Outside normal operating hours access is via smartphone and you use self-checkout. Shelves are only restocked during normal hours. This is a pilot program, but what do you think of 24/7 Migros?
The Cybernetic Consciousness is one of the three tech factions, together with the University and Data Angels. They have some exceptionally good bonuses especially for building and fast research. Their long unwieldy name is often shortened to Cyborgs or CyCon.
The Cyborgs have the faction agenda "Rational Objectivity", and a lot of Aki's diplomacy lines are about logic and rationality.
The Cyborg origin story is Aki runs an AI experiment on the Unity which becomes sentient. She then does brain surgery on herself (?) adding implants and becomes one with the algorithm. She convinces other people that brain surgery is awesome and they form the Cyborg faction, which is a collective consciousness of humans united by the algorithm and their brain implants.
Collective consciousnesses are something of a theme of SMAC, as Planetmind is a collective consciousness, Transcendence victory involves everyone on Chiron being united into a collective consciousness. And the Telepathic Matrix Secret Project. There is also the Hive which explores in a different way the idea of a collective working as one.
Generally the collective consciousness is considered to have "Threads of personality", that is to say, individuals do not entirely dissolve away the collective but are an individual floating in a sea of consciousness.
The game is actually quite shy of details on the Cyborg ideology specifically, in fact fully half of Aki's quote are simply infodumping on the nature of progenitor resonance powers, and Aki's most famous quote says nearly everything:
> "Those who join us need give up only half of their humanity--the illogical, ill-tempered, and disordered half, commonly thought of as 'right-brain' functioning. In exchange, the 'left-brain' capacities are increased to undreamed potential. The tendency of Biologicals to cling instead to their individual personalities can only be attributed to archaic evolutionary tendencies." > -- Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, "Convergence"
It is sometimes suggested that the algorithm or collective is actually in charge, and Aki Zeta-5 is not the leader but merely a kind of figurehead used for diplomacy and such, though the quote does suggest the cyborgs continue to use their brains independently even if they don't care about individuality.
In diplomacy, Aki is accused of "grafting silicon onto your few remaining biological components" which might suggest some cyborgs also "upgrade" their bodies with robotic limbs and such in the manner of Cyberpunk and Deus Ex.
It's natural to wonder whether members of the Cyborg faction have a choice of whether or not to have brain surgery and be connected to the algorithm. There's not much in the canonical lore to say, but my assumption is that yes, it is consensual, and the Cyborgs do not for instance forcefully perform brain surgery on the inhabitants of a captured base.
Here is my reasoning:
Hence I tend to think that at least in the early games, only the leadership and talents are actually cyborgs, with there still being many ordinary people living ordinary lives under the rational guidance of the cyborg elite, with a transition to near complete cyborgification as technology progresses.
By Aki's own words in diplomacy "My intent is to impose rationality and order on the inhabitants of this chaotic Planet".
Nevertheless, details are extremely sparse on how she would achieve this goal. For example, with the original 7 factions, there are a number of blurbs about the Morganite plan to corner the global energy market. I generally assume though, that Aki would rely on the superiority of the cyborg way of life to attract new members to the CyCon rather than Borg'ing it up. But there's also really nothing to say that going on full on aggressive assimilation is contrary to her agenda.
The Cyborg have extremely strong bonuses combined with highly flexible social engineering.
Overall, I rate the Cyborgs extremely highly, easily on par with the University. The only thing that holds them back from being absolutely broken is their pop-booming impairment.
The Cyborgs are an excellent momentum faction, all they need to do is research Doctrine:Mobility or Planetary Networks + reverse engineer probe team, and they can make Recon Rovers, they're also tied with the Data Angels in that they only need to research 2 techs to have Impact Rovers. So the Cyborgs are a top 3 faction in terms of the speed at which they can roll out Impact Rovers. Also the +2 Effic helps make everything a bit easier and more flexible, on a standard map they can expand to 9 bases instead of 6 before b-drones appear, or they can run Police State or Planned and still have normal Effic. While the Cyborgs are great at a few fast Impact Rovers, they can also do Police State very well and spam out units, not quite with the effectiveness of Miriam or Yang, but Police State hurts them less than it does most factions.
Their main special perk is the tech steal, should they attack a faction which can put up a fight and doesn't immediately surrender, they can easily liberate tech, not even needing to unlock probe teams to have this luxury. These kind of faction perks especially matter on Blind research, where you can rely on what you start with but not the whims of research, cyborgs can immediately attack with laser units and steal tech, and if their foe is stuck without armor or weapons (this is really common for the likes of Lal and Zak who don't have BUILD or CONQUER priority) then the laser weapons will shred them.
I feel the Cyborgs are most at home with a Builder strategy. They are a top-tier Demo+FM faction as they can trivially combine +4 Effic with +1 energy per tile, unlike most factions which are best served staying somewhere around the middle with the energy allocation, the Cyborgs can simply run 100% EC or 100% research, whichever is most useful at the time. For example, after unlocking a critical facility like Tree Farms or Hybrid Forests, it makes perfect sense to just run 100% EC with Wealth until you've finished rush-buying them everywhere, then you can go back to 100% Research with Knowledge. If the Cyborgs can get an EC boon, such as Engineer specialists, they can devour the tech tree terrifyingly fast.
While the University and possibly Morgan can out-research the Cyborgs in the early game, no-one can rival their mid-game research pace without being significantly larger.
The Cyborgs also have quite an easy time pop-booming relative to some other pop-boom impaired factions, as they do so under Demo+Planned with +2 Effic, this means their base count threshold for b-drones is 50% higher and that really helps with Golden Ages, and they have more energy to throw around for psych. Their ability to devour the tech tree also makes them excellently positioned to beeline the Cloning Vats and eliminate their one weakness.
Overall the Cyborgs are extremely strong builders, though perhaps with quite a high skill ceiling, to really maximize the cyborgs potential involves quite a lot of switching between SE and such as the situation demands.
While the Cyborgs are flexible in general besides being unable to run Fundamentalism, I wouldn't call them the best Hybrid faction, when you have the strongest research in the game you don't really need to rely on probes and natives much as these are more "underdog" tech, Green is also kind of lackluster for the Cyborgs because Demo+FM is already giving you half the reason to run Green, the +4 Effic is not only about energy allocation flexibility, but also helps you actually get most of the raw energy you're harvesting, hence the Cyborgs need to be much more sprawling before Green results in more energy than FM. But there is nothing stopping you exploring these avenues of the game and the Cyborgs slip into bouts of conquest very easily, and can very easily raise huge amounts of EC for buying and upgrading units.
I'd say that both in the base game and with Thinker mod, Aki is one of the stronger AIs.
Based on faction and personality attributes Aki is actually the most peaceful AI leader in the game, this is because she is a pacifist like Morgan and Diedre, but unlike them, she doesn't get in everyone's business about their economic SE choice, she only gets mad about Eudaimonia and Thought Control which come so late as to be irrelevant. Aki has little reason to declare vendetta and for the most part only gets attacked by others, or dragged into shared vendettas through invitation.
Her AI priorities are DISCOVER and EXPLORE, which happens to be same as Lal. This makes her fairly expansionist, and also makes her build a lot of probe teams, and pursue some quite useful SPs. I generally consider EXPLORE to be a very good AI priority as it encourages good things like growing and various kinds of useful infrastructure like Formers - this is one reason why AI Dierdre can perform quite well. DISCOVER is kind of bad by itself (Zak), but if tempered with another priority the extra inclination to pursue techs like Planetary Networks, Pre-Sentient Algorithms Fusion Power and Orbital Spaceflight can be good. If there is one downside of this preference, is it doesn't direct her to the really strong conquer line ending in the Cloning Vats that a human would probably pursue.
The +2 Effic works very well for AI, with respect to how the AI plays, the Cyborgs can be described as "a generic faction, but better". +2 Effic and +2 Knowledge both provide very good generic value as they work great with any combination of SE. Aki is also protected from running Fundie which would usually be a mistake for the cyborgs.
As Aki lacks the CONQUER priority, she won't build that many units and can be vulnerable to being invaded by a warmonger, however the sheer speed with which she researches does tend to mean she has access to weapons (including starting with lasers) and is more likely to build decisively useful SPs like the Citizen Defense Force and Hunter Seeker Algorithm. Furthermore she is simply embroiled in fewer vendettas than most AIs which helps her to build in relative peace.
Nevertheless, the AI does not understand the unique strengths of the Cyborgs such as how exploitable Demo+FM is and how effectively the Cyborgs can beeline to critical techs. In Thinker mod she'll often just hang out in Demo+Planned which is okay for her but isn't great as she isn't even getting pop-booming out of the deal. So even though the Cyborgs are a substantially stronger faction than the Hive, AI Yang will still often play more strongly than AI Aki.
So I thought I'd do a deep dive series for the SMACX factions. I plan to do all of them, but I'll start with The Data Angels who are probably my favorite faction, ironic as when I was reading my old posts on the Apolyton forums from 20 years ago, I discovered myself calling them "boring".
Like all factions, the Data Angels are largely a blank slate on which to project your own beliefs about what they are, though they are basically conceived as being techno-anarachists inspired heavily by 80's hacker culture.
Important Note: The Angels are not "a faction of hackers". They are a faction with a strong hacker culture, where hackers have positions of power and influence, and which takes great pride in cyberwarfare. But there are still all the ordinary everyday jobs done by ordinary people.
Their faction ideology is "Free flow of information" which is almost certainly a reference to "information wants to be free" though still with elements of the kind of free flow of information that Zak and Lal talk about. They have the SE agenda of Democracy, and the SE aversion of Power. This aversion to Power shows up strongly in Roze's quotes, where Roze would seemingly prefer to manipulate things behind the scenes rather than resorting to overt force, something she would surely consider a failure of style, even if she's not a pacifist as such.
> War is war; destruction is destruction. You think this is obvious. But war is not destruction, it is victory. To achieve victory, simply appear to give your opponent what he wants and he will go away, or join you in your quest for additional power.
-- Datatech Sinder Roze, "Information Burns"
For me the natural economics of the Data Angels is Free Market which in SMAC basically means "do whatever you like consequences be damned", as Planned and Green both seem contrary to their liberalism (also gameplay wise, Free Market goes very well with probe teams), while their values would be Knowledge though in terms of gameplay Wealth also works extremely well.
My 2026 vision of the Data Angels, is more anarcho-capitalist than traditional anarchist, something like a faction which superficially is a mix of rule by silicon valley technocrats who actually make really good tech (kind of Morganite monopoly style where it's so good other factions want to use it, this also reflects the Angels being canonically an offshoot of Morganites, though Angels would have much weaker corporate rights/protection) and a direct democracy such as using "polls on X formerly known as Twitter" for faction level decision making. But with a powerful shadowy intelligence agency with Roze at its head, actually pulling the strings, the transparency you might expect to find in the Peacekeeper Democracy, would not exist at the "higher echelons" of Angel society, with Roze's agenda and scheming being ultimately unknowable, while information would certainly flow freely through the Angel's networks, there would also be an impenetrability to outsiders, those attempting to infiltrate the Angels would never know if they've been artfully maneuvered into a honey pot.
> The idea first of all was to create a center without a physical location, more of a nexus of thought where we could trade intelligence, turncodes, and technique. The second goal was to hide it from the very probe teams that used it. Nothing could be more secret than a collection of information that spends 99% of its existence dissolved into the ether.
-- Datatech Sinder Roze, "Putting the Covert in Covert Ops"
Overall the Angels society would definitely lean a bit dystopian just because people wouldn't have an incentive to work together to make a better society and because their leader is textbook chaotic-neutral in D&D terms.
Their opposition to Yang's police state and Miriam's fundamentalism would be most heartfelt, as freedom of action and freedom of belief would be core tenets in Angel society, coercion would be firmly rejected, with control instead being exercised subtly through manipulation.
Unlike some leaders, Roze doesn't really seem to have an agenda, or at least, not an end game. Like Lal straightforwardly wants to be the supreme leader, just achieved diplomatically. Yang wants everyone to be in one big happy police state without the happiness. Miriam wants everyone to either love God as much as she does or be dead. Dierdre wants everyone to live in harmony with planetmind.
But what does Roze want? Roze seems to be like Swensgaard, in that she seems to be somewhat parasitic in nature, she doesn't want to conquer the other factions, in fact in a sense she needs them for her own prosperity and amusement. However given Roze's secretive and scheming nature, you can also imagine she has an agenda but keeps it to herself: if she does has a plan for global domination, it'd be like the Morganite economic victory plan to corner the global energy market, but where the Angels would infiltrate the entire world with their tech and algorithms until they are secretly controlling everything.
The Data Angels come close to being a completely generic faction, which is honestly a big part of their strengths, since penalties can be as faction-defining as bonuses. Spartans have a punishing industry penalty, the Hive and Believers struggle with research pace, Morgan can be practically crippled by his supply and hab penalties if not played carefully. A perfectly generic faction would actually be quite strong, able to fully exercise all SE options and not held back in any particular way.
But let's look at the actual faction modifiers.
Starting with Planetary Networks is absolutely bonkers as it's probably the most pivotal tech in the game, anyone who has played tech stagnation + blind research will know just how important and game-changing Planetary Networks is, it's pretty much a tipping point in progression, and the Angels just get it on a silver platter on turn 1!
Planetary Networks unlocks:
Also it's a prerequisite to Industrial Automation, which is also an incredible tech as it unlocks Wealth, Crawlers and the PTS.
The Angels also start with Information Networks, this allows building Network Nodes, but also is a prerequisite to Nonlinear Mathematics. It's worth noting that starting techs do not increase tech costs, so any faction which starts with two techs has a secondary tech lead over factions which start with only one tech, this is especially true when both are on critical tech paths.
The Angels are a very decent momentum faction, this comes down to the following benefits:
Overall the Angels are nasty little gremlins when it comes to rover-rushes, being both fast out the gate and hard to counter.
In my mind the Angels are most naturally played as Builders, boosting their early expansion with Planned then transitioning to Demo+FM+Wealth to run a rocking economy. The Angels don't exactly have any economic bonuses, though just not having maluses is an excellent foundation, they can swap between Free Market for +1 energy per tile, and Planned for bouts of pop-booming which pretty much puts them ahead of factions who can't do that, like Gaians who can't run FM, and Morgan who can't run Planned.
Their probe bonus is also absolutely incredible for Builder play, but perhaps not for the reason you'd think.
Armored probes work excellently in combination with Demo+FM+Wealth, as:
An armored infantry probe will generally cost 1 or 2 rows more than an infantry defender, but in exchange you have a unit that doesn't cost support, which will quickly pay off the extra cost, it'll have much higher morale, and you can freely send it into enemy territory to be a nuisance and ZoC block. It's also still a probe team so it can walk up to enemy bases and do probe actions, creating a dilemma for them: they can sacrifice units to kill it, or leave it alive to get up to mischief such as probe actions and ZoC blocking.
Armored probes have limitations, most importantly they can't be designated defenders and are destroyed by collateral damage when stacked, so you basically have to use them 1 per tile, but this is completely fine for ZoC blocking, you can basically push a wall of the things forward and create a quagmire for the enemy, the fact that probe teams aren't subject to ZoC blocking themselves also means they can be pushed past enemy units to make even more headaches and make room for more probes to move forward, and creating a safe zone for conventional attackers to mop up the stranded enemies with any counter-attack having to first break through the probe wall.
Armored probes are great for anyone running Demo+FM+Wealth, but they're extra good for the Angels because they are trivially elite due to the +2 probe and the free covert ops center.
Having these very high morale armored probes as defensive screens is definitely one of the best builder perks of the Angels, running Wealth can create a measure of insecurity as your defenders are easily killed, requiring that you use your own offensive units to kill the enemy, but the Angels can be more secure hiding behind their highly durable armored infantry probes that can even easily push into enemy territory to extend the buffer zone.
The Angels are also naturally better than pretty much anyone at using a strong economy to mindcontrol the enemy, Morgan and the Cyborgs can both do 100% energy allocation with +2 economy, which is a neat perk and at least lets them rival the Angel's cheaper mind control, but the Angels are firmly a top mind-controller faction should you wish to exercise sheer economic power.
Generally the hybrid playstyle involves doing a mix of different things, and generally using a hybrid army of conventional military, probes and natives. The Angels excel at this kind of playstyle, as they have no penalties to any of these vectors, for instance they can use natives perfectly well under Green, and their elite probes are an excellent asset, both for actual probing, and the armored infantry probes for pushing forward and ZoC blocking. The Angels can do particularly well under Wealth, enjoying the industry bonus to make cheaper probes and natives, which aren't impacted by the morale penalty, meanwhile conventional attackers tend to do okay even with morale penalties due to attackers generally being so much stronger than defenders in SMAC.
However the Angels also have the unique option of running Knowledge for much stronger conventional military, while still having really good probes! The Covert Ops Center isn't a super great building by any means and it can be hard to justify the cost, but getting it for absolutely free including in captured bases means the Angels can continue to enjoy elite probes and a high effective probe rating at bases even under Knowledge. That Knowledge is so penalty-free for the Angels helps to soften the oh-so-painful blow (sarcasm) of not having Power available.
While some factions have weaknesses, the Angels really don't. Kind of the most you can say is "they don't have 80% faster research like the University" and things of that nature. They aren't vulnerable to early rushes because of their insane start, and they don't really have any weaknesses such as vulnerability to falling behind in tech or weak points like the University's weakness to probes. They have the tools to thrive under any circumstances. Like if they are in a tiny map knife fight they have the perfect toolset, but if it's a huge map with tech stagnation and blind research and no-one to steal from: they have the perfect starting tech and are excellent at builder play! Probes are even in general a great equalizer, but are less equalizing vs a strong Angels. Even in hostile circumstances like an angry progenitor they have an above average toolset, as they have the tools to immediately steal resonance armor and are utilizing Planned economics for a discount on everything, I might well even prefer the Angels over the Hive for a knife fight with a Progenitor just because it might be a very long time for the Hive to get probes.
In general I consider the Angels to be the most robust human faction, tied with the University and Cyborgs, while they don't have the unit/infrastructure spam ability of the Drones, or the diplomatic overpoweredness of the Peacekeepers, it's really hard to put them in a situation where they'll flounder and their probes can absolutely dismantle other factions. If we really have to say something, the Angels tend to benefit less from diplomacy and theft than other factions, like the Believers and Drones can be terrifying when they have a tech sugar-daddy consensual or otherwise, whereas the Angels, like the University, are a bit too self-sufficient to really be able to exploit other factions.
The final thing I'll cover is AI Roze. AI Roze is close to being a carbon copy of AI Lal. Both have SE preference of Democracy, both have the erratic personality which makes them kind of dicks in general, and the only difference is Lal has EXPLORE+DISCOVER priorities, while Roze has BUILD+DISCOVER. This should mean that AI Roze will focus a bit more on infrastructure while Lal will focus a bit more on growth, but as a practical matter they tend to play in a really similar way and fulfill a similar role in the game, lacking CONQUER priority and also lacking any faction bonuses to unit spam or combat means being largely combat-ineffective without a massive tech lead.
AI Roze will tend to just exist and be a nuisance, she's quite resilient to being exterminated by aggressive AIs because DISCOVER priority makes her train probes aggressively, and her various probe advantages plus an emphasis on economy, makes her very well positioned to recover lost bases through mind control, it'd take an AI with MC immunity (Fun Miriam, or owner of the HSA) to really make headway into her faction otherwise she'll swiftly reverse any gains. So she won't do much besides MC the odd base to be a nuisance, but she'll tend to keep existing and often does better in this regard than other builder factions who can't reverse gains as easily.
Because Roze has BUILD+DISCOVER priorities it's not impossible that she'll do a Zak style runaway by nabbing critical SPs and blasting through the tech tree. However, because she doesn't have strong faction bonuses for such play, she's rather more reliant on having favorable terrain to get in a strong position. The AI, including thinker AI, is nearly entirely ignorant of the Angel's unique (and partially unintended) perks, so tends to play the Angels quite generically, and as a generic faction, this results in rather generic performance.
So Beakon's fertilize behavior is instead of pooping lime, they have the option of delivering lime directly to a Flue Coral, saving the need for a Duplicant to do it. The basic idea is a fed Beakon makes 5 kg/cycle lime, and the Flue Coral consumes 5 kg/cycle lime.
The bug is that Beakons don't actually check if a Flue Coral needs to be fertilized, in the spirit of Nike they Just Do It™, this means whenever you have a Flue Coral in the same room as Beakons, the Flue Coral will act as a bottomless pit for lime.
You could have a ranch with 20 domesticated Beakons and a wild Flue Coral which doesn't even need fertilization, and you will get 0 lime, because 100% of the lime will disappear into the Flue Coral.
There is a bug report related tho this: https://forums.kleientertainment.com/klei-bug-tracker/oni_beta/beacons-keeps-fertilizing-just-one-flue-coral-r52753/ But at this time it hasn't been acknowledged by the devs and is still "pending".
edit: To be more precise about the details
Beakons fertilize Flue Coral without limit. Lime will accumulate in a Wide Hydroponic Farm from which it can be later removed if you wish. But if the Flue Coral is wild, the lime simply never exists.
As a practical matter, this means that N to N setups using domesticated fish and corals work okay, 1:1, 4:4 that sort of thing. But if there's an excess of Beakons you'll either lose the poop or need to empty it from the wide farms.
I couldn't find this information through google, so I decided to test it and make the information. In short: 147 km is the highest completely safe altitude.
Circular 0 inclination equatorial orbits:
The inner radiation belt is a torus which is not equatorial, like Earth, Kerbalism's Kerbin's magnetic pole is about 10 degrees off from its rotation axis and the inclination of the radiation belt reflects this, as such a marginal orbit will dip into it for parts of each orbit.
But the highest low orbit that never touches the inner belt, is 147 km. The lowest high orbit that never touches it, is 630 km. The belt becomes much more intense as the orbit gets deeper into it, increasing from 0.014 rad/h to as high as 10.39 rad/h in the middle (about 400 km) so merely brushing the fringes of the belt isn't a serious threat (e.g. up to say 160 km it's not seriously threatening and an eccentric orbit with a low Pe might not hit it at all on a particular orbit).
Polar and highly inclined orbits:
There is no completely safe low altitude, as the outer radiation belt comes down to the atmosphere around the poles, although the radiation intensity is not very high relative to the inner belt and the orbit quickly passes through the radiation zones.
An altitude of around 3100 km is required to be completely outside the inner and outer belts, this altitude should be safe for any orbit regardless of inclination.
Magnetopause:
The magnetopause starts at around 5900 km, being outside it increases radiation only slightly, from 0.014 rad/h to 0.025 rad/h.