posted 04-23-99 10:48 PM ET            

You'll actually find good answers to most common questions in the in-game Datalinks, under the HQ section in the left-hand in-game menu. The topics are all interlinked and there's an alphabetical index covering most things. However, here are a couple of brief answers:

Supply crawlers. There are quite a few uses for these. To build them, you need to research Industrial Automation (Build 3). You can do several things with them, e.g.:
1. Build crawlers and send them to a base where you are building a Special Project or a prototype unit (which cost 50% more than normal, unless you're the Spartans, who get "free" prototypes), and you will get the option of disbanding the crawlers and putting their *full* minerals value towards the cost of the SP or prototype. This is a good way of completing SPs quickly - send in 5 or 6 crawlers and the job's as good as done!
2. Set up nutrient/minerals/energy convoys from well-supplied bases to under-supplied bases. To do this, build a crawler at the base where you want to send the supplies from, then send it to the base where you want the supplies to go. You then get the option of setting up a regular supply convoy from the first base to the second.
3. Set up nutrient/minerals/energy convoys from good production squares that happen to be outside a base's radius, so you can't use an actual citizen to "work" the square. Again, you need to build a crawler, send it out to the square you're interested in, then right-click on it and use the Convoy option. You'll get a choice of which resource you want the crawler to start sending back to its home base each turn.

Energy Credits. If you ever played CIV2, energy credits are what SMAC uses to represent money, and energy in SMAC behaves a lot like money did in CIV. Basically, you can use the Energy Allocation setting in the Social Engineering screen (in the HQ section on the left-hand in-game menu) to distribute your energy reserves between Economy (add to energy reserves), Labs (speed up research) and Psych (create more happy citizens). This is quite complicated and it's worth reading up on it in the manual. For example, if you set your allocation to, say, 70% Labs and 30% Economy, you'll start getting high inefficiency (some energy gets wasted, i.e. just vanishes) each turn, as these settings like to be near enough in balance with each other. You can view your energy reserves as your "wealth" and can use energy reserves to "hurry" (i.e. buy) new units or base facilities if you want them completed quickly; for trading with other factions (e.g. buying research or bribing them to leave you alone!); or for bribing and thereby taking over enemy units and even bases by using probe teams. All this kind of stuff costs energy. Equally, other factions might offer you a sum of energy credits in exchange for a piece of research data, for example. You can ask other factions to lend you sums of energy credits if you're running low, usually with the option of paying them back slowly (but at a high rate of interest!)

You get energy credits from your terrain. Any square with a river in it automatically produces 1 energy per turn in addition to whatever other resources it produces. Build solar collectors to start collecting energy - the amount varies according to how high the terrain is - it's +1 energy point per 1000m of elevation, so solar collectors on top of mountains produce more energy than those at sea level. If you plant forests (a good idea, especially early in the game), each forest square automatically produces one unit of energy per turn. Ocean squares produce loads of energy if you build Tidal Harnesses on them.

These really are the basics... it's too much to describe, but the manual goes into it all in quite a lot of detail.