Terraformers were ok in SMAC, but in other civs... fuck worker units. In Civilization: Call to Power, they introduced PW in the place of Workers. Instead of getting units to build farms, roads, mines, etc, you allotted a percentage of your empire production (the stuff you use to build units) towards Public Works points. When you had enough points, you instantly put down the improvement on the tile.
I liked it, because you couldn't put tile improvements down outside of the city area of influence *unless* you connected it to another improvement. You couldn't put a fort down in the middle of nowhere without building a road to it for example.
If you had an exceptional production generation working, you could sometimes put down a settler for a city, and then next turn you could spend the required PW and place all the tile improvements for it. Then go on to work on something else.
I don't think it was balanced properly, and this was back in the days of city sprawl to win, but you'd end up with suburbia looking like this:
There was some ways the game ate up PW though. there were like 4 or 5 types of farms and mines with better outputs, that cost like 50, 100, 500, 5000 PW, and you had to build over the previous improvement.
There was a pollution mechanic in effect as well that ate up your PW too. Pollution would leave a barren patch of earth that couldn't be worked on until you spent gobs of PW to turn it back into grassland or plains.
It was very possible to scar the world and turn it into a nuclear wasteland with shear pollution if you weren't careful. SeaLabs and Orbital Facilities were protection in case someone was stupid to kill the planet.
I don't think public works is the answer either. I would prefer a worker-placement system borrowed from board games, but you can't pull your workers back without expending some kind of resource.
Honestly I don't really see much benefit from tile improvements existing. I mean, if you're working an unimproved plains tile, what does that represent if not farming? We've gone back to hunter/gatherer society on a tile just because it's not improved? Roads and highways yeah maybe, but just general exploitation of the land shouldn't require an improvement to represent.
Honestly I don't really see much benefit from tile improvements existing. I mean, if you're working an unimproved plains tile, what does that represent if not farming? We've gone back to hunter/gatherer society on a tile just because it's not improved? Roads and highways yeah maybe, but just general exploitation of the land shouldn't require an improvement to represent.
Honestly I don't really see much benefit from tile improvements existing. I mean, if you're working an unimproved plains tile, what does that represent if not farming? We've gone back to hunter/gatherer society on a tile just because it's not improved? Roads and highways yeah maybe, but just general exploitation of the land shouldn't require an improvement to represent.
I always assumed that the tile improvement represented a change from small-scale rural operations to large-scale heavy industry operations. Unimproved plains tile? Ma & Pa's small canola farm. Improved plains tile? Juggernaut factory farm operation.
With Love and Courage
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DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
The Last Federation is a typical Arcen game, which is to say its interesting but NOT a 4x, doesn't fit well into any genere.
I just spent a few hours with it. It's not a 4x but it has many of the hooks in spades. Instead of dealing with your own corner of space though you are trying to uplift a very inhabited solar system into an interplanetary federation. The solar system is simulated, including individual races internal politics, economy, social order and so on. You can help and hinder in a multitude of ways. The turn based combat is very cool too, kind of like a space based version of Leviathan Warships where you control a single ship. You can have allies in combat but they will do their own thing. So what you end up with is a cool turn based tactics game inside of a simulation game that does have a lot of overlap with features that make 4x games so appealing. It's really kind of mindblowing. It ate two hours of my time like it was nothing.
Honestly I don't really see much benefit from tile improvements existing. I mean, if you're working an unimproved plains tile, what does that represent if not farming? We've gone back to hunter/gatherer society on a tile just because it's not improved? Roads and highways yeah maybe, but just general exploitation of the land shouldn't require an improvement to represent.
I always assumed that the tile improvement represented a change from small-scale rural operations to large-scale heavy industry operations. Unimproved plains tile? Ma & Pa's small canola farm. Improved plains tile? Juggernaut factory farm operation.
By that standard then the majority of the arable land in the world today would still be unimproved...
for call to power,
unimproved tiles is literally going out into the woods or the field and picking berries/hunting for food. or finding ore on the ground.
tier 1 farming and mines indicate actually improving the land for crops/herding animals or digging for the material from the earth.
tier 2 and higher are continually better concepts. researching irrigation lead to advanced farms, mechanization gave mechanized farms, etc.
it didn't feel tedious. The main aspect was adjusting between three empire sliders between rations (more population growth and happiness), work hours (production at the cost of happiness), and wages (gotta pay the plebs, more money means more happiness). This would alter the outputs involved. more food means more people, more work meant quicker production, and if you push your people, you needed to pay them to keep them from revolting.
I guess if you wanted to be super efficient, you had to keep an eye on PW. Still, in the early game it was better to push all production into city improvements like barracks and walls and units and get a base civilization in place first, and then when you had about 4 or 5 citizens in the capital city, you could safely slide it 10 or 20% to keep city production from taking forever.
There were also several different government types that had different normals for the slider bars. Despotism had the sliders near 60%, so bonuses would show up only when you pushed it higher. Theocracy would require 70% food for normal citizen growth, but only 20% for money. You had to keep people fed, but you didn't have to pay them much to keep them happy. and then there was Corporate Republic which had 40% food, 50% work and 80% money normals. changing your government type was a serious investment.
with PW, it was adjusting sliders to push the happiness envelope, and then dealing with units. when you had a bunch of PW, you spent it. in the later eras, you'd make so much PW you could outfit a new settlement the same turn you built it and just leave it to its own devices and go back to worrying about the warfront. which was pretty cool at the end. I had Marines and war walkers outfitted with orbital drop attributes. completely bypass the transportation side of warfare. send them up the space elevator and then move them over space layer and drop onto the enemy continent.
Honestly I don't really see much benefit from tile improvements existing. I mean, if you're working an unimproved plains tile, what does that represent if not farming? We've gone back to hunter/gatherer society on a tile just because it's not improved? Roads and highways yeah maybe, but just general exploitation of the land shouldn't require an improvement to represent.
I always assumed that the tile improvement represented a change from small-scale rural operations to large-scale heavy industry operations. Unimproved plains tile? Ma & Pa's small canola farm. Improved plains tile? Juggernaut factory farm operation.
By that standard then the majority of the arable land in the world today would still be unimproved...
Yeah, and? Farms in Civ V don't allow the production of food, they just increase it. Which goes exactly with The Ender's description.
The one thing I'd love to have possible in Civ is to have your workers be able to plant trees or something, as well as more options around food production and technological improvement of such. Moving from direct city food to a shared food supply that can be reallocated with some gold (the more you reallocate, the more gold you spend moving stuff around) would be rad, as then you could go balls to the wall with production or science or culture cities while keeping other cities for food production. It would give you more reason to go wider and make land more contentious, which would be good.
The thing I find really satisfying about Civ that I miss in my Sci-Fi space games is that there's a sense of your empire completely defining the land area you cover. When you're a big space empire, there's no "land" to tile over and make your own.
Still, the workers in Civ do make me so annoyed that I basically just say "automate all of them", which is horribly inefficient.
The thing I find really satisfying about Civ that I miss in my Sci-Fi space games is that there's a sense of your empire completely defining the land area you cover. When you're a big space empire, there's no "land" to tile over and make your own.
Still, the workers in Civ do make me so annoyed that I basically just say "automate all of them", which is horribly inefficient.
It's kinda the opposite with me. In a game like GalCiv2 I felt my area of influence carried more weight than your influential borders in Civ V. In Civ it felt more like, "Past this line is my doorstep. Don't shit on it." very rigid city limits. In space 4x like GalCiv it's more like your projected coverage like in oceans. I imagine within that influence your people have private trading companies, advertising agencies, industrial concerns, etc. as well as implying to other races that your fleet is a stone's throw away to respond to aggression, rather than just a simple "I've got a colony here" indicator.
Honestly I don't really see much benefit from tile improvements existing. I mean, if you're working an unimproved plains tile, what does that represent if not farming? We've gone back to hunter/gatherer society on a tile just because it's not improved? Roads and highways yeah maybe, but just general exploitation of the land shouldn't require an improvement to represent.
I always assumed that the tile improvement represented a change from small-scale rural operations to large-scale heavy industry operations. Unimproved plains tile? Ma & Pa's small canola farm. Improved plains tile? Juggernaut factory farm operation.
By that standard then the majority of the arable land in the world today would still be unimproved...
Which is accurately represented by unimproved arable tiles yielding some food, but not as much as irrigated?
I like being able to steal enemy workers. They're another layer of resources that you eventually tap out (and have to retire).
I feel like you could snatch the workers by plundering the tile they're allocated to, giving you one slave labor worker to deposit back at one of your cities.
I like being able to steal enemy workers. They're another layer of resources that you eventually tap out (and have to retire).
I feel like you could snatch the workers by plundering the tile they're allocated to, giving you one slave labor worker to deposit back at one of your cities.
Ultimately anything you try to replace workers with is going to be as complicated/ tedious late game as workers are if you want to keep the ability change tiles.
I mean, best case you remove one click and lose a visual representation.
Honestly I don't really see much benefit from tile improvements existing. I mean, if you're working an unimproved plains tile, what does that represent if not farming? We've gone back to hunter/gatherer society on a tile just because it's not improved? Roads and highways yeah maybe, but just general exploitation of the land shouldn't require an improvement to represent.
I always assumed that the tile improvement represented a change from small-scale rural operations to large-scale heavy industry operations. Unimproved plains tile? Ma & Pa's small canola farm. Improved plains tile? Juggernaut factory farm operation.
By that standard then the majority of the arable land in the world today would still be unimproved...
Which is accurately represented by unimproved arable tiles yielding some food, but not as much as irrigated?
My point was that in civ, you almost never leave arable tiles unimproved for all that long, and yet if the standard is "farm improvement represents industrial-scale agriculture" most of the arable land in the real world is not worked to that scale and hence should have no improvement... and it being 2014 you would think that most of the world's land would be improved by now. I guess I think that most tile improvements don't really represent much of anything worth representing in a game with civ's scale. I can see why they might be needed for gameplay purposes, but I don't like them.
Yeah that really depends how you define improved and if you are only counting modern improvement. In fact most arable land has been improved at some point in human history, only a small portion has been modernized. But the scale of maps isn't anywhere close to a linear relationship with the scale of civilization on earth, so meh.
But that is the case with allI abstraction in 4x games, it's all about how you choose to define your world view.
I like being able to steal enemy workers. They're another layer of resources that you eventually tap out (and have to retire).
I feel like you could snatch the workers by plundering the tile they're allocated to, giving you one slave labor worker to deposit back at one of your cities.
Ultimately anything you try to replace workers with is going to be as complicated/ tedious late game as workers are if you want to keep the ability change tiles.
I mean, best case you remove one click and lose a visual representation.
I'm advocating dropping the tile swapping. If you commit a worker to, say, a farm, then they become farmers and they stay that way forever. I would prefer the whole series start emphasizing permanent one-shot difficult decisions aggregating over time, than a lot of transitory micro-managing optimization decisions that aggregate over time.
I would go with something like; each city gets 1 action for its own purposes, you as a civilization get X number of actions per turn to raise armies, settle lands, advance your government, etc, each unit gets a few action per turn to move, attack, explore, etc. When a city's population grows, you allocate that population unit either to the city tile (working inside a built improvement, like a Library) or the outskirts working a farm or a mine or something.
My least favorite turns in Civ 5 are the dead turns where I'm just waiting for stuff. My favorite turns are the ones where I get real decisions to make. Cut down the number of turns overall, increase the significance of decisions each turn, is how I'd roll it.
If, for example, in the Ancient Era I get 1 Civic Action a turn, and I can use it to found a new city within range (at the cost of the action plus whatever else it takes to found a city), or I can use it to raise an army, or I can devote it to governance and advance down a policy track...and I want to do all of those things this turn, but I can only do one...
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ShimshaiFlush with Success!Isle of EmeraldRegistered Userregular
I like being able to steal enemy workers. They're another layer of resources that you eventually tap out (and have to retire).
I feel like you could snatch the workers by plundering the tile they're allocated to, giving you one slave labor worker to deposit back at one of your cities.
Ultimately anything you try to replace workers with is going to be as complicated/ tedious late game as workers are if you want to keep the ability change tiles.
I mean, best case you remove one click and lose a visual representation.
I'm advocating dropping the tile swapping. If you commit a worker to, say, a farm, then they become farmers and they stay that way forever. I would prefer the whole series start emphasizing permanent one-shot difficult decisions aggregating over time, than a lot of transitory micro-managing optimization decisions that aggregate over time.
I would go with something like; each city gets 1 action for its own purposes, you as a civilization get X number of actions per turn to raise armies, settle lands, advance your government, etc, each unit gets a few action per turn to move, attack, explore, etc. When a city's population grows, you allocate that population unit either to the city tile (working inside a built improvement, like a Library) or the outskirts working a farm or a mine or something.
My least favorite turns in Civ 5 are the dead turns where I'm just waiting for stuff. My favorite turns are the ones where I get real decisions to make. Cut down the number of turns overall, increase the significance of decisions each turn, is how I'd roll it.
If, for example, in the Ancient Era I get 1 Civic Action a turn, and I can use it to found a new city within range (at the cost of the action plus whatever else it takes to found a city), or I can use it to raise an army, or I can devote it to governance and advance down a policy track...and I want to do all of those things this turn, but I can only do one...
Interestingly enough that was one of the main systems in the design doc for master of Orion 3 (they ended up taking it out).
According to the devs, there's a roughly 200 year gap in-between the end of a civ game and where Beyond Earth begins. Long enough for the "big mistake" to happen, for Earth to fall in to a dark age and then recover in time to decide to start colonizing other worlds.
According to the devs, there's a roughly 200 year gap in-between the end of a civ game and where Beyond Earth begins. Long enough for the "big mistake" to happen, for Earth to fall in to a dark age and then recover in time to decide to start colonizing other worlds.
They actually discuss what the Big Mistake was, or at least one of their theories, in one of those interviews.
A limited nuclear war in Asia someplace... China maybe? Not sure. The resulting flood of refugees fleeing the area causes an ecological disaster that knocks civilization back a few centuries.
I really liked their discussion on how we, as a people, would react if we discovered liquid water on another Earthlike planet out there. "The picture would be 20 by 20 pixels, but it would be on the cover of every newspaper and magazine on Earth the next day."
According to the devs, there's a roughly 200 year gap in-between the end of a civ game and where Beyond Earth begins. Long enough for the "big mistake" to happen, for Earth to fall in to a dark age and then recover in time to decide to start colonizing other worlds.
They actually discuss what the Big Mistake was, or at least one of their theories, in one of those interviews.
A limited nuclear war in Asia someplace... China maybe? Not sure. The resulting flood of refugees fleeing the area causes an ecological disaster that knocks civilization back a few centuries.
I really liked their discussion on how we, as a people, would react if we discovered liquid water on another Earthlike planet out there. "The picture would be 20 by 20 pixels, but it would be on the cover of every newspaper and magazine on Earth the next day."
Man, is it Fall yet?
The obvious option is
India-Pakistan
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
According to the devs, there's a roughly 200 year gap in-between the end of a civ game and where Beyond Earth begins. Long enough for the "big mistake" to happen, for Earth to fall in to a dark age and then recover in time to decide to start colonizing other worlds.
They actually discuss what the Big Mistake was, or at least one of their theories, in one of those interviews.
A limited nuclear war in Asia someplace... China maybe? Not sure. The resulting flood of refugees fleeing the area causes an ecological disaster that knocks civilization back a few centuries.
I really liked their discussion on how we, as a people, would react if we discovered liquid water on another Earthlike planet out there. "The picture would be 20 by 20 pixels, but it would be on the cover of every newspaper and magazine on Earth the next day."
The advantage of terraformers in SMAC over workers in Civ is the terraform up/down command and the game's weather patterns.
There's so much more than up/down to manipulate rainfall though.
Super-terraforming cities with supply crawled condenser farms and citizen-worked boreholes, and massive echelon mirror solar farms supply crawled to your super science cities is something that just isn't in the civ games.
And then there's the fungus. Planting it to create large fungal barriers to control your borders with neighbors you have treaties with to prevent encroachment is a personal favorite strategy of mine.
And then when you are preparing for war you can drive rover formers into their territory and screw up their terraforming to give yourself an advantage. Overwrite their defensive sensor arrays with solar collectors, plant fungus over critical tiles (like special resource squares) etc.
my solution to doom stacks was to disable war and take over the world with rock and roll. admittedly my victory was assured, but I was competing with myself for high scores.
my solution to doom stacks was to disable war and take over the world with rock and roll. admittedly my victory was assured, but I was competing with myself for high scores.
The advantage of terraformers in SMAC over workers in Civ is the terraform up/down command and the game's weather patterns.
There's so much more than up/down to manipulate rainfall though.
Super-terraforming cities with supply crawled condenser farms and citizen-worked boreholes, and massive echelon mirror solar farms supply crawled to your super science cities is something that just isn't in the civ games.
And then there's the fungus. Planting it to create large fungal barriers to control your borders with neighbors you have treaties with to prevent encroachment is a personal favorite strategy of mine.
And then when you are preparing for war you can drive rover formers into their territory and screw up their terraforming to give yourself an advantage. Overwrite their defensive sensor arrays with solar collectors, plant fungus over critical tiles (like special resource squares) etc.
Terraforming in SMAC is basically its own game.
I'm a little forgetful, but wasn't the AI terrible at that in SMAC? We talk about the combat AI a lot, but honestly, worker and tile improvement AI has always been terrible and is often, in my mind, the biggest difference between human and computer players. Good god, the number of times I invade an AI and I'm like, "Wtf, where are all your tile improvements? Why are you building farms on hills? What's going onnnn?!?!"
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ShimshaiFlush with Success!Isle of EmeraldRegistered Userregular
Yeah the AI is generally bad when it comes to workers in most civ games, SMAC included. Deirdre was the best of them in my experience, but mostly because she was more likely to plant forests which are among the better tile improvements, at least up until boreholes and other advanced options are available.
They never seemed to build those when they come around though.
I'm getting that itch to play SMAC again. The sounds, the setting, the music, the voiceovers, secret project videos... It's such a rich game.
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I liked it, because you couldn't put tile improvements down outside of the city area of influence *unless* you connected it to another improvement. You couldn't put a fort down in the middle of nowhere without building a road to it for example.
If you had an exceptional production generation working, you could sometimes put down a settler for a city, and then next turn you could spend the required PW and place all the tile improvements for it. Then go on to work on something else.
I don't think it was balanced properly, and this was back in the days of city sprawl to win, but you'd end up with suburbia looking like this:
There was some ways the game ate up PW though. there were like 4 or 5 types of farms and mines with better outputs, that cost like 50, 100, 500, 5000 PW, and you had to build over the previous improvement.
There was a pollution mechanic in effect as well that ate up your PW too. Pollution would leave a barren patch of earth that couldn't be worked on until you spent gobs of PW to turn it back into grassland or plains.
It was very possible to scar the world and turn it into a nuclear wasteland with shear pollution if you weren't careful. SeaLabs and Orbital Facilities were protection in case someone was stupid to kill the planet.
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Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
That game was boss.
Unimproved plains tiles are unirrigated.
Which... doesn't work well.
I always assumed that the tile improvement represented a change from small-scale rural operations to large-scale heavy industry operations. Unimproved plains tile? Ma & Pa's small canola farm. Improved plains tile? Juggernaut factory farm operation.
I just spent a few hours with it. It's not a 4x but it has many of the hooks in spades. Instead of dealing with your own corner of space though you are trying to uplift a very inhabited solar system into an interplanetary federation. The solar system is simulated, including individual races internal politics, economy, social order and so on. You can help and hinder in a multitude of ways. The turn based combat is very cool too, kind of like a space based version of Leviathan Warships where you control a single ship. You can have allies in combat but they will do their own thing. So what you end up with is a cool turn based tactics game inside of a simulation game that does have a lot of overlap with features that make 4x games so appealing. It's really kind of mindblowing. It ate two hours of my time like it was nothing.
By that standard then the majority of the arable land in the world today would still be unimproved...
unimproved tiles is literally going out into the woods or the field and picking berries/hunting for food. or finding ore on the ground.
tier 1 farming and mines indicate actually improving the land for crops/herding animals or digging for the material from the earth.
tier 2 and higher are continually better concepts. researching irrigation lead to advanced farms, mechanization gave mechanized farms, etc.
it didn't feel tedious. The main aspect was adjusting between three empire sliders between rations (more population growth and happiness), work hours (production at the cost of happiness), and wages (gotta pay the plebs, more money means more happiness). This would alter the outputs involved. more food means more people, more work meant quicker production, and if you push your people, you needed to pay them to keep them from revolting.
I guess if you wanted to be super efficient, you had to keep an eye on PW. Still, in the early game it was better to push all production into city improvements like barracks and walls and units and get a base civilization in place first, and then when you had about 4 or 5 citizens in the capital city, you could safely slide it 10 or 20% to keep city production from taking forever.
There were also several different government types that had different normals for the slider bars. Despotism had the sliders near 60%, so bonuses would show up only when you pushed it higher. Theocracy would require 70% food for normal citizen growth, but only 20% for money. You had to keep people fed, but you didn't have to pay them much to keep them happy. and then there was Corporate Republic which had 40% food, 50% work and 80% money normals. changing your government type was a serious investment.
with PW, it was adjusting sliders to push the happiness envelope, and then dealing with units. when you had a bunch of PW, you spent it. in the later eras, you'd make so much PW you could outfit a new settlement the same turn you built it and just leave it to its own devices and go back to worrying about the warfront. which was pretty cool at the end. I had Marines and war walkers outfitted with orbital drop attributes. completely bypass the transportation side of warfare. send them up the space elevator and then move them over space layer and drop onto the enemy continent.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Yeah, and? Farms in Civ V don't allow the production of food, they just increase it. Which goes exactly with The Ender's description.
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Still, the workers in Civ do make me so annoyed that I basically just say "automate all of them", which is horribly inefficient.
It's kinda the opposite with me. In a game like GalCiv2 I felt my area of influence carried more weight than your influential borders in Civ V. In Civ it felt more like, "Past this line is my doorstep. Don't shit on it." very rigid city limits. In space 4x like GalCiv it's more like your projected coverage like in oceans. I imagine within that influence your people have private trading companies, advertising agencies, industrial concerns, etc. as well as implying to other races that your fleet is a stone's throw away to respond to aggression, rather than just a simple "I've got a colony here" indicator.
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Which is accurately represented by unimproved arable tiles yielding some food, but not as much as irrigated?
I feel like you could snatch the workers by plundering the tile they're allocated to, giving you one slave labor worker to deposit back at one of your cities.
Ultimately anything you try to replace workers with is going to be as complicated/ tedious late game as workers are if you want to keep the ability change tiles.
I mean, best case you remove one click and lose a visual representation.
My point was that in civ, you almost never leave arable tiles unimproved for all that long, and yet if the standard is "farm improvement represents industrial-scale agriculture" most of the arable land in the real world is not worked to that scale and hence should have no improvement... and it being 2014 you would think that most of the world's land would be improved by now. I guess I think that most tile improvements don't really represent much of anything worth representing in a game with civ's scale. I can see why they might be needed for gameplay purposes, but I don't like them.
But that is the case with allI abstraction in 4x games, it's all about how you choose to define your world view.
Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.
I'm advocating dropping the tile swapping. If you commit a worker to, say, a farm, then they become farmers and they stay that way forever. I would prefer the whole series start emphasizing permanent one-shot difficult decisions aggregating over time, than a lot of transitory micro-managing optimization decisions that aggregate over time.
I would go with something like; each city gets 1 action for its own purposes, you as a civilization get X number of actions per turn to raise armies, settle lands, advance your government, etc, each unit gets a few action per turn to move, attack, explore, etc. When a city's population grows, you allocate that population unit either to the city tile (working inside a built improvement, like a Library) or the outskirts working a farm or a mine or something.
My least favorite turns in Civ 5 are the dead turns where I'm just waiting for stuff. My favorite turns are the ones where I get real decisions to make. Cut down the number of turns overall, increase the significance of decisions each turn, is how I'd roll it.
If, for example, in the Ancient Era I get 1 Civic Action a turn, and I can use it to found a new city within range (at the cost of the action plus whatever else it takes to found a city), or I can use it to raise an army, or I can devote it to governance and advance down a policy track...and I want to do all of those things this turn, but I can only do one...
Nice little piece here.
Interestingly enough that was one of the main systems in the design doc for master of Orion 3 (they ended up taking it out).
It's a cool idea but hard to balance.
They actually discuss what the Big Mistake was, or at least one of their theories, in one of those interviews.
I really liked their discussion on how we, as a people, would react if we discovered liquid water on another Earthlike planet out there. "The picture would be 20 by 20 pixels, but it would be on the cover of every newspaper and magazine on Earth the next day."
Man, is it Fall yet?
The obvious option is
Everyone knew it. Everyone expected it.
And that is exactly why it didn't happen.
There's so much more than up/down to manipulate rainfall though.
Super-terraforming cities with supply crawled condenser farms and citizen-worked boreholes, and massive echelon mirror solar farms supply crawled to your super science cities is something that just isn't in the civ games.
And then there's the fungus. Planting it to create large fungal barriers to control your borders with neighbors you have treaties with to prevent encroachment is a personal favorite strategy of mine.
And then when you are preparing for war you can drive rover formers into their territory and screw up their terraforming to give yourself an advantage. Overwrite their defensive sensor arrays with solar collectors, plant fungus over critical tiles (like special resource squares) etc.
Terraforming in SMAC is basically its own game.
Can you imagine a world without lawyers war?
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I'm a little forgetful, but wasn't the AI terrible at that in SMAC? We talk about the combat AI a lot, but honestly, worker and tile improvement AI has always been terrible and is often, in my mind, the biggest difference between human and computer players. Good god, the number of times I invade an AI and I'm like, "Wtf, where are all your tile improvements? Why are you building farms on hills? What's going onnnn?!?!"
They never seemed to build those when they come around though.
I'm getting that itch to play SMAC again. The sounds, the setting, the music, the voiceovers, secret project videos... It's such a rich game.