a chance to work with the high-tech-units. Even when I played long enough to get these techs, there was no necessity to build these units.
Much different this game: although I was a builder (and a quite quick one), I had to fight in most phases of the game, with full concentration on the workshop to design the most effective units. Learned a lot with it.
In year 2227 I only had 2 SP�s (AI had 11, mostly Zak),
in 2314 I was ready to ascend
(but still had to fight a war against incredible huge Believers Imperium for the SP�s, and also reseach for 50 thought-techs).
Finished in year 2339
Score 11800 (only as tie-breaker)
with 1106%
There where more than 39900 labs per turn (with dem/green/science/kyb and 100% research), that makes a tech-rate of 5.4 !
Have fun with it.
ARES 7

You can load the save-file at the page of aceplayer:
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Dome/3802/
T50_Lal_2101
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Author	Topic: Who here has the best SMAC score and rating?
Singularity	posted 06-13-99 08:34 AM ET My best was with the Gaians. I was getting 5 techs a turn until I transcended. My rating was 301% and my score was 6534.
jimmytrick	posted 06-13-99 09:46 AM ET What level? Ironman? I had a 506% and 8100 on Librarian, Ironman, tech stag, but heck that is nothing..... I am going to be interested to see what the HOF has. I suspect we will all go nuts trying to beat the best posted scores! Please tell how the heck you managed the 5 techs per turn? (this may be easy without the tech stag?)
MichaeltheGreat	posted 06-13-99 10:06 AM ET I'm working on a TI game as the PK where I'm trying to break 10,000 pts. I'm in year 2285 so have a long time to go, have my opponents beaten down to protoplasm, no major problems with planet, and I'm over 6000 pts now, but bored to tears with all the micromanagement - I want to see what the max number of cities and units are. If I live long enough (don't die from boredom), I'll post in the HOF - what's the link to it? The truth is, I rarely finish the game as SP - you reach a point with the AI where it's like the Indy 500, but you've got the only Indy car, and everyone else is these arthritic little old ladies pushing a baby stroller. Now I'm only doing PBEMs and some IP games, and playing around with different approaches to the game. I play maybe 2-3 turns per week with my high score game.
LoD	posted 06-13-99 12:07 PM ET My best score was 12738/1194% on TI with the UoP. I don't think I'm the best here, 'though. I still have a lot to learn about SMAC. LoD
jimmytrick	posted 06-13-99 01:52 PM ET LoD, did you intentionally run up the score? In my game I went for transcendance ASAP. I never thought to try to strecth it out to see if I could increase the score. Anyway, do you take pupils? Great score.
LoD	posted 06-13-99 03:46 PM ET Well, I didn't rush the projects with those little glowing thingies called energy credits. On the other hand, I ordered two cities to build the VoP, hurried the production in the one with a lower mineral output, and switched to AtT after the Voice was finished. Anyway, I don't find my score to be very hard to attain: Oversize map (190X80 AFAIR), colonies everywhere once I got the CV and Space Elev. combo. On top of that, I got the Threshold to Transcendence a little earlier than M.Y 2400. Imagine - as the UoP ! I think I need a mentor. LoD
Krushala	posted 06-13-99 05:14 PM ET Mine would be 683% and 9110 score. I guess I could have tried for 10000 but I got tired of building sky hydorponics labs, and I had an energy market crash from 320000 to 80000. This was on thinker. I had the most amount of bases this game, unbelievable micromanagent. I conquered every enemy base except for one then occupied every square on his city radious until he was size one then trancended.
DilithiumDad	posted 06-13-99 06:29 PM ET I have scored over 10,000 several times (but never over 11,000 oddly enough) and over 600% as Thinker with PK's, UofP and Hive. My only conquest win was with the Gaians, but the score was much lower. I have tried saving and retrying several games, and definitely staving off transendence raises your score. You need to have all the SP's (they count 25 points). You also get points for commerce at the end of the game, so it is important to have suriving pact brothers. The biggest factor is transcendent thoughts, which give you 10 points (versus 1 point for all other techs). So waiting for your cities to max out with 40 sky hydroponics and slowly building the Voice and the Ascent give syou the best score. But watch out. In one game where Morgan was strong, he almost had enough to buy the ascent! I had to rush it to completion to avoid (oh, the ignomity!) losing to an AI player. My fastest Ascent was 2311 as UofP --Huge AMpa of Planet and I landed on Garland Crater and had the middel continent to myself. But my score was only 6,000.
Krushala	posted 06-13-99 06:51 PM ET Have to agree with you on those suggestions. It seems conquest victory isn't worthwile. Same with fastest trancendence. In civ2 my % score seemed to go up the earlier my spaceship hit alpha centauri even if my score didn't go up. In smac you get penalized when trancending really fast. My fastest would have to 2330. I could have gotten faster but I always make sure I have all the other secret projects completed or conquered.
jimmytrick	posted 06-13-99 07:04 PM ET What about the book you write? Who has the best book? Does it vary in someway from the score and percentage?
Krushala	posted 06-13-99 07:28 PM ET Lately it's always been Stairway to transcendence. Except for my recent fastest transcendence score which I think was a couple levels below stairway. I think anything above 300% gets the stairway book.
googlie	posted 06-13-99 07:53 PM ET Transcendence gives the highest base score at 2,000 points, followed by diplomatic and economic at 1,200, then conquest at 1,000, all reduced by the number of turns. Half the value if co-operative (or pop adjusted value if pact transcend) Add on pop bonuses, SPs, commerce, native life forms bonuses and standing, then subtract ecology penalties. Finally apply the worldsize, climate and game difficulty modifiers (+100% for Ironman) Thus you can see that prolonging the game (more turns) is only worthwhile if you are increasing the pop or getting the thoughts bonuses. I could be wrong, but I don't think the energy credits you finish the game with has any bearing. But MichaeltheGreat is right. Unless you are into boredom or record setting, prolonging the game to up the score seems like a waste of good SMACing time
Koshko	posted 06-13-99 09:20 PM ET The energy credits don't. Use them to instabuy stuff on your newer cities.
Apocalypse	posted 06-14-99 12:02 PM ET My best is 4352%. It was on Transendence and Ironman with natives on the highest setting. The map size I had (I forget how big) use up almost all my HD space free (which was over 100MB) so I dropped a whole bunch of colony pods all over the map before I transended at the last possible moment.
quizara tafwid	posted 06-14-99 02:35 PM ET MichaeltheGreat: the max number of units is 2^10 (I can send you the save file if you want) I would imagine that that is the upper limit for bases too (but you'd need a large HD to test it out!)
aceplayer	posted 06-14-99 07:21 PM ET Its easy and silly to run up the score. I have a website with scenarios - Get the best Alpha Centauri score in the lowest year! Send me the result. This is a true challenge. Prove your ability. Go to: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Dome/3802/
Shining1	posted 06-14-99 10:35 PM ET Wow. An actual apocalyse post - rarest of rarities. How goes it, legend of the old forums? I can't remember my best score - I think it was 218% or something as the Gaians and a diplomatic victory. It takes real patience and dedication to run up the score on this game, though you can get some amazing results. But it doesn't really mean anything particularly, save that you have great stamina when it comes to micromanagement and you don't cheat all the time. Not a particularly big deal. Earliest victory is a better gauge of pure skill. Games that last longer than 200 turns seem to be a rarity for me - anyone else find this?
MichaeltheGreat	posted 06-14-99 11:41 PM ET Shining 1 - except for the one bored to tears run up the score game, I never play 200 turns. Even on TI, by 2250 I can always opt for a diplomatic victory by myself - it's not even funny. And that's assuming I'm playing Miriam and starting in the dunes. With the PK, there's something wrong with my play if I can't do the diplomatic victory by 2225. In conquest games, I find it's usually a matter of how quickly I can find and reach their colonies, not how long it takes me once I'm there, but again, I can't go over 200 turns without trying to slow down. Even to transcend, by 2275 or so, I've always got it nailed down. I even transcended as Miriam by 200 turns - the 20 percent tech handicap is no big deal, especially once you start harvesting pods and getting all those energy credits and alien artifacts.
ARES 7	posted 07-02-99 10:52 AM ET Hi folks, this was my last game: Standard-sized random planet with standard settings (middle, average). Standard rules. Everthing just default, beside: Iron Man, TI blind research off / on (up to you  Off of course, if you are clever. 30-50% ocean. Just easy to put. No special settings to special strategies or faction-choices. The possible variations of settings are nearly countless. One can make a contest for every one of this. This is for everybody, for every strategie and faction and playstile. No restrictions and so on. Just the easy way, how the game was likely planned to be played. Easy and fair to compare. Ad in the faction.TXT �files of AI-players (backup old files): TALENT, 4 (PK: TALENT, 2 ; UoP: leave out DRONE, 4) SOCIAL, +INDUSTRY SOCIAL, ++RESEARCH That�s all. The goal is: - Fastest Transcendence with - 50 transc. thought-techs and - all SP (build or conquered) You see the extraordinary challenge? Believers without reseach-penalty, UoP with ++++RESEARCH, no drone-problems and quicker building SP�s (and everything else). Also there is no way to escape into transcendence, while AI is busy to fight each other. You really have to build an army, defend AND attack. With the highest possible tech! I personally never was challenged to do this before in a builder-stile game won by transcendence. Big-sized maps and lots of water favour human players. If you do not want to have much problems with AI-opponents, its ok to play like this (with huge, you also need a huge amount of time, if you do the necessary micromanagement). On 30-50% ocean, the AI plays much less inefficient. So you have a hard competition and still enough opportunities to use water-vessels intelligently on most maps. The conditiones for the contest, may be they sound too hard for you. That was exactly I was looking for: Something (possibly too) hard to beat, even with a silly AI as opponents, so that it is a challenge for an experienced player. . I started a game with PK. Just a mediocre starting place. No rainy. No bonus. Only one pod and a little river. (The save-file, I gave to aceplayer for his scenario-page). When I realized, UoP is my next neighbour, I was excited. Being behind in tech is not too bad with UoP next door. Send over some probes ... ! Make him surrender and he will be your research-slave. But it came in another way. First attack came from believers with transports. They surprised me with 422-rovers, when I had 212-ones. Later, they posessed half the world, eating up huge hive-imperium. Fighting back Miriam and still force the building challenged me 100%, but I succeded. Then I was ready to take care for Zak. I faded when I realized his power. He had the parameter-defence-SP and many others, going to finish hunter seeker! Chaos (A8) and air-power against my A4, D3. Out of the first 15 SP�s I got only two. This was a really unknown feeling for me (may be since the old days of CIV1, emperor level). After about 100 turns, I wanted to resign. Thought: I made it too hard. ++reseach is just to much. They will kill me like a fresh mindworm, as they please. I�m good, but not as good to be able to handle this. Zak had still a treaty with me, but his attitude in the communikation-window showed: agressive. Before restarting, I wanted to demolish this game just for fun and sent over two probes, one turn before Zak got hunter. I got 2 techs. Both times he declared, that he does not like this, and that I should do this not again. At that point, I realized that he didn�t think of me as an opponent to take serious, and that he is a peaceloving person against weak factions like me poor little underdog. So I continued. Zak had 45 techs compared to my 35. Through intense micromanagement, I was able to at least keep this difference of 10 techs for a while. This phase was most thrilling. Every moment Zak could come over. When Miriam had a full-size power-column, UoP was 66% and mine was 45%. Later, when my column got even with Miriam, Zak declared vendetta on me. Then a high-tech-war started, what I never had before in SMAC like this. Ok, every game comes out different. With other neighbours, may be some games are not to win. If you play my save-game, you know it is possible to win. Because, I am on the way to it. It is just a question of time to conquere UoP, the missing SP�s and to research 50 tr.thinker-techs (in the end, they will come in a bunch every turn). . just finished my game on TI+level (aceplayer referres to it on his page as: T50_Lal_2101). Lot of fun and action. Normally, when i went for trancendence on odinary TI, I rushed through the science-tree, had a tech an more every turn, didn�t care for military-units, for AI-opponents didn�t care much about me. Mostly 111 scouts as defenders were enough. Many games I finished already after 90 to 150 moves, because the winner seemed to be settled. What I missed most was, that I never had a chance to work with the high-tech-units. Even when I played long enough to get these techs, there was no necessity to build these units. Much different this game: although I was a builder (and a quite quick one), I had to fight in most phases of the game, with full concentration on the workshop to design the most effective units. Learned a lot with it. In year 2227 I only had 2 SP�s (AI had 11, mostly Zak), in 2314 I was ready to ascend (but still had to fight a war against incredible huge Believers Imperium for the SP�s, and also reseach for 50 thought-techs). Finished in year 2339 Score 11800 (only as tie-breaker) with 1106% There where more than 39900 labs per turn (with dem/green/science/kyb and 100% research), that makes a tech-rate of 5.4 ! Have fun with it. ARES 7 You can load the save-file at the page of aceplayer: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Dome/3802/ T50_Lal_2101