Episode: 4050
Title: HPR4050: Playing Alpha Centauri, Part 5
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4050/hpr4050.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:02:29

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,050 for Friday the 9th of February 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Alpha Centauri Part 5.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Avonca and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
This summary is Part 5 of Tips on Playing Alpha Centauri.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode
in the computer strategy gaming series I've been doing.
And what we're going to do today is wrap up our look at Alpha Centauri.
I want to start by taking a look at the whole idea of happiness.
Now, as we've mentioned in this series, the key to all of the 4x games is to keep a balance.
And one aspect of this you see in pretty much all of these games from the first civilization
on is to keep your people happy and productive.
It may look different or have slightly different mechanics in one game versus another,
but you will probably find it is there in any 4x game.
Now, in Alpha Centauri, this takes the form of drones and drone riots.
Drones are the unhappy citizens, and they stop working and producing,
which in itself is bad because they will eat your food and give nothing back to your base.
Happiness can be affected by some faction-wide choices,
but it's always applied on a base-by-base basis.
Now, to see how this works, you need to go to the base screen and click the psych button.
This will show you how the citizens of your base stack up.
Initially, you will only see a top line for unmodified,
which just gives you a look at your raw numbers before any modifiers are taken into account.
Now, modifiers can come from facilities, from your spending budget,
from police, from the game level, and from some secret projects.
These can reduce or increase the number of drones in their tools that you will want to make use of.
And if you're ready to pay a price, there is nerve stapling.
Drone riots will occur at any time if the number of drones exceeds the number of talents in a given
base, so you can either decrease the drones or increase the talents to stop them.
So, let's take a look now at some of the facilities that you can build.
And this is one way to increase happiness.
Remember that there's costs involved.
You have to spend minerals to build the facility,
and then you have to spend energy to maintain it.
So, the first is the gene jack factory.
This increases your minerals by 50%.
But you get one more drone and you're more vulnerable to mind control.
So, this is a way of increasing production.
But, you know, you might think of it as you're pushing the workers harder and they resent it.
A hologram theater.
This increases your psych rating by 50% and quells two drones.
Now, note that psych has an indirect effect as well.
It can convert a worker into a talent and some talents can quell drones.
Or if there are no workers at the base, it can convert a drone into a worker.
Now, the hologram theater is expensive to maintain, though,
because it has a maintenance cost of three.
So, if you don't have a deep treasury, you might want to look for another way of doing it.
Paradise Garden is going to give you two extra talents at the base.
Punishment sphere.
This quells all drones at the base, but eliminates all talents and adds a 50% penalty to research.
But, it can be useful in some situations.
Recreation Commons.
Now, this quells two drones and only has a maintenance charge of one.
That makes this almost a mandatory build in every base.
And you get it pretty early.
So, it's a good one to slot into your build queue.
Research Hospital.
This quells two drones, but again, this one has the maintenance cost of three,
just like the hologram theater.
So, unless you have a deep treasury, you got to really think about this one.
When looking at this or the hologram theater, it is worth thinking about your overall strategy
in terms of wide versus tall.
A wide strategy is to build a lot of bases and grow them slowly.
In this case, putting a high maintenance cost facility in each base will cripple your economy.
But a tall strategy of building fewer bases, but making them huge,
such as from using crawlers to gain added resources,
lends itself nicely to using these facilities.
With large populations, in fact, they're really necessary.
But because there are not as many, the cost is less of a problem.
Now, the tree farm, this gives you a 50% bonus to psych.
And, you know, that psych is a general thing that measures how happy people are.
So, you know, if you increase your psych rating, that is going to indirectly reduce drones.
Okay, police.
Military units at your base can also function as police, but there are limitations.
First, you need to look at your base police rating for your faction.
You can see this in the social engineering screen in the HQ menu.
Now, what you want to do here is be aware of how your choices affect your police rating.
You will start out with a basic rating, which can vary by faction.
And then you can modify that by your social policy choices.
Like police state in the politics session is good for plus two police.
Free market in the economics section hits you for minus five on police.
In the late game, when future society options start to appear cybernetic is minus three to police,
while thought control is plus two to police.
You can then figure out basically how much you can do with police using this list.
Okay, so here's how it works.
Minus five means your base has two extra drones for each military unit away from the territory.
All right, and that's going to kill you if you're in a vendetta with another of the factions,
because if you have military units in their territory, you're going to have drone problems
really fast. A minus four rating means one extra drone for each military unit away from the
territory. Minus three is one extra drone for each military unit away from the territory
after the first one. So the difference between minus three and minus four is with minus three,
you get one freebie, and then it starts killing you.
With a minus two rating, you cannot use military units as police at all, and you cannot do any nerve
stapling. Minus one rating, you can have one police unit allowed, one military unit functioning
as a police unit, but no nerve stapling is allowed. A rating of zero, a neutral rating,
you can use one military unit as police. A rating of one, you can use up to two military units as police.
A rating of two, you can use up to three military units as police.
And a rating of three, you can have three units as police, but the police effect is doubled.
Also, as you discover new technology, you can get the ability to construct military units that
employ non-lethal tech, which increases your police capability. I suppose that's things like
tasers. Now, there are a few conclusions one might draw from this.
First, if you're planning a tall strategy, a few bases, but grow them large,
going to war will be more difficult. You'll want your units out fighting, not sitting at home,
pulling garrison duty and policing your drones. And large bases generate more drones in the
raw numbers before modifications. A better strategy, if you're going for war, is to build wide,
build lots of bases, and have each one only support a few units.
And some factions are better than others for going to war. Now, Santiago of the Spartan
Federation is obviously a good choice here. But in addition to that, the hive is also good,
because they have the basic police state orientation. And not only that, but in the case of the hive,
each base that they build automatically come with perimeter defense, which is useful as well.
Miriam of the believers is also good, because her followers are all fanatics, giving them very high
morale. On the other hand, Morgan is a more difficult choice. He is a natural for free market
economics, which penalizes your police options. Lady Deardery is in the middle. She fits better
with a green economy, which has no police penalty. Now, note that if you have too many units from
one base and you get drone problems, you can re-home those units to other bases, as long as those
bases still have some room to support. Now, to do that, you just move the unit to the base that
you want to be its new home, and then hit control plus H, and that re-homes the unit.
Now, game level affects this as well. Anytime you build a base and your population begins to
grow, at some point, drones appear. But when this happens is determined in part by the game level.
Now, I say in part because we're not taking into account any other modifiers. This is purely what
the game level does. So, if you start at the lowest level, which is citizen, you can have up to six
people before drones appear. The next level up specialist is five people. Next level talent is four,
then librarian is three, thinker is two, and transcend is one. Now, you can find a complete list
of the game levels in your characteristics at the Alpha Centauri Wiki, and there's a link in the
show notes for all of that. Now, secret projects can affect this. If you build the aesthetic
virtues, that's plus one to police. If you build clinical immortality, that's one additional talent
in every base. Human genome project, one additional talent in every base.
Longevity vaccine, one less drone at every base if you have simple or green economics,
two less drones if you have planned economics. If you have the planetary transit system,
that is one less drone at any base size three or less.
Now, if you're at a very low game level, that's not going to matter at all, but at the higher levels,
it can be important. Self-aware colony counts as one extra police at every base if you were allowed
police, and that depends on your police rating as we saw above. If you have the telepathic matrix,
your bases never riot. Now, that's good, because when they riot, they tend to destroy
facilities that you've built, and so you have to rebuild them. And if they destroy a facility
that produces psych, i.e. happiness, you can see how it just becomes a cycle that's very difficult
to get out of. Now, if you build the virtual world, all network nodes count as free hologram
theaters. That's very significant, because as we saw, the hologram theaters have a maintenance
cost of three. So, network nodes are something you would probably mostly build for the sake of science,
but you know, they can also help you hear if you have virtual world.
Next, you're spending budget. That is going to influence all of this. Now,
you're spending budget is set in the social engineering screen at the HQ menu and is divided into
economy, psych, and labs. Now, what you do here affects all of your bases equally. You can use the
arrow buttons to change the spending in increments of 10% of the total. Initially, you'll have your
budget divided between economy, 50%, and labs, 50%. And that's the default setting when you start
the game. And that's not a bad division, in a lot of cases, at least early in the game.
But as your number of bases increases and each one gets larger, your drone problems will also
increase. Now, if you've paid attention to building up a healthy cash flow from your energy sources,
such as by building solar collectors on every farm tile, you should be able by the mid-game to
divert some of that to psych. If your economy is really good, you can take the first hit from the
economy portion, making your budget a 40, 10, 50, 40 economy, 10 psych, 50 labs. And why would you
do that? Because if you can keep your labs going, that maintains your science advantage.
Now, if you need more and your head on research and generating lots of it, every turn from your
from your facilities, take another chunk from labs and set your budget to 40, 20, 40.
It's only your cash, i.e. energy, that you are spending here, not your minerals. So you can
continue building facilities and units. But what you want to watch out for is facility maintenance,
which is paid for in energy. And if you need to, you can always set one or more bases to convert
minerals to energy by setting your build queue to stockpile energy. This is a bad thing long term
because the rate of exchange between the two is not terribly great. But as a quick fix, it can
be very helpful. Now, we've mentioned nerve stapling. And this is a procedure that instantly ends a
drone riot and stops it for 10 years. But the effect does wear off and pretty soon you won't be
able to repeat it. It is considered an atrocity and will result in other factions putting sanctions on
you. But if you have repealed the UN charter, you won't get any sanctions. And if that's your aim,
Yang will always be in favor. Yang is the leader of the hive. Personally, I avoid this, but it's in
the game if you want to try it. So summary. Even at the lowest levels, you need to pay some attention
to happiness in managing the drone problem. But if you were just learning the game and starting out
at the citizen level, you should be able to experiment with these techniques without too much trouble.
But at the thinker or transcend levels, you will need to be laser focused on this from the very
beginning. Considered that you need to add bases to be successful and that means building colony
pods. And each colony pod reduces the base population by one. So just to produce a colony pod,
you have to at least get your base up to size two. And at the transcend level, a base with size two
will go into a drone riot and stop producing anything. So you need to be very careful.
If you have cash, you can get the colony pod mostly built. And when the population grows and the
drone riot happens, you can hurry the build by spending the cash, i.e. energy, to complete it,
which should also bring your population back to size one and the riot. Now that's the hardest
possible level. But even at the middle levels, like talent or librarian, you will need to be tweaking
your happiness to prevent drone riots all the time. So get to know how all of these tools work.
Now finally, I hope this discussion has fired some people to check this game out.
In my opinion, it made some important advances and has a richness of gameplay that makes it worth a
second look. I tend to think of Alpha Centauri and Civilization III as basically two alternative
paths to advance beyond Civilization II. And in some ways, Alpha Centauri is the more interesting path.
But Civilization III is also pretty good, and that's where I want to get to next.
So this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and is always encouraging you to support free
software. Bye-bye!
On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.
