150bases is kinda small...

[The Commodore]

Hello.I am looking for any other expantionests out here...I mean building is importat,but I perfer to take AI buildings,not make my own...your size24 base is nice,but my 50size5 bases will out reserch yours.

[WhiteElephants]

It would be interesting to see how much you lose to inefficency with all those small bases. I imagine after some point you wouldn't gain any research after founding a new base because of lose to inefficency not to mention the drones created. Just ask one of the economists around here. It's that darned deminishing returns thing.

Oh, and I (we?) usually have about 15-20 size 24+ bases.

[mark13]

quote: your size24 base is nice,but my 50size5 bases will out reserch yours.

There are usually 15-20 bases in the normal perfectionist strategy - most of them churning out 1000+ research points by the late game. Efficiency hurts a lot more in SMAC than it does in civ2 - ICS is not nearly as efficient, and I can imagine the drones to be murderous. I can imagine most of your bases losing a lot of energy to inefficiency - even when maxed out, these bases will produce no more than 50 research points. ICS is good for conquest rather than economic purposes - and for what it does, it is extremely effective. However, for the most part, there is no way on earth that an ICSer is going to out-research a good perfectionist player.

[Hydro]

Ack!

Cycling through all those bases would be like counting chads in Florida - time consuming and painful.

No thank you! 15 bases is plenty!

[Qualicide]

one base? what are we, OCCers?

meybe if you had 200 bases with no ineff, you might be able to outreserch my 15

------------------
Well, you guys want a PS2? heh heh :strokes console lovingly:

[The Commodore]

hmmm...Good points,all...I use Demo/Green/Knol/Cyber,so
I have +7(!)eff.rating...not much coruption there! In
addtion,in the late game,when the builder has nice big city batch,I will have made SOME infrastructure in my bases...yes it takes forever to go through all those build orders,but thats ok.By lategame I will have about 27 or so13+pop bases.The rest of the bases,with their 7-9pops(depending on my SPs)are pretty happy because they have small pop=few drones...and,I will get some of the builder's nice big bases ...it is nice for me to capture big bases...all the eggs in one basket,and all...'build'is a fine strat. but I perfer explore.

P.S.The point of this post was to see if there were any other conquor/explorer people here.

[The Commodore]

Other rambilings:Orbital instalations...very nice...a energy satt.will give 1+energy PER BASE. 20vs150 bonus...


PPS--Sorry about the format in the last post...it looked fine when I typed.

[Sikander]

Commodore,

Take a look through some of the older threads for posts by David Byron. He was an (ICS or Borg) style player par excellence.

I started as a perfectionist city style player, then moved to ICS, and finally ended up somewhere in between. My impressions are these:

1) ICS uses time more efficiently. By growing horizontally, and keeping bases small your overall growth rate is impossible for a perfectionist to match outside of a late game pop boom with hab domes. Another time advantage is the close packing of bases under ICS, which means that a colony pod may only be one or two turns away from it's alloted deployment space. That's fewer turns where it is costing it's mother base a mineral, and more turns where it is producing from two squares, where vertical population growth only produces from one.

2) Perfectionist cities use space more efficiently, as they build facilities which multiply energy and mineral production. While it is possible to build facilities in smaller bases, it takes more time, more minerals and eventually too much money spent on upkeep to reach the same multiplicative level.

Playing on huge maps, this advantage in using space may not be so advantageous in the short run, as a player may well have plenty of space for expansion early on, and technologically may not be able to build enough facilities to keep pace with the rapid ICS expansion paradigm. Furthermore, hab limits and ecological limits on mineral production both limit a player's ability to take full advantage of the area within his base's production radius, often until very late in the game.

3) Efficiency: There are two types of efficiency in the game, and the perfectionist style has an advantage over ICS in both. Firstly, there is the bureacracy drone problem, whereby the sheer number of bases creates drones throughout the empire. A perfectionist protects himself from this problem by limiting his number of bases, and by building facilities which curb drones. An ICS player must make drone control a central part of his strategy, which means that he is almost forced to win the race for certain special projects like the HG, VW and PTS in order to avoid drone riots inexpensively.

The other type of inefficiency relates to the percentage of produced energy lost due to SE Efficiency rating and the distance from the producing base to the headquarters base. Again the Perfectionist will tend to have the advantage in the long run, as his smaller number of bases will tend to be fairly close to his headquarters, he will also tend to have built Children's Creches, and finally he will also tend to be able to use Specialists to produce Labs, Psych and Econ free from inefficiency losses.

4) ICS is more efficient for warfare. This is true because the large number of bases allow several advantages. Firstly, they give you a large number of build queues, which allow faster production of military forces. Secondly, the loss of a base is not a large thing, since it only represents a small portion of the total productive capacity of your empire, and has only received minimal infrastructure upgrades in the form of facilities. The last advantage may well be the greatest, and it is the support advantage. Support allows a certain number of free units per base, and obviously a player with more bases is allowed more free units. Again, these advantages need to be taken with a grain of salt. It is critical for the ICS player to build all of the free facility SPs in order to gain the ability to produce quality units in every base. And the ability to produce clean units will somewhat offset the ICS player's support advantage.

5) The Great Paradigm Shift: The Supply Crawler.
The supply crawler shifts the debate between ICS and Perfectionist base strategies toward the perfectionsist base side of the equation. The reason is that Supply crawlers act like a mini pop boom coming out of your production queue. While players of both styles will use crawlers to some extent, the perfectionist will tend to use them more, and to greater effect due to his ability to multiply their production.

Supply crawlers will only produce one of three things. Nutrients (which the ICS player usually doesn't want), Minerals (which both players crave up to a certain point) and energy, which both players most certainly want. The Perfectionist is more able to use all three more readily than the ICS player, because of his ability to multiply the effect (Minerals and Energy) or to use Specialists (Nutrients). Also, the tendency to lose less energy to inefficiency adds a small advantage to the perfectionist's side of the ledger.

Now it is also true that an ICS player has an advantage in that he can build even more crawlers than his opponents, since he is not building many facilities, and likely has an armada of formers who have nothing better to do than to build nice productive squares on the frontiers of the empire. Unfortunately, this technique tends to run into some problems as the empire gets larger and larger. First of all, future bases sites will tend to be covered by crawlers, which will limit future ICS growth. While not unforeseable in any event, this is the largest advantage the ICS player has over the Perfectionist. Once the ICS player abandons growth for increased productivity, he is now playing a game which he is poorly situated to play as well as the Perfectionist. Secondly, by placing his crawlers at the periphery of his empire, he will have a harder time defending them. Meanwhile, the perfectionist can replace his workers with crawlers, which are well defended by his bases, and his workers can be converted into ultra-efficient specialists who can take advantage of all the multiplicative base enhancements built by the Perfectionist.

Which is better, ICS or Perfectionist Base style?

I don't claim to know the answer. I have played both, and for me the ICS strategy worked better. Unfortunately I tried ICS after my perfect base phase, and my game knowledge and playing skills were considerably improved by then. For quite a while now I have been playing a style which is somewhere in between. I place my bases two to three squares apart along the coastline of my continent, beeline for crawlers, then replace my workers with crawlers. Eventually I build most of the base facilities in every base, as well as a vast majority of the SPs. My crawlers eventually colonize the empty interior space of my continent. I very rarely use crawlers to harvest anything but Minerals (early) and Nutrients (later). Like the perfectionist, I tend to quit expanding the number of bases fairly early on, and don't resume laying down new bases until late mid-game or later.

I think the decisive factor for me comes down to the PIA factor. I like the rapid growth of ICS, but the huge number of bases and units really takes a toll as I move into the middle part of the game. I tend to never finish games as it is, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of moves etc. which must be made each turn. ICS tends to excacerbate that problem for me, and thus I tend to quit when the game is a foregone conclusion, often around the end of the 1st century.

[MariOne]

Sik, it's posters like you who make Apolyton worth visiting!
After this thread first posts, I felt the need to clarify an ambiguity, which you put straight in point 3.

WE and mark13 seemed to state (to a superficial reader) that the # of bases have a direct link to inefficiency.
Of course they instead correctly shunted a more circuitous line of thoughts.

Your # of bases does NOT affect your (in)efficiency in any way.
There is instead an *indirect* connection with which inefficiency (as independent parameter) influences the 2 downsides of having a high # of bases.
This has been clearly summarized in Sikander's point 3.

- A higher SE inefficiency will cause more drones to be generated by bureaucracy, with equal # of bases.
- the more bases you build, the more distant they inevitably have to be (physically) from you HQ, the more energy they'll lose, also depending from your SE inefficiency parameter.

I only wanted to point out for the less experenced players, that if you build more bases they will NOT generate more inefficiency: they'll just suffer more drones and energy loss problems, proportionally related to the SE efficiency you *independently* choose.
Sorry for being obvious.

I have a question stemming from there which could add more tou the discussion.
We saw that inefficiency is one of the inevitable problems which will hurt an ICS player.
Well, should he try to counter that effect, adopting Green/Knowledge SE (where applicable)?
Or would that struggle negate the nature of the strategy, while a true ICS must just accept to take in the losses of inefficiency, and go for enhancing the positive aspects of ICS (instead of struggling to "negate the negs" he chose to live with in the first place when adopting the strategy itself)?

[mark13]

Mario, I may have inadvertantly implied that the # of bases links in some way to inefficiency, but I was merely working on the assumption that the sheer number of bases would affect the distance to your HQ.

Having said that, the points on ICS being good for warfare are well-made, and can be illustrated perfectly in the Hive approach. The AI (gasp ) uses something akin to an ICS approach when playing the Hive, and thus Yang is probably the strongst of the AI-controlled factions. The reason this works can be linked to the fact that the sheer number of units supported free in a particular base - 4 in Yang's case. After the usual garrison/former, that means looking at 2 attacking units supported free. With 30 bases, this means 60 units, whilst still maintaining the full productive capacity of your bases.

In this way, the Hive can be used to devastating effect as a momentum player in the early/mid part of a game. However, research takes a huge hit, and so the maintaining of an up-to-date army is critical. This can, of course, be achieved by probe teams, although in time these will become less and less effective, after high-security interlocks are in place. Although you could expect to have conquered the world by that time, it is not a certainty in MP games. This, to me, is the Hive's great downfall - if they don't hit early, and hard, they will get left behind. If a Hive attack is made with largely obsolete units, they will be largely ineffective.

This is, basically, how the ICS works. Although I have used the Hive as a model for this, it can be applied to any faction at all - but research and economy will take a huge hit in the mid-game. In Civ2, this is less the case, as the amount of trade lost to corruption is not of the magnitude it is in SMAC - also crawlers (caravans) have a much more limited use. This tends to make the ICS approach a lot more devastating. Is it as effective in SMAC? No. It can still be used to good effect though, in certain circumstances.

Just my opinion, though.

[Lord Maxwell]

I have played both ICS and perfectionist, and these days I generally go for thin expansion up to about 25-40 bases. (Depending on map size, neighbours.) If I have to "much" room, as in playing on a huge map and ending up alone on a continent I still stop at about 40 bases, but build them to form a moyo. (A hole in the middle, so I have a ring, two-three bases deep with big unused territory in the middle.) This makes me suffer somewhat in early mid game, but I feel that I make up for that before, by out-expanding the more conservative perfectionists, as well as later when I have double their amount of bases.

I found one thing that destroys ICS (and that destroys energy park), even with low res caviars my computer goes belly up when I try to scroll over a screen with every square fully developed, random formers moving around and a supply crawler on virtually every square. You can scroll at a decent rate when you are very zoomed in, but I prefer the "standard zoom out".

I only have PIII-500, with 128Mb ram and a 16Mb voodoo 3000 card.

Sleeze would work much better if it didn't kill my comp. (I am pretty convinced that I by playing my best ICS can kill myself playing my best perfectionist, and pretty easy at that. Even with 50x as many games as perfectionist under the belt.)

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Sik,

Well done and well said.

A couple of minor adds to the whole ICs vs. perfectionist approach.

With regard to efficiency there is a seperate but not often talked about efficiency at work here as well. THat being carried over minerals from one build q item to the next. A perfectionist base tends to have 30+ minerals at its disposal. This on the outset appears to be a very good thing (after all we all want to build things and build quickly) but can in fact lead to wastage. Carryover from one build Q item to the next allows but 10 mins in carryover. ICS bases tend to be small with significanlty less mins (albeit manymore Buid q's to build things) as a consequence once an item/unit etc is completed the truncation losses are much likely to be small if not nil. Now one can of course partially rush buy at perfectionist cities to ensure no wasted mins in the carryover but sheesh thats a PIA.

In ICS'ing, an SP like PTS, is a huge huge deal much more so than even cloning vats for a perfectionist player. Similarly PEG, Comand Nexus, or any other SP that gives a free facility is much more worthwhile inthe hands of an ICSer than a perfectionist.

Finally for an ICSer, that armada of formers does have work to be done primarily inthe form of boreholing wherever possible to make the most out if its population. A 2 boreholes per ICS colony is a juggernaut assuming your formers can keep pace and find suitable borehole sites. Boreholes become an ICSers best friend as they are extremely productive and they naturally limit vertical growth and the drones one will get as the base grows in size w/o facilities etc.)

The problems with ICSing are it by defaults makes you very powerful very quickly. As a result hated very quickly. As a result more often than not locked into a warring kind of game (either becuase people hate you or becasue you've run out of room to expand). Once at war the ability to grow depends on successful execution of the war not necessarily the ability to successfully build.

Finally, with respect to Mario's added questions as to what is the better approach for a ICSer, and I'll paraphrase the question to be should an ICSer strive for efficiency and all that comes withit or simply live with the consequences of ICS strategy.

I think what needs to be defined is the play style and the importance of the various SE attributes.

For example when ICSing support is a must in that the free 10 minerals upon base founding is huge considering the number of base foundings. So one doesn't normally want to sacrifice support for efficiency and that normally rules out Demo.

Police can be a huge boon especially if non lethal methods are inplay. But that holds consequences in terms of efficiency.

What I have experimented in the past with was Police/green having PTS SP. In doing so each newly formed base was 3 size normally a single nonlethal police unit held all drones at bay and by having a worker on a kelp farm or condensor farm this allowe the other two to work boreholes. The net zero efficiency wasn't terrible and all drones were easily controllable. Growth was an issue but not bad considereing I would strip my 3 base in terms of population by building pods until the point of base disband and then taking the last pod to be used as a resettlement thus getting around the whole population growth issue.

This was very much along the lines of what David Byron discussed but he neglected to indicate his prefence for SE choices. However, he did give a clear indicationthat he did run positive police ratings and was prone to nerve staple with regularity. The approach I outlined tho' doent' necessitate the nerve stapling.

Og

OTOH I absolutely find that kind of game incredibly boring. But have tried it for experiments sake.

[This message has been edited by Ogie Oglethorpe (edited December 28, 2000).]

[Sikander]

Ogie,

Good points all around. To expand on what you said about mineral wastage, the same can be said for Labs. Once a tech is achieved, any excess lab points produced at that base are lost. Large perfectionist bases (and most definitely SSCs) can lose a not inconsiderable number of labs this way. All in all though, these factors are fairly minor in the long run.

In my medium approach I tend to keep mineral production fairly low, shooting for 16 or so early on, and only slowly increasing them. When I reach 30 or so, I don't really bother putting much mental energy into getting any more. All I really want to do is build crawlers in one or two turns. I do watch for overproduction, and usually design units to take advantage of the current average production of my bases. Thus, while a trained scout may cost me only 9 minerals, if my average minerals are 30 or so, I will beef him up just a bit to save cash when I upgrade him into his final form.