The Clean Death of Us All - SMACX AI Growth mod version 1.52

[bvanevery]

Details silence descendant

silence descendant

MY 2271.  Once again we have the opportunity for dirty deeds, but they are logistically impractical.

[bvanevery]

Details out cyborged

out cyborged

MY 2275.  I spend 2 Artifacts and a lot of cash to beat Aki to the Theory of Everything.

[bvanevery]

Details inevitable

inevitable

MY 2292.  Zhakarov insists on war with Cha Dawn.  Since I can never please everyone, I acquiesce.

Details the times they are a changin'

the times they are a changin'

It occurs to me that all my mindworms and spore launchers are dead.  The Caretakers haven't fielded an indigenous life form in eons.  Battling Planet life forms has been rare, although that could be attributed to my Green stance.  I have buckets of new weapons technology I could wipe out the Caretakers with, that I'm not even using yet.  All I'm really doing is sitting around garrisoning, and finally claiming the Monsoon Jungle.  Why be Green anymore?  Perhaps I can make peace with Morgan, and be the total planetary sycophant I always aspired to be.

Morgan doesn't want to talk.  It usually takes a probe team to bring the recalcitrant around.  They like to interrupt just as you're about to steal from them.

[bvanevery]

MY 2293.  I decided to stop fiddling around with the Caretakers and make a modern weapon.  Well, partly.  They have 1 mindworm I want to eliminate, so I made a Fusion R-Laser Speeder. 

Details you can go your own way

you can go your own way

With so many wars afoot, why not train my troops better?  It will tick off Zhakarov, but he doesn't provide me any tech anyways.  I don't want my people unhappy because I'm marching troops around, and it looks like I'll be doing that for quite some time.

[bvanevery]

Details time for the brush off

time for the brush off

MY 2299.  At the beginning of all of this, I said I didn't care what happened to you.  That Aki could overrun you if she liked.  Back then you only had 2 bases.  You've improved and occasionally been useful since, but you are not what I'd call, an asset.

I try to broker peace between him and Aki, but he points fingers at her.  I'm not going to pester her, until she pesters me.

Details find me a Dutch boy

find me a Dutch boy

I didn't mean to.  I guess it's Capitalism.  I'm building Centauri Preserves to try to keep it from getting worse.  But I'm equally determined to build Robotic Assembly Plants afterwards.  If this is enough to put Planet underwater, well won't that be amusing.

Details stuffed

stuffed

I finally took over their capitol.  I lost my modern unit in the process.  I don't care.  The real issue is global warming.

[bvanevery]

Details I am abusive

I am abusive

MY 2302.  Yeaaaaah Robotic Assembly Plants.  I never build those things.  You're not watching how to win the game anymore.  It's 5:30 AM and this is what your brain looks like on global warming.

 

And I'm just refusing to build Trance units because I'm mental.  Like why can't I kill everything with Scouts?  Because they're getting picked off here and there, that's why.

I do have a few Trance units from the old days.  I just don't have the rails to move them around so easily.  Recently I made mag tubes take a lot longer to make.  They were overpowered, you could get anywhere with them.  I think I've found a balance where they're still useful, but not quite a superweapon anymore.  I've had incentive to build other things.

Actually it turns out my 2 Trance units are right where they should be.  I'm going to wait for the mindworms to attack.  When I attack them, it strengthens the remainders.  Let's see if they'll wear themselves out on me, without getting stronger.

[bvanevery]

Details to put the brain back in gear

to put the brain back in gear

MY 2305.  Coming back to the game from last night, and being foggy headed not really knowing what was going on, I had to save scum this turn.  That probe team actually took over Decision: Manifold !  Piles of hitting the ESC key to get that stupid turn to end.

I think it's pretty ridiculous, as they've only got 297 credits to their name.  I've got 1321 credits and I don't know exactly how the takeover equation works, but your bank account vs. theirs is one of the factors.  Yes it's their former capitol, but it was stocked with military units they can't individually afford to subvert, and it's only 10 squares away from my own capitol.  Yes they have a slight advantage running a Police State, giving them +1 PROBE, but it shouldn't make it that easy for them.  My captured citizens aren't even unhappy, they've got 1 yuppie and 1 plumber, due to all my wonderful secret projects for keeping people cheerful.

Subversion is very much overpowered in the original game.  I've toned it down in my mod, making mind control cost 2x as much for most factions, but there are still problems that can't easily be solved with .txt only modding.  Binary modding could put it to bed, but it's a lot of work to get into that, and it's illegal.  So as an indie game developer wary of exposures, I'm not going to get into it.

I haven't done any kind of probe defense at all this game because it just hasn't been an issue.  I've managed to block and kill the various teams that they sent at me, mainly by marching my units around doubled up in pairs.  Eventually they got to the point where they just weren't fielding enough probe teams to be dealing with them, but I got a bit over-extended and extremely slack, making the final push on land.  I'm finally deigning to make a Missile Needlejet which is going to end it all.

Here you see an expedient that works, which illustrates why this problem is complete baloney.  Since they can't afford to mind control my individual units, they are used individually as a wall around my city.  If they were actually in the city, the probe team could take it over!  Total.  Misdesign.

Details collaborators in global destruction

collaborators in global destruction

I meet Morgan in the field and that's enough to get him to talk.  My big mindworm was only evenly matched with his unit anyways.  He signs a Truce but not a Treaty.  I move out of the way as I don't trust him to honor it.

[bvanevery]

Details flooding sucks

flooding sucks

MY 2306.  This is why I usually don't play Capitalist and build all these factories.  I've got mindworm pops galore again, and not much in the way of units to fight them.  All my hard work hand terraforming every single square of my empire, is in jeopardy of being flooded out.  Cue Weird Al Yankovic singing, "Our Land's In Jeopardy, ba-by.  Oooh oo ooo ooooh!"
 

The good news is, it's probably not severe enough yet, to actually be a problem.  I have a lot of productivity.  Much more than I'm used to having, for winning these games.  And this is merely an ecological flood.  Not a Planet punishing you because you're an evil chemical weapons abuser flood, with beaucoup de mindworms.  That is a problem.  I've done AARs about that and lived to tell the tale.  Sorry if I'm totally breaking character with this commentary and reportage, but I'm really tired today after last night's late night bender with this game.  I've probably got, a thimble full of acting ability right now.

Details flanked

flanked

So here I have the problem that Cha Dawn is threatening to blow a big hole in my defensive line.  Somehow the Caretakers are spamming probe teams and another one will be produced next year.  Must be the AI's INDUSTRY advantage on Transcend difficulty.  That team could walk right through and take over.

Details thick wall

thick wall

I didn't really think my Elite Recon Rover would win against the Cultist units.  They're on forest and they've got better armor than my weapon.  I think my best bet is to put 3 sacrificial units in front of them and just take the hits.  With luck, the last unit will survive, blocking the probe team from getting through.  I'm also not sure of the turn order.  Maybe the Caretakers will move before the Cultists attack.

Could somebody please tell me why my 13 year old laptop is getting so hot just playing this stupid game?  Well, and having a web browser open to type this up, and the Snip & Sketch screen capture program.  And a .txt document about something else.  Still, it shouldn't exactly be intensity.  I think it's Microsoft's fault, pulling baloney with Windows 10 again.  Overheating is definitely a recurring theme if you troll the internet about it.  Another possibility is something is ageing and therefore heating more.  It's bad enough that I might have to do something, like beg off.  Let's see if running on battery power will cure it.  It's supposed to be on passive cooling, and it's like it's not doing it.

Task Manager shows low to no disk usage, and not really any load on the CPU.  I was expecting to see one of Microsoft's wonderful background tasks chewing up everything.  What gives?

Need to go look at a schematic of the motherboard to make a guess at what's cooking.  It's not the battery, as that's external old school snap-on and cool to the touch.  Fan is blowing.

Gotta go deal with this.  Gripping conclusion to the probe team problem later.

[bvanevery]

Details chicken

chicken

MY 2307.  The plan worked.  The Cult showed no appetite for attacking.  I guess Green Impact troops don't feel good about attacking Elite Synthmetal troops on Rocky terrain.  I've left a hole for the probe team to walk around if it wants, so that it can land neatly at my front door.  That would allow my returning Needlejet to kill it.

I still don't know what's causing my old laptop to overheat.  It started very quickly after I started playing again this morning.  The only expedient I've got so far, is I put a small piece of metal under it as a "foot" to elevate it from the surface it's sitting on.  That gives somewhat more air circulation.  It is not enough and again, I'm going to have to beg off to go deal with this.  What a mystery.

Details rushing

rushing

I've got too much money, but not quite enough to complete the Self-Aware Colony.  I've rushed everything I can without penalty, meticulously making partial payments just to be a completely efficient jerk about it.  The drill is multiply your mineral output by 2, then subtract that from the payment required to complete.  It's approximately if not exactly correct.  Good enough for government work.

Details stiff prototyping penalty

stiff prototyping penalty

For some reason, even at a Skunkworks the cost of completing a Conventional Missile prototype is egregiously expensive.  The missile itself isn't that much, as obviously I can bang it out in 3 turns.  "10 minerals in" isn't enough to avoid a huge penalty.  Maybe it is treated like a Secret Project and 50 minerals have to be in, to avoid a penalty?  I suppose I'll be finding out next year.

[bvanevery]

MY 2308.  The probe team wandered into the open and was summarily executed.  I have a respite of 3 turns before I have to deal with it again.  I'm way too busy elsewhere with anti-mindworm garrisons and fungus removal to commit any more troops though.  The Missile Needlejet will have to gradually wear them down.

Can't blame Firefox for my laptop running hot.  Having a lot of subprocesses is normal for it nowadays.  I probably have to open my laptop up and frankly, I just want to play my game right now.

Details dummy

dummy

Because I've been worrying unduly about the theoretical potential of an Energy Market Crash, I have left myself without enough money to rush the Self-Aware Colony.  Aki will complete it next turn.  I don't like this SP much anyways.  It has a misfeature where you can actually get less Non-Lethal Methods performance out of it, than you otherwise would.  It does cheapen maintenance costs though.

Details gouging

gouging

The Conventional Missile prototype still costs a lot for the minerals involved.  I've had a historical aversion to rushing units, for reasons I can't remember, and this may be why.  The equation for facilities is 2:1 credits to minerals.  For units, it may be nonlinear.

[bvanevery]

Details overkill

overkill

MY 2309.  I've worked long and hard to push these 2 unarmored clean independent sea formers back to safe waters.  I'll be darned if I'm going to let some pesky wimp ship kill 'em now!  My Missile Needlejet wasn't in position to do anything, and I don't keep a navy out here.  These waters have been pretty quiet.  I've previously sailed a captured Sea Colony Pod all the way home and made a base with it.  Fortunately when you do that, you don't get freaky Aliens for your citizens.

Details knock it off

knock it off

Since Aki just finished her SP, and I want to burn excess money, and there aren't enough research powers in the game to get things through the Planetary Datalinks, I thought this would be a good time to trade for techs.  I ended up straight trading techs with her, not buying them.  I really don't care about research supremacy, as I've got enough techs to wipe out the entire planet as is.  Production is my limitation, and mindworms when I scale my production up.  They seem to have calmed down now, but I don't really want any more global warming.  So, my original 3 cities are the big producers, and the rest are just making garrison scraps.

I've almost got a semi-modern Trance Silksteel garrison up everywhere now, but Aki just traded me the Photon Wall.  I don't need it for any immediate neighbors though, and the mindworms certainly don't care about conventional armor.  I'd be going back to 3-Res armor if things got really dire.  I switch my Skunkworks production to a prototype that will complete next turn, and I switch all my Silksteel to Photon production, in cities where I won't take any penalty.  That's all but 1 of them.  That's a funny quirk of paying cash for barely completed units, as it pretty much ensures you won't have 10 minerals in next turn.  I suppose if I wanted to be maximally productive, I'd add 20 credits = 10 minerals in to the cost, so that next turn I could do it again.

I finally got her to knock it off with Zhakarov.  I don't really care what happens to him, but I don't need wars between my allies for their own sake.  If nothing else, I make more COMMERCE income when I have allies, I think.  I'm fuzzy on that math.  I certainly make a lot of money nowadays for whatever reason.  Some of that was mindworm kills.

My laptop only overheats when I'm playing this game.  This makes me wonder if the graphics emulation is somehow running through the integrated 3D graphics chip, using far more GPU resources than would be normally expected.  This would explain why I don't see any indicator of performance overload in Task Manager.  It could be the GPU that's doing all the cooking, not the CPU.  This is some ancient Intel integrated graphics thing.  For that matter, maybe the recent Windows 10 bug-free graphics driver is at fault.  I can't remember exactly what I have installed in that regard, although when I've done it by hand, I've used a Windows 8 driver.  Keeping a 13 year old laptop running Windows 10 is a bit of a trick.  Not a hard trick, if one is a techie god, but there are mysterious problems here and there.

I need a GPU activity detector.

[bvanevery]

Details consequences of stewardship

consequences of stewardship

MY 2310.  Sorry, Aki.   

I've completely forgotten to check my own cities for flooding threats.  That's a reality of playing late at night and singing off when you're dead tired.  Hard to remember what's going on the next day.  Well hopefully nothing's gonna get me.  I usually remember to do a check, when my cursor finally drifts over something that's threatened.  Other reasons to inspect cities from the top level map, would be to look for particular units.  Haven't needed to do that lately.

I've played games where I've tried to use global flooding as a weapon against the AI factions.  It doesn't really work.  It degrades their empires but it never eliminates them.  They also have a nasty habit of rebuilding their sunken cities in the same locations.  In short, the AI has a proclivity towards spam.  The idea of wiping them out all at once sounds good on paper, but doesn't work in the real ocean.

Another thing I learned one game is that if you commit serious atrocities to an enemy, and then the planet floods, and all of Planet's mindworms come to get you, and you didn't finish off that enemy, the flooding will slow down their demise.  They can survive long enough to build nukes and take you out later!  So if you're going to commit atrocities, you'd better finish them off.  The corollary to this, is only commit atrocities to enemies one-by-one.  Unless you're trying to write your own epitaph. 

After a bunch of dog interruptions, finally remembered to check my cities.  None of them are at flooding risk.

[bvanevery]

Details broken rail

broken rail

MY 2312.  I had to reload my turn because I didn't see that my mag tube line was broken.  So obnoxious when a unit just tries to move into the rough.  I don't remember having a minerals resource in the ocean either.  Must be another flooding consequence.  I checked my bases again and none are in danger.

Details incommunicado

incommunicado

The Monsoon Jungle got cut off as well.  Looks like I'm going to need formers more than anything else.  My Trance garrisoning is reasonably complete now, and it's actually only my original 3 cities that get threatened by mindworm pops.  The hinterlands don't have enough productivity to matter.  It seems that if I could just get every city up to at least 10 minerals, I could run everything on cash, hurrying every turn.  I've not generally played that way, but it could work for my circumstances now.

Details too much

too much

160 credits seems like an awful lot to complete a unit.  That's getting up into Research Hospital territory.  If this were a facility, I'd only have 40 minerals to get through, so 80 credits.  This suggests that units may be at a 4:1 ratio, rather than 2:1 for facilities.  Looking at alphax.txt, these ratios are not moddable.  Well I'll just let these things complete in their own sweet time, I guess.

Details secret project climb

secret project climb

I never stopped working on the Self-Aware Colony.  I completed my research this year, and although I can now start on nukes, I didn't gain a new secret project to switch over to.  As I do have supply crawler capability, I cash my last Artifact to try to get a SP-bearing tech.

Details I'll vote for that

I'll vote for that

It worked!  Maybe I'll finally win an election.  I can't complete the project this turn because I had a drone riot.

Details slackness

slackness

It occurs to me that with Chaos weapons now available in prototype, I don't really need a MORALE advantage over the Caretakers.  In fact I can probably easily afford a disadvantage.  It may not be great for fighting off mindworms, but a lot of my troops are pretty experienced.  This won't make Zhakarov any happier, but I'm not going to take penalties for military units out of my territory, until the war with the Caretakers is over.

[bvanevery]

Details the head once again

the head once again

MY 2314.  With the undue influence of the Empath Guild, I'm finally able to wrest control of the Governorship from Morgan.  The vote shows that I don't really have an ironclad standing in the world yet though.  If I were to alienate Zhakarov, he could play kingmaker.  If I want to rule, it would be best to get the war with the Caretakers over with.

[bvanevery]

Details wtf

wtf

MY 2315.  I just looked at their credit balance before taking this turn.  They had like 254 credits or so.  How much did it cost them to buy this unit?  And surely, they don't have enough money to keep going and take over my base?

Details they did not

they did not

No, but that probe team is being a pill.  Maybe I'll finally make a defensive probe team unit.

You ever just felt like saying, "I'm busy making my stuff.  Leave me alone." ?  Like really expensive gewgaws for my 3 oldest cities.

Their team survived.  That's annoying.  It's Commando.

Details monitoring the overheating

monitoring the overheating

Meanwhile in real life, I found out that Task manager can show you stuff about your GPU and power usage.  I don't know if the GPU monitoring actually works or is relevant to an Intel integrated GPU.  I'll do further research on that.  But power usage is way up there.  It often hits "very high" as well.

Hmm, I'm using a Scient modified binary, to give me automated game saves.  Does a stock binary draw the same amount of power?  Better check that.

Details didn't cost them much

didn't cost them much

It seems they only paid on the order of 100 credits to buy my unit.  That's not good.  It means they could thwap me a couple more times.  On the other hand, it might also deplete their bank account for nothing important.  I mainly don't want my facilities trashed.

Details double the guard!

double the guard!

Because I am extremely lazy, and resentful of all the probe team nonsense I've suffered in this game over the years, I refused to cough out a team of my own.  It wouldn't be ready to help this year anyways.  My immediate expedient, is go to back to having 2 units in every blocking square.  Now if the team comes, it'll have to come right up to where I can kill it.  The Caretakers will not be pulling that stunt again.  Not without actually sallying forth and attacking me.

But I'm not shelling them anymore, which is mildly annoying.  But I'm very, very lazy.  When did I start this game?  11:30 PM thereabouts?  And I'm hungry.  Whatever.  I just don't care.  I want my "big base stuff" finished, to see what that gets me.  Nukes and so forth.  Maybe do some pop booming.

Details die scum

die scum

Almost forgot I have a perfectly good Missile Needlejet to be hitting them with.  That's what happens in day-to-day gaming.  I need food.

Details modest concession

modest concession

Ok ok, I just learned Organic Superlubricant and should make a "slider" hovertank prototype.  Might as well be a probe team.  It doesn't have to do a good job.

I need to make some food, let my laptop cool down, and try the stock binary.  I mean, I could burn my pinkie if I really wanted to, holding it on the side vent.