Multiplayer: Alien Crossfire

[MercantileInterest]

"Upon arrival in the Alpha Centauri System, the U.N.S.S. Unity had the grave misfortune to stumble into the middle of a battle between two hostile alien factions. Captain Garland ordered early launch of the landing pods moments before the Unity suffered crippling hits. Alien firepower destroyed several pods before the survivors reached the surface but the human distraction allowed the losing alien ship to maim its rival, forcing both to land on Planet."

        - Gayle Nambala
                 The Early Years

Time for yet another game, with a full seven human controlled factions:    (MercantileInterest), , (Pierce Ji-Yang), (Auriga), (Nevill),    (Funbot) and  (Maeldun)  (Keiko). We will use this thread to post propaganda, data charts, host planetary councils, etc. Spectators, feel free to chime in.

The rules are as follows:

(click to show/hide)

A player may not:
1. Reload the game multiple times or load the game into the scenario editor
2. Conduct diplomacy prior to having met in-game
3. Use colony pods to increase a base beyond its maximum population limit
4. Use build queue manipulation or other exploits to hurry production at reduced costs, or build something that could not directly be built
5. Take advantage of the stockpile energy bug by adding it after units in build queues
6. Upgrade crawlers to more expensive designs before adding them to secret projects
7. Connect multiple artifacts to the same network node (supposedly possible if you rename the city)
8. Set the home of a unit to the base of a pacted AI faction
9. Start a terraforming task in one square, cancel it, move to a different square and then finish it there (in case of combat terraforming)
10. Perform an act of aggression against a player and complete pending negotiations in the same turn
11. Reverse engineer custom units to gain undiscovered abilities, weapons, armor, etc. Reverse-engineering from other factions is allowed (i.e. capturing a unit and making new units from it in the workshop, even though you lack the tech).

As for probe teams, PBEM games are bugged in that the person using the team gets to decide how the faction should react upon discovery. For this reason, exposed probe team actions must always result in the harshest reply (dissolve pact/treaty).

Finally, Planetary Council information must be fully shared with all players upon request (the game doesn't properly show how the factions voted to all players, only the result).

[bvanevery]

I am curious, do you have an expectation of how long your game is likely to take?

[funbot]

I am curious, do you have an expectation of how long your game is likely to take?

6 players and no tech savy factions (beside aliens starting boost), and if and maeby more or less balanced starting zones.. Year and a half? :3

[bvanevery]

Good Lord.  How do you manage to sustain personal interest in a game over such a long period of time?  Are you regarding it as some kind of "small MMO" ?  I would just think momentum would be impossible to keep up.

[funbot]

Thats just a worst case scenario estimate rly, with a big factor on how just one least active players out of six can hinder the progress of the game.

But ye, idk. I've had once excatly year and half game with my rl friend of mine, and I got so immensly immersed in the game that just intrest never rly dropped (RP, calculating attack and defence values on chokepoints of the map, estimating enemys tech advance and all that shiat). Welp, untill I made noob mistake with my droppod units and messed up my weeks of planning for a Major take over of the friends capital an' couple other big cities. Then I ragequitted hard and were literally depressed for week or two kek 

[funbot]

Welp, maeldun hasnt answered to my pm for his email, soooo i'm just gonna leave savefile here i gues.

[Maeldun]

Hello everyone, been down with a bit of what seemed to be a mild pneumonia for a couple of days, am doing mighty fine now however.

Looking forward to playing with you guys and hopefully having the entire planet under the conquering spartan boot sometime soon (not really though).

[MercantileInterest]

! No longer available

My fellow laborers,

We've come to a new world and we're going to build a new tomorrow. The oppression, the prejudice and the tottering class structure of old Earth have all been swept away. This is our world and no one can take it from us. We're going to fill our future with hard work, sweat and grime. The system will favor the workers. Each man will be his own master. Life will be worth living. Let's have a cheer for a tomorrow worth living for!

     - from Foreman Domai's address

[bvanevery]

Personally I find it quite drole that there are going to be "workers" on Alpha Centauri.  Like it isn't all high tech and automated with people just pushing a few start and stop buttons.  We already have factories like that today!  Manufacturing jobs are not coming back to the USA, no matter what [Sleezebag] says.  Factories used to employ thousands of workers because there was more manual labor to do.  Now a modern factory employs a few hundred workers at best.  That isn't zero jobs but it's not a lot of jobs.

Locally in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for instance, Caterpillar came in several years ago.  After Dell shuttered all its US desktop factories, including the new one in Winston-Salem.  Anyways Caterpiller came in with a similar deal with the State of NC, that if you provide X number of jobs, you get Y tax breaks.  And that if you miss the job targets, you owe NC money.  Well, Caterpillar hasn't made its target of about 500 workers and is currently trying to renegotiate the incentives contract.  They would flee if they didn't have the contractual obligations and penalties to deal with.  Companies in general, flee at the first opportunity it suits their budgets, if their toes aren't held to the flames.  In Dell's case, they were in so much financial trouble that it actually made sense for them to take the big hit.

Domai and his Workers are a complete stupid fantasy that will never happen in any future.  Corollary: Yang's hordes are a complete stupid fantasy too, but we like the macabre and dismal of the human condition, so at least his character is interesting.

Aldous Huxley made the prototype for all of this in Brave New World.  It was an excellent piece of future projection for the time he wrote it, in 1931, when large numbers of people still worked in factories.  Yang's "genetically engineered worker, or genejack" is directly taken from the Deltas, the bioengineered worker class.   They didn't have genetic engineering in Huxley's time, as DNA wasn't known yet, but Huxley did have ideas about bioengineering such as treating fetuses "in gravid bottles" (that line might have been at the beginning of Crome Yellow actually.)

BTW Yang's asks, "Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?"  The answer is, you cannot tyrannize that particular worker.  But you can tyrannize the entire society, which is not exclusively composed of Deltas, but also Alphas and Betas.  You can structure a society in such a way that it is onerous to the human condition as we know it today.  IIRC Brave New World is about 1 such Alpha who feels tyrannized, in a society where everyone else seems "happy".   It's also an open question, how any Delta could be reconditioned when given "freedom".

Now having said all this, I do like your customized banner artwork.  I just hope you contemplate the absurdity of your regime as you roleplay it.     Seriously, it's not the 1930's anymore.

[MercantileInterest]

The glorious Union of the Steel Driving Men will be doing intelligent manual labor. We're dealing with a colonial society on a virgin planet. Nothing will work as planned. Machines designed and built on Earth will be thoroughly unsuited to their new situations. Everything will constantly corrode, grind to a halt and break down. Only the constant hand of human intervention will prevent catastrophe.

...but, yes, once we figure out how things work on Planet, there won't be much demand for hordes of workers.

By that time, the virtue of ceaseless manual labor will be drilled into every citizen's head. We see the same thing on Earth right now. Chinese characters make for an awful writing system. Hasn't made them go away. Hard work isn't a better way of getting things done; it's a better way to live. 

[bvanevery]

Har har har, good save.  Lately I've been thinking about how various factions actually can't exist at the time of "apocalyptic Earth, survival scenario, landfall on Planet."  Too much overhead.  Like the University and the Centauri Monopoly, forget it!  Ain't gonna happen.  They represent social phenomena that have to come later, if they ever come at all.  Those factions exist because the authors wanted to comment on academics and CEOs in their own society.  They're merciless about it and those are some of the funniest bits in the game.  But it's actually pretty bad as hard sci-fi.  Not that everything has to be hard sci-fi, but SMAC does tend that way, when it's not hand-waving reality away that is.

[bvanevery]

Oh and BTW,

The glorious Union of the Steel Driving Men

Sexist!

May the ghost of Rosie the Riveter drive your faction to its utter demise.

[MercantileInterest]

We need patriarchy just to halve our labor force.

[bvanevery]

Heard at a Gaian campfire:

"How many free drone men does it take to screw a light bulb?"

Also wondering: what are you going to do when some other faction starts terrorizing you with Industrial Automation?  Refuse to use supply crawlers?  Between crawlers and forests I'm known to create cities with 60..70 minerals output.  No factories and no eco-damage.  Don't know how well that would work in a multiplayer game, but from a role playing standpoint, it's pretty much the opposite of the "compulsive virtues of work" ideology you have in mind.

I've also observed, (human player) factions change their ideology as time advances and enviornmental conditions change.  Spartans put down their guns when they don't have enemies nearby, for instance.

[Pierce Ji-Yang]

Here is the saved game for JeroenDStout to add back in the already dead players. I am posting it here because I could not attach it to the private message to him.