Favorite Units

[CEO Aaron]

Choppers. Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers, Choppers.

Can you tell I love choppers? Once I have choppers, I build drop garrisons and choppers, and all who oppose me die. Clean nerve-gas choppers with the best weapons and plant you can find.

I almost never get to build hovertanks and gravships, cause my choppers have finished off my foes too soon.

[Adalbertus]

Clean nerve-gas choppers

You don't like submissives, eh?

[Blake]

I think.... he likes choppers.

[BustaMike]

Clean Fission Singularity Laser Stasis Armor Hovertank Battery.

7000+ minerals to build

I like nerve gas too.

[CEO Aaron]

Adalbertus: No, I generally don't bother to accept the surrender of the AI factions, since they tend to be so worthless and dumb, with the possible exception of the University, since they can occasionally pitch in with a free tech here and there.

I actually won't build/use atrocity weapons, unless one of the AIs call the vote to suspend the charter, which I always let through if I'm casting the deciding vote and/or the Governor. However, in about 80% of the games I've played, the peacenik factions will get marginalized early, leaving a bunch of nuke-happy loons. (Miriam, Zak, Santiago, always Yang, that guy's harder to kill than a steel plated cockroach).

Once the Charter's been lifted, I usually take special effort to PB the poor sod who called the vote to lift it, as a sort of self-righteous object lesson. I especially like seeing all the planetary landmarks underwater.

[Blake]

You shouldn't scoff at commerce income, I could trade a tiny city to an AI pact mate, and get about +5 commerce income out of the deal, probably in a city with a good deal less ineffeciency. Once put through some facilities this would result in about 10 actual energy, better than the pathetic 2-5 minerals and 0 energy you would have got out of the base (for larger captured bases stuff them full off specialists).

Amusingly enough you can increase your score by giving cities to a pact mate, because the commerce income is worth more than the population.

A Morgan submissive makes a particullary good dumping ground for unwanted base because of the scads of commerce income he generates.

[Earwicker]

Absolutely! And the earlier you create your submissive, the longer the benefits last. Depending upon who you defeat, the benefits can be enormous. Like Yang or Domai with Zak under their thumbs to help out a lot with research. Captured Cult bases make great gifts . . .

[CEO Aaron]

Okay, point taken re: submissives, I'll give it a whirl. On a side note, Mister President, you said you gave up on the auto designer. Did you actually manage to turn the annoying bugger off? If so, how?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by CEO Aaron
Okay, point taken re: submissives, I'll give it a whirl. On a side note, Mister President, you said you gave up on the auto designer. Did you actually manage to turn the annoying bugger off? If so, how?

IIRC select Game, Options, and a menu will open up with about 5 or 6 submenues. Almost every sort of option is available in those submenues, though I don't remember exactly which submenu the autodesign function is located in. Obviously not in display or sound.

[Straybow]

Definitely turn off auto-design: second option in Game Preferences. Possibly nothing more annoying in the entire game.

I can't play with just one of each chassis type in my build menu as somebody said. While only one special is allowed it takes more than 2 of each chassis to fill the necessary roles. I've never gotten to your euphemistic Death Spheres; games are either over or way too boring to last that long.

Yeah, the light empath jet is handy, especially since regular worms can't attack units in the air. Until then the light empath rover and light empath foil are both patrol units and pearl harvesters.

Military units get bonuses against noncombat units so formers die too easily. I've not found armoring them worthwhile. I don't have SMAX, so fungal/tectonic missiles are out.

I have found picket foils wonderously effective: best armor, AAA, best gun that doesn't bump the cost up a row (usually Impact). Crank 'em out and blocade your opponent's air units at your seashelf edge. (And later, at his own coast.) They're strong enough to take out unarmored transports easily and sometimes armored transport cruisers.

I build tidal harnesses just outside base radii and station deep radar supply foils on them. They form an early warning net as well as boost energy enormously. When attacks come in earnest the picket foils team up with them, and replacement supply foils can be armored for a little extra cost and an extra margin of defense.

Last comes the Dogs of War: light AAA Drop Garrison (whatever weapon doesn't bump up the cost). Smother enemy territory, plink his formers and crawlers, pillage his improvements, and impede his movement.

[Adalbertus]

Military units get bonuses against noncombat units so formers die too easily. I've not found armoring them worthwhile.

There is a 50% non-combat penalty, but this applies only to unarmored formers, crawlers etc. I've not (yet) seen anything of a bonus for attackers in this case. As soon as you give them armor, the penalty disappears.

[Clear Skies]

Which is nice, because all you ave to do is slap synthmetal armour on your supply crawlers and formers and their penalty when defending against native life vanishes. Great for crawlers which spend all their life in fungus...

[Shard]

Favourite non-combat: Supply Crawler

Favourite Combat: X Impact Rover or Shard Copter

[Straybow]

Really? It seemed that whenever I did put well armored (plasma+) crawlers or formers in the field enemy aircraft had no difficulty plinking them. I've never seen the AI use armored crawlers or formers, only transports. AI transports are allowed to have AAA ability as well, which clearly cancells the bonus because they are just as tough to sink as combat foils/hulls.

I guess "R-Laser" and "X-Impact" are SMAX weapons??

[MariOne]

1st: you can't seriously hold the AI as reference for unit design!!!!

A plasma armor in the field is no match for a missile aircaft "in general", when it's on the field outside the umbrella or AeroComp and AAA (and eventually sensor).
A plasma crawler will be as easy to kill from the air as a plasma garrison.
An unarmored former is twice as easy to kill from the air than a scout patrol.
You won't notice much difference with the naked eye tho.

If you LOOK in the combat display panels Straybow, you will CLEARLY see that unarmored-unweaponed units report a "-50% non-combat" modifier, while there's no corresponding bonus listed in the attack modifiers. In case, remember to switch "fast battle resolution" off!
Even better, if you really need to check and learn, toggle "pause after combat" on....

Clear Skies, while what you say is true, remember that native life attacks land units with a 3 vs 2 basic strength ratio.
Without the synth, a former or crawler would fight at 3 vs 1 because of the penalty.

3vs2 is alas not an effective improvement over 3 vs 1.
In this sense Straybow ended to make the good choice.
Your formers and crawlers will keep being almost always killed by worms even if you "slap" your synth armor on them.
But a Synth former will cost one whole more mineral row to build it.
IIRC a Synth crawler would cost TWO more rows (5 instead of 3).
With all those extra rows, you'd build much more rovers and crawlers than those you can actually foresee to lose from worms. For sure many many more than those you can imagine to actually *save* thanks to the added armor.

Whole different issue would be using Trance. But that would make them extra expensive, because of the units cost structure.
The only truly viable solution if you want to effectively protect your crawler/formers against worms, is Synth armor AND Neural Amplifier.
Otherwise just accept the structural loss and replace them, it's more convenient. Besides, instead of causing the worm to die when attacking a tough former, you'd better let him kill the former and then kill the worm, gaining a refund from planetpearls which partially compensates the cost for the substitute.

Later, Fusion R-Plasma Formers/Crawlers will become affordable, if you want to insist on that path.

R-lase is Resonance Laser, and is a SMAX weapon.
The whole concept of Resonance is and Alien concept intorduced in Alien Crossfire. Like with R-Plasma (resonance enhances unit's defense or offense in PSI combat, in which the nominal value of the armor/weapon itself would be otherwise ignored)

X-Impact is instead a classic SMAC concept.
X is the prefix the game adds to units description and names when you add the Nerve-Gas ability.
An X-Chaos Chopper can wipe a size-7 base with 3 Gas attacks (even a size-11 if there are *exactly* 3 defenders in base!).

[Clear Skies]

Hm...I was working using Fusion power, where it effectively becomes 3vs2 but with 2x the power behind you...
Still, what you say is entirely right. I just never build armoured formers/crawlers until post-fusion...
Although armoured sea formers are very useful when dropping your opponents' bases into the sea. But that's only if you're a sick twisted weirdo like me.

[MariOne]

Beware, there's a well-known "bug" regarding Reactors and PSI combat.

Native units ignore your reactor when fighting.
Thus although you have twice the hit points, they'll be eaten twice as fast.
With Singularity reactors you even get a disadvantage.

[Mongoose]

I thought version 4.0 of SMAC fixed/changed the Singularity reactor to have 40 HP. Didn't the bug you reference here disappear then as wll, MariOne?

[johndmuller]

Do we even want to call that psi/reactor thing a bug?

IIRC, in the early versions of AC, the native life units were at an large disadvantage in the later stages of the game, after advanced reactors came into use. I suppose that was because they were taking those 10 hit points without any modification while the advanced regular units were playing with 20 or 30. Later versions were said to have changed the combat resolution so that the combat effects of non-native units with higher reactors versus native life was neutralized (it seems like they tweaked the numbers to give the non-native units damages multiplied by their reactor level (or reduced the NL damage comparably, whatever)).

IMhO, the current version where NL is still a serious threat later in the game is better, and if Firaxis actually patched the program to install that approach on purpose, they apparently also felt that it was the proper approach. One could rationalize this with the theory that the psi effect is on the operators of the equipment, not the equipment, so the results should not be related to the equipment's reactor.

The 40 vs 30 hit points thing was a separate issue which may or may not have been addressed at the same time or the same patch as the psi combat resolution thing, but is not really related otherwise.

[Mongoose]

I thought the 'bug' to which MariOne referred was that singularity reactor units took 4 HP damage per hit in Psi combat while the reactor only provided 30 HP. The idea behind 'evening out' Psi combat seemed to be that all units remain effectively at 10 HP during it. Reducing the effective HP of Singularity reactor units to 8 was the 'bug'.

[Straybow]

MariOne, I said I've never seen the AI make armored formers or crawlers because the AI is who I've played against. While the AI makes armored transports I haven't had the combat odds turned on, so I haven't seen it displayed. The AI very quickly churns out the maligned AAA armored transports that we can't even design, so the window of opportunity to see the effect of armor alone is short. Thus I have never seen that armor alone removed the -50% penalty. I am perfectly willing to take people's word for it.

Nonetheless, my original statement stands: I see no clear advantage to armoring formers and crawlers. When I tried (long ago) I didn't notice the attackers having any difficulty plinking them, so I deemed the cost unjustified.

Transports are the exception. Their cargo is valuable enough that any slight improvement in survivability seems justified to me, at least on a psychological level. If I can manage to probe an AI AAA transport then it gets added to the unit list and I can build it, too.

[MariOne]

Straybow, indeed we agree.
I'll state it more clearly.

Even if it's true that adding armor to a unarmed unit removes the non-combat penalty in defending, in the end you are right that it's not worth for defending land units against worms, because you'd only improve from 1vs3 to 2vs3.

It could make sense for defending against laser-armed enemies, but the armoring costs at least 50% in production and soon here come Impact weapons to make it almost moot again.

I have to say that I saw once an opponent (Blarney of CGN) recur as last resort to upgrading 3 of his formers (all he had available) to plasma and keeping them in a base defended by AeroComp & sensor, succesfully managing to fend off my missile Jets while he sent in or built more AAA garrisons and keeping his base.
Thus they may be useful tactically in specific cases, but not as a general rule.

On the contrary, we know that a perfectly viable tactic for Morgan is to use armored probes.
They are indeed as good as synth garrisons against enemies.
The main downside is that it's moot to stack them, so it's a thin-layered defense. But they cost no support which is a paramount bonus for Morgan, and such garrison has embedded probe defense. It doesn't provide police, but under FM that is irrelevant.
Armored probes are NOT useful against worms tho.
Because of the high equivalent-cost of the probe equipment, Trance is expensive. At this point it's worth to use Plasma, as the cost reduction for Trance on Plasma balances the higher armor cost.

Of course this all changes after Fusion, when you find out that thanks to the higher reactor and of the base cost of 3 rows for a Fusion unit, you can add armor FOR FREE on formers and crawlers.


Regarding SEA units, that's a whole different issue, as their basic strength is *on par* (1vs1) for PSI combat.
I too take the effort of designing a bestarmor-trance version of my transports, and spend the extra cost for making the load safer against IoDs.
___
Mong, I was actually referring to both aspects of Reafctors & PSI.
I named it a "bug" for brevity, actually the adjustment DOES make sense, it's just that players who don't know it don't expect it to behave that way, and the proposed odds for the combat are misleading as they take the Reactor inot account while the PSI combat doesn't.
We could say that the bug it's not in the evening-out of Reactored Psi Combat, but in the fact that the combat display doesn't reflect it.
BTW, I'd object to the common belief that higher reactors are *detrimental* for PSI combat.
As a matter of fact, they should be irrelevant. At least, I did NOT personally observe a Fusion unit having less chances than a Fission one against worms. Its chances are indeed made even to ignore the reactor, not made worse.


Regarding the Singularity Reactor in PSI combat, that is a proper bug, but I admit I only report that info secondhand, as I NEVER use singularity reactors. As a matter of fact, I NEVER even research the requisite tech, unless an ill-planned research path leaves me no other alternative. I barely even get to Quantum ones, go figure.
Indeed, once one gets that high in the tech tree and has not won yet, the closest victory at hand would most likely be Transcendence, and Singularity it's not on that path (nor is Quantum).

[Straybow]

I don't think I've ever gotten to Quantum. Maybe I'll augment the research rate in alpha.txt and see if that helps… kinda doubt it since I rarely have old units upgraded to the next level weapon before the one above that comes along.

[MattyBoy]

I like that bug, too. Silly to become near-invulnerable to native life, just because of discovering better reactors.

Strongest unit: Supply Crawler (too strong)
Favourite unit: Former (like the balance of trying to get former work done while growing at the start)

Vel makes good point that formers are important in any serious battles, though I don't go in for armoring them, except to leave them blocking choke points in longer term.

Blake hit nail on head regarding freedom fighters. That is exactly how I use them - expendable, then survivors get upgraded to take advantage of morale. Using them in maybe-suicide missions is great value for minerals spent as they can make such an impact in:
- first, establishing early air superiority
- second, isolated strikes on ground forces at points of weakness.

By the time that shard or choppers come along, air superiority is probably still with the player that won the early air battles anyway.

[Arnelos]

Sorry to bump another burried thread, but I couldn't resist...

My favorite unit of all time is one I originally thought to build when I FIRST played the game and I got pissed off at the planet for continuously killing my formers...

Trance Formers - robots in disguise!

They're still my favorite unit, just for the amusement alone.

As for my favorite combat unit... probably the Trained Psi Tank.

[Method]

hmm, i'd have to say i never use wave psi choppers anymore. ever. sea probes and trawlers are probably my favourite units now.

Trance Formers - robots in disguise

clever

[Arnelos]

Yup. I thought of building Trance Formers in my very first game of SMAC the same day the game came out

Having been an avid poster on the Firaxis forums for a year before the game's release, I bought it the day it came out... and when I got royally pissed off at the mindworms, I invented the Trance Former.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the Trance Former is not one of the auto-designed units, two of my friends independently invented the Trance Former the same day... so I don't get credit for being either the first person or the only person to think of this when the game came out.

But it remains one of my favorite units just for amusement

[Capt Dizle]

Originally posted by MariOne

___
Mong, I was actually referring to both aspects of Reafctors & PSI.
I named it a "bug" for brevity, actually the adjustment DOES make sense, it's just that players who don't know it don't expect it to behave that way, and the proposed odds for the combat are misleading as they take the Reactor inot account while the PSI combat doesn't.
We could say that the bug it's not in the evening-out of Reactored Psi Combat, but in the fact that the combat display doesn't reflect it.
BTW, I'd object to the common belief that higher reactors are *detrimental* for PSI combat.
As a matter of fact, they should be irrelevant. At least, I did NOT personally observe a Fusion unit having less chances than a Fission one against worms. Its chances are indeed made even to ignore the reactor, not made worse.


Regarding the Singularity Reactor in PSI combat, that is a proper bug, but I admit I only report that info secondhand, as I NEVER use singularity reactors. As a matter of fact, I NEVER even research the requisite tech, unless an ill-planned research path leaves me no other alternative. I barely even get to Quantum ones, go figure.
Indeed, once one gets that high in the tech tree and has not won yet, the closest victory at hand would most likely be Transcendence, and Singularity it's not on that path (nor is Quantum).

In playing the CGN Challenge this month (game by Darsnan), I indeed used many singularity reactor units against the beefed up University faction. The University built tons of worms. I have not done any documentation but I can clearly report that singularity units perform worse against worms than the odds shown. And worse than R1, R2, or R3 units.

[The Mad Monk]

TranceFormers -- always. I tend to keep them well armored, too.

Also TrancePorts -- long range pod poppers extraordinaire!

In some games, I'll spend a little time in Power, and crank out a bunch of cheap little 'reserve' units of all kinds, for upgrading when needed.

[ellie]

Im generally a builder so i rarely have fights VERY early on.

However i like choppers a lot for their multi attack feature. And later on when im subjegating the factions i like elite drop singularity troops (get 2 moves of course) combined with drop behemoths for their high movement.
Sometimes its nice to add the blink option for a tough base assault.

Biggest dissapointment is locusts of chiron. Maybee its me, but psi units are useless later in the game.

Ellie