AAR: When the 'Ethical calculus' always equals more mad science! (Thinker mod)

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Welcome to another After Action Report for Thinker mod! I've been playing SMAC and beating Transcend for many years, and recently installed Thinker AI. At first, it absolutely stomped me, even on Thinker difficulty, but I slowly figured out what I was doing wrong and, after a half dozen games on Thinker, started actually beating it. I've won four games on Transcend difficulty (two in previous AARs) so far, but the game is (usually!) hard. Just how I like it!

I'm playing with Thinker 3.5. Many awesome changes recently from Induktio; I'll try to showcase a few of them as the game plays out

Differences from default settings:

• New world builder disabled
  I don't love the pangaea-ness of the maps it made on my first few tries.
• Rare pods disabled
• Nessus Canyon enabled
• Buff to Planet Cult
  +4 Planet instead of +2.
• Nerf to Usurpers/Caretakers
  -1 INDUSTRY and no recycling tanks

Again, map is just Standard with middle-of-the-road choices for all customizations. Transcend difficulty, blind research, no Unity Survey. All factions randomized.

Who are we this time?

Ah, my first Zak game with Thinker! Now that I've been inducted into the halls of rapid, risky base expansion and staying with size 1-2 bases all early game, I wonder how much strong Zak will be. Unlike Lal's drone bonus, Zak's drone penalty doesn't matter if you just stay small!


Not bad. I pop the colony pod, and instant T1 mind worms. Well, [poop]. At least it's still in the first 15 turns when mindworms are pathetically weak. Hopefully they hit either my colony pod or scout and die, and don't hit my headquarters and eliminate the base.

They hit the HQ, but it just destroys the Network Node! Cheers!

Still... not what I'll call a fabulous start.

Hopefully everyone else is doing equally poorly. Speaking of...

Huh. That's a lot of aggro. And a couple of scary builders. Still, I'm a fricking scary builder faction myself. If I get enough space early, I should be completely fine.


Oooh, nice. Two decent landmarks in my territory. +1 Planet is really nice early.


Crap, they're really close. Fortunately, they just Treaty up, trade a tech and then bugger off.


That's my third alien artifact. I'm definitely going to be able to get an early game wonder. Hopefully two; I'd love weather paradigm + The Virtual World.

I try teching for Secrets of the Human Brain, but the Gaians beat me to it. REALLY not surprising, since they get Centauri Ecology to start (basically mandatory to pick up before Secrets even though it isn't a prereq) and green factions get a big boost to that whole tree of prereqs. Here's the blind research odds for a normal/+PLANET faction who has Biogenetics and Centauri Ecology:


MUCH better odds of getting Social Psych. The same holds true at Secrets of the Human Brain, and to a lesser extent for Biogenetics (which has great Discover/Explore weights in addition to being boosted by being a tree farm prereq and a secrets prereq, and so is very likely for anyone going Explore/Discover to be their first tech after Centauri Ecology.)

So that's why she usually gets Secrets of the Human Brain if she's in the game. One tech fewer up front, and all her odds are better than normal.

I digress though. I keep exploring deep into Drone territory in spite of the Treaty until he kicks me out:

Oh drat, he has the Monsoon jungle. This is going to be a mighty powerful drone faction. Especially once you include how much better the +INDUSTRY is for Transcend-level AI

Next, he calls me up and offers to sell me Yang's commlink. Excellent. He then offers a pact. Well, that's a bit tricky. One sane play here is just aggro rush them. I have a lot of pod-popped troops and some natives courtesy of the Manifold Nexus... But that sounds risky and I'm a chicken. Zak doesn't NEED early domination. Free network nodes are the bomb.



I also get a treaty of friendship from Yang.


None of my cities are doing amazingly on minerals, so I decide to go straight for the Virtual World. I'll miss the Weather Paradigm, but I can't afford the risk of not getting VW. It's just way too good for University. I cash in all 3 alien artifacts here. Should be able to rush it in a few turns.

My continent is really spicy on the secret projects:


It's really hard for me to imagine that it's optimal for the drones to be building THREE secret projects, but eh. They are the drones, and Yang seems to be letting them get away with it. In spite of having the Command Nexus.

Final Map:

Final Tech Tree:

[bvanevery]

Now that you're pseudo-Gaian ala the Manifold Nexus, I would think that getting off your tightly squeezed peninsula, and capturing Isles and possibly also mindworms and spore launchers at sea, would put you in good shape to stop the Drones.  Assuming you bring those captured units back.

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Next thing that happens is I meet the Gaians and trade for everybody's comm frequencies at cheap prices, do a few tech trades, and get maps of most of the landmasses:


Looks like the drones actually don't have that much space to scale, unless they manage to take out Yang or the Usurpers. And Yang is a pretty tough nut before air power. A human Domai could do it, but AI, even Thinker AI? Probably not.



Looks like Yang actually has the bigger territory. He could be a problem... Though his tech rate will probably suffer into the midgame and he doesn't really scale with size THAT well due to inefficiency. He's started warring with Domai, and it looks like things are mostly going Yang's way. Turns out that triple special project is too greedy... who knew!

You can also see I'm now on my midgame transition, with crawlers and tree farms coming out, and a lot of boreholes being made.

On another note, since my -PROBE gets me a boost to discovering prereqs of the Hunter Seeker Algorithm:

Time to focus on that!

Unfortunately, as soon as Yang takes a base adjacent to my territory...


He declares Vendetta. Dang it. I am SO not ready for war.

I do have one brave laser foil exploring back behind yangland, who immediately gets to take the fight to the enemy!


That's one Hive base down...

TWO hive bases down...

And then he snipes the ship with aircraft, which he discovered before me. 



Which he is also deploying to great effect against my home territory.



Just what I needed Deidre!



Ooof, tough choice. I'm often happy to pay for peace, but my planes are just starting to come off the assembly line, and I'm fighting him on a narrow front. If I don't keep fighting him now, he'll finish wiping the drones and then attack me. On the other hand, I'm 90% sure I'm currently researching pre-sentient algorithms. I want space to build HSA; it will make this war a lot easier for me.

Eh, I'll keep fighting.

Final Map:

[pblur]

Now that you're pseudo-Gaian ala the Manifold Nexus, I would think that getting off your tightly squeezed peninsula, and capturing Isles and possibly also mindworms and spore launchers at sea, would put you in good shape to stop the Drones.  Assuming you bring those captured units back.

Honestly, this would have been a really good call to swap research to Explore about as soon as I found the Nexus + Domai so close. Getting early foils snowballing into early isles and early diplo for techs... Yeah. That would have been great. I need to keep that in mind.

[bvanevery]

I need to keep that in mind.

In my SMACX AI Growth mod it's easier to do because all factions start with ships available.  We're not Cro-Magnons, why should it be hard to make ships?  Only because SMAC was based on Civ II and they didn't want to mess with the game mechanics too much.  But getting "runted" on a small island or peninsula is a serious problem for everybody, including the AI.  Since I don't change the stock AI in any way, I get more out of it by not having a gameplay bottleneck for its decisionmaking.  So if it thinks it would be better off spreading by sea, it will do so.

[pblur]

Well, I think it makes more lore-sense than you give it credit for. Remember that Planet's atmosphere is a gasping death to earth lifeforms. The challenge here isn't rediscovering sailing. It's more like inventing surface submarines with self-contained life support systems. This is also why it skips the shallow water phase of technology. The WATER isn't the problem. It's the air.

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I mean... if you're going to pay me to do it?

So, the Hive is still winning a war of attrition on my southwest. I just don't have the military built up that they do, and the drones have been mostly neutered as a threat. Plus they have the command nexus, so they have the morale advantage... bascially my biggest advantage is that I'm not trying to make chaos needlejets with fission reactors. Just a waste of time.

They conquer one of my bases, and do the usual demand for tribute. I refuse. They offer a free blood truce. I refuse. Then:

Fine. If you're going to PAY me to have a breather on the turn before I finish researching pre-sentient algorithms, I'll take it.

I rush HSA, and finish it in about 3 turns, with several bases making crawlers:


There's my faction weakness eliminated! Well, between that and The Virtual World. I park a cheap unit in one of the drone bases on the front lines, and Yang 'launches a surprise attack' on it when trying to conquer that city. Free restart of the war! He does offer me *generous* terms for stopping it:


No, I don't think so Yang. I have cheap Gas Chaos Needlejets, and you don't. I like it that way.


The air war begins in earnest. The combination of using SAM land units for cheap snipes on interceptors, having cheap Gas Chaos craft and running Planned+Wealth gives me a huge logistics advantage over him. Though my morale kind of sucks. And, well, the Gaian's are getting scary.


NOOOOOOO, that's one of my favorite secret projects!

And on top of that, they've raised a land bridge between their land and mine:

(in the north-east.)
Well, at least my war against Yang is beginning to go my way. I've reconquered the cities he captured from me (except for one that was eliminated), and ond of the former drone cities. My win from here probably depends on conquering most of the Hive; at least through their good secret projects.

I finally get Mind/Machine Interface the turn after the Gaian's finish the Cloudbase Academy, and rush Cyborg Factory. Cyborg Factory is not as good as cloudbase, AND is more expensive, but it will neatly compensate for the downside of Wealth at least.


Final Map:


The Planet Cult and the Caretakers remain notable forces, but the Gaians and the Hive are the current leaders. Unless Yang manages to pull a miracle here, I'm going to knock him out of the running. The tricky part will be making sure I replace him, instead of the Gaians running away with the game.

Oh, and a cool new Thinker feature; local satellite yield display!

I have 3 hydroponics labs, and this base has an aerospace complex, so I get 3 nutrients per turn from satellites.

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The war with the Hive
The war continues with the Hive on the back foot. They're at war with literally everyone, so their attrition is bad. They're slightly below me on tech, so their attrition is bad. I know to use SAM land units and they don't, so their attrition is bad:


The key here is that I actually need to conquer enough cities to make my later University-power tech machine able to get ahead of Diedre.

This is made a lot easier by my being in a pact with Deidre, and able to trade techs pretty easily.


I managed to get a foothold in from the northeast too, in former drone territory, and I'm pushing across. I really want People's Foundry, because it has the weather paradigm and the planetary Transit system. I don't see myself getting much use out of the latter, with nutrient satellites and popbooming, but the former (harhar) is great even in the lategame.

I finally manage to push through to that city, and snag the secret projects.

I have a really solid set now. That's a foundation that will really pay off when I'm building up later.

Yang does have 3 more secret projects; the merchant exchange (who cares), and two good ones in his capital: The Human Genome Project, and The Command Nexus. So I start diving toward The Hive on the far south-south-west of the island. The Gaians are being really annoying pact brothers and sniping bases if I'm not careful, so I have to make sure to do oldschool democrawar, with all the defenses falling in the turn I capture it.

My labs are doing really well, even though I'm at war. I did drop Wealth in favor of Research:


I would be completely insane on the research front right now in vanilla, but Thinker nerfed Research-stacking. It now scales tech/turn instead of tech cost. In vanilla, this would be 1.66x the techs per turn. Here it's only 1.4x. Still, I'm ahead of Diedre for the moment.

Speaking of, we get into a 3-way conquest situation on the west, with Planet Cult joining in:

Deidre manages to snatch it with a probe team. I'm honestly fine with that; should reduce my border friction with Planet Cult.

Sunspots come, and with them the *totally deniable* mass nerve stapling.

Another nifty new Thinker feature:

Turns left on Nerve Staple are neatly displayed in the bottom-right of the map graphic.

I finally push down and steal the Hive from Yang:


Yay one less drone! And I've been sitting in planned+democratic a lot of this war, so most of my captured cities are big and productive already.

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But wait, the game is actually just kind of won...

I've gotten both of the tech multiplier wonders in a city with 4 boreholes, and I just checked the science output there.



That's quite solid for the midgame!



... so solid in fact that it's practically as much as Diedre's entire faction is making. And I'm making 3 times that one city total. And I have better special projects for scaling. And I have flechette defenses to deter planet busters. And I'm the fing University. And she's a pacifist.

Yeah, this game is effectively over and there really won't be much conflict left. I'm going to zoom to a Transcendance victory, judiciously skipping turns when I don't need the efficiency.

First, I finish conquering most of Yang's land bases and peace him out. No need for distractions. Let the caretakers and planet cult beat on him.

Next up, satellite spam:

After that, it's just 'research faster than Diedre, build infrastructure, rush all the secret projects except for The Dream Twister and The Nethack Terminus before her... and end the game still cranking out 3 times her research.'


Yeah, good luck with that. I finish Ascent in one turn, and win.
Final pre-transcendance map:


Got to a size 32 city. Noice.