3 bases in one turn. - Let's Play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire e3-06 :: Thinker Mod
Channel: aetherspoon
Date: 2023-02-01

War. War never changes. Except when aliens are just stomping some poor pathetic humans into the ground into meat paste to feed their babies.


Welcome to my Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire (with Thinker Mod!) series! Both myself (he/him) and my partner Kriatyrr (they/them) are playing through a run as Caretaker Lular H'minee. This run will be played using the Thinker mod (although not stock settings - see the chapters below) at Thinker difficulty.

The Progenitor race crash landed on Manifold Six after a battle between the Caretakers and the Usurpers. It just isn't a big enough planet for the two of them, let alone the humans stuck beneath an Alien Crossfire. Of course, since we're not playing as one of those stupid humans, we're just going to use them for our own gains... I mean, don't tell them that.

Thinker mod is a popular mod in the SMAC community meant for improving the AI in the game.... and it has a crapton of other changes not directly related to said AI that I didn't know about. This is why I had to heavily modify it. All of my changes are in the "Thinker Mod Changes" chapter of this video and I'll be keeping them consistent throughout this series. The main changes are the fact that I don't have the AI making fifty bases ASAP and the fact that I'm not using its map generator.

Thinker difficulty is one tier off of the maximum difficulty. Both Thinker and Transcend difficulties vary from Librarian by virtue of letting the AI cheat even more and giving you a larger penalty (specifically to how many workers it takes to spawn your first drone). Thinker difficulty on Thinker mod is roughly corresponding to Transcend difficulty on base SMAC, so let's see how well this works!

Recorded 2023.01.15. This would have been out sooner, but Resolve really didn't like the chroma key on this video; I did my best, sorry for the artifacting.

00:00:00 - Last time on...
00:01:59 - MY 2202 (Oh gods this is a long turn)
00:23:34 - MY 2203
00:30:56 - MY 2204
00:41:03 - MY 2205
00:47:36 - MY 2206
00:57:46 - MY 2207