Datapod recovered

Free Drones or Planet Bust.

Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.

So pleased this still works on Win10

Wish other played and appreciated it.
Such in-depth world building.

What went wrong with the Alien Xfire, /vr/?

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Indigenous lifeforms.

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>>3776725
>>3776501
>>3775896
Read it in game's invoice.
I want to install and play SMAC again if I were not stuck in this job.

>>3776854
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJlPr2KHSFo

>>3776859
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdCB9yE9Hcc

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SMAC was the first game I ever modded

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I just like imagining University at war. In my mind, high-morale-low-tech vs. low-morale-high-tech (morale meaning military training and such) looks something like this:

>"Doctor Zakharov, the Spartans are invading!"
>"What? Seriously? Shit. Ok, what do we have in the labs that's killed someone recently?"
>"Um, three people died in a graviton projector accident last Tuesday."
>"Ok, slap some treads on it and get a grad student to aim it at the enemy."

https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/

I ran across this when I was googling the secret projects, and I can't stop reading now. It basically has interpretations for all the quotes in the game, and thoughts what the different techs and buildings do. Needless to say, I find it all pretty interesting.

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>>3776678
Honestly, I think AX gets more bad rep than it probably deserves.

Not because it's amazing or anything, but because it's pretty similar to vanilla SMAC fundamentally, as far as writting is concerned.

With that in mind, think the thing that really ruined AX for me was the balancing. I remember having a fairly easy time beating transcend or thinker on AX--not because I was all that good at the game, but just because the Nautilus Pirates had such a big advantage over all the other nations, just because you could colonize on water tiles at the very beginning of the game, and it didn't help that there were basically no penalties for colonizing so aggresively until you reached what I remember to be a ridiculously high threshold that I almost never managed to reach in a typical game.

The writting and voice acting for AX, in my opinion, is pretty on-par with original SMAC. The glaring difference for AX is the leaders. Even though they were really just very shallow archetypes, they were good archetypes, and, most of all, they worked together really well: the space communists was contrasted by Morgan Industries, the evangilists had le space scientist man, and so on. AX didn't have that sort of interplay. Plus, I don't even remember half of the factions in AX. Except for Aki-Zeta. Something about her made my adolescent pingas rock hard, and I don't know why, except that she kind of looks like the lead actress from Crash.

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>>3777978
The factions in SMAX, from what I can tell, act as mixtures of the other factions

e.g. Planet Cult = Believers + Gaians
Madly hardcore religious, devoted to Planet

Data Angels = University + Morgan

Cyborgs = University + Hive

Free Drones = Hive + Spartans

The only one I can't place is the pirates. They're just plain watery

>>3777978
>>3779031
Pirates might be something like Spartan + Morgan, militant and individualistic. But yeah, they're my least favorite faction too. I hate the way the AI builds its sea bases right next to your land. At least the aliens feel dangerous (sort of), but the Pirates are just annoying.

The other problem I have with the new factions is that in the original game, things like "Planet Cult" gets mentioned way later on in the text bits, so it feels like they should be more like new factions that spawn partway through they game, kind of how like the aliens do, and not full blown replacements for the old ones. Besides the Cult, Cyborgs and Drones could fit that bill pretty well too.

what do you all think of the "canon" interpretation from >>3777340 that yang never made it to the late game? He stops appearing on quotes, which is a shame considering he's the edgiest faction around.

Funnily, AC doesn't have as strong an authoritarian bent as I'd initially thought- the hive is the only true police state faction in canon so far as I can see

>>3779096
I think part that is that factions like the Hive and Spartans will want to conquer the world before the endgame where they stop appearing, and Peacekeepers most likely will try to aim for a diplomatic victory, which also happens during the mid game. That could explain why those factions don't appear later on, since the player most likely won't be playing that far into the future as them, so it makes sense to give the spotlight to factions that will complete most of the tech tree.

The only problem with this is that you can try the economic victory relatively early too, and Morgan still appears in many of the late game techs, as does Miriam. Still, if a player is aiming for a transcendence/builder/tech victory, Miriam could probably still be around "dissenting" as an enemy faction, since you probably won't have bothered to wipe her out when you're too busy being a builder.

So I suppose it could be partly a game design thing where some of the factions were meant to shine earlier, although I think his interpretation of the "canon" makes sense too.

Does anyone know where to find the GURPS fluff for SMAC?

>>3780350
Ask /tg/.

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>>3777978
I have been trying to make SMAC harder for many years and I play with some of the AX factions
Typical game:
Me vs: Hive, Drones, Morgan, Consciousness, Gaia, and Data Angels
To me, these factions usually wind up being the strongest in a vanilla game
Then, I modded these factions to make them even stronger, and made them more peaceful, so they build more and are stronger in the mid/late game