Vile forms of Chiron lie rotting my mind Feasting like maggots - maggots in flesh So left your ruined cortex behind Now the mindworm knows glee as it nibbles upon your spine!
@@GuardsmanBass while Miriam is a bad neighbor, i personally feel Santiago or Yang is worse. I can stop the Church armies with some forest bunkers and sensors. Having poor tech means my guns are better. Yang and Santiago are unmanageable with human wave and assault rovers.
@@mrbluebell2735 Definitely. Miriam can be managed to some extent (as long as you can stop her probe teams), but Yang and Santiago are frighteningly fast in getting out those crucial Impact rovers. Yang even more due to his industry bonus and him outfitting his rovers with Synthmetal armor. The aliens are a nightmare and I rarely play a game with them in it. They are guaranteed to declare war on you even if you can't talk to them yet, and they're the only AI's that will extort you for tech/credits and still declare war on you afterward. (Although I'm not sure if that's a bug or intended─They love asking for a loan and when you give it to them they declare war on you)
@@suedeciviii7142 Same here, haven't played in 10+ years but love learning about the strategy and experiencing the nostalgia nonetheless. It would be cool if you uploaded a full Alpha Centauri playthrough with commentary, like @henrik9658 does for Civ IV!
Not spending money even in late stage will put you at risk of a "Market crash" event, which drains your reserves down to a smaller amount. If you do not spend the energy reserves you got, then the game's gonna end up spending it for you in a bad way :).
Good catch if unable to build the Planetary Energy Grid project. Getting enough energy banks is near impossible in every base to protect vs market crash. Keep spending to snowball in the meantime.
Did you know that in game you can left click on that little terrain box you show at 9:55 and it will display how the square will respond to certain terraforming benefits? Super useful for players starting the game trying to make sense of it all. 😊
@@suedeciviii7142 It’s accurate to the full potential yields of a square, not to the nutrient cap (etc). I just booted up a new game and found a nutrient resource on a moist square and the readout shift+right gave me was “Nutrients: 3, With Farm: 4”
@@suedeciviii7142it accurately displays what you will get with the current caps. Once the caps are unlocked it shows the uncapped yields. For example jungle gives two nutrients but will not benefit from farms until the cap is unlocked. The display shows this. With the cap it says there is no benefit to farms. After unlocked it shows 3. Farmed jungle with bonus nutrients goes crazy. 5 nutrients with the cap.
Suede CivIII: "you play Alpha Centauri on the lower difficualty levels, is this experience everything you want it to be?" Me who has never played Alpha Centauri in my life but is very invested in videos about it:"He read me like a book! how does he do it???"
Hahah. Are you curious about giving it a try? It's like $2.70 on sale right now. I was sceptical, but some viewers bullied me into it and I'm hooked now
@@suedeciviii7142 I already have it. Bought it a while ago when I was looking for a civ-like game i played as a kid, all i remember was the game had underwater buildings and a space(orbit?) building.
Yang: Morgan's coming over. Let's go downstairs and meet him. Miriam: I don't like him. I'm staying up here on the roof. Yang: We must descent. Miriam: I hate you.
Random useful fact: transports and formers suffer from worms for having "non-combat unit" debuff. Get them at least armor 2 before sending to some dangerous area.
SMAC remains my favourite game of all time. I played it pretty heavily for about 5 years when it came out, and still come back to it every year or so. I've played all the factions at one point or another, but Yang remains my favourite. Even if he's an asshole that everyone tends to hate. 😁 It's great to see more content for SMAC!
5:40 A little note here, a golden age gives you effective +2 growth and +1 economy in the base. It adds 1 energy/tile only if your faction is at 1 economy. There's an odd interaction where whether you have the psych to be in GA depends on whether you're already in GA, so AFAIK it's sometimes technically possible to hike your psych spending for one turn to start golden ages, and then lower it back down and still keep the GAs. Really unlikely in practice though, since being in GA requires having zero drones, and psych spending makes talents before it clears drones.
On former and supply convoy use. Orders to improve/gather can still be issued after movement. Its an optimization that can literally save a turn of terraform and productivity in a base.
One thing you might mention is the value of early snowballing. I've found that playing as Miriam (I like to dissent, sue me!) if I rush out a whole bunch of bases and formers fast, I can build up an unassailable lead. Research mostly just military techs, as I'm going to steal the others...
Keep these up! Fantastic. Honestly, that whole list of topics sounded good. I think your summary videos (like this one) are sorely needed as you've observed. I also like the idea of game summaries too.
The reason I always trade every tech possible with every faction is that once I can build needlejets I've basically already won the game, so the faster I get there the better it is.
I find that on the highest difficulty levels the AI is quite good at building interceptors and units with anti air buffs though. So what I end up doing then is to spam missiles to break through the toughest defense units before sending in the air force to clean up, but it can still be a challenge. Then you can capture the base with a drop unit. This is especially fun very late game when you can send missiles and then orbital insert (but you have usually effectively won already before that).
Man, this might inspire me to pick Alpha Centauri back up. Always played it as a teenager in the middle levels of difficulty (I forget what they were called, but like a 5/8 on the scale). I've played civ 5 and civ 6 in more recent times, and can easily win on deity, but for some reason alpha centauri feels so daunting to me now, even though I adored it back in the day.
NAVAL PROBES, 100%. It's often tremendously easy to seize bases, and it's a lot easier to mind-control a base for a beachhead than invading it with troop transports. Just in general, you should turn off the automatic workshop and make your own units. There's some fun stuff there. I really wish you could make flying probe units, but you can make flying colony pods if you're playing on an island map. I'm curious on your Former choices. Do you put them on auto? Try to optimize the terrain early on, or just build Forests? Once you have Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests, Forests are just better than almost any other terraforming option until you get the really good fungus late game.
Yeah, less dramatically I often put both colonies and formers on faster chassis so they don't waste so many turns getting to their destination to do their thing. In easy terrain, a former on a rover chassis terraforms dramatically faster just because it can move to the next square AND start to terraform in the same turn. They're more expensive, but that stops mattering at even decent production levels. Later on, when you get super formers, building a road network can go ridiculously fast if you have a bunch of rover formers because one makes a road, the next goes past it on the road and makes road THAT TURN, the next goes past both and does the same . . .
@@purplelibraryguy8729 a one move former is still able to work even after travelling over a square. While it does appear to lose about half a turn of productivity, a pile of formers working on the same square will finish a turn or 2 faster. Rounded up. Same applies for supply convoys.
how about discussing the late game? Ive never played a game when the 4th reactor mattered. Also, you mentioned naval probes in this one, but never mentioned the unit designer. Not designing units for specific tasks could be a beginner mistake too
Currently I would say I know the early quite well, but the further in I get, the more my inexperience betrays me. And yes, absolutely! I'd like to do a video on essential non-default unit designs
@@hoi-polloi1863 When you get Ecological Engineering and unlock Tree Farms/Hybrid Forests/Hab Complexes, it might be rewarding looking into terraforming Condensors and Boreholes around your core bases. If you then pop boom and/or send colony pods into your core bases until they reach size 14 (or 16 with Ascetic Virtues) you gain extremely productive core bases that are very flexible. With these bases set up you can auto-improve your outer bases while only having to micro-manage the core of your empire.
One HUGE improvement to supply crawlers would be to assign them to a city without having to drive it to the city and clicking "support from here." Edit: thinking about this, it could make supply crawlers too OP because you could switch every crawler's production to a single base and 1-turn complete anything. I suppose the mechanism could be to switch it's support if it's in the production radius of the city in question?
Supply crawlers would benefit from some QoL stuff, but are also a bit too strong. They would need some sort of nerf I think. But I do think they fit SMAC well in principle
This is a good video on Alpha Centari ❤❤ and I would like to know more about the Personality of the A.I. players, your voice always soothes me ❤ Edit: P. S.: For example, is the Alpha Centauri's A.I. personalities more complex than that of Civilization 3 or Civilization 5? Because I know that in Civ 5, leaders have many values that they act on/upon... And in Civ 6 Leaders would like you or dislike you if you fulfill their Agenda.
All the AIs will generally act the same UNLESS you put in "random leader personality and agenda" in the setup rules. However, that also lets them act very different from each other. The game is tough, more tough than you'd expect. They can be predictable though.
@@suedeciviii7142 I guess it's the Golden Age description. +1 Economy instead of +1 energy per tile? The latter doesn't sound familiar to me. EDIT: I should have read the rest of the comments first. Another commenter already pointed this out.
Are there any difficulty mods for AC? AC is amazing is a concept, but unfortunately the AI is arguably the weakest in Civ series, and even on max difficulty it's trivial to win with just about any victory condition, even if you do not use exploits, and there are many insane exploits in AC.
Vile forms of Chiron lie rotting my mind
Feasting like maggots - maggots in flesh
So left your ruined cortex behind
Now the mindworm knows glee as it nibbles upon your spine!
7:39 "Miriam responds well to nothing" ain't that the truth
Fantastic guide, looking forward to more smac content
Worst faction to draw as a neighbor besides the Aliens in that game.
@@GuardsmanBass while Miriam is a bad neighbor, i personally feel Santiago or Yang is worse. I can stop the Church armies with some forest bunkers and sensors. Having poor tech means my guns are better. Yang and Santiago are unmanageable with human wave and assault rovers.
@@mrbluebell2735 Definitely. Miriam can be managed to some extent (as long as you can stop her probe teams), but Yang and Santiago are frighteningly fast in getting out those crucial Impact rovers. Yang even more due to his industry bonus and him outfitting his rovers with Synthmetal armor. The aliens are a nightmare and I rarely play a game with them in it. They are guaranteed to declare war on you even if you can't talk to them yet, and they're the only AI's that will extort you for tech/credits and still declare war on you afterward. (Although I'm not sure if that's a bug or intended─They love asking for a loan and when you give it to them they declare war on you)
I haven't played Alpha Centauri for over a decade, but the youtube algorithm decided I needed to watch this tips video. And it was right, good video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@suedeciviii7142 Same here, haven't played in 10+ years but love learning about the strategy and experiencing the nostalgia nonetheless.
It would be cool if you uploaded a full Alpha Centauri playthrough with commentary, like @henrik9658 does for Civ IV!
Not spending money even in late stage will put you at risk of a "Market crash" event, which drains your reserves down to a smaller amount. If you do not spend the energy reserves you got, then the game's gonna end up spending it for you in a bad way :).
Good catch if unable to build the Planetary Energy Grid project. Getting enough energy banks is near impossible in every base to protect vs market crash. Keep spending to snowball in the meantime.
If you’re playing Morgan you want an energy back in every city anyway though
@@monolith94 Yes, but there is always that new city you settled or just conquered that doesn't have a bank.
Did you know that in game you can left click on that little terrain box you show at 9:55 and it will display how the square will respond to certain terraforming benefits? Super useful for players starting the game trying to make sense of it all. 😊
I did not know that, is it accurate? Or does it get tripped up by the nutrient cap, etc
@@suedeciviii7142 It’s accurate to the full potential yields of a square, not to the nutrient cap (etc).
I just booted up a new game and found a nutrient resource on a moist square and the readout shift+right gave me was “Nutrients: 3, With Farm: 4”
@@suedeciviii7142it accurately displays what you will get with the current caps. Once the caps are unlocked it shows the uncapped yields. For example jungle gives two nutrients but will not benefit from farms until the cap is unlocked. The display shows this. With the cap it says there is no benefit to farms. After unlocked it shows 3. Farmed jungle with bonus nutrients goes crazy. 5 nutrients with the cap.
Suede CivIII: "you play Alpha Centauri on the lower difficualty levels, is this experience everything you want it to be?"
Me who has never played Alpha Centauri in my life but is very invested in videos about it:"He read me like a book! how does he do it???"
Hahah. Are you curious about giving it a try? It's like $2.70 on sale right now. I was sceptical, but some viewers bullied me into it and I'm hooked now
@@suedeciviii7142 I already have it. Bought it a while ago when I was looking for a civ-like game i played as a kid, all i remember was the game had underwater buildings and a space(orbit?) building.
@@arashelahi2618 Only game I can think of is Civ 2 Test of Time.
Or maybe Outpost by the Studio Sierra?
@@suedeciviii7142 most likely Civ2 or one of the call to power games, due to my poor memory I cannot tell, even when I play them
SMAC in the lower difficulty essentially is a sci-fy book. A quite good one.
If Miriam is significantly ahead of you in tech, something has gone seriously wrong and you need to take a good hard look at yourself.
Yang: Morgan's coming over. Let's go downstairs and meet him.
Miriam: I don't like him. I'm staying up here on the roof.
Yang: We must descent.
Miriam: I hate you.
Random useful fact: transports and formers suffer from worms for having "non-combat unit" debuff. Get them at least armor 2 before sending to some dangerous area.
Please please please make more SMAC videos
There are literally no other videos except for Let's Plays (hyperbolic)
Great video btw cheerio!🎉
I second this! I really enjoy Suede's style of video and game presentation.
individual faction guides would be amazing!
I second this!
SMAC remains my favourite game of all time. I played it pretty heavily for about 5 years when it came out, and still come back to it every year or so. I've played all the factions at one point or another, but Yang remains my favourite. Even if he's an asshole that everyone tends to hate. 😁
It's great to see more content for SMAC!
5:40 A little note here, a golden age gives you effective +2 growth and +1 economy in the base. It adds 1 energy/tile only if your faction is at 1 economy.
There's an odd interaction where whether you have the psych to be in GA depends on whether you're already in GA, so AFAIK it's sometimes technically possible to hike your psych spending for one turn to start golden ages, and then lower it back down and still keep the GAs. Really unlikely in practice though, since being in GA requires having zero drones, and psych spending makes talents before it clears drones.
Oh damn, good catch! Big oversight there
On former and supply convoy use. Orders to improve/gather can still be issued after movement. Its an optimization that can literally save a turn of terraform and productivity in a base.
Interesting! I'll keep that in mind for my next play through
One thing you might mention is the value of early snowballing. I've found that playing as Miriam (I like to dissent, sue me!) if I rush out a whole bunch of bases and formers fast, I can build up an unassailable lead. Research mostly just military techs, as I'm going to steal the others...
Keep these up! Fantastic. Honestly, that whole list of topics sounded good. I think your summary videos (like this one) are sorely needed as you've observed. I also like the idea of game summaries too.
Will be getting aloha centauri on gog tomorrow
Nice to see! Let me know if you have any trouble setting it up
Loving these Alpha Centauri videos. :D Keep up the great work!
The reason I always trade every tech possible with every faction is that once I can build needlejets I've basically already won the game, so the faster I get there the better it is.
Yes, exactly, humans do better with technology. But challenge yourself!
I find that on the highest difficulty levels the AI is quite good at building interceptors and units with anti air buffs though. So what I end up doing then is to spam missiles to break through the toughest defense units before sending in the air force to clean up, but it can still be a challenge. Then you can capture the base with a drop unit. This is especially fun very late game when you can send missiles and then orbital insert (but you have usually effectively won already before that).
Man, this might inspire me to pick Alpha Centauri back up. Always played it as a teenager in the middle levels of difficulty (I forget what they were called, but like a 5/8 on the scale).
I've played civ 5 and civ 6 in more recent times, and can easily win on deity, but for some reason alpha centauri feels so daunting to me now, even though I adored it back in the day.
I'd like to see just more content of your about SMAC. Keep up the good work!
NAVAL PROBES, 100%. It's often tremendously easy to seize bases, and it's a lot easier to mind-control a base for a beachhead than invading it with troop transports.
Just in general, you should turn off the automatic workshop and make your own units. There's some fun stuff there. I really wish you could make flying probe units, but you can make flying colony pods if you're playing on an island map.
I'm curious on your Former choices. Do you put them on auto? Try to optimize the terrain early on, or just build Forests? Once you have Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests, Forests are just better than almost any other terraforming option until you get the really good fungus late game.
As a holdover from playing Civ 3 I never automate. Although having a couple on auto-clear fungus would be handy
Yeah, less dramatically I often put both colonies and formers on faster chassis so they don't waste so many turns getting to their destination to do their thing. In easy terrain, a former on a rover chassis terraforms dramatically faster just because it can move to the next square AND start to terraform in the same turn. They're more expensive, but that stops mattering at even decent production levels. Later on, when you get super formers, building a road network can go ridiculously fast if you have a bunch of rover formers because one makes a road, the next goes past it on the road and makes road THAT TURN, the next goes past both and does the same . . .
@@purplelibraryguy8729 a one move former is still able to work even after travelling over a square. While it does appear to lose about half a turn of productivity, a pile of formers working on the same square will finish a turn or 2 faster. Rounded up. Same applies for supply convoys.
@@purplelibraryguy8729a rover former can also better escape mind worms / enemy units!
Good stuff. I always tended to play in the middle difficulties and always play the same way, but maybe I give another character/strategy a try.
Roll up with good land, and try the higher difficulties out!
Nice, had a great game a few months ago! Looking forward to more! ;)
how about discussing the late game? Ive never played a game when the 4th reactor mattered.
Also, you mentioned naval probes in this one, but never mentioned the unit designer. Not designing units for specific tasks could be a beginner mistake too
Currently I would say I know the early quite well, but the further in I get, the more my inexperience betrays me.
And yes, absolutely! I'd like to do a video on essential non-default unit designs
@@suedeciviii7142 Trance defenders absolutely - costs nothing extra to equip
@@Stephens_Rocket Good catch! I've used the base trance infantry but hadn't thought of adding it to synthmetal garrisons, etc
Thanks! I really like playing Alpha Centauri and its good te get some tips from you!
I would love to see a video about terraforming strategies. What to terraform where and when.
Me too! I've gotten into a rut of new town -> build former -> road to another town -> auto-improve home base. Works, but can we do better?
@@hoi-polloi1863 When you get Ecological Engineering and unlock Tree Farms/Hybrid Forests/Hab Complexes, it might be rewarding looking into terraforming Condensors and Boreholes around your core bases. If you then pop boom and/or send colony pods into your core bases until they reach size 14 (or 16 with Ascetic Virtues) you gain extremely productive core bases that are very flexible. With these bases set up you can auto-improve your outer bases while only having to micro-manage the core of your empire.
One HUGE improvement to supply crawlers would be to assign them to a city without having to drive it to the city and clicking "support from here."
Edit: thinking about this, it could make supply crawlers too OP because you could switch every crawler's production to a single base and 1-turn complete anything. I suppose the mechanism could be to switch it's support if it's in the production radius of the city in question?
Supply crawlers would benefit from some QoL stuff, but are also a bit too strong. They would need some sort of nerf I think. But I do think they fit SMAC well in principle
This is a good video on Alpha Centari ❤❤ and I would like to know more about the Personality of the A.I. players, your voice always soothes me ❤
Edit: P. S.: For example, is the Alpha Centauri's A.I. personalities more complex than that of Civilization 3 or Civilization 5? Because I know that in Civ 5, leaders have many values that they act on/upon... And in Civ 6 Leaders would like you or dislike you if you fulfill their Agenda.
All the AIs will generally act the same UNLESS you put in "random leader personality and agenda" in the setup rules. However, that also lets them act very different from each other. The game is tough, more tough than you'd expect. They can be predictable though.
@@perrymeril thanks for the answer!! 😊 Much appreciated!!
More complex than Civ 3 I'd say. Although as @perrymeril pointed out, more intricate AI are more exploitable
@@suedeciviii7142 definitely more interesting than any civ leader for certain. These ai atleast feel alive.
Hey Suede, enjoying the AC videos, can you do a tutorial on how to install the thinker mod?
th-cam.com/video/Rv5AH89nTnc/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=EdooGaming
Here you go!
Moar alpha Centauri plz. Any content is good
Script written, next video will be Alpha Centauri
@suedeciviii7142 Yesh! Happy weekend bro
Could you do a SMAC video entirely about the thinker mod? Just got mine working!
That would be great! I've been trying out Thinker recently and it's definitely in a different league.
I would like to see descriptions on what buffs does the AI get at different difficulty levels.
As always: It's the economy
How good is the auto-improve for formers in AC? I'm curious how badly I'm being punished when I get lazy and automate improvements.
Do you have the Thinker mod?
@@suedeciviii7142 No.
I'm not actually sure why I'm watching this. I've beaten the game on transcend, and regularly play on that difficulty. I guess you can always improve.
To look for mistakes in my video of course :) There's one, did you catch it?
@@suedeciviii7142 I guess it's the Golden Age description. +1 Economy instead of +1 energy per tile? The latter doesn't sound familiar to me. EDIT: I should have read the rest of the comments first. Another commenter already pointed this out.
Are there any difficulty mods for AC? AC is amazing is a concept, but unfortunately the AI is arguably the weakest in Civ series, and even on max difficulty it's trivial to win with just about any victory condition, even if you do not use exploits, and there are many insane exploits in AC.
Do you mean beyond the thinker mod? That's the one I mention at the start of the video