CCE

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Contents

Gameing 4X games, a beautiful space opera, a Turn Based Strategy Game based on a Civilization engine, telling a story of humanity's evolution past earth on and in concert with a godlike gaia entity. It's some of my favorite scifi.

SMAC Strategy Stuff

Summarized from the Alphacentauri2.info Wiki.

Pop-booming

References

  • +6 Growth + +2 Nutrients causes a city-size increase of 1 each turn until the nutrient needs can't be met

  • Build a Children's Creche, Social Engineer towards Democratic/Planned → +6 growth

Crawler Tech

References

  • Crawlers can be used to harvest resources. Use them to bring resources to cities and grow them, perhaps Pop-booming.

  • Support costs eventually slow city growth, crawlers can resolve this.

Once you get the tech, then set all your cities to crank out a crawler or two, then maybe a colony pod or a former (depending on size and what is already built), then more crawlers, formers and colony pods. Maybe a recycling tank or a rec common if the city needs it, but otherwise facilities are low priority at this point. Getting crawlers and terraforming done (so they have something to crawl) and more cities built is the key.

Later in the game sea crawlers (or trawlers) get into wider usage

Crawlers as SIGINT:

They can act as early spotters and obstacles if enemies are coming your way. Trawlers for instance can be freely fitted with the radar special ability when it becomes available

Social Engineering Settings

References

Social Engineering is basically a set of modifiers you apply to your faction which give different Buffs/Debuffs that map to the real systems.

Gaians

Dem/Planned/Wealth

"Your main problem will be lack of cash to support the massive amount of facilities you'll be churning out. To combat this, simply assign a couple of specialists per base (you'll only need 3 or 4) and you're away."

Hive

"for the vast majority of the game you should be in Police State/Planned/Wealth."

  • +3 industry

  • +1 economy

University

"If you're going for sheer size, and using specialists to help early-game research, you're going to be in Dem/Planned/Wealth for much of the early game."

  • Free Market is probably the "optimal" setting if you can keep drones under control.

  • Swap between Planned and Free Market to Pop-boom.

  • Knowledge as soon as you can take it.

Morgan

  • "When you play Morgan, your number one problem is going to be efficiency" → don't use Democracy until late game

  • Frontier/Green/Wealth

Sparta

  • for "rover-rushers" - Police State/Green/Survival

  • for builders - go for Democracy/Free Market/Knowledge early on - Democracy/Green/Knowledge later.

Miriam

  • Research is a bugbear. Start with Democracy/Free Market/Wealth and focus on building up cash, using that for trades and probes to boost research.

  • Swap to Democracy/Green/Power when you attack, loot their research, you should have huge attack bonuses

Peacekeepers

  • "Early on, you've practically got no choice whatsoever - Democracy/Free Market/Wealth is your combo"

  • Planetary Governorship should be your goal - make sure to pop boom so that elections go well, switch to Green to research air units, switch to Knowledge makes it easier to mint Elite units in the late game

  • Once you've done all of this, play as a momentum attack or builder faction

Early SMAC Combat Priorities

References

  • if on an island - ships. Otherwise, just go to:

  • probes

  • rovers with size 4 weapon

"Mobility in an attack is essential" -- can't disagree

  • Centauri Ecology - you need those crawlers to get your empire going.

  • Information Networks & Planetary Networks - to get probes and be able to go planned.

  • Doctrine Mobility - to get rovers and command centers.

  • Applied Physics and Non-Linear Mathematics - weapons.

  • doctrine flexibility - ships

  • High Energy Chemistry & head for planes, MMI and Fusion (puts you pretty much on regular builder beeline)

Combat Encounters for Dummies

  • Locate the opponent with scouting rovers

  • Send out probes

  • Send out probes by sea

  • Infiltrate. Infiltrate.

  • Check diplomatic relationships

  • Investigate garrison units

  • Make sure they're not attacking you

  • Plan for a sweeping victory, no quagmire

  • Plan the route to try to avoid detection

  • Don't drag it out

    • "One mistake commonly seen is reluctance to divert the resources needed to get a war over with. Sometimes players wish to at the same time build a facility or something because it will improve the base output later or because switching away would cause a mineral loss"

Early Defense Priorities

  • Infiltrate

  • If it looks like you're about to be attacked, switch to military production, don't hesitate

  • Defensive Terraforming:

    • Having a ring around the city of forest squares means the attacker cannot roll in from afar but needs to park in front of your your city before attacking.

    • Having a 4-1-2 in the city means you can kill off two incoming rovers before he gets to fire a shot. This basically forces him to bring in minimum 3 rovers or to bring along defensive armor and stack his units.

    • Making roads on the forest squares enables you to move out - hit and move back in.

    • Just don't extend the roads so that he can use them to move in on you even faster

  • Sea bases just need to be beefed up with defensive units

    • "A transport can hold two units so most often what you will meet is two attacking units being landed"

    • But if they bring two boats... plan to re-take.

NEXT Builder Strategy

References

Running Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri on NixOS in Xephyr and Wine with wrapWine

This uses my little wrapWine module and it uses Xephyr to keep the game from taking full-screen control of my desktop and forcing it to an unnatural resolution.

wrapWine sets up a simple shell script wrapper[fn:1] to launch my games in their own WINE environments.

It would be nice if this could run terranx.exe too... hrmm..

nix:tangle ~/nix/pkgs/smac.nix:noweb yes
{ pkgs, stdenv, lib }:

let wrapWine = (pkgs.callPackage ../lib/wrapWine.nix {});
in wrapWine {
  name = "sid-meiers-alpha-centauri";
  firstrunScript = ''
    <<firstrun-script>>
    <<pracx-configuration>>
  '';
  setupScript = ''
    <<startup-script>>
  '';
  executable = "terran.exe";
  chdir = "$SMACDIR";
  teardownScript = ''
    <<teardown-script>>
  '';
  # tricks = [ "vcrun2010" ];
}

Like I said, it goes in Xephyr so this startup script starts it. SMACDIR is referenced in the script, and is the location the file is installed to in probably ~/.wine-nix/sid-meiers-alpha-centauri.

shell#+name: startup-script
export SMACDIR="$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/GOG Games/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/"
Xephyr -br -ac -noreset -screen 1900x1200 :1 &
export DISPLAY=:1
export WINEARCH=win32
export WINEDEBUG=warn-all,fixme-all
sleep 2

And this teardown script kills it 😉

shell#+name: teardown-script
pkill Xephyr

If that WINEPREFIX doesn't exist, it'll run the firstrunScript. It encompasses an install of

shell#+name: firstrun-script
echo "-- Setting up SMAC"
wine $HOME/sync/setup_sid_meiers_alpha_centauri_2.0.2.23.exe

echo "-- Setting up SMACX"
wine $HOME/sync/SMACX_UP_v2.1_Installer.exe

echo "-- Setting up Yitzi"
${pkgs.rsync}/bin/rsync -av "$HOME/sync/Alpha Centauri Patch/" "$SMACDIR"
${pkgs.rsync}/bin/rsync -av "$HOME/sync/terranx.exe" "$SMACDIR"

pushd "$SMACDIR"
echo "-- Setting up PRACX"
wine pracxpatch 
popd

PRACX is configured disabled-by-default in Yitzi's patch ... meh. Turn it on, make the dimensions match what's in my

shell#+name: pracx-configuration
echo "-- Patching Configuration to use PRACX"
${pkgs.gnused}/bin/sed -i "s Disabled=1 Disabled=0 " "$SMACDIR/Alpha Centauri.Ini"
${pkgs.gnused}/bin/sed -i "s ScreenWidth=1024 ScreenWidth=1920 " "$SMACDIR/Alpha Centauri.Ini"
${pkgs.gnused}/bin/sed -i "s ScreenHeight=<DEFAULT> ScreenHeight=1280 " "$SMACDIR/Alpha Centauri.Ini"
${pkgs.gnused}/bin/sed -i "s WindowWidth=<DEFAULT> WindowWidth=1920 " "$SMACDIR/Alpha Centauri.Ini"
${pkgs.gnused}/bin/sed -i "s WindowHeight=<DEFAULT> WindowHeight=1280 " "$SMACDIR/Alpha Centauri.Ini"

Finally, this is installed through Arroyo Home Manager and my rixpkgs overlay.

nix:tangle ~/nix/hm/smac.nix
{ pkgs, ... }:

{
  home.packages = [ pkgs.smac ];
}

and then run sid-meiers-alpha-centauri.

Footnotes

[fn:1] I'd like add XDG icons...

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