As a continuation on my efforts from my post on cracking Naphtha and Fuel Gas in the same Cracking Unit, I've developed what may well be the ultimate in Cracking flexibility. Feed in Heavy Oil, Naphtha, Fuel Gas, Hydrogen and Oxygen in any combination and if it can crack, it will crack (e.g. if you don't provide any Hydrogen it obviously can't crack Heavy Oil).

https://preview.redd.it/fw9f96yic1th1.png?width=1124&format=png&auto=webp&s=f0f4d823a12b23c4459c1ce96275cc0e886f7806

( Blueprint: https://coigame.com/Blueprint/3833 )

Earlier I had dismissed loopback, but after further experimentation I found narrow sets of condition where loopback seems to be stable, thus eliminating the need for a water loopback.

The first is keeping the loopback pipe extremely short, ideally 1 segment. It's possible to use a longer pipe, but you have to prefill it with hydrogen or something which is annoying.

The second leverages building buffer sizes, and requires the somewhat paradoxical combination of features used in ways not intended:

1. "Trucks CAN IMPORT cargo" must be set, this increases the internal buffer sizes from like 3 or 8, to 40.
2. Truck import should be prohibited in reality. Ideally by using a Logistic Zone with no trucks in it.

Actually nothing goes horribly wrong if truck import is permitted, it's just a waste of truck labor. Also this is designed to be turned on without interference from trucks, truck deliveries can put it in an unstable state that require additional truck deliveries to correct. So just paint a logistic zone over the Cracking Unit before building it.

Now here's an example of where this works brilliantly.

https://preview.redd.it/d6axmyw5d1th1.png?width=1181&format=png&auto=webp&s=0c97a7a648a56983a53455544db148415b3b5a51

In a new Tight Spot playthrough I decided to store Heavy Oil in a tank farm (burning the light oil).

Once I'd researched cracking, I was using nearly precisely 36 diesel as produced by Distil II. So I simply bulldozed my entire Distil setup, built 2 electrolyzers to produce 8 hydrogen and a full flex Cracker to live off the stored Heavy Oil for a while.

You need 9 Hydrogen to crack 24 Heavy Oil, but I loop back in the 6 Fuel Gas together with electrolyzer Oxygen, so the Cracker runs on about 88% Heavy Oil and 12% Fuel Gas, nearly perfectly consuming the 8 hydrogen.

Furthermore, I subsequently injected Fuel Gas from digesting Sludge from Wastewater processing, further stretching the Heavy Oil slightly.

Once I had drained the Heavy Oil tanks, I built a new Distil I+II+III setup, exporting some Naphtha to make Rubber (etc), and used the same unit to crack everything to Diesel, resulting in a production breakdown like this:

https://preview.redd.it/l7e20t75e1th1.png?width=1127&format=png&auto=webp&s=b57f7486fdd3229032d438473121927a8d9352f5

At this time I was making roughly 45 Diesel from roughly 34 Crude Oil (contrast Distil II, making 36 Diesel out of 60 Crude Oil). To achieve this level of Crude Oil conversion without flexible cracking, would require 3 Cracking Units and 24 extra workers, and while not prohibitive, on Tight Spot it's not that easy to spam workers. The Full Flex Cracker only needs about 35 kW (on average) to run the Pipe Balancers.

That is the setup roughly maxed out with the Cracking Unit running at roughly 100% uptime, though it goes a bit higher if more Diesel comes from Distill II and Heavy Oil Cracking due to more Naphtha and Fuel Gas going to other recipes.

In this playthrough I've been running the Full Flex Cracker for around 70 years without it suffering a single hiccup in spite of having all sorts of challenges thrown at it, like dramatically changed input ratios, power cuts cutting off the hydrogen, oxygen depletion due to fertilizer etc. It has been 100% stable the entire time, and freed from the tyranny of truck deliveries its internal buffers fluctuate at the same levels they had on day 1.

Obviously the Stacker is great, almost free to build, 40 kW of power, no workers, no maintenance, that's a hard to beat value proposition if you want some land-boobs.

The Stacker Tower on the other hand, requires 600 kW of power, 20 Maintenance + 7 per 100 tiles extension and 4 workers.

I started asking question in the title, after seeing my Stacker Tower with a few extensions was using HOW MUCH maintenance?!

Basically a Stacker Tower, without extensions, uses 5 diesel Trucks worth of maintenance, 4 Trucks worth of workforce. It does save fuel, I'd guesstimate 600 kW of raw electricity is about 1 or 2 trucks worth of fuel (it'd be about 1 hydrogen Truck via Electrolysis, but that's a fairly expensive way to get fuel). Each extension adds about 0.2 Trucks worth of maintenance but nothing else.

A couple of trucks making dumping trips of trivial distance can move a shitload of product, like in this sandbox setup, where each setup is dumping 384 units/m, two Trucks with 92% uptime, are keeping up with the Stacker tower, while costing like half the upkeep.

https://preview.redd.it/8ephks7pz2nh1.png?width=1782&format=png&auto=webp&s=8482062cfbfebd5369dd60ea928b97527fa4f68b

You might think that a Stacker Tower could save some maintenance by going idle, but it basically runs at 100% uptime and uses the full 20 maintenance unless you feed it large batches and let it fully idle between batches (e.g. with Train delivery and force-feeding the Tower directly from a Storage II or better - and if you force-feed it from a storage, it can't receive multiple input types), even at idle it still needs 4 maintenance of course.

So my feeling is it seems to be balanced around the assumption the full 900 units/m throughput for the Stacker Tower is actually being used, if it were used for say, a single tier 2 belt of 200 units/m, then it seems Trucks assigned to dumping are much more economical. This means the Stacker Tower might be okay in the end game with tier3 belts that can actually reasonably feed its appetite, but for when it is introduced in the tech tree, its upkeep is way too high to justify using it instead of trucks, unless you really want that slope which is too steep to drive up or have actually used up your truck limit.... and it's probably the least good way to free up truck labor, like I have a long tier 2 belt weaving all the way up and out of armageddon crater, and it still uses less power and maintenance than a stacker tower.

At some point the extensions would become cheaper than adding more trucks.

So TL;DR is stacker tower basically seems to require too much maintenance to justify using it vs Storages with a dump zone.

Building Reputation with phony loans

You gain Trade Reputation (Credit Rating) when you pay a yearly installment, and the amount of reputation gained is based on how large the loan was relative to your economy when the loan was taken out.

So at the very start of the game, when your economy is still tiny, you can take out 50 year loans, of half the maximum amount. For example a loan of wood which is really easy to scale up on many maps, maybe a loan of brick which you can repay using quick trades to get new brick (bonus: quick trade brick turns up in the trading dock so there's no long delivery).

Building reputation means lower fee and lower interest rate. On Captain, both end up at 4%.

Building reputation is not free, as trucks have to make 1 delivery a year per loan. I consider this early game truck labor is the main cost of these phony loans, not the resources themselves. Loan slots are also limited (initially 3) but you get more slots as reputation increases.

Taking out loans for stuff you need

First off, if you need a loan and all of your slots are used on phony loans, just pay one of them back.

• Take out the shortest term loan that allows you to borrow as much as you want to.
• Go to the Trading Dock, and set the priority of repayments to really low.

This way you will only pay back the loan as you have surplus resources. Each missed year, you have a year's interest added to the balance, it's pretty much taking out a new loan but without having to pay the fee. So if it was worth taking out the loan for those materials, and it's still worth taking out a loan, just don't repay and it's like taking out a new loan at really generous terms to cover the year's interest and defer paying the installment.

Missing payments harm your reputation. But if you built your reputation to 100, you can miss a lot of repayments before the reputation loss actually changes anything, on Captain, you already have 4% interest rate at 75 reputation and anything over 75 isn't doing anything for you anyway.

And then, as you actually make payments, you'll easily recover the reputation you lost earlier. If it's a problem you can also take out a new loan of stuff that is easy to repay just to (re)build reputation.

• Pay the loan back

While if you need the materials, you shouldn't pay back the loan, the corollary is, if you don't need the materials, you should pay back the loan, that's because you're paying interest every year which is a vampiric drain on your economy. And if you need to take out a new loan, the fee ends up at only a single year of interest, so if resources were going to sit around for 2 years in storage doing nothing, you should've paid it back and taken out a new loan, because the fee is less than 2 years of interest payments.

Taking out a short term loan means it'll be paid back aggressively as resources allow. You could take out a 50 year loan, and make manual repayments, but taking out a short term loan means you don't need to remember to make repayments (but you should make manual repayments if it comes to mind).

Uses for Loans

I think the most useful use for loans, is for construction parts 2 and 3 for mid game builds. Instead of waiting to stockpile these construction parts, just take out a loan, build out your stuff, and repay the loan. Pretty much any time you need more construction parts, just take out a loan. You'll get a way higher return on investment than the interest rate.

A loan can also be good for warding off a "death spiral" or economic depression, like if you notice your electronics production has collapsed due to some logistic mess and now everything which relies on it is grinding to a halt, you could just take out a loan of electronics to quickly refill, as usual, deprioritize the repayments so you only pay it back once things are back on track, repayments do you no good if you're still struggling.

The other use for loans, rather more 'sploity, is Trading Dock teleport. Like say you want to build a bridge at the far end of Dragon Tail. Bulldoze your Trading Dock, and rebuild it at the site of the bridge, both the dock and bridge site should be in a special logistic zone to stop random trucks interfering. Then take out a loan of like 1000 bricks, and once your Amphibious Trucks have delivered all the bricks to the bridge, simply repay the entire loan: the materials are magically taken from your main storages at the other end of Dragon Tail. If you pay it back in less than a year, you've paid no interest, only the fee, like on Captain, that's a 40 brick fee to teleport 1000 bricks across the map, it's reasonable. This is naturally mainly only useful for buildings where you can't use quick build to teleport resources, so that's pretty much bridges, water/oil pumps and vehicle depots. The Trading Dock itself, can be quick built using Unity.

The Planet Cult are one of three Green factions in the game, along with the Gaians and Caretakers. They are widely regarded as one of the weakest and most difficult to play factions in the game, due to fairly punishing penalties and a very singular strength.

Faction Origin and Ideology

The Planet Cult have the openly genocidal faction agenda "Restore Planet to its Pristine State" which automatically puts them at odds with every other faction except maybe the Gaians and Caretakers who might sympathize with the idea of leaving Planet alone.

Their faction origin roughly goes like this, a boy is found in the fungus, breathing the air without a face mask - in fact the faction file is called "fungboy.txt" so this is a very important part of the faction origin. This boy seems to enjoy a powerful connection to Planet and a cult quickly forms around him.

I actually consider the Planet Cult to be one of the most realistic factions in the context of Chiron. We generally accept that Miriam's faction is okay, even though the Believers worship an invisible sky wizard who doesn't actually exist - and I say that as an unbeliever IRL, but also in the SMACiverse, Miriam's sky wizard doesn't seem to ever actually do anything for her or against her enemies, so it's fair to say doesn't exist.

But on Chiron, humanity discovers a pseudo-deity which actually exists, is actually immensely powerful, and actually does stuff including actually talking to people in their dreams and literally reshaping the landscape. And while it makes sense that we have factions like the Gaians who seek to understand Planetmind, it's also natural some people will be like "fuck that noise, we should worship this thing". To be fair to Miriam, Planetmind also doesn't seem to do anything special for the Planet Cult due to their worship, but I'm not saying that the Cult are taking the rational approach, just that it fits with human nature.

> "Mankind has been blind for thousands of years-for all of its history. We have come to a place whose wonders are a hundred-fold more amazing than anything on Earth. Around us is clear evidence of the will of a higher power. I bring the Vision to the blind eyes of men. I bring the Word to the deaf ears of men. I will make them see it. I will make them hear it." -- Prophet Cha Dawn, "Planet Rising"

What is Cha Dawn

No-one ever asks How is Cha Dawn. The game doesn't explicitly say what Cha Dawn is, as is often the case leaves it up to the player's imagination. But I have a fairly firm head-canon on what Cha Dawn is.

In my head canon, Cha Dawn was a gaian boy who wandered out into the fungus and asphyxiated to death, dying in a patch of fungus, he was animated by the power of Manifold 6 and a thread of personality entered his body, which had been vacated by the boy.

And hence Cha Dawn is an alien intelligence in a human body that never ages because it was reanimated by alien powers, and this gives him unusual resonance powers and a strong connection to Planetmind.

This is not to say that Cha Dawn is "the" spokesperson for Planetmind as he claims, because Cha Dawn is only a small fragment and doesn't enjoy a full connection to Planetmind, kind of like tame native life which is canonically not connected to Planetmind but is instead being guided by the consciousness of the handlers.

And Cha Dawn's personality fragment seems to be nasty and intolerant, a part which treats humanity as "the planet death disease" that must be purged, not the more whimsy aspect that delights in the diversity and novelty of Earth life.

That's just my head canon. You are welcome to believe that Cha Dawn is a boy with brain damage whose ranting and rambling is interpreted by the cultists who elevated him as their prophet and political figurehead.

Planet Cult Agenda and Society

The Planet Cult's agenda is pretty clear, and Cha Dawn's aggressive personality and CONQUER priorities make it pretty clear how they intend to carry out their agenda and it ain't by asking nicely.

Cha Dawn is the recipient of some of the harshest diplomatic criticisms of any leader, and while we should always assume a measure of straw-manning when it comes to diplomatic accusation, they should also not be considered baseless, for example Conqueurer Marr is accused of eating humans alive, and it's hard to get a reputation for eating people if you haven't eaten even one human. Meanwhile, Lal is accused of things like "humanitarian whimpering" and aspiring to "set himself up as some kind of benevolent dictator" (yes, benevolent lol), the problem that other leaders have with Lal is they don't want him telling them what they can't do, not that he like tortures people or something.

With Cha Dawn we get such unsavory lines as "exterminating anything that walks on two legs", "plot the eradication of all sapient life forms on Planet", "feeding your opponents to hatchling Mind Worms", "torturing opponents in his loathsome Brood Pits".

Cha Dawn is condemned as harshly as Yang, H'mninee and Marr, and everything suggests that Cha Dawn is a monster and Cult society is an oppressive one where humans are treated as a lower form of life than mind worms, valued only for their subservience.

Planet Cult Faction

Bonuses:

• +2 Planet: this makes Cult mind worms really quite strong on attack and makes it easy to catch wild mindworms.
• Starts with a free mindworm: starting with a free unit is always nice.
• Free Brood Pits with tech: normally Brood Pits aren't a great building, but getting them for free is pretty nice, as they offer +2 Police Rating, a 25% discount on native life and +1 lifecycle bonus. Sadly they usually come a bit late to really be meaningful.
• Mindworms do double police duty: Mindworms effectively have non-lethal methods, so will pacify 2 drones or 3 drones with +3 police rating. This can be nice, but it falls off badly once you actually have non-lethal methods, as police units are a lot cheaper and can take clean reactor.
• Starts with Social Psych and Centauri Ecology: These are solid starting techs, especially for a green faction which doesn't have to be concerned with military investments.

Maluses:

• -1 Industry: This makes nearly everything more expensive and hampers exponential growth.
• -1 Economy: This reduces HQ energy by 1, which may slow early research by a fair amount (depending on the EC/Research split), but more importantly, makes Free Market useless.
• Unable to run Wealth Values: This is a nasty penalty, as Wealth is the natural SE for a native user and a good general discount when building out infrastructure.

Overall the Planet Cult have rather punishing penalties that makes them slow in every way, but somewhat mitigating this is that their starting tech is actually quite good particularly for a faction which can catch free mindworms to take care of the military side of thing. Also while their SE situation is painful due to being unable to utilize FM or run Wealth, they can at least popboom normally.

Cult Strategies

Momentum

The Cult have a very straightforward momentum strategy, send some scout patrols out into the fungus to trawl for worms, capture 2 or 3 worms, and send them to another faction to attack their stuff and hopefully force a surrender, then you can use that faction as a slave. Worms are basically free, which is nice, but it's highly reliant on RNG and also native life settings for the map and even how the fungus is located.

The Cult are not that good with conventional military due to their industry penalty and their tech situation is not completely ideal, though starting with Cent.Eco is nice as you can then immediately start researching to recon rovers, and the free mindworms probably more than compensate for the industry penalty, assuming worm-catching RNG is kind to you.

Builder

I've sometimes described the Spartans as half-assed builders thanks to -1 Industry, but the Cult are entirely-ass builders. Being unable to run FM or Wealth is pretty much an automatic disqualification from being good at building, then we add an industry penalty which slows down exponential and vertical growth.

The Cult can take advantage of starting with Social Psych + doubled worm police, to make a large base for building SP, this means despite the -1 Industry they aren't completely awful at getting a desirable SP like the WP and this is the best route to being somewhat effective builders, get the WP, pop-boom bases, use specialists - though note the Spartans and Hive can also make a larger base this way.

Also if you don't have any aggressive use for your captured native life, you can generally use them as police units, for 2 drones suppressed and no support cost, this is actually a reasonably nice perk on thinker and transcend difficulty, and saving on supply thanks to these worms being independent can give quite large advantages when minerals per base are so low. The cult's free native units will also create significant military deterrence discouraging AI's from declaring vendetta... and if the AI does declare vendetta it's nearly impossible for them to cross fungus in the face of even a few cult worms.

Another SP to aggressively pursue is the AV, then once you get your free Brood Pits you enjoy a +3 police rating which lets you take care of all your drone control needs for really cheap. Naturally the SPs that boost native life are also highly desirable, and having a hope of winning the race to these SPs might be the main benefit of a Builder strategy: Cult locusts boosted by SPs are very nasty. But unfortunately, the Cult is very poorly positioned to win races to SPs, particularly compared with the powerful researchers like Zak, Aki and Morgan: your best bet really is having enslaved one of these strong researchers in the opening turns.

Hybrid

The Cult are pretty naturally a hybrid faction, you're not really good enough at building to go full turtle and because your ECONOMY always sucks you don't get good peace dividends from commerce, you'd often prefer to be stealing and attacking, luring enemies into fungus field to grind up their armies while training your worms, trying to steal the techs for the vital SPs, or even conquering the SPs themselves. The Cult are basically the kind of faction who should declare vendetta on other factions simply so they can't build in peace.

Why the Cult is the weakest faction

The most major weakness of the Cult is they are all-in on native life, but native life has some serious weaknesses, and if the Cult can't capitalize on their unusually strong start they really have very little going for them once more tech comes into play. Some of these weaknesses are shored up by the multiple SPs that enhance native life, especially the Neural Amplifier for +50% defense and Dream Twister for +50% attack - Cha Dawn incidentally is not well positioned to actually win the race to these SPs.

But the greater problem is that there are some highly effective counters to native life regardless of how boosted they are:

• Hypnotic Trance and Empath Song provide large psi bonuses and allow very cheap units to defeat expensive native units. And no matter what, it's hard to get good odds when attacking bases, and it's also hard to get good odds on defense.
• Natives (other than Spore Launchers) defend against bombardment with 1 defense vs weapon value, this means they get badly damaged by even Missile artillery, and are smashed like bugs by weapons like Fusion Laser, furthermore SAM artillery can target and completely destroy Locusts, as flying and naval units are not merely reduced to 1 hp by bombardment. Even a Free Marketeer can easily defeat natives by extensively using artillery. Meanwhile, Spore Launchers aren't really a counter to artillery, because simple empath scout artillery hard-counter spore launchers and inflict collateral damage on the stacked units anyway.
• Self-destruct is a poorly balanced feature, that counters natives incredibly well. A self-destructing unit inflicts (Weapon * Reactor) / 2 hits to all adjacent units that aren't protected by a base or bunker. Natives only have 10 hp, so a 10-1-N*2 unit, or a 20-1-N*2 unit will completely delete all adjacent natives, so a simple 3 row infantry unit with very green morale and 10% health can completely delete an adjacent stack of demon boil Locusts of Chirons over water, which it can't even attack. Self-destruct means any native unit caught outside a base can be simply deleted regardless of relative planet rating, and the low movement speed of most natives makes them vulnerable.
• The Missile unit (missile chassis) uses conventional attack vs defense, rather than psi combat, this means it is a guaranteed kill on any psi unit. Missiles are fairly expensive, at fusion level comparable to a native unit, but if it's a scenario like Free Drones pumping out Missiles vs Planet Cult pumping out natives then the missiles are absolutely winning. To make this even worse, missiles are highly effective when self-destructed, with incredible range to easily reach out and delete any natives not huddling in a base.

The AI is not competent in using any of these anti-native strategies, it won't use self-destruct at all and only uses the others haphazardly, so in a single player game the cult retains some combat edge with natives, but against competent foes natives pretty much cease to be relevant, besides some uses for locusts, which don't actually require the faction to be good at using natives.

Cha Dawn is often compared with the Gaians, which are a much more balanced faction, as Gaians enjoy +2 Effic rather than -1 Industry which really helps in the mid to late game, and their +1 Planet is enough to gain many of the early game native perks, and they can run Wealth for a discount on natives. In fact, in a natives vs natives slugfest the Gaians will beat the Cult thanks to being a whole 2 industry ahead and stronger research and faster infrastructure build. The Gaian's early game is a little bit weaker (at least on high difficulty when worm police become relevant), but they are overall a much more balanced faction with much less reliance on natives, but nevertheless being better at using natives. And even Morgan is arguably a better Green user than Cha Dawn, because of Morgan's really strong Green+Wealth combination that gives Morgan much faster research or much more cash to throw around, and again a whole 2 Industry ahead of Cha Dawn.

The Cult can also be compared with the Spartans, who have -1 Industry and can't run Wealth. But the Spartans have much more flexible SE able to use FM to accelerate their research, and in the mid game when natives fall off a cliff, the Spartans get trivially elite units, and elite conventional units can be really strong due to their extra movement point and sometimes crossing thresholds where the armor power exceeds attack power. Santiago would absolutely eat Cha Dawn for breakfast by the mid game as she can whoop his natives with artillery while her elite units are hard to get good odds against.

Basically the Cult really are the worst faction in the game besides a brief period of potential glory in the early game where they can dominate in terms of military might, but even this relies more on catching opponents unaware, as scout patrol spam will handily defeat natives.

AI Cha Dawn

Cha Dawn is stuck with a fairly weak faction which is fairly difficult to play, as such he usually does not excel, the rather punishing penalties to industry and growth simply puts him behind the expansion curve.

Cha Dawn's priorities are EXPLORE+CONQUER and he has the aggressive personality, this happens to be completely identical to Miriam and H'minee. So far as priorities go, this is a solid combination, with EXPLORE encouraging growth, expansion and various kinds of useful infrastructure like Formers. And CONQUER encourages building units. Cha Dawn is roughly as aggressive as Miriam, as he has aggressive personality, and he gets up in everyone's business about their economic SE choice, mostly only Deirdre is safe from his wrath.

In the base game Cha Dawn's performance is nothing to write home about and he usually amounts to nothing though he isn't as prone to total failure to thrive as some other factions as starting with Cent Eco and having EXPLORE priority does mean he tends to actually make formers. In Thinker mod while Cha Dawn still doesn't really understand Cult momentum play, Cha Dawn does train mindworms very aggressively and with the Thinker change to give a planet bonus/penalty on psi defense, not only offense, Cha Dawn's hordes of mindworms with large bonuses from PLANET can absolutely dismantle a Free Marketeer AI such as Morgan - in more than one game I've had to save a Morgan pactmate from a voracious Cha Dawn eating him alive and cutting through his defenses like a hot knife through butter. Overall the Thinker AI does not understand anti-native strategies such as using bombardment to soften up the worms or switching to Green. Nevertheless, Cha Dawn does struggle to generate the kind of sheer unit mass to be effective against non-FM users and is unlikely to do a Yang style runaway conquest, likely getting stone-walled after eating any free marketeers he can attack.

I'm not talking about getting out of paying back the loans, but being a good honest captain. And not whether loans are good or not, they seem to be pretty good once you have 4% interest rate and fee.

Anyway, my main two questions are:

1. Are "phony" loans effective like taking tiny loans of stuff like coal that is easily paid back? Or is reputation gain more closely tied to how large the installments are (perhaps relative to your economy).

2. I'm guessing there's some kind of diminishing returns on reputation gain, is it something like that you need to take loans of more advanced materials to keep raising reputation. Or can you literally just grind coal loans all the way?

In my latest playthrough I've been taking out 50 year loans and paying them off after a few years, perhaps refinancing (paying off the old loan with a new loan) if my interest rate has dropped a lot. It kind of feels like this is just plain better than short term loans as paying back as little as possible each year allows better compound growth. Is there a counter-argument in favor of short term loans?

I think one of my tips would be that loans for stuff that is easily quick-traded (bricks and such) is a good way to build early reputation because in a pinch you can effectively use different things to pay the installments.

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.

Faction Ideology and Nature

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.

You will be assimilated? Or your consent is important to us?

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:

1. Aki has the pacifist personality and her quotes do not suggest forcefulness.
2. The cyborgs suffer from "Sequence breaking" where they have cybernetics before this technology has been developed on Chiron. This can be explained by them taking technology from Unity, but presumably such supply of neural implants is limited.
3. It's hard to reconcile drones with being connected to the algorithm, e.g. with how the Telepathic Matrix suppresses all drone riots.
4. For the most part, the diplomatic accusations towards Aki are about the process destroying the sentience/soul of humans and the like, not accusations around extreme forcefulness as might be aimed at Yang, Svensgaard and Cha Dawn.

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.

Aki Zeta-5's Agenda

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.

Cyborg Faction Bonuses and Penalties

The Cyborg have extremely strong bonuses combined with highly flexible social engineering.

• +2 Efficiency. The most faction-defining bonus, this delays the appearance of b-drones allowing the cyborgs to expand more aggressively and always improves the efficiency of a sprawling empire, it improves many SE combinations, makes it easier to forgo Democracy if you want the extra support, and the Demo+FM combination is amazing as it allows lossless 100% energy allocation combined with +1 energy per tile.
• +2 Knowledge. This just straight up gives the cyborgs 20% more research for their research. This is a really useful bonus and helps the cyborgs win races to critical techs.
• Steal a tech when capturing a base. This is a nice little perk especially for momentum play, though doesn't do anything if the equivalent game rule is enabled.
• -1 Growth. This slightly slows down early expansion (though Industry rating is more important than Growth rating), and has the more important effect of only allowing pop-booming through the complete Demo + Planned + Creche + Golden Age combination.
• Unable to run Fundamentalism. This is fine, because for the most part you only run Fundie when you're behind in tech.
• Start with Information Networks and Applied Physics. This makes the Cyborgs one of only two factions to start with firepower (the other is the Usurpers), and these happen to be both prerequisite techs for Nonlinear Mathematics. Not actually the most immediately useful techs but nothing to complain about, and starting techs don't increase the cost of subsequent techs so having two is effectively a small permanent boost to research.

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.

Cyborg Strategy

Momentum

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.

Builder

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.

Hybrid

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.

AI Aki

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".

Faction Ideology

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.

Agenda

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.

Faction Strengths and Weaknesses

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.

• +2 Probe and free Covert Ops Center with tech: The faction defining bonuses, the Angels have really good probe teams in the early-mid game, it's basically trivial to get elite probes.
• -25% mind control cost: A bonus which truth be told, I hardly ever use, as even discounted, it's still usually cheaper to just take bases by force, while units are often still too expensive to justify stealing. But in situations where it does make sense to use MC, it's nice to have a tidy discount.
• Gain any tech possessed by 3 infiltrated factions. This bonus doesn't matter, if the angels can infiltrate they can steal, and they tend to be tech leaders anyway, and their best SE favors peaceful play and trade pacts, but it occasionally helps get low priority techs.
• -1 Police: A pretty much nothingburger penalty, technically it prevents you nervestapling except under Police State, and it makes Police State slightly weaker, but normally you run police state for the +support, and being able to use 2 police units is still plenty.
• Unable to run Power: Probably the least impactful SE aversion, Power is one of the least useful SE options, its modifiers aren't that great, and it's diplomatically not that useful, coming too late to define early alliances, and only being useful for friendship with Santiago and Sven, or after you've built the Cloning Vats: but then you've won anyway.
• Starts with a free Probe Team: Very handy for scouting if you take care of it, and can provide an opportunity to steal tech or EC.
• Starts with Information Networks and Planetary Networks: So absolutely insane, it deserves its own section.

The Angel's insane start

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:

1. Planned Economics, meaning the Angels enjoy Hive-like expansion the moment they scrounge up enough EC to make the switch (which can be very fast, or take a while, EC boons include pods, worms, and other factions).
2. Probe Teams, which both allow building probe teams for various purposes most importantly stealing techs, and also allow reverse engineering the probe chassis to make rover units (that is, you select the probe team, and swap the equipment to a weapon and now you have a rover).
3. Librarians: Along with probe teams, this is the other reason Planetary Networks is so impactful, when terrain is bad in terms of energy, forcing a base to size 5 and making some librarians is a great way, sometimes almost the only way, to get some actual tech pace.
4. The Virtual World: It's a very decent SP for builders, one of the best.

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.

Angel Playstyles

Momentum

The Angels are a very decent momentum faction, this comes down to the following benefits:

1. They start with the ability to run Planned to supercharge their expansion, and also start with the rover chassis and a prerequisite tech to Nonlinear Mathematics. They only have to research two techs to have Impact Rovers, which ties them with the Cyborgs who start with Applied Physics and Information Networks.
2. They can support their offensive with probe teams, including their free probe team. In particular this can allow stealing technology before the victim is prepared to surrender, also probe actions can be used to provoke a vendetta should insults not suffice, causing the other party to take the diplomatic blame, you might also try liberating some EC for a relative advantage.
3. Should the enemy have probe teams of their own, it's harder to use the probe teams against the Angels, for example the University has a mean impact rover rush, but it can be quite viable to reverse that rush by buying out a captured base together with the rovers! That's much more expensive to do vs the Angels.

Overall the Angels are nasty little gremlins when it comes to rover-rushes, being both fast out the gate and hard to counter.

Builder

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

Armored probes work excellently in combination with Demo+FM+Wealth, as:

1. Demo has a support penalty: probes don't cost support.
2. Free Market causes pacifism drones: probes don't cause pacifism drones.
3. Wealth causes a morale penalty: probes aren't affected by negative morale.

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.

Hybrid

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.

No Weaknesses

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.

AI Roze

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.

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.