And then it got worse.- Let's Play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire e3-09 :: Thinker Mod
Channel: aetherspoon
Date: 2023-04-27

That's a big oof right there, but not too surprising given that I'm fighting a three front war. Over an hour of recording and only FOUR turns! I certainly hope player!spoon can figure out how to get out of this pickle soon!

Also, as a heads-up, I'm sure you all have noticed how slow these releases are getting. That's because I'm moving! I'm moving in May, so I don't expect to have any SMAC recordings (let alone editings) then. I should be back in June with a much better and easier recording setup.

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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) 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 2023.04.09 - one per month seems to be my pace at the moment.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Thinker Mod Updates!
00:05:06 - MY 2219
00:30:33 - MY 2220
00:39:41 - MY 2221
00:51:48 - MY 2222