Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Author Topic: Alpha Centauri AAR: Human Resources  (Read 2754 times)

Loud Whispers

  • Bay Watcher
  • They said we have to aim higher, so we dug deeper.
    • View Profile
    • I APPLAUD YOU SIRRAH
Alpha Centauri AAR: Human Resources
« on: May 12, 2017, 10:41:21 am »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The year is 2100, mankind's last hopes for survival have landed upon a planet in the Alpha Centauri, yet few have survived the planetfall. Sister Miriam Godwinson looked upon the planetary survey, seeing a world given over to her flock.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The mission was clear: Populate the world, refuse to be contained, be a sea of people spread over the land and seas. If mankind was in peril, mankind had to go forth and multiply! Venturing forth up the Sunny Mesa, Believing terraformers planted verdant forests everywhere they went, the planet's indigenous xenofungus unable to compete with the carboniferous earth-plants unleashed upon a native ecosystem. Such aggressive plantation of invasive species held some advantages, it helped change the atmosphere to be more conducive to human life, it replaced the xenofungus and cleared infested space for human habitation, and the carbon it locked up greatly reduced the proliferation of the native mindworms - worms which had the dreadful habit of overrunning human settlements, implanting their larvae directly into their brain.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The year 2105 Prophet Cha Dawn and Foreman Domai emerged from the fungus, carving out their own space in the high-nitrate sands. It would take 60 more years for Miriam to find the comm-links to establish lines of communication with the other two factions, establishing an amicable relationship with the Drones and Planet Cult. A treaty of friendship with a proletariat dictatorship and a pact of sisterhood with environmental ecowarlords wasn't all that bad of an idea compared to facing no less than four alien invaders alone.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The Xenos were powerful, possessed of far superior technology and resources than the fledgling human colonies. Weaponized mindworm boils were somewhat useful, and in lieu of better technology, simply drowning the aliens in hordes of humans would likely achieve the same effect - thus the three human factions formed an uneasy alliance with which to strike the Usurpers and Caretakers, the four alien factions any one of which was superior to us.

Patchy

  • Bay Watcher
  • Mukyu
    • View Profile
Re: Alpha Centauri AAR: Human Resources
« Reply #1 on: May 16, 2017, 04:43:03 pm »

Sweet another AC game. So 4 alien factions now this time? Well at least they'll always be at war with each other. Might give those technologically backwards humans a chance hehe. Noticed you picked Domai with his malus to science and Cha Dawn.... honestly pretty horrible in the hands of an ai. Human-kind is gonna suck at science till you manage to ramp up the believers to ridiculous levels again or maybe go probe crazy on the aliens. Get your nerve gas weapons ready, at least that is my go to strat when dealing with the aliens early game.

G'luck and following
« Last Edit: May 16, 2017, 08:17:52 pm by Patchy »
Logged

Loud Whispers

  • Bay Watcher
  • They said we have to aim higher, so we dug deeper.
    • View Profile
    • I APPLAUD YOU SIRRAH
Re: Alpha Centauri AAR: Human Resources
« Reply #2 on: May 19, 2017, 06:20:02 pm »

Sweet another AC game. So 4 alien factions now this time? Well at least they'll always be at war with each other. Might give those technologically backwards humans a chance hehe. Noticed you picked Domai with his malus to science and Cha Dawn.... honestly pretty horrible in the hands of an ai. Human-kind is gonna suck at science till you manage to ramp up the believers to ridiculous levels again or maybe go probe crazy on the aliens. Get your nerve gas weapons ready, at least that is my go to strat when dealing with the aliens early game.

G'luck and following
My thinking of this game was to get maxscore, the highest score I've ever achieved, with the most significant bottleneck for maxscore being how much population you can cram into the map in 500 turns (or how much terraforming one can tolerate before perishing). Thus: Human Resources. Miriam can field horrifying hordes of formers, probe teams and colony pods without even compromising one bit on security - with four alien factions ensuring there will always be a high-tech foe to probe upon, yet no grand coalitions arrayed against the orange blob colonization machine. This should in theory allow for complete saturation of the entire map within 500 turns

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The battle for the Monsoon Rainforest went exceedingly well, with Believing mindworms and rovers overrunning the Usurper outpost despite their technological superiority. Unfortunately, the Free Drones were the ones who ultimately captured the Usurper base, capturing the rainforest for themselves and stunting Believing colonization efforts. This was not enough of a setback to justify abandoning the Believing-Free Drone treaty of friendship, certainly not in the face of such vastly superior aliens. Thus the Believers traded and stored energy, accruing a warchest of 1,500 energy credits, waiting for one of the enemy's invaders to arrive on the perimeter - ripe for capture and reverse engineering.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The dramatic struggles of facing a foe whose single soldier is equal to six of yours could not compare however, to the Believer's efforts to spread like oil across water - a thinly applied paste of humanity scattered all across the red surface of Planet, planting forests and children alike all over a uniform grid with each 1,000 man outpost in mutual support of all but the most remote fringe bases. With the discovery of the Weather Paradigm, teaching the faction how to manipulate the very weather of Planet itself - rain condensers were constructed, pouring the heavens down unto the forests. The loss of the rainforests ceased to be an issue, for now the arid mountains would be the bounty of the earth, and the sparsely populated outposts mark the sites of future cathedral-cities.
Trees provide a balanced mix of food, minerals and energy when harvested, which increases with the usage of tree farms and hybrid farms - base facilities unlocked with the advent of planetary economics. Condensers provide a bonus to food production, but normally cannot be placed on forests, yet there is a curious mechanic whereby forests can spread onto tiles with condensers which allows for the wondrous creation of condensed hybrid forests - whose productivity is only rivaled by late-game intensive resource networks.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
By the year 2210, with the construction of the Planetary Transit Network, allowing the people of Planet to flow as an uncontainable vapour through the world, the foundations for this hyper-productive hybrid tree farm grid were being set by a fleet of terraformers, cultivating the future working grounds of the dormant masses of agrarian colonists. The 23rd century stage was being set for the great mass mobilization of the Believer's human resources.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Map of faction territories and their bases - the most notable thing about the Believer grid being that while other factions are constrained by the availability of fertile mountainsides and coastal communication lines, the Believing grid covers all terrain with impunity and disregard.

Dorsidwarf

  • Bay Watcher
  • [INTERSTELLAR]
    • View Profile
Re: Alpha Centauri AAR: Human Resources
« Reply #3 on: May 20, 2017, 02:19:05 pm »

A LW AAR? Oh boy!
Logged
Quote from: Rodney Ootkins
Everything is going to be alright

Patchy

  • Bay Watcher
  • Mukyu
    • View Profile
Re: Alpha Centauri AAR: Human Resources
« Reply #4 on: May 23, 2017, 04:44:01 pm »

Well should be an interesting run then. I tried to see how much pop I could cram in, in the 500 turns too once way back. I went with absolute min distance between bases though, and it appears you have spaced yours a lil further apart. I also had all human factions, so I did have to burn a bunch of time and resources into neutering them so my hive blob could expand uncontested. I forget what pop I ended with unfortunately.

My usual play style was to get up to roughly 10 to 15 bases and then start building them high. The mass pop one I had so many bases, not sure how many anymore. But it made the satellites scary powerful, especially since my hive with police/planned there was getting the kind energy rates I'd see on my Morgan demo/fm games.
Logged