Golden Age Question

Verrucosus · April 7, 2003, 04:56

Hello,

I have a question about Golden Ages. I'm playing a single player game under SMAC v5. I'm playing as Morgan on a standard map at Transcend level. I have
19 bases. Social choices are Democracy/Green/Knowledge, so my bureaucracy limit is 13 bases. In a number of my bases even the first citizen is a drone. Even when I allocate all my energy into Psych, not all of my bases will enter Golden Age. Specifically, the bases that have a bureaucracy drone and an uneven number of citizens don't. This is because the maximum amount of Psych in a single base is twice the number of citizens. In bases with an even number of citizens this is just enough to turn half the population from drones into talents, leaving the rest of the drones to be pacified by police, Recreation Commons, etc. However, in bases with an uneven number of citizens, we are just two Psych points short. I cannot raise my efficiency rating any further, and I failed to get the Human Genome Project. Is there anything else I can do?

Verrucosus

MariOne · April 7, 2003, 06:51

Offhand, you perfectly summarised the happiness/bureaucracy/GA/population rationale.

In base with odd (=2n+1) citizen number, requiring " at least half # of happy citizens for a GA this means that 'n' is not enough, and 'n+1' are necessary. This leaves only 'n' for doctors, and the psych they provide might not be enough. Often only because of these even/odd considerations and the base psych limit.
All the SPs and facilities reducing drones won't help you, you indeed need something to *create new* talents, like the HGP does.

AFAIrecall, the short answer is NO.

The longer answer, is to alter the premises of your situation (like Kirk did when cheating the Kobayashi Maru escapeless death-facing test...). That is:
1. conquer the HGP
2. get to the late game tech with the related Talent boosting facility (Paradise Garden?)
3. get to the very late game tech with the related Talent boosting SP (Clinical Immortality?)
4. get to the future SE which further boosts your Efficiency (Cybernetic IIRC, or was it Eudaimonia?), so to reduce your B-Drone impact, although this might be useless...

5. If you go for GA for their Econ benefits, wait for the odd-sized bases to grow by 1 to an even-sized. Eventually, *force* that growth (by adding CPods).
Eventually, *reduce* the base size to an even one (by producing a CPod), reassigning the leftover tile & excess resources to a neighbor base in need of them.
If you instead wanted to use the GA as a mean to provide pop-booming (Demo+Creche+GA), too bad. You'll have to alternate the above growth step with it. That is, you force base growth to, say, 6 by pod-booming, then you pop-boom to 7 thanks to GA which is immediately and inevitably lost, then you pod-boom to 8 reinstating GA and pop-booming again, and so on....

MariOne · April 7, 2003, 07:07

BTW, I assumed with SMACv5 you actually mean SMAX or SMAXv2, or GA won't help you for pop-booming.

Verrucosus · April 7, 2003, 07:23

Thanks, MariOne, for the very detailed reply. I've just discovered Planetary Economics, so I'll have to wait a bit for the talent-creating devices you listed. The Human Genome Project is in the middle of Yang's territory, but I'll check if there's something I can do to get it.

With SMAC v5, I meant not SMAX, but the version of SMAC you get when you apply the XP patch released last year on top of SMAC v4. I've seen some evidence of changes to SMAC v4 (maintenance costs appear to be correct, from what I've seen), so part of my plan is to test if a Golden Age boom works under this version.

Given the confusion I caused recently about negative efficiency and bureaucracy limits, I immediately caution that this is just my personal impression from only two games I played since applying the patch. Gameplay changes are neither documented in the patch's readme file nor - as far as I know - have they been confirmed by others.

Regards,
Verrucosus

Verrucosus · April 9, 2003, 07:49

I finally had a chance to continue the game I described in the first post.

The Human Genome Project was somewhat inaccessible. It might have been possible to slip in a few probe teams. Money wouldn't have been a problem (hey, I already sound like Morgan), but I could not have defended the base for more than two or three turns and I was not sure if Yang would be willing to accept a truce after losing just one big base.

So, I used the second strategy you suggested. It involved a lot of preparation, but eventually I had enough colony pods to have one round of pod-booming in all bases affected by bureaucracy drones. Having brought all of these bases to an even number of citizens and secured sufficient food supplies, I turned on the Psych. It worked! All bases pop-boomed during the next turn, and, after adding the colony pods in the bureaucracy-drone-bases to bring them back to an even number of citizens, during the turn after that. Having run out of colony pods I turned off the Psych, but now even the bases suffering from bureacracy are at size 9, which is pretty close to my hab limit of 11 - the Ascetic Virtues are still in construction.

It is now my impression that both Golden Ages and maintenance costs are working correctly under SMAC Version 5.0 (which is what it's called in the version entry of the help menu). Since no fixes had been officially advertised and I haven't read about any similar experiences by others, I would appreciate it if someone else could check whether I'm hallucinating.

As a word of warning I should add that although the XP patch can be uninstalled separately, some of the changes it makes to the non-planetary-pack version of SMAC remain after uninstalling. I've noticed this in respect to the faction selection screen, the planetfall prologue and the graphics for solar collectors and mining stations.

Regards,
Verrucosus

MariOne · April 9, 2003, 08:49

Well, I never even considered dowloading it, not having XP anywhere.
This might advise me to give it a try nevertheless.
I wonder tho whether it updates any system driver (or if it uses any XP-specific system routine calls in the patched code), so that it actually cannot run under Win98SE...

Verrucosus · April 9, 2003, 09:00

I have no idea what the patch does exactly and I don't recall seeing any specific information in the readme-file. I haven't used the patch on my old computer, so I don't know if it would work on pre-XP versions of Windows. However, I do recall that the readme recommends the patch for those having problems under Win2000 or WinXP and for those involved im multiplayer games with players who use it. That at least implies that it should work on Win 98.