AAR: Surviving in a hostile world; Santiago takes on the Builders (Thinker Mod)

[DrazharLn]

Lol. I don't know how you go about getting your forces to fight each other. Let alone getting probe teams to fight each other. Do *you* know how you did it?

[pblur]

Yep! When you enter a pact city with a probe team, you get to choose between keeping moving and beginning covert operations. If you already have a probe team in the city and select Begin Covert Operations, your probe team in the city will defend against your probe team entering the city.

[DrazharLn]

Heh

[pblur]

And cue the final, uneventful years of builder Santiago. I bascially just swapped back and forth between economy and labs based on how much I wanted to buy a [poop]-ton of some new facility. I got nanoreplicators, hab domes, and quantum labs in almost every base; only 4 bases were below size 20 by the end of the game. Labs scaled insanely, as they do, and I was making 13000 labs per turn.

Morgan tried to make things spicy, repeatedly declaring surprise wars. I would conquer one of his bases with a probe team, and he'd sue for peace in exchange for that base.

I rushed for Clinical Immortality first, but by the time I got there it just wasn't a viable strategy without conquest (which is time consuming compared to just hitting the 'hurry' button 20 times per turn):


I just hung out for a few more turns and bought voice/ascent, for an easy Transcendence victory on turn 153.


Honestly, the game was won from the point I dominated my home island. I could have won in so many ways from there.

Edit: Really? The forum replaces the sh-word with [poop]? 

[Buster's Uncle]

Yeah; we got standards.

I think the comedy translations are funny.  I won't get mad if you trigger some other translations, and you do have an option in your profile to turn off the filter for your viewing - though our swear filter is easy to accidentally circumvent, and I'd rather people kept it on so they can clean up their own mess when that happens...

[Geo]

Edit: Really? The forum replaces the sh-word with [poop]? 

Yeah, our Administrator likes to [Sleezebag] (or is it "[Sleezebag]") his cards. 

[bvanevery]

And Fundamentalist is available early in vanilla, giving you another +MORALE, making the Spartans pretty overpowered.  Generally I thought of them as the easiest faction to win a game with.

This might be partially a difference in playstyles, but on Standard and larger maps I'd rather have a proper builder faction like University or Deidre. Especially on the Huge maps I know you prefer, there's no way I'd take Santiago over any of the builders;

Yeah in my SMACX AI Growth mod, which has Huge maps as its design center, you also have the benefit of Clean Reactors being available from the beginning of the game.  So when in doubt, you can make more Formers.  And then make more roads.  And mag tubes become available pretty early as well, so you have a viable means of crossing large distances.  All you have to do is make enough Formers.

Absent that, getting across Huge maps is a PITA!  Before I started modding, if I got Santiago and she had no nearby faction to munge, I considered it a big disadvantage / worst case start.  Particularly when I was playing with Enormous and Giant maps, which are terms for very big things in my world building settings.  Enormous is the largest map you can generate without starting position bugs in the vanilla faction placement algorithm.