u/Rtyeta

I sometimes like to change my faction leader name and titles to some different version that amuses me like Computer LAL 9000 if I plan to go cybernetic as Lal. Typing that out at the beginning of every game is a bit of a nuisance, especially if I'm restarting to get a starting area that doesn't look boring to play.

I'm wondering if there's a way to save that as the default set of titles, at least for when I'm playing the characters?

This was probably the hardest mission of the night elf campaign to do deathless, though there was some stiff competition!

The Game's Rules and Character Goal

I'm going to be joining a game which is starting at level 3 (intended goal is to go to 20, but obviously I think it's unlikely to get anywhere near that far), using standard ability scores, but has two notable changes (and one minor one):

1. We all get one bonus feat

2. Multiclassing has no ability score requirements

3. Crits max out your damage dice instead of doubling them. (Which is a nerf to crits, albeit a minor one)

I have a character concept that I think fits well as either a wood elf or shadar-kai, so I'll go with one of those. Probably taking shadar-kai unless no one else in the party has access to Pass Without Trace, in which case I think Wood Elf would become a better option

I'd like to play a melee-focused bladesinger (I'm aware that being a control caster is stronger, but I've played too many other control casters lately).

I'd like some other people's thoughts and input about which multiclass dip to take, and the ability scores and feats and spells that will be effective in the levels that are actually likely to see play.

Current Build Thoughts:

Multiclass Dip: This is a very rare opportunity to play a paladin-bladesinger at all, or a ranger-bladesinger without needing to sacrifice a bit of Con for a bit more Wis. Both provide weapon masteries for Vex+Nick, and both advance spell slots. That'll be very helpful for damage later since several of the effective bladesinger damage boosts like Shadow Blade and Conjure Minor Elementals upcast very well. Plus of course having more spell slots does also boost my utility and my defenses and so forth too. So I definitely plan on taking a 1 level dip in either Paladin or Ranger.

Defenses: I can't actually be a bladesinger till next level, so for one level I'll rely on wearing medium armor and a shield and weapon juggling to draw and stow shortsword and scimitar. Then next level I can switch to bladesinging properly.

Paladins have good saving throw proficiencies, wizards do too, but rangers have awful ones. So if I go ranger, I'd actually start level 1 as a wizard in order to have good saving throws. Which means I'll have 2 fewer total HP with that route than if I go paladin. A bit of a nuisance now, though trivial by the higher levels. I guess there's also a trade off of Int saves vs Cha saves. Both somewhat rare but important when they happen. I don't really have a strong preference there.

Smites: The DM also said that since Tasha's Cauldron had given Searing Smite to Rangers, I'll be allowed to take Searing Smite if I do go Ranger, even though it doesn't have Searing Smite in the 2024 PHB. So I'll have a smite option with either the paladin or ranger dip. However, although smites as a bladesinger sound very fun, I'm not sure how often I'll actually want to use them in practice. They take a bonus action, and bladesingers infamously need a fair number of bonus actions to set up in combat. Plus if I take Dual Wielder (which I think I'll want to eventually), that's another thing that requires bonus actions and thus blocks smites.

Spells from the Dips: I'll have bad Cha and at best mediocre Wis, so I certainly won't want to prepare something like Command if I go paladin. Bless would be good at the early levels, but after that I'll need to concentrate on things like Shadow Blade more often. I'd have access to the other Smite spells, which would be kinda fun in theory, but I can't make foes fail saves against things like Wrathful Smite or Thunderous Smite. So probably not useful in practice. Divine Favor could be fun at later levels... IF I have time before battle to spend yet another bonus action to power up. A big if. Shield of Faith superficially sounds good defensively, but it'd basically just be inferior to the Blade Ward cantrip in practice I think.

So as I see it, paladin compared to ranger would mostly get me Bless at the early levels and then Divine Favor later. Nothing else very good.

Ranger would get me Absorb Elements, freeing up a wizard spell preparation slot. Entangle is... maybe ok sometimes. Even if enemies succeed the saving throw, there's still difficult terrain and sometimes that's pretty good. Speak with Animals is great utility. Zephyr Strike is fun and feels bladesinger-y but I think it'd be terrible in practice most of the time since it eats concentration and a bonus action. And then there's Hunter's Mark. Very strong here at the beginning, and then falling off later. Maybe not quite useless later on though! Since it doesn't cost a spell slot I think I could do something like cast Hunter's Mark and then an upcast Spellfire Flare to do ok ranged burst damage. Not great, but I can imagine it being an option I'll want once in a while since I have higher level spell slots to spend anyway.

Leaning Ranger over Paladin: Overall, it seems like Ranger's spells are likely to be more useful. Especially since I need to heavily weight the early levels where Hunter's Mark is good . Ranger also gives me +1 skill and a much better skill list. So that'll give me much more utility than paladin. Thus, I'm currently thinking Ranger is overall the way to go.

Origin Feat: Lucky is banned at this table, but I usually would prefer either Alert or Tough anyway. I'm leaning toward Alert. I think it's particularly good for a bladesinger because I really want to go first to activate bladesong if a fight breaks out suddenly, and if I do want to use a control spell it's great for that too. Or I could use it to let a specialized control caster take my initiative count to go first or something. I think it also fits the elven character a bit better than Tough anyway. I didn't see any other options that looked appealing for this character, but maybe I missed one.

1st Level Feat: Things get tricky here and of course it needs to go hand in hand with my ability scores. Currently I'm leaning toward picking Elven Accuracy. I have lots of ways to generate advantage with a familiar, Vex, and later shadow blade for starters. And I have good early game damage boosts like Hunter's Mark that benefit from having high accuracy to land them. And perhaps most importantly it doesn't cost a bonus action or something to use! Crits being a bit weaker in this game is a minor downside. But this character does still decently profit from crits since I eventually roll a pretty good number of damage dice.

Ability Scores: I'm thinking of Str 8, Dex 17 (then 18 with Elven Accuracy), Con 14, Int 16, Wis 10, Cha 8

Later Feats: I'm thinking Dual Wielder at character level 5 and taking Dex to 19. That's the point where Shadow Blade would be upcastable and suddenly become a great option with Dual Wielder, so good timing. Two 3d8 shadow blade hits, plus a nick. Very bonus action hungry though, so I'd want to do something else in fights where I either can't set up in advance or expect things to end fast.

Then Mage Slayer at character level 9 to get Dex to 20. My mental saves are not bad but they're not great either and mental saves are certainly getting more important then.

The one downside is that I'd spend a fair amount of time with 19 Dexterity, which feels a bit inefficient. I do lean toward having a build that works well at the levels I can guarantee I actually get to play, rather than one that is perfect at high levels I may never see.

Spells: Ranger covers Absorb Elements, free Hunter's Mark, and then I'd probably take Searing Smite to use when I have free bonus actions occasionally. Maybe swapping one of those out on days where I don't expect to need to block a lot of elemental damage but do expect to need to provide food or talk to animals or something though.

For cantrips I'd go with Minor Illusion and Message for their great utility, then maybe Blade Ward to spam-cast every minute if I think a combat might break out suddenly but I don't know where. That or Mind Sliver if there's a good control caster in the group I could support with that. I think at this level Booming Blade or True Strike or something would be mostly useless since I can't use them with Nick. I'll swap something out for booming blade around bladesinger level 6 when I can use it more effectively.

For wizard spells for now I'll of course take Shield and Silvery Barbs and Find Familiar. Utility Rituals like Detect Magic, Unseen Servant, Identify, etc. I'm leaning away from control spells for this character and am not impressed with the new level 1 wizard control options anyway. I was thinking of taking Spellfire Flare to use sometimes with Hunter's Mark since I have level 2 spell slots to spend and few other things that upcast well. And with elven accuracy advantage on the first blast from a familiar and hunter's mark on the damage and so forth, that's a decent ranged attack at this level.

I don't think I'll take Shadow Blade next level since Hunter's Mark would be superior to it for a bit longer. I'll probably take it at character level 5 when it can be upcast and I can pair it with Dual Wielder. From there, things will probably shift toward more conventional gish picks I think.

Suggestions? Thoughts?

I've been doing a deathless run of the Frozen Throne campaigns and have now recorded enough videos that I thought it was worth sharing one. This is one of my favorite missions nowadays, since the dual goals of protecting your base while also advancing the runner across an amphibious map filled with secrets is really unique and cool.

I've been having a frustrating time, in that it seems that (regardless of map size), I absolutely always encounter another faction within the first 10 turns. With the more aggressive AI turned on, I'm always at war within 10 turns. (I'm not even exaggerating about that. I mean I literally have not gone more than 10 turns without being at war in any game I tried to start over the last few days) I don't even have time to produce a single military unit that isn't a scout infantry before I'm under attack.

And it feels like early game combat is 90% luck. Particularly since I always seem to be next to the high-morale Spartans and never anyone else. (One time actually on a Large size map it was both the Spartans AND the University encountered and at war within 10 turns)

This, as I said, happens whether I'm playing on a normal size map or a huge map.

Is there a setting to force people's starting locations to actually be more than 5 squares apart? I'd kind of like to be able to actually research a single technology and build a single military unit before the fighting starts.

So I recently updated to a new version of Da Vinci Resolve (version 21), and the new interface seems to make it much harder than the one I was used to to efficiently change the speed of audio clips. I'm wondering if I'm missing an easy way to do it.

My projects often have two audio tracks accompanying the video one, and I frequently want to slow a few seconds of it down by, say, 10% to make spoken words sound clearer. Or conversely, sometimes I want to fast forward through an unimportant section.

It used to be that I could just select the 3 clips, go to the Audio tab in the Inspector panel, hit the checkbox for "Ripple Timeline" in the Speed Change section and then change the speed to whatever I needed.

But now Ripple Timeline no longer seems to exist there, so that's no good.

Instead the only approach I've found so far is to go to the Speed section in the main portion of the window, under the video. If I change the speed of an audio track there, it still won't ripple anything. But if I change the speed of the video track, THAT will ripple and push back the rest of the timeline. Then I need to separately change the speed of the audio tracks and THEN manually stretch them out to fill the extra space left by the previous ripple. This is all very inefficient and I'm sure there must be a better way, so I can do it quickly like before?

I've been trying to learn more about the mechanics and strategy of atrocities and nerve stapling in particular. Unfortunately the Alpha Centauri wiki about atrocities is pretty brief and has a dead link to a non-existent page with more info. Likewise I don't think the in-game datalinks had much of the info I've been looking for. Although I'm playing the game unmodded, I did find a little bit of info here on the Thinker mod documentation about the original game rules: https://github.com/induktio/thinker/blob/master/Technical.md#atrocity-details

If I understand correctly (more on some contradictory results later though), it's a huge problem if you commit a major atrocity. Every other faction will supposedly declare vendetta on you (Permanently?) and you'll (supposedly) be booted out of the planetary council, which seems strategically awful since I assume that means losing the benefits of being governor, not being able to deploy solar shades to stop global warming, and other problems if it happens. Plus the planet will get mad at you and your eco damage will go up by 5 at one step of the calculation, requiring you to build 5 more tree farms to fix your eco damage I think for every major atrocity.

There are 2 major atrocities: Using a planet buster, or committing more than a certain number of minor atrocities. On Transcend, that number of minor atrocities is more than 12. On Thinker difficulty the critical number would be more than 16, and so on increasing by 4 per difficulty. Notably, once you get beyond that threshhold, I've been able to verify that EVERY minor atrocity counts as a major one as far as the planet and eco damage are concerned. It's not 1 major atrocity per 13 minors, it's every single minor atrocity beyond 12 counts as a major.

However, it seems like some minor atrocities don't actually just add up one by one in the way you'd expect. Per that documentation and my tests, some minor atrocities only count once: using nerve gas on non-base tiles and nerve stapling in "bases that are assimilated".

Testing:

I was uncertain what "bases that are assimilated" means. At first I thought it might mean bases you've taken from another faction and which have in that sense been assimilated into yours (the ones that have that Captured Base status. I've never found any way to get rid of that and make captured bases ever achieve normal happiness...). Thus I thought this documentation was saying that you can nerve staple captured bases as many times as you want and it only counts as 1 atrocity, but if you nerve staple your own original bases, then each of those would count as an atrocity and push you toward the critical number. However, I just tested it and nerve stapling your own bases is perfectly fine. I just nerve stapled more than 12 of them on Transcend and all I got were the usual sanctions, no major atrocity.

Conversely, I loaded up a save where the U.N. charter was in effect and I had a bunch of captured enemy bases, and then nerve stapled them all. There was no notification from the game about that being a major atrocity or anything, and I wasn't kicked out of the U.N. but my eco damage absolutely spiked. WAY more than the +5 I was expecting, it was +22 or so in various bases (which is part of what tipped me off that every single atrocity past 12 counts as a new major one). Also even though I had random events off, a volcano erupted?! I have no idea what that's about.

But yeah it seems like each instance of nerve stapling a captured base counts as a separate minor atrocity.

Bizarrely, the fungus itself apparently cares whether the U.N. charter is in effect. Nerve staple a bunch of enemy bases with the U.N. charter in effect? You get a bunch of eco damage and mind worm attacks. Do the same thing with the charter repealed? The fungus doesn't care.

Anyway, I can confirm that nerve gassing enemy troops outside of bases is fine and counts as just 1 atrocity no matter how many times you do it. I did that hundreds of times after that game I recently memed about where the AI factions had overridden my veto and had insisted on repealing the U.N. charter. No problem there, so nerve gas troops in the open as often as you want.

Ultimately I'm left very confused as to why I committed enough minor atrocities for the planet to count it as several majors and give me a pile of eco damage, yet I wasn't kicked out of the global council or anything. Is that a bug or is the documentation and the wiki wrong, or what? Or can the governor not be kicked out maybe?

I'm also confused why a volcano erupted even though random events are off and there was no mention anywhere I could find that eco damage would make volcanoes erupt or anything like that?

Strategy:

It seems to me that the only minor atrocities which are useful to commit are

1. Nerve Staple a captured base which is too large and too precarious on food and short on energy to just fix with police or Doctors or Psych

2. Use nerve gas on enemy troops that are out on the field (this only ever counts once)

3. Nerve staple your own bases if you need to (this only ever counts once).

Obliterating bases, using nerve gas on bases, and using genetic warfare against bases seem like they'd almost always be counterproductive since you're ruining something you could capture and use. The situations where you want to do that seem so rare that I wouldn't want to build a strategy around an assumption that I'll need them. Maybe if an enemy base is at size 1 and I already have a colony pod in the area, I might want to obliterate the enemy one and build my own if it really is impossible to ever get rid of the 'captured base' detriment?

So it seems to me that you can plan on having 10 allowed nerve staplings of captured enemy bases on Transcend. That allows you to also use nerve gas on enemy troops as often as you want, and nerve staple your own bases as often as you want and still not exceed the critical number of 12 minor atrocities. 10 nerve staplings of enemy bases is probably plenty I would think, since it's unlikely there will be more than 10 enemy bases of such large size and poor food supply that you can't just make the drones content via other means. So you can probably splurge on a luxury atrocity or two by nerve stapling a medium-sized base where you just don't want to go through the expense of making the drones happy. Just make sure you never exceed 10. That's your atrocity budget until the U.N. charter is repealed.

Once it's repealed you can nerve staple whoever you want whenever you want, etc.. But I still wouldn't want to nerve gas bases or oblierate them because then the war stops being profitable.

Nerve Stapling Your Own Bases?

I'm wondering if it's a worthwhile early game strategy to just nerve staple your own bases at the beginning on Transcend.

Seems like you can do it as much as you want and only have it count as 1 minor atrocity, so it's not going to deplete your atrocity budget for stapling captured bases later.

The downside is sanctions negating any Commerce with you (first 10 turns, then another 20, then another 30, etc. However, in my own limited experience, Commerce is pretty useless. The amount is tiny compared to my economy, enemies are benefiting from it too, and since I'm playing with the more aggressive AI setting everyone declares war on me pretty soon regardless of what I do and that ends any commerce. Furthermore, in the early turns before you've met anyone, Commerce is literally worthless when you haven't met anyone and so there seems to be no downside to having sanctions then whatsoever.

This would also block the base from having any talents, but I don't think that matters at all unless you're going for a golden age, which you'd presumably coordinate substantially later in the game after getting some Secret Projects like the Human Genome Project and whatnot. So as long as you've let the nerve stapling wear off before the golden age, there's no downside there either.

I've read that sometimes you can't repeat nerve stapling on a base, with the drones becoming immune. I'm not sure what causes that to happen or not happen though. And the wiki says there's a possibly bugged behavior where you can actually just immediately nerve staple them again with the drones never becoming immune?

In any case, the upside of nerve stapling in the early game is that you wouldn't need to spend your precious early turns and early support slots building police or whatever. You could focus on just colony pods and formers. Furthermore, you could potentially grow a city to larger size in order to allow it to have more mineral production for racing to Secret Projects or just deploying more formers faster, and more energy production for research. Even just delaying building police for 10 turns seems like a decent benefit. And if you can make it 20, that seems massively valuable in scrambling for territory.

Anyone have any answers to these unanswered questions, or strategic thoughts about whether this early stapling makes sense?

In every game I've played so far, booming my population has been a cornerstone of any victory condition. That's the moment I go from roughly on par with the Thinker/Deity AI's powerful start to stronger than all of them combined, and able to pull ahead permanently in tech and money and military size and then run them all over. Or be able to guarantee my election or whatever.

But it seems like some factions can easily population boom quite early in the game, while others basically can't at all- or at least not until it's super late and super expensive. (For example, anyone can pop boom with the Cloning Vats, but that's ~50 turns after many factions could already have boomed and then taken over the world).

The best and earliest technique I can find so far is to get Democracy (+2 Growth), Planned (+2 Growth), and then put a bunch of the economy into Psych for a few turns to get bases into Golden Age (+2 Growth, bringing you to the crucial +6 which makes your population grow every turn). Basically get a bunch of cities to size 3 after an early sprawl of tiny cities, then shift to Planned and ~50-60% Psych for 5 turns to boost every base from size 3 to the size 7 cap, then switch back to Green and 0% Psych and enjoy massive profits for the rest of the game. Maybe later in the game repeating that in a second boom after you've built HAB complexes everywhere and have enough nutrient income to support bigger cities.

I've tried using Democracy + Planned + Children's Creche to boom instead of Golden Age. But I do not find it to be feasible in the early game or an efficient use of limited early game minerals to get a Children's Creche built in every single size 3 city to boom them. It seems much cheaper and easier early in the game to just do Golden Age for a few turns. I'll use Children's Creches afterward if I need to do a second boom after HAB complexes sometimes, or if I've conquered a bunch of AI cities where the AI has terraformed tons of mines for minerals to build CCs but no boreholes for energy for golden ages. (Not to mention conquered bases are harder to do golden ages in anyway since everyone is angry. Is there a way to fix that ever?)

But all of this leads me to my question: are the factions which can do an early boom basically just superior to the ones that can't? Morgan can't boom easily because he can't do Planned, for example, so his only option would be to have Democracy AND a Children's Creche in every single city AND get them all into golden age (AND have a HAB complex everywhere due to his terrible base size cap). +1 Economy allowing him to get to +1 Energy per square seems utterly inconsequential compared to having ~3x the energy due to having ~3x the population. Likewise the Hive's +1 Growth looks good at first glance, but they can't use Democracy, so they get stuck at a mere +5 Growth. And the difference between +5 Growth and +6 Growth is bigger than the difference between +5 Growth and -2 Growth...

Having completed a couple of games on Thinker difficulty to learn the rules, I'm going to do Transcend difficulty now (And also I'm going to try the rule setting that makes the AI more aggressive, since I'd thought they were too passive before and that made them too easy). I've turned off random events since I just hate random luck elements in any strategy game. I'm trying to figure out the optimal way to start so I had both some ideas I wanted to check, and some questions.

1. It looks like what units I start with might be random? I usually start with 2 colony pods and 1 scout infantry, but one time I only had 1 colony pod, which seems terrible. And on the game I just started, I also had a ship?! I'm not sure why. I don't think it can just be that I'm on an island, because I had just lost a game where I started on an arid island (And then suddenly some mind worms on an isle of the deep and some Spartan recon rovers on a transport ship showed up out of the fog and instantly took cities on opposite ends of the island on the same turn like 20 turns in, so that was a game over out of nowhere...)
2. As far as I can tell, bases should always be founded on the worst available terrain? It seems like the base's tile is forced to always provide 2/1/1 resources regardless of the underlying terrain. Thus if I build the base on something really good like a Rainy Rolling River tile, I just get the same 2/1/1 as if I had founded the base on garbage like an Arid Flat tile with no river. And thus founding the base on trash terrain and instead having my first citizen work the good terrain nearby is kinda like instantly doing ~20 turns worth of terraforming
3. Does having a Resource on the tile change that tactic about it being ideal to found a base on the worst terrain?
4. I'm playing as Pravin Lal since that looks like a clear best choice for managing drones on transcend, and also an ideal choice for a pop boom later on with democracy + planned + golden age/children's creche (depending on whether a given base has more minerals or more trade I guess). Pravin normally makes 1 citizen per 4 rounded up be a talent- but does that include directly turning a drone into a talent if there are only drones? Or will it just turn a drone into a worker?
5. For tech progression I've been going Social Psych first. Since Pravin starts with Biogenetics, that then lets me rush to Secrets of the Human Brain as my second tech. That's not amazing on its own or anything, but it gives me a free tech if and only if I grab it before the University does, which I think is only possible if I rush it. I could spend the free tech on Ethical Calculus to unlock Democracy super fast. But I'm not sure that early democracy is actually worth it yet since that would A) cripple my early support of 2 free units per city down to just one, B) give me a growth bonus which I can't actually use very well since if my cities grow beyond size 3 they start rioting, C) Give me an efficiency bonus which also doesn't matter much since efficiency seems irrelevant while my cities are all tiny and clustered anyway. So it doesn't seem like I actually want Democracy just yet and should stick with Frontier? Am I wrong about that though? Higher efficiency would at least let me direct a higher % of my economy toward research without penalty which might speed up research at a cost in money.
6. Instead of getting Ethical Calculus as my free tech, maybe Centauri Ecology for formers and then Information Networks (can't afford network nodes yet but building toward Planetary Networks to get a planned economy and toward Cyberethics for Knowledge)? Getting Planned for the Industry boost seems nice, Efficiency penalties from Planned seem irrelevant until my empire is bigger, and the growth is... still not helpful yet but it will be great eventually? I'm open to instead doing a tech path that focuses on economy stuff instead if that's better than this focus on knowledge and industry. I was considering Free Market, but that basically looks like certain death in the early game when it'll prevent me from using police but I don't yet have enough Energy to spend some on Psych to pacify people. And not to mention the -3 Planet would mean I probably just die to early mind worm attacks, right?
7. For managing drones, I'm basically just planning on spamming out colony pods for a while so that none of my cities ever grow past size 3 and few grow past size 2. Thus as Lal I just don't need to do anything to manage drones most of the time in that early stage, right? If a city does temporarily grow to size 3, I can either put a scout infantry police unit there or just have the extra citizen be a Doctor for a couple of turns if I'm close to finishing the colony pod that will drop it back to size 2.
8. In terms of what stuff to build early, I've been leaning toward alternating colony pods with formers. I don't really build many recycling tanks currently? Sometimes a scout infantry to either scout or try to avoid instantly losing cities to mind worms. I'm really not sure what is optimal here. I don't feel like I can afford the number of turns it takes to build a Recreation Commons to manage drones that way. In any case, Recycling Tanks don't seem like they're worth it? They give +1/1/1 but they cost a gajillion turns to build, the nutrients aren't actually all that helpful because I don't think I can productively grow beyond size 3 anyway. and a former can generate more resource bonuses than that every few turns. I guess the Recycling Tank doesn't cost support so that's something. When do more experienced players usually build Recycling Tanks relative to formers or scout infantry?
9. For early terraforming, the optimal choices feels very map dependent? If the terrain is arid garbage, maybe some forests (the extra minerals also help compensate for support penalties when I do go democracy I guess)? But ideally I think I do not have to plant that many forests immediately because ideally I have some hills where I can put a solar collector for 2 energy or some river tiles to work with or something. Forests feel to me like something one falls back on if there is literally no good terrain to work. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Roads if there's nothing else to build and my cities are already working all the tiles they have enough citizens for.
10. I would expect this very precarious stage where I can't grow to continue until I can get out Human Genome Project and Weather Paradigm and The Virtual World. HGP might actually be even more important than Weather Paradigm since it would let all my cities grow another size, greatly powering them up (and making it easier to get enough Minerals to quickly build the other two!). WP would let me get out early boreholes and get some condensers and (my personal favorite so far) drill some rivers for tons of extra moisture plus energy plus ease of transport on various squares. Once I have those 3 wonders, I think I can then boom and win the game.
11. I haven't been too impressed with Supply Crawlers so far. Seems like a good thing to build to rush out secret Projects later on in the game for sure, but not actually that great for gathering resources compared to satellites or compared to just getting more formers to make your existing squares better?

Any other tips? Any stuff I'm not thinking about correctly or not prioritizing highly enough? Any better way to manage drones on Transcend so my cities can grow past size 3 earlier?

So I've been noticing that neither Aerospace Complex nor the Space Elevator consistently work the way they're supposed to in terms of making satellites give your bases the full amount of nutrients/production/energy they're supposed to.

I've currently got, for example, 32 hydroponics satellites. I checked various bases, some with the Aerospace Complex and some without it. Most of the Aerospace Complex bases got the full +32 nutrients when I counted up their total minus what I could see their squares were actually producing in that base. But some only had 16 as if there was no Aerospace Complex there.

So I built the Space Elevator, hoping that would fix it. Nope. The problem persists. Some bases, seemingly at random, get 16 nutrients and others get the full 32. With not even much of a correlation anymore as to whether that base has an Aerospace Complex.

Anyone know what causes this bug and how to fix it?

So I'm playing through my first game in which a global warming message triggered. At the start of this turn, I got a warning that global warming would happen and it was expected that sea levels would rise (some amount I don't remember) over 20 years.

I called a council meeting as soon as all the build notifications finished, and deployed solar shades. This said sea levels would fall 333 over 20 years.

Does this mean I'm in the clear, and the two will counteract each other with no problems? Or should I expect major problems with the sea level alternately rising or lowering? Or is it possible that the rise from global warming won't quite match the fall from global cooling and we'll just get a slight rise or a slight fall?

Also- should I expect nothing to happen FOR 20 years, and then a dramatic change? Or should I expect cities to start drowning immediately if they're just at sea level, and then for cities a few feet above sea level to drown one by one over the next 20 turns?

Secondarily, I'm wondering how this happened. Although I have like 200 boreholes and each one has warned about temperatures rising dramatically, I've been getting those warnings for like 150 turns with no consequences. So why now when I haven't built many new ones?

For that matter, my eco damage is 0 at almost all cities and has been at 0 for a very long time due to tree farms and so forth. And I don't THINK the AI could be causing it, because I exterminated all AIs except for the University having a single tiny polar base that can't be causing any eco damage.

Edit: I can confirm at least that deploying the solar shade immediately after getting the global warming message meant everything was fine. No sea level changes happened.

We don’t need no drone nerve stapling!

We don’t need no Thought Control!

Eudaimonia is the choice now!

Chairman, leave them drones alone.

Hey! Chairman! Leave them drones alone!

 

All in all, it’s just another base in the hive.

All in all, you’re just another base in the hive.

 

(If you don’t spend on Psych, you can’t have any Talents!

How can you have any Talents if you don’t spend on Psych?!)

-Pink Droid

I'm going to go on a very long drive tomorrow, and I'm looking for ways to use some of that time to practice Portuguese. I've looked briefly at a few podcasts, but the ones I found seemed to be structured around reading a transcript while listening, which is not feasible on a drive.

Does anyone have suggestions about good ways to learn or practice, or helpful things to listen to? I'm currently around A2, but understanding what people are saying aloud is probably what I'm having the hardest time with and thus what I'd most like to improve on

So I'll admit this is rather silly, but as I've been starting to try to play this game, I'm realizing that one reason I'm not getting into it (unlike Civilization 2, which I played a lot of) is that my starting area always just looks so... ugly. It's gross and red with fungus and desert-ish looking stuff. Even the oceans aren't looking good.

But I've seen in screenshots that it can eventually look green and blue and more satisfying. Is that only a lategame thing with massive amounts of terraforming by units and technology that aren't available for a long time? Like in Civ 2 slooooowly changing individual tiles of plains into grasslands with an expensive lategame engineer for 12 turns apiece? Or can I get out of this phase of everything being a smear of red pixels early? (Or am I just being unlucky with my starting terrain, like how in Civ2 you could start with a bunch of oceans and grasslands and forests and rivers, or you could start with a bunch of drab deserts and plains)