All-Specialist Bases

[Mr. President]

I've heard this term batted around once or twice. How does one go about making a base like this? It seems like an intriguing way to avoid pacifism drones.

[Zakharov VII]

Crawlers. Condensor/Farm squares will produce 4 nutrients (assuming the base terrain isn't Arid - then an adjacent Condensor is also needed), even before Gene Splicing, IIRC. Later Soil Enrichers will bring this up to 6 nutrients, IIRC.

The first bunch of crawlers should get minerals (crawling boreholes or rocky mines), and then crawlers have to go out to feed the base. Once some nutrients are crawled, all workers at the base can switch to specialists (Engineers are great!).

Not only do you avoid pacifist drones this way, you also avoid inefficiency. Specialists are immune to inefficiency, and so it is an excellent way to make a productive base halfway across the world from your Headquarters. A base of 14 Engineers produces 42 base Energy and 28 base Research, before Energy Banks/Network Nodes/etc are applied!

Z

[Flubber]

Specialist bases are often the way to go when conquering the poor AI on larger maps. Innefficiency would suck away almost all of the energy and you do not want to waste money on drone control. So my periphery bases will often build nothing but formers and crawlers

If you have built the CBA, these specialist bases become doubly easy in the later game through the use of food satellites. -- often no terraforming is needed at all to get the base up to size 5

[Andemagne]

couldn't those all specialist bases be achieved also thru those orbital thingys (satellites) that produce food?

[Mongoose]

Not entirely, no. That's because each base is limited to one resource unit per unit of population for each type of satellite. A size 5 base can draw only 5 nuts from skyfarms. Assuming a recycling tank provides 3 more, there are still 2 nuts missing from the level required to sustain the population level. The deficit increases by one nut per unit of pop over 5. So, at least one crawler will be required to convoy nuts and employ specialists other than empaths or doctors. (Or, I guess, if it were late enough in the game, you could make transcendii with a base under size 5 and forego crawling nuts.)

[vitamin j]

For more bang per crawler, start by farm/condensing any nutrient bonuses you might have. I think that gives 7 nuts. When you add a soil enricher, it becomes 10. In the Monsoon Jungle, I believe it's 13!

[big_canuk]

Don't forget trawlers for bases with water access. Kelp is former time friendly and spreads like mad. Trawlers cost the same as crawlers post fusion.

bc

[Andemagne]

thanks mongoose, I did not know that.

j vitamin: that can't be 'cos soil enricher and condenser have same effect, so if you have one you don't need the other. I don't know but I think that 7 or 8 is max what you can get from a land tile.

[vitamin j]

Contraire, mon frere,
The condensor and soil enricher do two different things. A farm on a rainy square gives 3 nuts. A condensor makes it 4 (in addition to increasing the raininess of every adjacent square by one level.) Add a soil enricher, it becomes 6. On any kind of nutrient bonus, the condensor multiplies the effect of the bonus. Check it out.

[Adalbertus]

Andemange, vitaminj,
I checked it in the scenario editor. Vitamin j is right, maximum is 13 nuts in the jungle on a nut bonus, with farm+soil enricher+condensor. I'll post the full thing in the FAQ thread.

[MariOne]

Don't forget to search for the several threads in which the issue was covered in detail in the past, even recently.

Contrary to what documented, Condensers and Enrichers DO have the same effect!
It's just that they're cumulative.
They increase the collected Nutrients by 50% (multiply by 1.5) rounded down.
Only Condensers tho *also* increase raininess in their and adjacent tiles.

Condensers allow to bypass restrictions too.
That's why a rainy+farm+condenser can yield 4 nutrients pre-lifting, whence the importance of the WP.
I frankly can't recall about Enrichers, as they "supposedly" come after Gene Splicing. Can't recall whether I ever figured to test the exceptional case should you "receive" AEE before getting GeneSplicing...

continued after a break
to exemplificate the Cond/Enr effects.

rainy+farm = 3 (only 2 pre-lifting)
rainy+farm+Cond = INT(3*1.5) = INT(4.5) = 4 (always)
rainy+farm+Enr = INT(3*1.5) = INT(4.5) = 4 same as above
rainy+farm+Cond+Enr = INT(INT(3*1.5)*1.5) = INT(4*1.5) = 6

WITH a NutSpecial
rainy+farm+Special=5 always
rainy+farm+Special+Cond = INT(5*1.5) = 7
same with Enr
rainy+farm+Special+Cond+Enr = INT(7*1.5) = 10

in case the NutSpecial comes on a "just moist" tile, pre-Cond the tile will only yield 4 with a farm.
The Cond will tho make it rainy bringing it to fit again in the example above.
The *Enr only* will NOT make it rainy, limiting the yield to 6 instead of 7.

In case the NutSpecial comes on an arid tile, the best thing you could do initially is to forest it!
When the Cond becomes available, it will only become moist
moist+farm+Special+Cond = INT(4*1.5) = 6, add Enr and get to 9
But a 2nd Cond adjacent (even diagonally) to the 1st one will make all the tiles rainy, fitting back into the 1st example.

JUNGLE, without Special
rainy+Jungle+farm = 4 (only 2 pre-lifting)
rainy+Jungle+farm+Cond = 6 always
rainy+Jungle+farm+Cond+Enr = 9 always

JUNGLE AND Special
rainy+Jungle+Special+farm = 6 always
rainy+Jungle+Special+farm+Cond = 9
rainy+Jungle+Special+farm+Cond+Enr = INT(9*1.5) = INT(13.5) = 13

BTW, if you compare the yield of a rainy+farm+Cond yield, and then rainy+farm+Cond+Enr, on a normal tile with respect to a NutSpecial tile, you see that you can "boost" the value of the special, by one with just Cond and by 2 with Cond+Enr.
That's why plopping a new base on a Nut Special and Cond+Enr a normal tile yields in the end 2 Nuts less than plopping the base on a normal tile and Cond+Enr the NutSpecial.
Problem is, that the Enrichers become available pretty late in the game, and also the Condensers are not immmediately available unless you grab the WP (not guaranteed in multiplaying).
A base on a NutSpecial would allow you to exploit it always regardless to where you place your workers, giving you much more flexibility. If you are in a tight race against human players to get the upperhand in the early game, sparing your NutSpecials for when Condensers and then Enrichers will be available might be a luxury you can't always afford...

[Adalbertus]

MariOne, yesterday I also skipped testing Enricher before restriction lifting, as well as a Enricher without farm, because both seem to arcane, even if the scenario editor allows this. Imagine a scenario with soil enrichers all over the place and the first person who realizes that there are no underlying farms has best chances to win -
I definitely was too lazy to look in old threads when I wrote the FAQ post, but if you know some people to honour on this topic (such as yourself...) you're welcome to post them, I will edit them in. I still feel more newbie than veteran

[MariOne]

Adalbertus,
I didn't realise you had *already* posted in the FAQ when I posted the above.

We did the same work.

You did a very precise job, covering all the cases in a neatly organised way, and presented them in a tidy tabular form, which I much appreciate and had no time to put up above.

I could not have done better.

[MariOne]

Well....
Rethinking to it, there ARE some very minor points I would have added to enhance your FAQ entry and make it perfect!


1. a correction
Offhand I am almost (99.999%) sure that Jungle doesn't lift restrictions per se.
Thus a plain RainyJungle tile should yield only 2nuts pre-lifting, while you listed it as 3/3.

2. complete and extend an explanation
when you precise that Enrichers require Gene Splicing, you could add that Condensers too require it, but you can build them earlier if you grab the WP

3. couple of formatting/presentation suggestions
- for best readability, you might add a line-break every 3rd line, that is to outline the grouping of the arid/moist/rainy cases and better visually separate the Nut / Jungle / NutJungle groups
- in most of the cases where you list 2 values (before and after Gene Splicing) actually show the same number. This happens when you have a NutSpecial on the tile, or when the yield is not greater than 2 in the first place. Formally this is exhaustive and precise, but visually id does not add new information, while making the table a bit more confusing to read.
I suggest that you report the two numbers *only* when they're actually different. This would also clearly highlight the cases where the restrictions do play a role. (also, reporting two numbers in all the Condensers columns is plainly incorrect, because Condensers alone DO lift restrictions even if you get them from WP before Gene Splicing. That's one of the reasons why the WP is so important)

[MariOne]

Here's how I would have formatted it:

            plain  Farm  S.Enr     only  Farm   S.Enr 
                                   Cond  +Cond  +Cond

arid          0     1      1        -      -      - 
moist         1     2      3        1      3      4
rainy         2    2/3     4        3      4      6 

+Nut
arid          2     3      4        -      -      -
moist         3     4      6        4      6      9
rainy         4     5      7        6      7     10 

+Jungle
arid          1     2      3        -      -      -
moist         2    2/3     4        3      4      6
rainy        2/3   2/4     6        4      6      9

+Jungle +Nut
arid          3     4      6        -      -      -
moist         4     5      7        6      7     10 
rainy         5     6      9        7      9     13

If you like it, you can copy/paste directly from here, you'll just have to add back the code and the bold ubb tags.

[Mongoose]

Interesting...and all this time I thought Soil Enrichers weren't available until Advanced Ecological Engineering.

[MariOne]

Hmmm... and where above or in the FAQ did we write something that let you intend the contrary????

The "them" in my point 2 above refers to the *nearest* item (like in nested if...else), that is to Condensers, non Enrichers...

(be damned if I can get whether your post above is sarcastic or serious... )

[MariOne]

Anyway, back to the topic, the table above should help you to get an idea of how many Nutrient-specialised tiles you need to crawler to sustain an All-specialist Base.

Remember:
you can use one Nut from a Sat for each of your citizens.
The second Nut he needs to eat must come from the ground.

If you have a NutSat for each of the Nuts you collect from the ground, that will also be the # of citizens you can support.

With Tanks a (normal) basetile yields 3 Nuts.
Too bad that a sized-3 base doen's allow the use of specialists (apart Empaths and later Transcendii).

Getting other 6 Nuts from a normal Cond+Enr tile, with 3+6=9 NutSats in orbit, will allow you to support a 9-specialists base. With Engineers this means 27ec and 18labs, boosted by facilities but immune to inefficiency.

Getting 6 Nuts from TWO of the above tiles, with 3+6+6=15 NutSats in orbit, will allow you to support a 15-specialists base...

The problem is, with an all-specialist base you don't *work* BoreHoles!
For me this is all just theory, but there are many who actually put it in practice in their (especially SinglePlayer) games.
How do they approach this issue?
Do you:
- just don't use BHs, and content of mines/forests for the minerals
- use BHs to crawler 6 minerals and waste the 6(+) energy
- actually dodn't use a strictly *all*-specialist base, but use one Citizen to work a single BH per base

The latter case should be one worth better investigating with respect to the topic.
If you have a single working citizens in an otherwise all-specialist base, how much pacifism can you afford?
You know that pacifist drones are created AFTER the pacifying effects of Facilities and Psych (?).
Is there any effect you can put in place to quell it, or to be able to avoid the pacifist (or the captured-base) drones you need a strictly all-specialist approach?

Just wondering.
Maybe for a single pacifist unit you might be better-off by using *4* workers and some psych-specialist, so that you'll balance the inevitable 2 drones with 2 talents...?

[Mongoose]

Originally posted by Adalbertus (in his FAQ article)
Only one number is valid after restriction lifting -Soil Enrichers require Gene Splicing.

From my unmodded alphax.txt:

Soil Enricher, EcoEng2, Soil Enricher, Disable, 8, Construct $STR0, f, F

(emphasis added in both places)


Additionally, I can confirm that Jungle squares by themselves do not lift nut restrictions.

[MariOne]

Ah, that...

strictly speaking, Adalbertus was quoting a necessary but NOT sufficient condition
in other words, you must have discovered GeneSplicing before (amongst other far prerequisites) to have Enrichers, but having GeneSplicing is not yet enough to have them.

In my posts above, I had indeed mentioned the rare occurrence that you get AEE from another player before you get GS yourself.

The meaning of it all is:
as the WP does not grant Enrichers, barring miracles, when you get to build one you'll have for sure already lifted your Nuts Restrictions and it's not worth bothering to list the exceptional case in which you don't.

___

more interesting: don't you have any insight about the singleworkerbase/pacifism/dronecontrol question?

[Adalbertus]

Sorry, I posted around 1AM and had to go to bed already two hours earlier ...
What I meant was that Gene Splicing is in the research path of Advanced Ecological Engineering, and given one is a level 3 and the other a level 7 tech, you could probably won't get Soil Enrichers before restriction lifting, even not from artifacts. The only chance I see is that someone else has EcoEng2 while you don't have Gene Splicing. In this case the game is probably pretty much lost. I'll correct it, thanks for the suggestions:

About the *all*-specialist bases:
I'd use it in two situations:
- Instead of a base with Punishment Sphere to re-home all (clean) military units. Specialists don't revolt.
- If you have a base far away from your HQ, the energy production gets so much wasted that you don't lose ~6 but only one or two energy when you crawl the tile. Then crawler+specialist is better.

Lately, I've adopted the 2-in-diagonal base spacing, crawling 4 or 5 tiles for nuts, and having 1-2 boreholes per base, worked. In that setup, I'm not so really interested in an empire spreading over the whole world
In my HQ (=SSC), I work as many tiles as possible to get a high commerce. (Commerce seems to be calculated only from worked tiles, not from crawled energy nor specialists).

P.S: This is post prince-2

[Mongoose]

In my experience, workers get made into pacifism drones first. So, no, a single worker situation won't work to circumvent pacifism drones. I think you'll require four workers to do as you suggest...two to be made into talents through Psych or SP and two to be Drones. And this for one unit at -5 POLICE or two at -4 POLICE. Better to use all specialists in most cases. An exception is if you have the Genome or are playing the PK...PSYCH allocation to get 2 psych in the base will create the second talent needed to offset the two pacifism drones mentioned above. A size four base can then support two pacifism drones, as long as you have sufficient base facilities to have no drones before pacifism...hope that's clear enough to follow. The size four threshold is critical for Morgan, of course, as that's the largest base possible before Hab complexes or the Virtues. It's also the point at which the extra drone control from Transit disappears. For Morgan to fight an early war in Market, he needs a bunch of size four bases, a healthy PSYCH allocation and the Genome. (if no Genome, then an obscene PSYCH allocation)

In most cases, it's better to either set up an all-specialist base with crawled mins for support or to drop free market.

PKs, Drones or Spartans are better than Morgan at fighting in Market.

[Mongoose]

Crawled energy does count toward COMMERCE calculation. Energy from satellites does as well. Specialists do not.

[MariOne]

Another comment to Mr.President initial post:

You'd have realised by now that an All-Specialist base has a double purpose:
- drone control (in general, not specifically from pacifism)
- bypassing inefficiency on collected energy

with the ultimate underlying catch that in optimal conditions the ec/labs yield from an Engineer is usually higher in any case than the yield you'd obtain from the energy you'd collect from a tile (+ related eventual commerce) making that Engineer a simple worker.

That is, a (high-level) specialist is more convenient and efficient than a worker, regardless of the two above points, period.

I would say anyway that the inefficiency-bypassing purpose is paramount on the dronecontrol/pacifism one.

If your main pourpose is to control *pacifism* drones, you should be informed that there is an alternate tactic, although not necessarily a better one.

Army Laundering (sp?).

Instead of eliminating pacifism drones by turning all the bases suffering from it into all-specialist bases, you pick a base capable of supporting many units (= lots of minerals production) and not yielding much labs.
You *home* there all the units causing pacifism drones.
You build a Punishment Sphere there.
Optionally, you make all those units Clean, to help tackle the support issue in that base.
It can be cumbersome, but it lets you free of managing your workers/specialists in the other bases, and you don't need to rely on crawlering nuts for that base.

A mix of the two:
you use strictly Clean units (a pretty heavy restriction: the Clean investment is not really worth it if the unit is going to live less than 10 turns, which can easily happen for attacking units), you home them in a 1-sized base. Making its single citizen a doctor that base will self-support using its basetile yield.

And interesting niche tactic:
if your target is in range, use cheap expendable kamikaze - if a unit (e.g a chopper) will probably die on the same turn you produce it, you won't have to bother about the pacifism drones it would cause

[vitamin j]

I could've sworn crawled energy didn't count towards commerce... I'll have to check it out for myself. It's been a while since I fired up the SMAC.

By the way, in the last MP game I was in, I used the (almost) all-specialist approach extensively as the Gaians with size 5-7 bases. This was based almost entirely on crawled farm/condensor/nutrient bonus combos. Running paradigm economy and having a base full of librarians or technicians as needed can be very effective.

[Adalbertus]

Mongoose, I tested it. Crawled energy does not count towards commerce. In my present game (I'm Domai) I had a headquarter with ~320 energy, both crawled and worked. 13 commerce with the best PK base. The second best of my bases got 58 energy, 11 commerce.
I put crawlers for ~140 energy for the HQ out of service and had still commerce 13. I removed one worker from tile with 4 energy, commerce immediately dropped to 12.I use SMAX V2.0.

P.S. this is post Prince-1
Edit: There is a bug in the database or a mistake in the FAQ. This is my 300th ont-topic post and I should be prince with the 301st.

[MariOne]

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant, forgive my English.


I said that with a worker you collect energy and generate a related commerce.
With an Engineer you don't collect nor energy nor thus any commerce.

Yet, the direct yield of an Engineer in terms of direct labs and ec should be more convenient than the net final yield from the raw energy and the related commerce he'd collect/generate as a worker instead.

And this even before taking in consideration the ineficiency immunity benefits for a specialist.


As vitj reports, he even perceived an effectiveness using more primitive Librarians and Technicians, and leaving Satellites alone.

___

PS: sorry, this post is rather moot, I didn't realise we cross-posted, and didn't look again above my 19:34 post before posting this

Thanks Mong for the considerations about the singleworker/allspecialist comparison.

[Mr. President]

Thanks everyone for your comments. I'm going to give this trick a serious shot, as it seems quite good all around.

[Mongoose]

Adalbertus, Thanks for the correction. Funny how you can still learn new things about this game after playing it for so long!

Mark Twain was right! "It's not what you don't know that hurts you...it's what you know that just ain't so."