I've played a couple of games as Santiago on Thinker level, and nobody has surrendered to me, even at the point where I'm sitting outside their last base, and it's undefended, and it's still "The world will rejoice when I crush you into oblivion!"

Now, I get that after I've committed an atrocity or two, like obliterating a dozen or so bases that just didn't work for me, then nobody will cave. But even in the early going, I switch to Fundamentalist to encourage Miriam to surrender, and Police State to encourage The Hive to surrender, but they fight to the last man.

And with them, I never broke a truce or treaty.

Is Santiago just a surrender-free type of gal?

Speaking in a Borg drones voice i say this "Diplomacy in Alpha Centuri is Irrelevant".

Remember it, meditate on it, write it on the walls, write it on your face, write it down on paper and then eat it.... Dimplomacy in Alpha Centauri is irrelevant.

Accept it, then go enjoy the game.... The stupid unreasonable mindless turd AI is there to make you want to destroy them, enjoy! And even if you did ally with one, they will thank you by shoving cities up your arse.

Peace is just the interlude between wars.

It is a quote from many years back but I cannot remember exactly how it went or who said it so left out the quotation marks.

You might be missing the point. A key part of conquest is base management, specifically, base elimination. It greatly helps to have one faction surrender to you, so they can be your bitch. When you take over a base, and you don't want to keep it, then you just destroy all the enhancements (farms, solar collectors, etc.) and then gift the base to your bitch faction. It might be beneficial to starve them down to size two or three if they are close to one of your bases and consuming a valuable resource tile.

I think i remember playing around with strategies like that years ago.... if i knew i could not hold a base i would gift it rather than let it be taken. I have also tried creating cities and gifting them to the AI for the purpose of making the AI fill out their territory which the Ai is bloody awful at doing.... but mostly i will use the editor because i want to give cities to the enemy for the same reason.

Edit: Also the random map generator has a bad habbit of leaving out huge areas of terrain while deploying races very close together or on tiny islands.... so you need the editor right from the start to fix up all that nonsense and also i like to give the weaker races an extra base or two so they can keep up a bit better.

But, in the end i prefer not to take enemy bases in the first place because it ends up being too much work. I just fix up my own bases and usually whittle down nearby enemy bases i dont like until i can vanish them.

Only when i am finally done with the game and am ready to go on a massive blitz across the planet and win the game will i actually start taking bases, and by then it is a must to have enough formers to push mag tubes wherever i go

That's a good idea, I've never thought of trying to give a base to an AI faction that I didn't control. (It could be a great way to set up a massive technology steal....)

I've never used the editor, that's something I should check out. I think I'm missing out on something there.

Thanks!

If you want a massive technology steal, save up all your artifacts until you have an artifact in every one of your cities then make sure you have a network node in each city, then where reasonably possible, make sure you have stolen all the tech you can steal, because once you do the next step, your never going to find another tech to steal! So once you did all that, activate every artifact in 1 turn! The AI will never be ahead in technology over you again after doing that! Then you can upgrade all your units very nicely too.

Second phase...your going to want the super collider project, then as you explore the rest of the map, send all artifacts to the super collider city, but don't activate them yet, wait until you recovered all possible pods first, then activate them all in 1 turn!

In order to recover many artifacts , your going to need plenty of transport ships, preferably mind worm naval units and always try to keep a land unit on board - usually a spy because you always find lots of pods on coastal land tiles while exploring with ships.

Enjoy!

PS, i was forced to set pods to landing sites only in my games, because the above just made things too easy, even on 'thinker' difficulty!

That's something I've been thinking about for a long time, in terms of optimal efficiency of using the artifacts. The number of turns it takes to discover new technology remains pretty much consistent throughout the game, at least the way I play it, with cities producing an ever-increasing number labs that more or less stays in line with the ever-increasing number of labs required for a new technology.

What I generally do is hold off using the artifacts until I am researching Industrial Automation. In the early going, each subsequent research discovery costs 24-26 labs more than the previous one. So the first two are 22, then it typically goes 48-72-96-120 and so on. If, while researching something at 48, you activate two Artifacts then when you finish researching that tech, then next one jumps a step for each artifact, meaning to 120. IA is the one tech I don't want to get caught waiting for.

I'm also wary of using them early because it might give me Polymorphic Software or Optical Computers, which is way down the list of priorities in the early game.

That said, the game is one big race, and overall I think to get maximum turn advantage over the opposition it's better to get the most techs early rather than late. But I do see a huge potential benefit to what you're describing, and I will try that in my next few games.

Once I have Mind Machine Interface, I confess that I exploit the bug that gives combat units unlimited air drops in a single turn - if you use the mouse rather than the keyboard to do airdrops. I send a trance drop scout rover out to open up all the pods I can find. Then I build Drop Rover Transport units, and send them out to fetch the artifacts that are discovered. It's a little cumbersome, but I find using transport ships to be so dicey. I may be wrong but it seems like you run into way more islands of the deep in the water than mind worms on land.

Once you have Super Tensile Solids, and can build the Space Elevator, then the distance to recover them is no longer an issue, you go from anywhere to anywhere else in a single turn. But by that point, you generally just have a few technologies left to discover, I think 15 maximum.

Those projects that increase energy and labs at a single base are awesome. I build energy farms - areas of the map where I alternate a row of echelon mirrors with a row of solar collectors, then I elevate the land to get the solar collectors over 3000ft. I build supply rovers at all bases, and they all go to the base that has those projects and make it their new home base, then off they go to collect the energy.

I'm torn on the relative value of using artifacts to build wonders. The Weather Paradigm and Virtual World are pretty essential, but the Merchant Exchange has huge long-term value, and I'm a big fan of the Empath Guild.. It's really difficult to get all those wonders no matter how early you start cranking out supply crawlers to help with construction. Using two or three artifacts can be the difference between getting them all or not, and to me, some of those projects are more valuable than getting a tech ten turns early.

J.

Transport ships are like colony pods, they are worm magnets! Never collect a pod with a transport ship on fungus ocean tiles! Use ocean mindworms.

The fastest way to get mindorm ships is to have the mindworm capture technology or play Gaian and build a few combat Foil ships. Wherever they travel, always land on an ocean fungus tile on the last move, your bound to get a mindworm to pop up that you can then capture. As the numbers build up, the harder it gets to capture more. If your willing to do allot of reloading, you can get quite a large fleet very fast! And the captured mindworms usually do not require support unless you captured them very close to your base, so try to avoid doing that.

I never usually have any trouble getting all the useful projects on thinker difficulty? You must be expanding a bit slow?
Just in case you did not already know this.... try to found your early cities near nutrient bonuses and put Forrest on those bonuses. First thing to build in a new city is always a former, then a scout, then churn out colony pods.
As your boarders expand, older cities start getting too far from new terrain to continue building colony pods, that's when i build a recycling centre, then a recreation centre, then a wonder.

Yeah on Thinker the problem mostly happens if I'm playing Morgan or Lal (and always with Santiago). Never Zakharov and almost never Deirdre. With those other factions, sometimes you're on an island without much to help accumulate energy - not even so much as a river, and the other factions just get their tech and get the wonders faster.

On Transcend, even with Zakharov it is a real challenge. I play Transcend on a mega planet, 80x160, in the hopes that the other factions aren't meeting and trading technology early, and hoping I don't get stuck near one of the militaristic factions. I'm a lover, not a fighter. At least, until I get Super String Theory and Mind-Machine Interface....