Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/The Lord's Believers: Difference between revisions

This might seem like a contradiction in terms, considering the slow start with research and the twenty percent higher tech costs, but in truth, you can offset both of these things with relative ease. Once you get Centauri Ecology, the boost in support enables you to crank out an obscene number of formers, very quickly moving to terraform the entire continent, and making all your bases that much more productive. Not to mention the fact that, as with the Spartans, most people will be content to leave you be if you play a Builder game, and odds are, they're just breathing a sigh of relief that you're not attacking them! If you ARE attacked however, your best chance at defending is with an active stance, using pre-emptive strikes to take advantage of your native 25% attack bonus and running Fundamentalism to prevent subversion. Research wise, even when you're running Fundamentalism, Network Nodes everywhere gives you a net gain of +10% to your research rates. Not nearly the boost it gives others, but then, you'll only be running Fundamentalism if there's trouble brewing, otherwise, you're better served by some other Social Engineering choice ([[Civ:Social Engineering#Democratic|Democratic]] springs immediately to mind here). You're cash is good (ability to run [[Civ:Social Engineering#Free Market|Market]]), your troops are good, and you can offset the research hit by a program of steady builds and active probe teams to keep up until your infrastructure is in place. The Miriam Builder game is by far the most active of the lot, as she must make early and regular use of probes to keep pace until the infrastructure is in place, but it's quite easily pulled off.

Also note here, that when you play the Builder's game with Miriam, you will want to be very careful and specific about when you run [[Civ:Social Engineering#Fundamentalism|Fundamentalism]]. True, it gives you almost total immunity to enemy probe actions, but it utterly kills your research, regardless of your infrastructure, so use it only when pressed, or when pressing an attack against someone else.

Again, like the Spartans, this one's a no-brainer. Race for [[Civ:SMAC Tech Tree#Doctrine: Flexibility|Doctrine: Flexibility]] and [[Civ:SMAC Tech Tree#Planetary Networks|Planetary Networks]], switch to [[Civ:Social Engineering#Fundamentalism|Fundamentalism]], save your money, find an opponent, infiltrate, Probe them to death to get their tech, steal a base and upgrade all the garrisons to best/best, using pre-emptive strikes to defeat the forces sent against you (and continue to subvert them all the while). Build cheap scouts or Recon Rovers every turn, upgrading them to whatever is needed (remembering that the newly captured base will get a larger than normal share of "free" units), and keep punching your opponent. In the field, with even tech, your forces are ''very'' hard to beat, especially if you're running Fundamentalism, as they cannot use Probe trickery against you, and you get a morale boost too!