For information on the Alien Crossfire factions, see Civ/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/The Alien Crossfire Factions. Also see Civ/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/Understanding the game. CEO Nwabudike Morgan At a Glance: +1 Economy -1 Support Extra Commerce income Severe population limits (smaller bases) Starts with 100 extra energy credits Probably the most underrated faction of the original seven, Morgan is terrific if played correctly, but a novice will probably have to work a bit to get the faction humming. This is mainly due to the fact that Morgan's style of play is somewhat different from the others. The Morganite player must make the most of the faction's one big advantage: money. Morgan is the only faction in the early game that can go to war and still maintain a highly profitable economy. Selecting Values: Wealth, the faction receives +1 energy per square and gets an industry bonus to boot, strong advantages which can negate the Morale hit. Many players regard Morgan as incredibly weak because of the base size limitation, but this need not be a significant obstacle. Wealth is an integral part of almost any Morganite strategy, and Wealth comes with Industrial Automation, which also allows Supply Crawlers, a terrific Secret Project (The Planetary Transit System), and Hab Complexes, which allow Morganite bases to grow to size 11 without stopping. A more pervasive problem for the faction is the support hit, which tends to reduce the total size of the army it can raise (until the discovery of Clean Reactors, at least). However, this is largely offset by the acquisition of Supply Crawlers via Industrial Automation. Building additional bases and Crawlers can render the support issue moot. Granted, most Morganite players will tend to keep expanding a bit longer than the other factions to keep pace with overall population numbers, but in truth, another 1-2 bases will generally produce population parity. Further, The Ascetic Virtues will largely remove the small base issue, and The Living Refinery undoes the support problem once and for all (though by this point in the game, Clean Reactors will have long since come into play). This approach to the Morgan game takes his mercantile nature to heart. You don't profit by killing off your customers, and Morganite Builders can make utterly obscene amounts of cash. The commerce bonus gives you the kind of windfall normally reserved for the Planetary Governor (magnified further still if you are the Planetary Governor), and by running Free Market, Wealth, and "doping" your citizens into a Golden Age, you not only achieve pop-boom status (if you're running Democratic too), but also get +4 Economy, which does amazing things to the energy you get from your base squares! A Builder game, Morgan style revolves around defending all your bases with Trance Scouts until you get Clean Reactors, and catching up on all your prototyping or building a defense force at that point. In the meantime, all the money you're making each turn, combined with the industry bonus from wealth, enables you to rush-build your infrastructure with a speed that will make the other factions green with envy. It's all too easy to beat out even Domai's vaunted industrial capacity with Morgan's cash. As much as possible, the Morganite Builder will want to run Democratic, Free Market, and Wealth (while building and enjoying the benefits of many pacts or treaties), or Knowledge if an extra bit of research boost and efficiency is needed. If you need to go on the offensive, your Social Engineering settings of choice will be Wealth/Green, with or without Democratic (mostly depending on if you have clean reactors or not yet), and if you want to push your labs up to 100%, run Democratic, Green, Wealth (+4 efficiency), make your +1 energy per square, and dump it all into your labs. In this manner, you can out-tech even Zakharov, despite his research bonus! Even if you've got your heart set on playing the Builder game, you need to be prepared for war, but the good news is that you start with Synthmetal armor, and will find yourself only a few steps from Silksteel once all the early game resource restrictions are lifted (though in most case, getting to Bio-Engineering first, for Clean Reactors, will serve you better). Still, Morganite defenses revolve first and foremost around covert ops. If an opponent builds a base too close to you for comfort, either buy it and burn it down, or stack so many clean defenders in it that, regardless of your almost guaranteed lower morale, your enemies will have a hard time taking it back, and when fighting a defensive campaign, the presence of Children's Creches everywhere will offset Wealth's only minus, putting you in reasonably good shape. Industrial Automation is crucial for this style of play, as some portion of your industrial capacity will be tied up in the maintenance of a standing force, and if you have to make use of that force to launch an attack, simply drop out of Market in preference for Green, keep Wealth unless you just really need the extra morale percentages, and use Wealth's industry bonus and your inherent cash to replace lost troops at a faster clip than your opponents can kill them. Morgan excels at the art of attrition warfare. It does not matter if your first unit makes a kill, because one of the four of five coming right behind surely will, and you'll wind up with a core force of elites (survivors of the many battles) in the end! Remember, it applies to all the factions to a degree, but even more so with Morgan: You should never actually build the kind of unit you want! Build Laser Scouts or Rovers, and selectively upgrade your way to the kind of force you need, and don't worry about ignoring the weapons techs in the early game. If you're behind militarily, just make it a point to capture an enemy unit with whatever weapon you're looking for, and you can start building them as well, even if you don't yet have the tech for it! All the basic fighting strategies for Morgan's Momentum game work just as well for the Hybrid game, and unlike most other factions playing a Hybrid scheme, your cash position will be so good that you can almost always make offensive use of your probes. Do so! Again, put your eyes, mind and heart firmly on the goal of acquiring Industrial Automation. Crawlers, coupled with the building of new bases, will quickly put you in a position where you will be able to crank out as many if not more troops than your opponents! Two basic ways you can go about this are: Beeline for the Command Nexus to offset Wealth's Morale hit, and rake in the cash while beating your opponents with average to slightly above average troops, or, forget the money, run Green (still beelining for Doctrine: Loyalty) and beat on them with better than average troops. Either way works, but running Wealth opens up more options for you with Morgan, enabling you to offset your average troops with regular and very active offensive probe teams, subverting a base or two to establish a foothold, and then pouring your troops into it (and, if you really want to get mean, run Fundamentalism and Wealth to make it harder for your opponents to run probe actions against you). The Support problem is offset by an early emphasis on crawler production at all bases to spike up mineral outputs, and troops can be easily reinforced by rushing selective defensive structures in captured bases and by upgrading scouts produced to best/best configurations. Remember, as Morgan, you have a far easier time at paying for a war effort as you go, because you can get that magical +1 energy per square and still fight before Punishment Spheres. Everybody else has to either wait until they get higher up on the tech tree, or save for the invasion in advance. Use that to your advantage and attack earlier rather than later. Also, make active use of your probe teams to subvert enemy troops, adding them to your available force pool. Best of all, you can compare morale levels, and make suicide attacks with the worst of the lot, keeping the best for "sure kills" and consistently raise the morale of an elite core of your army, which will soon have you fighting on "Morale parity" with whatever enemy you are attacking, even if they began with an advantage in that department. About the only person you'll be hampered against in the early game is Miriam running Fundamentalism, as that will shut down your probe actions, but even then, with your better research rates, you should be at a higher tech level when you begin your attacks, and a series of swift, hard, unexpected blows (and who the heck expects Morgan to come out fighting?!) will give you all the edge you need. Academician Prokhor Zakharov At a Glance: +2 Research -2 Probe More Drones First tech research is free. Zakharov is plagued by drone problems, making the acquisition of either the Human Genome Project or the Virtual World of paramount importance. Fortunately, since you start with the pre-requisite to Planetary Networks, it is often quite easy to grab the Virtual World. Probe actions are expensive for you, and it's relatively cheap for your enemies to launch probe actions your way, so guard against that, and make the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm a high priority, but in the meantime, bulk up on defensive probes. You'll need them. Your main advantage is your labs, and whichever way you decide to run your game, your inherent research advantages will put you ahead of the pack quickly. Persistence and good planning will keep you there. Remember, you're getting the benefits of a no-maintenance-cost Network Node from the first turn you found a base. Everybody else has to build their Network Nodes, and pay maintenance costs for them, so build bases like crazy! Not only does this keep your bases smaller (to a point, offsetting the drone issue), but it also makes your colony pods very good investments for the minerals spent! This approach plays to your native facility. You're already a step ahead of the game, and if you get the Virtual World, then you're two big steps ahead of the game, as it totally negates your factional drone problems for bases size 4-7 and gives you two free facilities at each base you build. That's two less items on your infrastructural list, which makes building the rest that much easier for you. If you're playing the builder game, your main goal after restriction lifting should be to secure the Planetary Energy Grid to get yet another free, and maintenance free facility. Then, each time you build a base, about all you need to do is toss up a Tree Farm and a Creche, and you're ready to boom! (Building the Research Hospital as the base grows each turn). Nobody can build peacetime infrastructure faster than Zakharov, because the others don't start with a free peacetime facility. Morgan comes close, but even his vaunted money can't touch that. If you speed-build selected bases, you can turn those over to the production of battle-capable prototypes far more quickly than other builder factions, and be in a more classically "Hybrid" stance than most running this type of game. The two things you need to be ever-watchful for though, are covert attacks made to attempt to catch up to you, technologically, and, if you do plan an invasion, you will need to save cash for it in advance, because when you drop out of Market, most of your money dries up too (if you want to keep a decent research rate while warring). This approach plays to your ability to rip through the early game tech tree much more quickly than anybody else. You can be running Planned/Wealth by the early twenties if you set your mind to it, and specialize your bases out, with the fringe ones doing early war-tech prototyping, and your inner core working on infrastructure. Best of all, you can get to Industrial Automation that quickly, and still go back and pick up Mobility and Flexibility, generally ahead of those who beeline straight for them (exception: The Spartans, who are only one tech from Doctrine: Flexibility at game start). This means that you can get probe foils in the water plenty early enough to send them out exploring, and infiltrate most of your opponents' datalinks before they can even mount a good probe defense, which a crucial play. Combat wise, again, thanks to your free facility, you can pay comparatively less attention to your infrastructure and focus more on the warring techs, again thanks to your free facility. You can also let current game circumstances dictate exactly how your research edge is used, magnifying your advantage depending on the prevailing climate of the game. If you're isolated, fine. Drop to peace-time expansion till something develops, but if you've got neighbors close at hand, you can carry the fight to them rather quickly. Simply put, while everybody else is spending time and energy to get where you start from (i.e., the building of Network Nodes), you can be building fast attackers to take their bases! About the only group that can do this as or more quickly than you are the Spartans, and that's only because of where they begin on the tech tree. Theirs is a short term advantage in the sense that, research-wise, there's no way they can keep up with you. Even a heavy builder focus won't do it. This is a huge advantage, and if you put your mind to researching nothing but combat techs, you can have enough impact rovers for a good early game rush by the early to mid 30's! Except for the previously mentioned exception, nobody can top that, and that kind of raw speed plays well for a momentum game. If you find somebody on the continent with you, this is the kind of speed that will win you the game, and, once you make a couple of early kills to put you in a position of dominance, your faction is better suited than most to rapidly shifting gears. Colonel Corazon Santiago At a Glance: +2 Morale +1 Police Free Prototyping -1 Industry You've got the all around best, most balanced fighting force in the game. True, Miriam has an edge when attacking, but your bonus helps both attack and defense, and the free rover at game start really helps you if pod scattering is on, enabling you to pick up a larger than normal share of Unity Pods, and more intangibly, enabling you to build your bases with a better understanding of the map you're playing on (meaning simply that your bases will tend to be better arranged on the map, thanks to a more complete understanding of the continent as a whole....most people have to build their first few new bases somewhat blindly if they want to expand quickly, but this is not the case for you). Also, the Police bonus mitigates the effect of running Market, and enables you to forestall (or, depending on SE choices) do away almost entirely with drone control facilities, saving you time on infrastructure. The free prototyping is not a huge advantage until later on in the game, as all early protos can be completed with a single cashed in supply crawler anyway, but it's still a marginal advantage, and should be exploited whenever the opportunity presents itself. The industry hit hurts, but no more so than Morgan's support drain, and you can get back to "normal" Industrial capacity by simply switching to Planned. True, you take an efficiency hit, but that in turn can be undone by building Children's Creche's, rendering your negatives easily dealt with and gotten around. The Command Nexus is a very attractive project for you, and you're pretty well suited to getting it, as it is only one tech away from you, and grabbing it will give you hands down, the best troops in the game until the advent of bio-enhancement centers, which will bring the rest up reasonably close to your troopers. The Spartan's main strength though, lies in the fact that they need not necessarily make use of their army to instill fear. Just the simple knowledge that the Spartans are out there is oftentimes enough to give others pause. It takes you slightly longer to get your infrastructure in place than the rest, but the police rating helps in that, again, you can delay the building of drone control facilities, and once you DO get the infrastructure built, it serves you just as well. In the meantime, you have seasoned troops to defend your holdings with, a thing that cannot often be said of other Builder factions. Because of this, and because it's common knowledge that the Spartans can more than hold their own in a fight, you are uniquely positioned to build in relative safety. Think of it as classic isolationism, and most Momentum folk are looking for soft targets, something the Spartans have never been accused of. Add to that the fact that most of your opponents will not be expecting you to play the Builder's game, and that alone can often buy you the time you need to get the bulk of your infrastructure in place. Once it is, it's a simple enough proposition to take a look around the map and reassess your current situation, and again, if somebody decides to play rough and tumble with you, then they're just asking to get pasted. Your starting tech makes you a natural at this. You're only a single tech away from Doctrine: Flexibility, and only two away from running Planned and getting Probe Teams. Taken together, that alone puts you in a strong Hybrid stance (and if you get the Virtual World project, you will almost never have a drone problem). Others need to build command centers just to get to where your troops start, and because of that, most factions will think twice about attacking you, and with even a single Monolith someplace in your territory, and building a Command Center of your own, it's easy for you to put together a core force of elite whatevers to attack or defend with. You have normal cash and research rates, which means, thanks to a slightly lagging industry, that you might be a bit behind the curve, tech wise, but a bit of luck with pods (which, as mentioned, you have an advantage in getting) will easily balance that out, and oftentimes, those pods render your industrial lag moot, as they "autofinish" whatever you were building at the closest base to the pod you just popped. All in all then, a Hybrid approach is very easy to play with Santiago. This is probably the easiest way to run the Spartans, and it is a no-brainer, which also means, unfortunately, that this strategy can be predictable. You've already got rovers. It's a short hop to Impact weapons, and a short hop from there to global conquest. All of the speed work Velociryx has ever done on early transcendent victories has been with the Spartans, and with good reason. Quite simply, nobody can put together a crack attack force of high-morale Impact Rovers faster than Santiago. Zak might be able to get them about as quickly, but they still won't be as well trained, and in battle, that will be the telling difference, and in the early game, four rovers is about all you need to utterly lay waste to an enemy empire (Yang not withstanding, thanks to his Perimeter Defense network, but even then, a Probe action against the base in question can render his key defensive advantage useless). If you want a fast and furious game, build four Impact Rovers and send them hunting while you build up your empire. When they find someone, you'll be amazed at how much damage and terror they can spread, and at nominal cost to you. An important footnote here is that with Santiago, you can do reasonably well at fighting without Punishment Spheres under Market conditions, thanks to your Police rating. Lady Deirdre Skye At a Glance: +1 Planet +2 Efficiency -1 Police -1 Morale +1 Nutrient (fungus) Auto-capture first worm The efficiency boon is terrific, and if you had a good way to rake in the energy (Free Market), your faction would be almost unbeatable. As it stands, about the only way you can do it is via Golden Ages, which, while workable, is far from being as good, since the money invested in Psych detracts from the total cash earned. Still, you've other important advantages that make up for your lack of raw energy. Specifically, you are good at "channeling" what energy you do get. Run either Democratic or Green and you have a paradigm economy, allowing you to run either 100% cash or labs and rake in a respectable amount. Again, the drawback is that you can either have good income or good labs, but only average both if you keep your allocation at 50/50. The trick then, is knowing when to do which, and the approaches will vary (see below). Regardless of your playstyle though, you have two other important advantages which will serve you well. The first is the ability to draw resources from fungus squares. This helps your early game immensely, and means you have to spend comparatively less time terraforming (and you get Centauri Ecology at game start), to get your bases productive. The second is the ability to catch mind worms, with the added bonus that your first worm capture attempt is always successful. Goal number one then, is to send your scout patrol out trolling for worms! When you find one and catch it, you have the perfect pod-popping unit (assuming pod scattering is on), because even if the pod in question unleashes more worms, they will ignore your native life form, leaving it to you to either try to catch them and add them to your force, or move on to the next pod. Repeat this process when you get Doctrine: Flex and gun skimships, and you're pretty much set for the whole game, as Isles of the Deep make tremendously good pod-poppers, scouts, and transports...very versatile units! Forget the money. Beeline for Democratic, and make the switch as soon as you can, netting you a paradigm economy, and +4 growth (when you build Creches). At this point, you can slam your labs to 100% and keep pace with the best researchers in the game. True, your income suffers, but you can ease back from 100% periodically to save up more cash, and once you arrive at restriction lifting techs, you can reverse that for a time, effectively turning labs off to help you rush through infrastructure builds. Also, when you're ready to boom, you merely add Planned to what you've already got and giant bases are yours! Again, your research efforts are helped, if pod-scattering is on, by the presence of your mindworms, and, since you cannot run Market, you will be spending the whole game actively exploring, so if you find others who are running Builder or Hybrid styles (and making regular use of Market), a few probes into their territory with your mindworm force just might be sufficient to scare them away for Market (to avoid fighting a losing battle with your worms). Of course, this is an early game advantage, rendered much less effective once Secrets of the Human Brain are discovered, but the implications are that, if you spend a bit of time focused on catching 3-4 worms, you can keep your builder stance and put together enough of a force to effectively worm rush someone. Your troops aren't great, but Children's Creches are an excellent build for you, as it helps with both troop morale and further enhances your empire's efficiency. As with the Builder Game, capturing worms is important, and even moreso for the Hybrid game. You will definitely want to make early use of the worm rush if at all possible. Essentially, this is a denial strategy, added to the usual Hybrid mix. The goal is not so much to succeed in taking out an empire (though by all means, do so if you can), but to force them away from a Market stance and slow them down, enabling your 100% lab focus to blow past them, tech wise (Note: The reason it is important to force your opponents away from Market is simply that, Democratic/Market at 70%, despite the inefficiency, can out-tech Democratic/Green at 100%). You'll probably be stuck using your Probes defensively, unless you pull back from your lab focus in advance to horde cash, and again, with the Gaians, it is almost always more productive to run either 100% labs or 100% economy. To keep a 50/50 stance with this faction undoes one of your chief advantages. The real trick to playing this faction is in knowing when to run which setting, and that is determined by prevailing game conditions. Hybrids will probably want to run both Democratic and Green unless game conditions turn nasty, in which case, the Hybrid player will likely drop Democratic to go on more of a war footing, again, relying heavily on Native life forms to offset your otherwise less-than-remarkable troops. Go Native! Forget Democratic. Beeline for Doctrine: Flexibility and Planetary Networks for Probes and boats, then to Green, catch as many worms as you can, run Economy at 100% and build lots of Probes. The probes will make up for your lack of research, infiltrate enemy Datalinks, and augment your native attack force with captured enemy troops caught alone and in the open. Plus, the worms don't care what techs your opponents have and you're the best Psi-fighter in the game, especially if you zero in on Market-loving Builders (who probably also have a lot of nice techs you want). Again, the worm rush is vital to your success, so do not delay in building up your native attack force and constantly be scouting for opponents! And, once your attack force is on its way, focus on spreading your empire, growing lots of small bases to offset Green's growth penalty (you hardly feel it from size 1-2 bases). Sister Miriam Godwinson At a Glance: +2 Support +1 Probe -2 Research -1 Planet 25% attack bonus A superb faction, helped greatly by the Support bonus. The Believers get off to a slow start, but this need not be a crippling disadvantage. One good thing about it is that your bases will be laid out better on your continent, as you will generally have more time to explore before you can start expanding. The planet negative puts you at a slight disadvantage when fighting the natives, unless you attack first, which more than negates your -10% penalty, and the Support boon lets you field more units per base in any event. Also, your attack bonus allows you to work your way to "Trans-elite" troopers, giving you an extra point of movement, and a 25% attack bonus above and beyond what everybody else gets too. Also, the ability to switch to Fundamentalism and render your bases and units immune to subversion is a huge advantage! Oh, and remember, Miriam is the only faction in the game that can run Democracy and still build a new base with free minerals! (The key advantage here being that you can have comparatively more bases before you start getting drone warnings due to size). A word of warning with this faction: If you are attacked by a psi-force, get as far away from Market as you can. In fact, it would be far and away in your best interest to run green when faced with such an attack, because if you are caught by the worms while running Market, even with trance or empath-assisted troopers, there's almost no way you can win, especially if those worms are being controlled by Cha'Dawn or Deirdre. This might seem like a contradiction in terms, considering the slow start with research and the twenty percent higher tech costs, but in truth, you can offset both of these things with relative ease. Once you get Centauri Ecology, the boost in support enables you to crank out an obscene number of formers, very quickly moving to terraform the entire continent, and making all your bases that much more productive. Not to mention the fact that, as with the Spartans, most people will be content to leave you be if you play a Builder game, and odds are, they're just breathing a sigh of relief that you're not attacking them! If you ARE attacked however, your best chance at defending is with an active stance, using pre-emptive strikes to take advantage of your native 25% attack bonus and running Fundamentalism to prevent subversion. Research wise, even when you're running Fundamentalism, Network Nodes everywhere gives you a net gain of +10% to your research rates. Not nearly the boost it gives others, but then, you'll only be running Fundamentalism if there's trouble brewing, otherwise, you're better served by some other Social Engineering choice (Democratic springs immediately to mind here). You're cash is good (ability to run Market), your troops are good, and you can offset the research hit by a program of steady builds and active probe teams to keep up until your infrastructure is in place. The Miriam Builder game is by far the most active of the lot, as she must make early and regular use of probes to keep pace until the infrastructure is in place, but it's quite easily pulled off. Also note here, that when you play the Builder's game with Miriam, you will want to be very careful and specific about when you run Fundamentalism. True, it gives you almost total immunity to enemy probe actions, but it utterly kills your research, regardless of your infrastructure, so use it only when pressed, or when pressing an attack against someone else. Miriam's Builder game is so active that there really aren't many differences between it and the Hybrid game, except that, where the Builder will focus mostly on early game formers, the Hybrid player will take a few of those "free unit" slots and use them for the building of prototypes, sending them out hunting in much the same way that the Deirdre Hybrid player uses her native life forms. Again, like the Spartans, this one's a no-brainer. Race for Doctrine: Flexibility and Planetary Networks, switch to Fundamentalism, save your money, find an opponent, infiltrate, Probe them to death to get their tech, steal a base and upgrade all the garrisons to best/best, using pre-emptive strikes to defeat the forces sent against you (and continue to subvert them all the while). Build cheap scouts or Recon Rovers every turn, upgrading them to whatever is needed (remembering that the newly captured base will get a larger than normal share of "free" units), and keep punching your opponent. In the field, with even tech, your forces are very hard to beat, especially if you're running Fundamentalism, as they cannot use Probe trickery against you, and you get a morale boost too! Chairman Sheng-ji Yang At a Glance: +1 Growth +1 Industry -2 Economy Immune to inefficiency Free Perimeter Defense at every base If not for the lack of energy, this faction would be all but unstoppable, and as it is, they are far and away the most powerful AI faction, coming out on top of the AI heap in almost every simulation we have ever run. Their Growth and Industry bonuses make for rapid expansion, and their inefficiency immunity makes a massive empire with few to no drawbacks a real possibility. This, combined with their inherent "Citizen's Defense Force" makes them a tough faction to match, and if they happen to also get the Command Nexus (not difficult to imagine, since they start with its requisite tech) and Planetary Transit System (also not too much of a stretch, with active Probe Teams), then the rest of the world stands a good chance of being doomed. An important note about Yang: the immunity to inefficiency ability allows you to run Social Engineering settings which would utterly ruin any other faction in the game. Quite simply, you may freely ignore negative modifiers to efficiency! First, absolutely no one will be expecting you to play Yang as a Builder, so this will work very much to your advantage, but consider: You can switch over to Police State with impunity, enabling you to control your drones without the need to build any drone control facilities at all, and the addition of a Children's Creche at each base goes a long way in capturing what energy you do generate. Add to that the ability to run Planned (again, without penalty), and you get a faction with a huge industry bonus and no drone problems whatsoever. If you work heavily with forests, your income won't be bad, although you will never even begin to approach the energy levels of the real "Research Factions" in the game, forcing you to look for other alternatives. Fortunately, there are some very good ones, and you get them at the same time you get the ability to run Planned, namely: Librarians. While you're waiting for Industrial Automation, you can be whipping out Network Nodes and expanding like mad, and once you have the ability to create crawlers, it's easy (again, with your prodigious Industry bonus) to crank out enough crawlers to give each base some minerals to work with, and feed the entire population, and once you do that, every citizen you have can be converted to a Librarian, giving you perfectly efficient research capabilities, magnified by your already built network nodes. Now consider that if you take the time to build the Command Nexus, you essentially wipe out the penalties for also running Wealth (adding a bit more to your energy reserves, and giving you yet another boost in Industry). The only person in the game who can out-build you is Domai, and he has to contend with less-well defended bases, efficiency problems, and a research penalty, which more than offsets his additional +1 bonus to Industry. In short, although it might not appear so at first glance, the good Chairman makes an astonishing builder, and that capability, coupled with an active stance with probes will quickly see you on par with every other Builder in the game, should you choose to run the game this way. Again, this approach uses Yang's industrial might, and is not terribly different from his Builder game, except that a certain set of bases will be geared up specifically for the purpose of providing an offensive punch to the empire, whereas the pure Builder approach will not do so until and unless threats begin appearing on the horizon. The Yang-Hybrid model enables you to maintain an active attack/trolling force while keeping a fairly brisk research rate, and the ability to drop into full Builder mode if you determine that your potential enemies are very far away. On the other hand, it's easy (gotta love that Industry) to kick into high gear and get ready to fight, and very quickly, you can find yourself with an army numbering so many units that you can simply sweep the opposition off the map. Once more, your Industry and Police are the key factors to the Conquest game. The goal here is to simply skip over any real Infrastructural builds and focus on rapid colonization, followed by a buildup of troops that no one else in the game can match prior to the arrival of clean reactors. Even Miriam, with her support bonus simply cannot keep up with a fully geared-for-war Yang. So what if she's got better troops, you can replace your losses almost half again as quickly as she can replace hers, and her Probe Immunity is nearly meaningless to you. You likely won't have the cash to do much subversion anyway, and you can simply keep building units until you overwhelm her. Same with the only other truly good fighters in the game, the Spartans, except in their case, it's even easier to overwhelm them, because they have Industrial problems of their own, and the moment you achieve your first conquest on an enemy's soil, that is the kiss of death, as that faction must now deal with your enhanced Industrial output right there on their turf. Simply put, if they do not or cannot re-capture the base immediately, they're doomed. Commissioner Pravin Lal At a Glance: -1 Efficiency Extra Planetary Council votes Extra Talents Population limits eased (bigger bases) You might not look so hot on the Social Engineering table compared to the others, but that doesn't mean you're a pushover. Not by any stretch. Your advantages make you a force to be reckoned with in any game. Consider a fairly normal expansion paradigm. Even if you only do an "average" expansion, you're virtually guaranteed the Governorship, giving you a healthy Commerce bonus (extra energy to help offset the -1 Efficiency), and Infiltration of all factions (as good as the Empath Guild, for free). Add to that the fact that your extra talents and larger bases (giving Lal the ability to execute a Pop-Boom with little control infrastructure in place), and what you end up with is a faction that is quite far from being average. Democratic completely negates your singular negative, and is two thirds of what you need for a population boom. Add Planned and Wealth to that mix, and snag either of the early game drone control projects (Human Genome Project or Virtual World), and you can boom to size 9 with ease. The ability to do this earlier than almost any faction will give you a huge advantage in population, at which time, you can switch to Free Market, and out-tech even drone-plagued Zak. And once you get crawlers and Hab Complexes, you can boom all the way to size 16 with near-impunity, giving you such an edge in population that you'll be hard-pressed to lose the game. Yes, your troops are only average, but your greater population enables you to have more of everything: more research (despite the efficiency hit), more minerals, and more troops, and with the right facilities, your bases can quickly become very tough nuts to crack. One of Lal's main strengths is his sheer "averageness." True, you lack the Industrial Might of Domai or Yang, the Morale and Prototype bonuses of Santiago, the cash of Morgan, and the Research boon of Zak, but you're also not saddled with their liabilities, and your one disadvantage is easily offset by the simplest of base facilities. All of this puts you in the position of great flexibility, enabling you to shift gears much more readily than any of the other problem-plagued factions. Your one "banned" Social Engineering choice, Police State, would be something you would never need to run thanks to your extra talents (which, by the way, is like the Human Genome Project on steroids, as its impact on your bases is relative to the size of your bases — not static, as is the case with the Genome — and you get it for free!). All in all, you couldn't ask for a better Hybrid faction than this! Beware, however: That sheer flexibility can be both a blessing and a curse, and in a Lal-Hybrid game, you need to become adept at reading the ebb and flow of the game, and make the right choices at the right times (knowing when to shift into a war footing and when to pursue relentless research is vital to you: if the other factions make a mistake, they can play to their inherent advantages — cash, morale, or what-have-you — but all of your advantages are contingent on you making the right decisions at the right time, and a misstep can set you back very badly, as you have nothing really to fall back on). Still, with practice at reading the game, Lal can be one of the very best, most well-rounded factions in the game. At first glance, with your efficiency problems and average troops, you might think Lal ill-suited to conducting a conquest war, but again, his sheer flexibility (and, assuming you got the Governorship, his auto-infiltration of all factions) serves him well in this capacity too. Even fairly large, newly captured bases seldom have drone problems, as your "Talent" bonus kicks in as soon as you occupy the base, often completely negating the drones created via conquest. That, combined with a lack of any pronounced weakness which can be exploited by your enemies, makes you a wily and tenacious faction on the battlefield. To that end, however, you will only be as wily and tenacious as your own personal skill in battle allows, again, because your faction has no native combat advantages, meaning that you will have to engineer any and all advantages yourself (through a steady program of militaristic builds, and smart use of your standing army). Learn to do that well, and you will find Lal to be a doggedly determined fighter. This information was originally written by Velociryx in his SMAC FAQ. Used with permission.
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