Post if you're not a bot! (And how did you find us?)

[Alexhandr]

Haha. No, actually. I'm trying to learn to play with Hive for momentum (I know, nihilism is the opposite of what my forum profile icon represents!), & Morganites for builder. I've read and been told Sister Miriam's Believers are a pretty non-beginner friendly faction to play, considering that you really have to be hyper aggressive and hope that someone starts near you so you can probe team them! I would love to get to know the Believers really well at some point, but I know I'm not advanced enough yet if I've yet to touch late game consistently.

[bvanevery]

I've never thought about the Believers as "not beginner friendly".  That role would go to the Morganites, whose -1 SUPPORT completely cripples them.

[Alexhandr]

Yeah, I uh, have found that out the hard way a number of times myself. It's fun playing as Morganites and rolling in energy, but boy, does it become extremely difficult when you're dealing with multiple AI at war with you. Maybe I'll get Believers a go next time I play. My friend insists on playing with the map of Planet, which means there's continents/islands. What happens if I'm Believers and I get stuck on a continent/island with no opponent to steal tech from? Rush for Flexibility, then Probe teams?

[bvanevery]

Perhaps it would be good to follow up in a differnet thread, say in the Theory of Everything forum.  But briefly, if your isolated island is large, use your SUPPORT to make lots of Formers. The Believers are actually a pretty good Builder faction because they have so much SUPPORT.   Best to complete The Weather Paradigm too.  If you have that, you can make your large island even larger.  Eventually the sheer size of your empire will make up for your deficiencies.  Hey you might even find you're the Governor because you're so big.

If you get stuck on a small island, you're toast.  No matter what faction.  You make a beeline for Doctrine:Flexibility, but it will always put you behind other factions.

In my mod I have solved this by making D:F an E1 tech, no prereqs.  It's actually pretty ridiculous, historically speaking, that anyone would be waiting to build ships.  Waiting to build military ships maybe, but not ships.  Water is the most basic way that humanity learned to move long distances, beyond their feet.  Water access way predates road access.  And this is the future, where people already know how to make ships.

So, nobody really gets behind in my mod, because everyone can get off of their crap start islands pretty quickly.  Only way I could do better, is if I just gave everyone Transport capability from the get-go.  I haven't seen evidence of actually needing to do that.

[Alexhandr]

Interesting. Tyvm. What's the name of your mod?

[bvanevery]

SMACX AI Growth mod.  Look in the Modding subforum.

[JMN4444]

I've read and been told Sister Miriam's Believers are a pretty non-beginner friendly faction to play, considering that you really have to be hyper aggressive and hope that someone starts near you so you can probe team them!

If you're that type of beginner that loves to crush everyone early at the game, then The Believers are a very perfect choice for you ! The +25% attack bonus combined with the +2 SUPPORT means that one way or another, you'll end up covering the map with orange units without worrying too much about mineral support. the -2 RESEARCH/+1 PROBE means that you'll need to send your Probe teams Priests in the Clandestine acts Holy Pilgrimage of Tech Stealing The Acquisition of Holy Intellect from The University Faithless Heathens. Oh, and with that stolen tech, you'll end up creating better units than thanks to the +25% and attack boost. However, if you're the peaceful type of Beginner, is another definite option, as he's balanced in all regards in social engineering (-1 EFFICIENCY is solved by Democracy).

[FartWitch]

Hi I'm FartWitch!

I've been playing SMAC on and off since I was a kid and picked up crossfire a few years ago after hearing about it as an adult. Tend to play Stepdaughters, DataAngels and University.

Found this forum googling to win an argument (that this is the best computer game ever made) Ragequit my MMO recently and been thinking about giving modding the game a go so figured I might as well join.

[bvanevery]

Cool!  I'm curious what your pet peeves about the game are, that make you want to mod it.  Unless you're less interested in rules changes and more interested in new factions or something like that.

[FartWitch]

No real pet peeves! I find the base concept of the game, a colony to settle a planet splitting into colonies based on ideology and thought paradigms interesting! Seems like a setting you could do a lot with story and theme-wise.

I've not done much modding stuff before so yeah I'll be boring and want to start with new factions and reskinning stuff! I'd like to build from there maybe expand/mess around with the tech tree next? See how far I get is the current plan, the dream (if I had the time!) would be to do a small xpac 

[Dewbacca]

Dewbacca here, Dewy for short. Completely human, Militant Hippy, husband, father of 2, long time lurker, just now getting around to making an account and saying hello.

Hello.

I would suppose I found you thru Google, but I've been playing SMAC/SMAX since "Ask Jeeves".

[bvanevery]

Good grief Ask Jeeves that was so cheesy!  I did Alta Vista back in the day.

[Arcturus Mensk]

I have lurked for...about a year? And I was looking for mods for smac/smax and found this lovely gem of a place. Finally decided to announce myself after joining months ago and going straight back to lurking.

So...HI!

[bvanevery]

For a second there I thought that was Kirk smoking a cigar.  Then I realized it must be a flask of that probably illegal Romulan stuff or something.

[Buster's Uncle]

That's a telling moment about who Kirk is - it's The Enemy Within, the one where he was split into good and evil by the transporter.  So, does evil Kirk set out to conquer the universe?  Naw; he heads straight to sickbay to get his drank on with McCoy -which means regular Kirk is too much of a boyscout to keep any booze in his cabin- and then goes to try to break him off a piece of Yeoman Rand, which suggests he'd been wanting to, but, as established plenty of times, too professional to fish off the company pier...