AAR: Keeping the Peace between... aliens and Yang and Svensgaard? (Thinker mod)

[pblur]

Time to ramp up to war. Deidre's out of control, and needs crippled before she wins Transcendance. Fortunately, I already have her distracted fighting the other two main powers, so I have a little while to prepare.

First off, Yang. You have betrayed me for the last time! And your constant allegations of atrocities that conveniently only happened during sunspots when noone else could observe them weary me.



Yeah, this won't take very long.

On the other side of the world, Deidre is building yet more secret projects that noone else has the tech for. As a Pirate, I heartily approve of putting the space elevator in a seaside resort. I'm sure I'll come and visit it eventually...



Yep, Yang just kind of fell over. On the plus side, I can now run crawlers south to finish harvesting the south pole!



I continue a 50/50 split of econ and tech, trying to rush buy infrastructure everywhere. I'll have plenty of time for it to pay off during war. 1200 credits per turn is a lot of rushed infrastructure, especially at 90% mineral cost.

I manage to get Roze also at war with the Gaians... and I still have a spotless 'Noble' reputation, so people are mostly OK with me. Their biggest ask is that I declare war on the Gaians... which I will be completely happy to do, as soon as I can! I've rolled out covert ops centers in several bases, because I need them to get elite probe teams rolling off the assembly lines. While it would be NICE to just wait on one more probe team morale tech, I need to be ready to go soon. Gaians are starting to take bases off the university, and I can't let them run away with the game. They already have the majority of the planetary council votes; I'm reasonably close to losing diplomatically, as a faction with no easy access to pop boom.

I luck into the tech for the space elevator, and rush it in one of my bases. It's too valuable to let the Gaian's build, even if I'll be able to take it fairly early in the war. They swap to the network backbone in their coastal city. Great! You guys just hang on to that, tech a little faster, and I'll catch right up with my armada of probes.

Looks like I'm actually at tech rate parity with them for the moment:


But they're running Fundamentalist to deal with all the Roze probe teams, so that's a temporary parity. When I shift to a war footing or they shift to peace, they'll be miles ahead again.

Next tech I research gives Robotic Assembly Plants. I'm really beginning to sweat; she conquered 5 university bases last turn:

I'm going to rush these in my highest production bases, then go to war. I can't wait; need to cut her momentum. With lots of 50+ mineral cities, I should hopefully win or stall the war... and if I can keep tech parity with probes and the war stalled, I win.


Alright, time for war! I shift to running 60/40/0 on Econ/Psych/Tech (taking some advice from my thread on psych weighting). My first wave of attackers is primed and ready!


My pre-war tech:

My all-caught-up-to-Deidre-in-one-turn tech:


Yep, that's Quantum reactors, Transcends, and all three future society models. Big jump in power. It ALSO unlocks the Telepathic Matrix and Manifold Harmonics. I'd love to get both, but I can probably only afford to rush one. Telepathic Matrix it is! I'd love to be able to just ignore Drones. Yes please.



And, the network backbone is mine. W00t W00t! Deidre also just discovered Self-Aware Machines, and I immediately stole it. I really need to shift to building nessos mining pods all over the place. Painful though, because I'd also like a few orbital defense pods (Deidre has nukes, after all) and the self-aware colony. The nethack terminus would be nice too, partially as a block pick, but probably minerals take priority. I also have a lot of eco damage a few places, so getting some centauri preserves would be very helpful. And then there's a war I started before I really had the troops I wanted for it...

Tough choices, but this is why I prioritized mineral multipliers so heavily. It always gets tough to choose late in the game

Final Map:


Note on Thinker-mod in the late-game: the tech tree cost has been rebalanced so that there actually is a late game for human/thinker AI players. In vanilla, I would be at 1 tech or more per turn right now, and would just chew through the rest of the tech tree without ever having time to benefit from, say, the Telepathic Matrix. In Thinker, the lategame actually exists. Deidre and I are spending 3-5 turns per tech right now, and that's not going to get much better before the end of the game, even as we stack multipliers. That means a transcendance win will unlock in 16 turns at the very earliest, if we luck into just the right techs. More likely we have 30-50 turns left to play, so there's still room for investment to pay off.

[pblur]

Ongoing war with Deidre. It's not going so hot...



Yeah, that's right. They took back all my gains, and even took some of my units with probe spam. Now they're crippling my airforce because they had a ton of elite interceptors, and I have almost none. Yikes.

On the plus front, I'm winning the satellite war:


I'm trying leaning hard into spamming orbital defense pods, and blowing out their Nessus and Sky Hydroponics. Quite a few of her best cities are starving, and EVENTUALLY that should pay off with a few turns of them being completely disabled. Unforunately it will take a while to get there, since she hasn't been pop-booming in a while. I think going into military units might have been a better call.


Especially since they've taken two of my cities here. I need to push back. You can see they've almost wiped the university; things are getting really dicey in the war. At least I'm a tech ahead of them now; I think my path to victory is going to be Transcendance. Stall them out militarily, rush the transcendance project, and win. That's going to require sniping Clinical Immortality to prevent a Gaian Diplomatic Victory.


And now they've taken one of my main island cities. Dang drop pods. I need to spend time upgrading my defensive units. Things are getting tight.


At least project 'no, you don't get ridiculous satellite-fueled scaling with all your new cities' is going well!


At least, I'm only down to one tech left to unlock transcendence!

Final Map:


Compare this to the last final map. It's incredible how well Deidre is executing a multiple front war against several opponents. I needed to go harder on military production to compete here instead of orbital defense pods if I wanted to contest them militarily.

[Buster's Uncle]

pblur, if you have any notions for a user title -in place of where it says "Citizen"- and/or an avatar, I stand at your disposal as a form of applause...

[DrazharLn]

Looks very dicey for you! I was worried that encouraging the other factions to attack Deirdre would lead to this because of the nonlinear growth in power that SMAC has: she could have stomped them ages ago and got more powerful, but they hadn't upset her, so she didn't. I feel like the anti Deirdre coalition would have to share all their tech to compete and even then factions would be wasting research points chasing the same techs; each faction would be paying for prototypes Vs Deirdre only paying once and Deirdre also has a smaller proportion of her bases on the frontline so she can concentrate her war effort on offense. The only advantage I can think of for the coalition is lower energy losses to inefficiency because their territories are smaller (but then energy will still be wasted on duplicate techs, so :/)

[pblur]

Looks very dicey for you! I was worried that encouraging the other factions to attack Deirdre would lead to this because of the nonlinear growth in power that SMAC has: she could have stomped them ages ago and got more powerful, but they hadn't upset her, so she didn't. I feel like the anti Deirdre coalition would have to share all their tech to compete and even then factions would be wasting research points chasing the same techs; each faction would be paying for prototypes Vs Deirdre only paying once and Deirdre also has a smaller proportion of her bases on the frontline so she can concentrate her war effort on offense. The only advantage I can think of for the coalition is lower energy losses to inefficiency because their territories are smaller (but then energy will still be wasted on duplicate techs, so :/)

Sure, but Diedre switching to a war footing really helped me get ahead on tech rate. She switched from the usual Democratic-Green/Planned-Research-Cybernetic to Fundamentalist-Green-Power-Thought Control. That's a ton less research, and no more pop-booming. On top of that, she was council president and we'd passed the trade pact, so commerce numbers were huge this game. Cutting her off from all the free energy was also a huge boon. Her tech rate per turn dropped by more than 40% when I instigated those wars. Yeah, it let her snowball her city count, but... seems like it might have been the right call anyhow. Hard to say.

I did enable tech sharing as much as I could, so I think the wasted research was less impactful than it could have been. Especially after I joined the war and probed her into the ground, I gave Morgan and Zak her full tech set.

[pblur]

Time to beat Deidre at her own game; the true power on Alpha Centauri's planet is the Planetmind. The faction that realizes this and dominates the planetmind will defeat the factions that choose to scrap it out of lesser prizes on the surface of Planet. Now to prove that!

First, I quickly kick her back off my main island. She has no real support here, and almost all my bases have aerospace centers. Plus, I have the Space Elevator, so her drop range is limited. Rush a couple of shard infantry, recapture my base. No big deal.

I keep up the Orbital Defense Pod spam for a few turns, until I wipe out all her power transmitters:


By the end of this, I was making 9 ODPs per turn. Space elevator FTW! Now her tech rate BARELY scales with conquest. I'm trying my best to get Transcendance unlocked, hard-focusing Explore with 80% of my economy going to Labs. Also running Cybernetic and Free Market... which means my morale is a real issue with all of these interceptor fights. I start turning out as many quantum interceptors and drop defensive units and probes as I can. I just need to stall. I don't need offensive troops. Planetmind will be my offense. The exception is anti-mindworm offense, which I desperately need in a few bases...

Finally, I happen to offer to buy techs from Morgan, in spite of thinking he doesn't have any, and... got Singularity Mechanics. That's my last Discover tech, and I was researching it. It switches me to an Explore tech that's more expensive than any other tech I've learned so far!


This has to be it. Applied Gravitonics should be the same price as Temporal Mechanics, give or take a bit, and I think this is at least 50% more expensive. Time to preload my production.

Deidre is pushing in on me on all fronts. This is former Hive territory, now half conquered:

And in case any of you haven't fought a Thinker AI in late-game before, it's scary. They have a ton of production, and they spend it on useful things:



And of course, it's all powered by:


Yeah. I'm just glad that Deidre doesn't usually throw nukes around unprovoked.

Finally, it's the turn before my tech completes. I swap social engineering to reduce mineral costs on my supplies, and tweak Economy vs. Labs so I have as much econ as I can while still having a bit of margin to finish the tech this turn:

Rush each of the supplies:


Deidre has almost finished chewing up and swallowing everyone else, and is capturing 1-2 of my low-level uninvested bases per turn. I'm not trying to contest that too hard; better to keep strong defenses in the areas where I have GOOD bases.

But her time is short. The tech IS threshold of transcendance, and I cash in a few normal crawlers I have laying around to get the hurry cost on Voice down to something reasonable:

Bang, finish voice that turn. Swap to Ascent, cash in all my supplies, and then quick-swap my social engineering to minimum industry cost for an instant finish:

Sure, I lose a ton of units to trash morale for a turn, but it doesn't matter.

Note that this is the highest eco-damage I think I've ever seen

On that final turn, Deidre does a hail mary diplo victory attempt:

Turns out that snatching clinical immortality was CRITICAL to my victory path. If she had +100% votes and I have -50%, this would have been game over IMMEDIATELY before my transcendence win.

And there we have it! PLANET is the only offense you'll ever need!

(click to show/hide)

provided you have a sufficiently good defense in depth to soak getting conquered long enough

It's also my fastest Transcendance win vs Thinker AI, FWIW.

[pblur]

pblur, if you have any notions for a user title -in place of where it says "Citizen"- and/or an avatar, I stand at your disposal as a form of applause...

Well, 'pblur' stands for Perpetual Blur. Perhaps a title of 'Eternally Smudged'?

[Buster's Uncle]

Done.  -Okay, over where it says "Citizen" - that's a postcount title that will change later...


       

[pblur]

PERFECT. I'm an Eternally Smudged Citizen!

[DrazharLn]

What a game! I didn't think you'd make it, I wouldn't have in your place, I'm sure

[pblur]

Thanks! I don't know if it was THAT close. Part of me wonders if I should have just battened down the hatches, kept everyone at peace, built a bunch of supply crawlers, and sniped Ascent after they built Voice. I can't see any particular reason that would fail, provided I kept them from getting clinical immortality somehow. Or managed to pop-boom with psych enough to keep it from being an I-win button for them.

Honestly, the fact that building Voice or researching Threshold of Transcendence doesn't give you any advantage to winning a Transcendance victory is a REALLY weird thing about this game's design.

[Buster's Uncle]

I agree.

[DrazharLn]

It was much more interesting this way, so I'm glad you provoked some conflict

[pblur]

Yeah, I've never won the game that way. It's technically legitimate, but it just feels bad. There's no conflict, and it's just abusing the Pacifist AI.