Comparison of Single Mega-SSC vs Multi-SSCs

[551262]

Some time ago I embarked on my first "real" SSC project. I am a slow learner and the game is quite complex, and not quite my style either (how it stuck, I have no idea) but eventually I got to playing a Huge Map of Planet, Talent, standard Alpha Centauri factions and no mods of any kind. All A.I. players.

I chronicalled the experience in this post here at 'poly and now I've finally wrapped up an equivalent but with multiple SSCs. Let's get to work.

Here is a chart that lists each base and its ... ugh, accomplishments...



And the inevitable Asterisks*: Not all the SSC bases in the first block have every facility to enhance labs/econ. All have an energy bank, network node and biology lab, but beyond that it's a bit of a wash on who has what. I just got so bored that I didn't feel like having to rush-build every facility because the mineral count is pretty low except for a couple of bases (I'm not a builder at heart). Ironholm has the Merchant Exchange and the Space Elevator SP along with a handful of other SPs. The lower block corresponds to the base experiment linked above at apolyton. There are not many satellites up (the first block just has two sky farms, the first because of the global survey, and second for the +1 nutrient many of my SSCs needed to avoid starving); in the second block with Energy Directive and Admiralty Base I think there's the same number of satellites.

I will repeat what I said in the thread and which is that even with +6 growth, the Cloning Vats and a sizable quantity of nutrients, Energy Directive took FOREVER to grow. That is why I wanted to start this experiment to determine if it is better to have more, smaller sized, SSCs versus one...ugh I mean two SSCs. You'll note in this run that there are 11 SSCs, plus Ironholm, which I thought about making an SSC but it turned out to be so good at production that I couldn't help use it for other things like Planet's First Planet Buster and secret projects. In the First Run, I was able to scramble up enough resources (ahem...Scout Patrols to shuffle onto transport foils to disband, according to CEO Aaron I should use Scout Rovers, which is what I've been doing since) to build the Merchant Exchange at SSC Energy Directive but this time I couldn't do that as the University was too close to building it himself, which I couldn't allow. 

Like the Energy Directive run (I'll it the First Run from here on out), I used the Freshwater Sea and the Geothermal Shallows...I think that from what we gather from the chart above, one or two mega-SSCs are better than multiples, but one is vulnerable in case of a planet buster strike and can be a real bugger to make it grow large enough to be worth while.

General Overview


Terraformed Area


Two examples of the typical bases...



Some had access to boreholes, or had more facilities that could be made because of easy access to minerals.

Ironholm


For most of the game once the Geothermal Shallows got involved, this base had about 393 energy coming in. Then because I knew I would have to take some pictures I tapped a local acquifer, shuffled some squares around to get some more working squares (two) and redirected one of the crawlers in the Freshwater Sea so that it would bring in another 7 energy, so that I could push over 400 energy per turn coming in the door. It is only about 5 or 6 squares away from Sparta Command.

Social Engineering window and Labs Report...



Now, I want to digress a little bit to talk about inefficiency, for those who are a bit new on the concept.

(I think I have about 70 bases in operation, I believe I hit the bureaucracy limit five or six times )

The farther away from your HQ the base is, the more energy it loose to inefficiency. The more energy coming into the base, the more is lost. The higher your Efficiency rating on the Social Engineering window, the less is lost.

Take for example, this base. I have +4 Efficiency on the SE window. This base is 21 or 22 squares from Sparta Command.



Notice how all the energy coming in is immediately lost? This base is regulated to production and defense (note the proximity, it's part of a five base bastion block) but as far as energy is concerned, nothing is going to help your cash reserves (economy), help with drone control (the 20% allocation by the SE table is worthless here), and nothing whatsoever is going to labs.

Consider another case. This base is fairly remote, in the Northern Ruins...(note the five-base bastion block again)


Again, all the energy is lost to inefficiency. All of it. Orbital Power Transmitters will do you no good with this base, either. As far as energy is concerned, you may as well have zero coming in. But watch what happens when I change all the workers to specialists...



Ahh now we have some stuff going to economy, labs and psych. If only we could feed this population, we'd be set. Each worker consumes one nutrient and specialists need two nutrient, each. So what you do is feed the specialists, crawl in minerals if you can, energy will be a waste of time because of inefficiency losses, and you can still then use the base for producing military units or facilities.

(After I ended all my research, having researched everything, I switched to 50% economy and 50% psych, so this drone in the next picture actually doesn't appear.)



So then you have a typical far-flung base. Since I don't care for building at all, I could pass on the Network Node (but I have the Virtual World), the Energy Bank (but I need it to stop those market crashes), and aside from that, the base is just a production centre. With the boreholes, quantum converter and the Bulk Matter Transmitter SP (adds 50% minerals per base, same thing as a Robotic Assembly Plant), it's GTG and can freely crank out 24-3-1*3 Blink Amphibious troops, 24-1-1*3 SAM rovers, 1-12-1*3 AAA ECM punching bags, or whatever.

Compare the former base to this one, which is a lot closer to my HQ:



Get it? The name of the game is to specalize on certain bases to handle labs and cash, while the rest, as far as I'm concerned, are just production centres. Because specialists are not affected by inefficiency, and I believe managing such a SSC stuffed with specialists is easier than making gigantic energy parks, which are vulnerable to suicide choppers and mind worm attacks, they are ideal for labs and economy work.

While I have the floor, I want to talk about something slightly odd -- as I play on Mac OS X, and am probably the only one here and at apolyton to do so, of a slight difference. There is a binary of AC for Mac OS 7.5.3+ which I can run on OS 9.2.2, and the only thing I can tell that is different versus the OS X version is the build window:



That is the OS X screen. Compare it to the following...



You'll see "Assault" "Defense" "Air Power" and stuff like that. Also the OS X version doesn't need the CD to be inserted, which I welcome. I don't know how the Windows binary looks like, but it's something interesting. (You'll note how the text for the units is pinkish, this is because it is for CONQUER purposes in the view of the Governor, while the only other type I know of is the EXPLORE category, in this case for the 1-1-1*2 Empath Trance unit, which I use for anti-mindworm control when it's time to provoke fungal pops pre-Tree Farm building. Scout Patrols are also in the EXPLORE class. Facilities are also sometimes colored this way, one color for DISCOVER facilities like Network Nodes and BUILD facilities like Tree Farms.)

EDIT: fix some image auto-resizing code

[551262]

I guess I should append my opinion on the end here

One SSC, for me, is easier to manage. There is the problem on my machine (iMac G4, and the First Run I did on my Mac mini Intel machine under OS X) where the large concentration of trawlers and junk in the middle of the Freshwater Sea causes visual lag. Do. Not. Want.



That's Energy Directive from First Run. I'd say that the facilities to boost the labs and econ are easier to build, though it's not fun trying to wait for the base to grow with that slow growth rate. Just before the Hab Dome was finished, the base had 60+ extra nutrients coming in the door, it had a Children's Creche, I had +6 Growth and the Cloning Vats, so that's practically +8 Growth and the CV, can't get any better than that.

Dunno. I'd like to strike an easy balance between countering boredom and micromanagment with practical labs/turn. This is where I'd like some extra input. I'm not much of a Builder, more of a Momentum/Hybrid combo, I hate micromanagement, love warfare (needlejets and choppers bore me though), get bored easily, get stressed easily (which is why I only play for like two or three hours a day per stretch), hate big maps (take too long to get over with), and so forth.

[Buster's Uncle]

I suppose doing a game like this up as an AAR is out of the question?

[551262]

Maybe so. I brought up as a point of discussion basically I'm thinking "how little work on SSCs do I have to do to get a reasonable research rate?"

Also it appears that the forum's auto-resize is hicupping a wee bit.

[ete]

Impressive research income. Some tips: Try an all naval game using factions from the factionpack if you like war but dislike air, allows a larger map to have games which actually end. And for your distant bases losing all income to ineffic, get a creche. It works like +2 effic at that base, well worth it.

[551262]

Anybody else have any other words?

I'm doing this thread for learning of me, and others, as SMAC is a highly ornate game.

Actually in that game I think I have only two Children's Creches...I know Ironholm has one, but I can't think of any other bases that have one. I have tried building them at far-flung bases to see if there's an efficiency recovery, but have found it to be a waste of time and thusly I rarely build them now.

In "normal 551262 games" I play on Small maps, Talent difficulty (because I do it for fun, not to wrack my brains with stress, but when I do want a challenge I play Librarian) and my normal bases have just a recycling tanks, command center via the Command Nexus SP, two or three garrison units, a network node if I have the Virtual World SP (otherwise I don't bother), a perimeter defense if I have the Citizen's Defense Force SP, a Tree Farm, an Aerospace Complex if I intend that  base to produce air units OR if it's on the outskirts of my territory (to fend off marauding air units, coupled with the 1-4-1*2 AAA ECM units, should prove difficult), otherwise, that's about it.

[551262]

So I transcended yesterday, and conquered everybody today. Probably my biggest invasion and military force ever.

Thoughts -- Well, on the SSCs, they did allow me to keep up, (or surpass? couldn't tell) with the University. In the early years, I landed to the southern edge of the Freshwater Sea (one of my hand-picked maps where I have saves "saved" where I have two colony pods in a specific location so I can repeat various exercises at will) and Dedire landed just to the southern edge of the Pholus Ridge. I attacked her to wipe her off the landmass because I wanted total ownership.

In time I made contact with the University and the Believers. Couldn't make contact with the others, the University pushed Morgan off the Garland Crater landmass and the Believers quashed the Hive from the Monsoon Jungle mass. The PKs landed near the island between those two and was fairly weak for most of the game. I had a treaty with University, truce with the PKs (didn't care for a treaty) and the Believers were vendetta from first contact. Towards about 2300 they all pacted together against...me. But because the attacks were quite rare and I had established a very strong foundation and was stronger than all three put together, plus I was interested in the research and economy factors of multi-SSCs versus a single or two SSCs (which I have yet to read any such analysis establishing arguments for either strategy, thus the reason for this thread, to stimulate such discussion) I was content to Build and let them be. Eventually I got Singularity weapons around 2340 and the rest was just building and upgrading a massive military.

The transports were loaded with four 24!-3-1*3 Blink Amphibious infantry (first time using the Blink ability for me, never used it before), four 24-1-1*3 Artillery units, four <24>-1-2*3 SAM rovers, good for attack and air patrol purposes, two 1-12-1*4 AAA ECM punching bags, and two probe teams. Four of these such transports were unleashed at designated landing sites on the University and the Believers simultaneously, with heavy air support and naval units such as <10>-12-4*4 SAM AAA defense foils (the fusion laser was free, and I observed two occasions where this class of unit ate a fusion conventional missile and survived). Backup was supplied in the case of five transports for each front, one with 16 probe teams, one with 16 infantry, one with 16 rovers, et cetera. Then having conquered both factions and joining up near the Monsoon Jungle we loaded up again and crushed the PKs in two turns starting from the time I used the amphibious units to invade the bases to the last one.

So. Back to the original purpose, are multiple smaller SSCs better than fewer larger ones? I don't know. Large (like pop 57) SSCs are vulnerable and take a long time to grow, being that the larger the population, the more specialists, and thusly the more labs & econ. Because it gets progressively more difficult to grow as a base gets bigger and bigger, it could be a hinderance. I don't know. I do know that I get bored with cheap tactics like chop & drop and I hate spending 20 minutes per turn fiddling with all kinds of stuff.

That was the point of this thread, to incite discussion on what is a reasonable SSC arrangement to be competitive in the tech race. As a warmonger, I need tech to make good offensive units, back home I just need Tree Farms, Gene Splicing, Ecological Engineering, Biogenetics and a smiddling of other techs. Some bases don't even get hab complexes -- more hassle, more drones, and more micromanagement to worry about. For the front, I like to have chaos guns or better, plasma steel armour or better, fusion power (cheaper than fission), neural grafting, elite units and air power. My goal is to either pilfer those techs or out-tech everyone else so that they won't stand a chance militarily.

[Buster's Uncle]

Have we talked about making your headquarters your SSC - or vise-versa?  Headquarters suffers zero inefficiency...

[Kirov]

An impressive tech output, I must say. However, I’m not sure if the question “one SSC or more” really hits the nail here. A loose definition of SSC is “a city, usually HQ, where you energy-harvesting crawlers are homed and you try to build ME, TOE and Collider.” So you can’t really have 11 SSCs, they’re all just really developed bases. And you always need to ask if the SSC-strategy is better – for what purposes? If you want a high score, it’s probably cool. If you want to win as fast as possible, I see other options. And if you want to be efficient with your resources, to get the best bang-for-buck ratio, you should probably consider steering clear of any fancy, builder strategies like SSC or energy parks. As you yourself pointed out, an SSC is prone to a nuke. The best way to avoid it is not to disperse your science, but to use the nuke first.

This is really vague and general, as I’m afraid I can’t help you much with SSC. This strategy would get you killed immediately in multi-player, where exploration, intelligence and initiative become a huge factor, and you must count every mineral, as you compare yourself to other players, not to a different strategy. You don’t choose between a network node or energy bank, it’s between a network node or a transport foil for an ambush attack.

When you focus on such strategies as SSC, one of your main reasons must be “but I really like it”. Because if you don't, just scramble your nerve gas choppers and win by carpet bombing. Wins against SSC every time.


PS. Yes, Creches are a must at a much earlier stage. As a rule of thumb, it's one of the several facs you want at most/all your bases.

[Vishniac]

Anybody else have any other words?

Thanks!

Being an industrialist at heart, I have always valued my mineral output more than anything else and so never used any specialist except empaths to quell the occasional drone riot. (of course in SP, bases with more pop than tiles have specialists but I usually let the game handle them).
Now in 2 printscreens you showed me what can be achieved by specialist management.
Thanks, it'll be very useful! 

[551262]

I'm going to ask CEO Aaron on apolyton what he thinks. He's a builder at heart, and a dedicated Morganite, although he did start a topic some time ago discussing the prospect of Building with the Spartans.

Afterwards, he concluded from his experiments, that should the Spartans have nobody around to mug for cash and tech, the only practical thing to do is grow like a disease. The reasoning was that out-teching everybody else is a pipe dream, trying to outbuild a Builder faction is playing against the Spartan strengths, gaining the Spartan player little. He also believes that running Free Market as a Spartan is folly, for sure, because the Spartans can't run Wealth, which FM and Wealth go hand in hand.

[Vishniac]

A thing that particularly impressed me is that even when you have Labs: 0 energy , you can have 54 bonus points and so have a total of 54 lab points!
I guess the specialists are giving bonus points.
What about lab facilities? Do they just give % bonus and thus there is 0 bonus for 0 basic energy, or do they also give research bonus points?
(I hope my question is clear)

[551262]

I would like to answer that question, as I understand what you mean.

But honestly I don't know. The only way I could tell is to go back and scrap off a facility like a NN. Then if the bonus points decreases, we know it's giving bonus to the specialist output.

CEO Aaron replied and he made a couple of good points. He says he'll rig up a game sometime and offer his thoughts.

[Kirov]

I would like to answer that question, as I understand what you mean.

But honestly I don't know. The only way I could tell is to go back and scrap off a facility like a NN. Then if the bonus points decreases, we know it's giving bonus to the specialist output.

This is as simple as you described it, loading a save and scrapping a fac. I did just that and yes, facs lend their bonuses to specialists.

[Fal]

You seem to have some confusion about base growth.  You say that you had +6 Growth (in the SE settings I assume), the Cloning Vats, and 60+ excess nutrients, but your base took forever to grow.  That's because a base can only grow by at most 1 citizen per turn.  If you have the Cloning Vats then your SE Growth rating is meaningless, and more than 2 excess nutrients cannot be used by a base for additional growth.  The only way to grow a single base faster than 1 citizen per turn is to build colony pods in other bases and pod boom your SSC base.