Hello, everyone!

I have encountered a peculiar issue with the relationship between the psych readout for a base and the actual population of the base as it pertains to—what else?—drones; namely, there are many, many more drones than should be allowed given facilities, secret projects, and police.

For example, one of my oldest production bases, “Neuron C-1,” has a psych readout as follows:
Unmodified: Five Drones (to be expected)
Psych: Five Drones (Psych is at 10%, also to be expected)
Facilities: Five Workers (Rec. Commons, Network Node with Virtual World)
Secret Projects: One Talent, Four Workers (The Human Genome Project)

But the actual base population is given as:
One Talent, Two Workers, Two Drones

I am playing as Yang on Transcend Ironman difficulty, basic SMAC (not Crossfire), without mods of any kind (just the basic GOG installer). Also, I should mention that I do not use governors or automation until my empire becomes a bureaucratic nightmare (which hasn’t happened in this save file—yet).

I first played Alpha Centauri a few years ago, and this is my first game since then, so I’m a little rusty. I am by no means a TBS or 4X “master,” but as someone who appreciates strategy games and has spent hundreds of hours on-and-off playing games such as MoOII, Civ4, Medieval II, and others on the more high-powered difficulties, I’m a bit disappointed in myself that I cannot suss out the cause of this problem.

Before posting this, I did a little experiment in-game by loading my save and ending my turn several times before quitting without saving; while “Neuron C-1” should have experienced Drone Riots (# of Drones > # of Talents), it did not after five successive turns.

Part of me is inclined to label this purely as a graphical bug, but the rest is not so certain. I have a few other theories, but I’d rather a SMAC veteran explain what is actually happening in the game than some casual player like myself spouting some harebrained nonsense.

Thank you in advance!

The problem with this game is that someone had the bright idea of increasing unhappiness with the difficulty level.

Its just stupid and pointless and there are far better ways to increase difficulty.

What can you do about it?

1) Don't use democracy civics
2) You have to watch your growth rate, and if necessary slow it down by changing the terrain your city is working.
3) Think twice before building hab complexes
4) get your clean reactor tech ASAP and make police units

Thanks for the reply, mystikmind!

I realize that I should have updated this post a while ago, stating that I finished that round and these "phantom drones" actually just seemed to be a graphical inconsistency between the population readout and the psych readout. Once I managed to construct "The Telepathic Matrix," I stopped noticing the problem because it was no longer relevant.

You are correct about *how* extra drones come about and those are excellent tips for handling them. However, it doesn't explain the discrepancy. I've tried taking some screenshots with PrSc but the captured image is incomplete.

Is there a way of running SMAC in windowed mode? Or another way of screen capturing?

I don't know? Isn't there an option for running in windowed mode in the windows compatibility options? You know, by right clicking on the exe file?

There are a few other projects that assist morale as well as the telepathic matrix, but projects are often flogged by the AI as you know, so its necessary to be able to manage morale without them.