Switching Sides challenge story

[Blake]

I thought I'd give this another shot. Playing with SMAX factions on Huge Map of Planet.

Anyway I started off with the Ursupers, probably a bad choice but I wanted to play them. By 2140 I had overtaken the Caretakers, 2150 still no contact, I had control of most of the middle continent, except the mainfold nexus end, but had scouted it. Terraforming consited of lots of forest. No contact yet. Ind auto just arrived.

On the powercharts the aliens are equal, at about four times stronger than the best human factions, poor DJ Roze is half as high as the best human faction, so I switch to her.

One size 4 base, no former. Garrison consists of lots of scout patrol and synth sentinels and one probe team. Being harrased by cult spore launchers. Apparentely Rozes solution to being bomarded was building more garrisons.
New managment moves 4 units out to attack the sporelaunchers, Cha accepts peace for only a few techs. I'm right below the jungle, and it looks empty. Goody. I manage a pact with the Cult, he started near sunny mesa and is being clobbered by H'mniee who must have started near borehole cluster. On the great dunes is Yang (Sven got replaced with Yang)

Manage to trade ecology from Dawn, now it's colony pods and formers all the way, Yang stops by and is being all nasty. I trade two techs for peace and ask him to stop attacking the cult. Switch to FM for extra tech, weird bug means switched faction has 3 less drones every base.

The jungle really is empty, I've got about 4 bases in it when an Elite caretaker 4-3r-1 drops by via planetneck to visit my HQ. I lose a smaller city to the elite unit. H'mniee calls and offers a truce for the low price of two techs. I accept. H'mniee sneak attacks next turn. Typical. I then corner the caretaker impact squad with a scout patrol. I told the scout patrol it was armed with all the latest alien busting technology, and it believed me, so did the alien unit apparentely. Hawhaw. Counting my blessings that the scout patrol is blocking the impact squad I manage to find 80 credits, wasn't easy considering I had no infrastructure to sell and no contact for loans. Netherless I manage to bribe the impact squad and send it back down planetneck. Don't have mobility, and can't do a double reverse engineer trick to get an impact rover from a impact squad and probe team. Oh well.

H'mniee exterminates Cha dawn. He'll be missed.

My probes managed to aquire SOB from H'mniee and it's fundie time. The jungle is almost fully colonised, but defense it pitifull.

A couple of caretaker units turn up at the top of jungle so I bribe them, h'mniee is fundie and it's taking all of my FM income to bribe her units.

What a deligtfull suprise, Marr has dropped a 4-2-2 off to play above the jungles. Too expensive to bribe - doh, he is his usual lovable self and offers to exterminate me. How kind. H'mniee shows off her latest 6r-1-2 rover, and Marr kills it with his impact rover, so I kill Marr's impact rover with my bribed caretaker units. Phew.

Marr revists, this time four shiny needlejets kill some hapless crawlers and formers. Don't you just love that sinking feeling when the aliens get D:AP before you even have HEChem. Looks like Marr's got a base on manifold nexus

Yang offers a pact, probably something to do with the caretakers continued genocide program. The poor chairman only has one base left.

My probe teams suceed in extracting Centuari Empathy, so I switch to green. I've also researched doc:mobil and doc:flex and built my first foil, which pops a pod which completes my followup sea colony pod, SWEET. My jungle bases are about size 4 and I've set them to build impact rovers probe teams and mindworms. I'm sending my sea colony pod and foil down to that medium sized island in the southern ocean. I'm nowhere near either alien in the powercharts.

Things look bad for the datajacks, after a decade or so Marr comes back with 8 needlejets. He also sinks my foil with one of his nifty impact foils, but the sea colony pod evades destruction and is still heading for the island. A steady stream of 6r-3r-1's and 6r-1-2's are pouring down from caretaker territory.

At this stage I'm not sure if I can hold the jungle, between Marr wiping out my crawlers and formers, and h'mniees ground pounders things look bleak for the datajacks. Still havn't met Domai or Aki, once I establish a base on the island I'll send a foil to meet them. Aliens have complete monolopy on SP's. My brilliant plan is to turn the southern island into a nice wee fortress, with my (diminishing) mainland supplying energy credits for rushbuying. All hopes rest with 10000 DA citisens on a solitary sea colony pod. But now I must sleep

[DilithiumDad]

Great game! This illustrates one of my original points which seems to have been lost, namely that one of the most intriguing aspects of a switching sides challenge is having to deal with the monster faction you created! Marr had a human-assisted start and that is proving quite difficult to overcome, depsite all your best SMACX skills honed through countless hours of play!

[Blake]

Update:

Turns out that was Roze's darkest hour.

In the next 4 decades Marr actually conquers a Caretaker city above jungle, this is good and bad news. Bad news he can now snipe at half my territory with his damn needlejets, good news he devestates H'mniees attack force so I'm actually safer than I was before, Marr can't conquer my cities with his jets, and H'mniee can't get near my cities thanks to Marrs jets.

Anyway when I thought I was doomed I decided to makes lots of money to build up that southern island (from now on "DJ Island"), size 5 cities got turned into techicians, smaller cities stockpile, worms are trolling up a healthy income too. Started ship construction project to meet Domai and Aki. Ships all 2-2-4's or 1-3tr-4's. My HQ and a second base are safe (as long as I have the jungle) from the Aliens and have lots of mineral crawlers and are building sea colony pods like they are going out of fashion, soon I have 4 sea bases around DJ island and have started T-forming it.

Then GOOD thing happens, Marr agrees to a truce for two techs. Marr isn't quite as bad as H'mniee I find. This means my navy is now SAFE to explore. Also my cities are now safe because Marr is harrassing H'mniee.

So I start on basic infrastructure, then impact rovers.

My ships are happily cruising towards FW sea, I also send a sea colony pod FW sea way and bump into one of Domai's bases.

I wrestle a pact from Domai, without even needing to declare vendetta on Marr. I was suprised, usually the AI's like to kick you while your down. I also trade for Gene splicing, Ecological Engineering, Enviromental Economics, Adapative doctrine, at which stage I declare I'll never call Domai names again, altough I take that back when I noticed the jerk has half conquered poor Aki, explains where he got all that cool tech from though.

Domai covers the land east of FW sea, Aki everything north of FW sea, altough looks like domai captured his way into controlling all of FW sea. Mount planet is still unexplored, my next objective will be to colonise that, could do with an industrial powerhouse. DJ island just doesn't have the mineral resources, and the sea cities are ill equiped to field a fleet of formers for boreholage. Those +6 min squares on Mt Planet are going to be real nice.

Now my plan is to infiltrate Marr, put probes outside lots of his bases then in one turn probe him for D:AP HEC SFF and anything else his scientists cooked up in my abscence. Unfortunately (for Roze) I had gone very light on coastal cities for Marr, with marine threat and whatsnot.

Some things I've noticed so far about switching sides, having the aliens tends to screw things up, they are hard enough to catch up to playing normal factions, toss the itteration idea out the window. If you intend to try to iterate through every faction would be best to choose builder factions and try not to go to war. Would make for a VERY interesting end game, with several factions having massive orbital operations and advanced terraforming & infrastructure.

btw if anyone wants a challenge against two VERY heavily armed militaristic aliens I have a year 2150 save.

[knowhow2]

How do you switch sides? I mean can you really do that (without being a computer expert that is)?

[Blake]

Hit Ctrl-k to start the scenerio editor (this marks your game as CHEATED)

Then select "switch sides" from the scenerio menu, OR hit shift-F3 and choose the faction you want to change too.

(optional) Once changed hit ctrl-k again to disable the scenerio editor, otherwise you get some bases options and stuff.

[knowhow2]

okey, thanx for the tip, I'll try that.

[Blake]

I played another intersting switching sides challenge, this time switching sides to whatever faction was losing most badly. Standard Map of Planet

I started with Morgan and built up a nice little core of cities, and planted a nice big forest.

I then left morgan to help the PK's for a while, they were in a morgan spartan sandwich, mainly established him on some other landmasses.

Next I went to Domai and got his terraforming (land and sea) sorted out, and packed in some extra bases.

Then back to lal who was being beat on by Santiago, he had mangaged to lose most of his bases on other landmasses. Got him almost sorted out when I notice Morgan is having a field day crushing Zak. So I leave Lal at the mercy of Santiago and switch to Zak, who is one turn from losing his HQ to the Morganite juggernaught (SE = Fundie, Frontier, Power). Morgan is really mean, and attacks with dozens of probes. Luckily his target is the Uni HQ so he can't mind control it. But he DOES assasinate researchers so I can never finish D:AP.

Got truce with Morgan and he starts clobbering Lal instead (I know Morgan and clobber don't go in the same sentence, but this morgan really was clobbering). Lal basically got eradicated by Morgan and Santiago, and they took all of his nice bases I had built up.

When I look at what made morgan so strong I suspect it was the forest I planted and all the formers I had built, the forest had spread significantly and Morgan had LOTS of bases, probably 10 more than I left him with.

Also Domai was even stronger, I had changed to him in peacetime so all I did was terraforming and expansion (with Lal and Zak I was fighting for survival) so Domai had a nicely forested Uranium flats, some boreholes, quite a lot of condensors and excellent sea terraforming. With all of this nice terraforming Domai was easily leading in population, production too no doubt.

So even only 30 years of human control at the start of the game can make an AI faction a LOT stronger, even changing there usual play style. And when I consider specifically WHAT made the AI stronger it comes down to - forest. So in theory if I edit alphax.txt and make all terraforming but forest available at a later tech (for example):
Free: Forest, Kelp Farm
Road: DocFlex
Farm, condensor: Gene Splicing
Solar, Mine, sea mine, tidal harnass: Industrial Economics
Remove Fungus: Cent. Empathy

and give all the factions a starting former then they would be forced to plant a small forest, which would then grow into a larger forest, which would increase the "value" of the land and encourage the AI to build more bases around it. (a mapmaking trick to get AI's to build bases densely is to lay "tracks" of uranium everywhere)

[knowhow2]

After reading this thread I deceided to have a go at it. I set up the game with mostly warmongers (miriam, yang, santiago, Cha Dawn, Marr, H'minee and the not-so-much-of-a-warmonger-but-best-at-swamping-your-opponent-to-death-with-lots-of-troop-kinda-guy, Domai) on a large, 50-70 % ocean, weak erosive, abundant life, dense random map. Of cause all the factions were suppose to be more aggresive than usual. The first try (I did play it twice) I started with domai. He landed on a semi-good place. The good thing was that next base was build on a GREAT place. With domais industry and the 4 nut producing base I were pumping out pop pods every other turn with rush build. In just 20 turns I had a 10 base strong ground to stand on. Sadly for me Miriam already build 6 bases and many many infantrys (infantries?), and she was next to me. Then I quickly switch over to santiago to try to rescue her since she was a base from getting herself smashed by Marr. I quickly build a pop pod and got her to an unhabited part of the map (the same land as domai and miriam but a bit farther away) but by then I realise that Cha were also getting his behind kicked so I switched to him trying to keep him alive from H'minee. Also discovering the joy of map editor I kept placing and removing landmarks until I got the map scenario I wanted. Things got out of hand and I decided to quit that one and start over. I pressed ctrl+shift+Q, followed by quickstart and right to new map. This time I figured I should start with Cha, and made him after 30 turn or so the top faction in tech. I continue this later.
[This message has been edited by knowhow2 (edited March 13, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by knowhow2 (edited March 13, 2001).]

[zsozso]

I'm still paying my first multiple-switch challenge game, that I mentioned in the other thread. Short story:

1. Started with Zak on huge planet near Uranium flats. Peacefull 50 turns, built a very solid empire with a bunch of early SPs.

2. Switch to Miriam, no terraforming done whatsoever, lots of useless
infantry units. I manage to get her up to speed, exterminating Marr during the process (he wouldn't stop harrassing my formers, so I just had to wipe him out ). Early second century (i.e. after 2200)
I landed on Zaks continent and started rover-rushing him (and stealing all his techs in the process). That pushed Miriam up to #1 (or Zak down to #2, depending on POV).

3. Next switch around 2220 to the Drones. Lots of work to build infrastructure, had to ship over to another place, because I did not want to confront former-me Miriam before I'm ready. Unfortunately she did not wait for me to get as strong as I wanted, so I had to switch to full-war mode in a rush. For 10-15 turns it was a real hard game to stop her and fight back. But I managed to turn the situation around and started to take over her territory. In the meantime Zak got back his bases on the other continent from Miriam (interestingly, the AI could not keep the bases I conquered for her), so Zak got pretty strong again. I got DAP, built a bunch of X penetrators and was researching for MMI, while producing crawlers for a quick build of Air-base academy and Bioenhenacement SP (don't remember the name now). For my disappointment I have overtaken Zak on the power bar at the moment that I got MMI... ~2300

4. So I switched to the Cyborgs. They were in a losing war against both of their neighbours: Morgan on one side and Caretakers on the other. What a nice sandwitch... Fortunately, a little diplomacy and tech gifting turned them around so much that they both pacted with me! Then I built up the infrastructure (again for the 4th faction...) to be able to get into level with Zak both in tech and industrial productivity. Then I started to wipe him out with X-chaos choppers, a bit later X-shard ones. However,
when I finished off Zak (and the remains of Miriam who was pretty much destroyed by the Drones in the meantime) I had to face the big monster I created: Domai with a strong, well-built empire and all the techs I had PLUS CBA and the Bioenhancement SP (Cyborg Factory? - that should be mine as Aki!). So he had elite <6> defenders in all bases, which were by default equipped with Aerospace complex. Bottomline is, they came out with a defense strentgh of around 30 against my X-shard choppers which were around 25 attack strength. It took about 2-3 choppers to kill a single defender - and he was much faster to build new ones than I was to build new choppers. In the meantime all my nerve gas actions resulted in a rather harsh response from planet: bringing up the sea levels by a few thousand feet after a heavy mind-worm rape session. And I still could not crack Domai... Had to reach for the last tool: Planet Busters (but first I made a focused reesearch session to get orbital defense pods fearing the response). That did the trick... The two key SP bases of Domai gone with some others thrown in for good measure.

5. Time to switch, but time is actually running out: it is 2425 when I switch to the Caretakers. Things are looking very very hard... All the bases are in the sea with little production. Under heavy attack by the Drones and close enough to Aki to expect attacks from that direction soon too. Not sure if I can survive long here - let alone overtake the first place within 75 turns.

Altogether, it is a great challenge. The best SP game I ever played.
Zsozso

[knowhow2]

Cha Started on a small island and I use the scen edit to cheat a little bit by giving him FOUR (!) borehole cluster on that small continent (I guess it was more a continent than island). But for some reason I just wanted four bases so I build four top-condition bases with all the facilities. At the same time I took a look at the scen edit and wanted to see if the other factions had made any progress. Yang was strong and domai was strong (I kick started him by putting two of his best bases in a middle of ruins, that certainly made him the best faction after awhile. Miriam and santiago were quite weak but did have a lot of land to expand so I left them both alone. Meanwhile Marr started at he bottom of the map far away from anyone. so with help of the Scen Edit I connected his continent to the one at the top left side, namely the one with H'minee on it. I went back to Cha, building stuff, catching mindworms popping pods. Even though I had the four best bases, I kept on missing the first SPs. The only one I got were VW out of the first 4-5. Another look at the Scen Edit I noticed that Marr had just stopped in expanding. He just kept on buliding troops but that wasn't doing anything for him since he was stuck at the bottom of the map with no factions close to him. So I switched to him and started to crank up pop pods. After 5 turns or so he went from 3 bases to 12. After that I switched back to Cha, doing my own thing leaving the others to fight out there own battles. Everyone seems to hold their ground although miriam and santiago were still the weakest ones. I decided to pull miriam up a nitch and gave her all my tech. Suddenly she went up to be the best tech factions (without a single probe!!!). But she kept on cranking up infantrys, with just 4 bases she didn't have a lot to say. So I switched over to her and cranked up pop pods á la Marr. To make things even more exciting I turn on scen edit and connected H'minee and Marr 's continent to Domai's. By then they both massive attacked him from two fronts. Suddenly Marr went from dislocated to giant conqueror, taking bases both from Domai and H'minee. Just to put the things over the top I connected Yang to miriam, santiago and domai with some scen edit. A full scale war broke out on the continent (now, one large one).

Switching back to Cha, I kept using tricks to get more tech and SPs. But I kept it with just 4 bases (16 size each with AV). When Cha got the MMI around 2232 I rushed build both Cloud base and Cyborg fac. Now he got plenty of probes (elite), 2 chaos needlejets, a few rovers and a handfull of creds. Just to make it a fullscale war I connected Cha to the rest and he certainly proved to be quite a force to be reckon with. In 2 turns he took two of Yangs bases and smashed a army of Domais chaos rovers.

Just now I sort of got tired of the game and for some reason wanted miriam, domai, santiago, Cha to be pactmates and so I switched around making offer and stuff just to get them into pacts. It was hard since they were all aggressive towards me, but I manage to make miriam pact mate with cha and domai, santiago with cha and domai and cha and domai went from vendetta to treaty. the funny thing is that Yang is in the middle of the four of them, vendetta upon everyone. By now I didn't wanto play anymore so I left it unfinished. Maybe I should go back and let the computer resolved the battle?
Would be fun the make them all reach singualarity machanics and see what happens. hmm, i should probably try that out. Marr and H'minee might start PB eachother soon too.

edt. keep mixing letters in words, sorry, like hadr ro doami
[This message has been edited by knowhow2 (edited March 13, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by knowhow2 (edited March 13, 2001).]