SMACX Without Aliens

[Nuk Em]

What is the process to play SMACX without having the Alien Factions becoming part of the game? It would be nice to play SMACX with all it's improvements with out the Aliens overpowering the game.

[Fitz]

You have two choices:

1) Select SMAC Classic from the main menu. I'm not sure which tech tree this uses though.

2) Select which factions you want to play with, and do NOT include the aliens. If you want to play all SMACX factions, just substitute two original factions.

[Nuk Em]

When you say choose which factions you want to play with, how exactly do you do that? I see how to choose the faction the player will use but how do you assign what factions you will play against?

[mark13]

Hi,
There should be a drop-down menu on the right hand side of the faction bar. This will allow you to include the faction of your choice, and also any custom factions you may have created.

[stuntman19]

If you click on the faction box(aliens), you will get a pop up of all the available factions. Just choose the one you want in the game. You will have to choose the smacx option to get a mix of the old and new human factions though. If you play classic smac you will be using the old tech tree with fewer techs.

[Purple]

When you choose your faction a pulldown menu next to each of the 7 player slots will let you fill that slot with any of the 14 factions. The order of the players in that list will be the order of play during the game.

[Hydro]

One interesting option in SMAX for picking factions: pick one faction for ALL the other 6 slots! That way you can fight 6 Yang’s (if he is your worst nightmare), or 6 Deirdres (a dream?). It is interesting to have identical factions, or 6 Gaia’s Landings all over the map, or see Dee go to war with herself. It does make diplomacy kind of rough, though, since you never quite know who you are talking to.

Another fun variant: 3 Boogers and 3 Marrs! You know they’re going to hate you, and each other. Watch the fur (or carapace) fly!

Hydro

[Chowlett]

Several rather loose ends seem to have been left over from vanilla SMAC - for example, at the end of a game when it displays the hall of fame, it lists only the 7 factions in this game, and places victories as other factions under the slots they occurred in, with no resemblance to the actual faction used.

Also, I just won as Roze with an economic victory (far too easy - Thinker level - but all my Transcends have had me start about 5 tiles from a momentum faction ), and the epilogue still reads about uniting humankind. What about the aliens? They're very strong and could probably take us all down, but nooooo, just leave the epilogue as it is.

[RedFred]

Chowlett is right. The SMACX starting positions are typically worse, often much worse than in SMAC.

Regarding the choosing of different factions, my favourite method is to choose random factions. While this does not preclude the aliens from appearing, the interplay between the SMAC and SMACX factions is often interesting.

Click on the landscape on the top right to randomize.

[Helium Pond]

Um, just to clear up any potential confusion here:

There are two different things that could be thought of as "the main menu": 1) the screen that comes up when you launch axstart.exe, which is the screen that lets you choose to play SMAC, to play SMACX, or to exit. 2) the screen that comes up after this, which is the main menu of SMAC or SMACX, depending on which one you selected.

If, from the axstart screen, you choose to play SMAC, you will be playing regular old SMAC, as I hope would be obvious.

If you choose to play SMACX, when the time comes to choose your factions, there are three greyish panoramas at the top of the screen: one shows the SMAC factions, one shows the Crossfire factions, and one shows the arc of Planet's surface (this randomizes the factions). Fitz said he wasn't sure which tech tree was used if you chose the SMAC factions. The answer is that as soon as you choose "Alien Crossfire" from the axstart menu, you have committed to playing a game under Crossfire rules, and therefore using the Crossfire tech tree and new mindworm life forms, no matter which factions are involved in the game.

Could be that no one needed that explanation, but just in case...

[Fitz]

Actually HP, I was referring to not being sure when you choose SMAC Classic from the axstart.exe menu, that lets you choose SMAC Classic or Alien Crossfire. If you choose SMAC Classic from that menu, I know you get the original factions, but:

Do you get the SMACX Techs?
Do you get the SMACX facilities that are not tied to new techs?
Do fungal towers, Spore Lauchers & the new sea alien life form exist?

That is what I was unsure of.

[mark13]

Actually, it can be very confusing - despite the label of vanilla SMAC a lot of the new graphics deployed in SMACX are used in that as well - the boreholes and solar collectors, for example....strange....

[Googlie]

Fitz:

The answer is no, no and no.

(Just loaded it and went into the datalinks - no x techs, nor SP's - so obviously Classic carries with it the Alpha.txt and not the alphax.txt)

Googlie

[Gothar]

Is there any way to skip the ax start cause mine appears to be all buggy. My start menu appears up the top where the ships are and it often jams up(keeps repeating it) on one of the soundeffects when you move the mouse over the different options.I think it's probably caused by my screen resoloution because when i play it on 640 by 480 it's fine. It just seems a pain to have to change my resoloution everytime I want to play. Bassically I was wondering if there was an exe file or something in the directory that you installed it into that would take you straight to the orignal and another that would launch smacx or something like that.

[WhiteElephants]

Gothar -- That's exactly what I've done. I went into the SMAC folder and removed the short cuts to SMACX and replaced them with the SMAC short cut. To play SMACX I go into the start menu, then programs, then Firaxis, etc., etc. I too remember having difficulty starting SMAC from the graphics menu that popped up with SMACX. If I recall correctly I would select the original SMAC, it would load briefly, and then return me to the desktop.

[Chowlett]

I've had no problems with shortcuts - just create a shortcut to "Terran.exe" for SMAC and to "Terranx.exe" for SMAX

[WhiteElephants]

The shortcuts are fine it's the menu that SMACX brings up when you load it.

[Googlie]

Gothar:

You can change the default screen resolution from the .ini file - see the readme.txt for instructions

G.

[RedFred]

Needed or not, it was a post of exceptional clarity, HP. With all the new people browsing the boards it never hurts to bring this up.

[Helium Pond]

quote: Originally posted by WhiteElephants on 12-13-2000 06:32 PM The shortcuts are fine it's the menu that SMACX brings up when you load it.

???

[VoodooChild]

One alternative to not having the aliens land when playing X games is to replace the txt files with a human faction or some vanilla custom faction. This way you can still do randoms and not know what your facing.

[Sikander]

I think Whitelephants is referring to the menu that comes up when you load the cd and have autoplay on. I use shortcuts directly to the two executable files to avoid the problems associated with SMAC/X changing my resolution.

[WhiteElephants]

Sik, you hit the nail on the head. When I wrote, "short cuts" I meant the shortcuts I created on the desktop.

[Fitz]

quote: Originally posted by Googlie on 12-13-2000 10:45 PM Gothar: You can change the default screen resolution from the .ini file - see the readme.txt for instructions G.

You can also disable the opening movie in the .ini
Speed the loadup. See the SMACX handbook for the details.