Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack: Secrets of the Crawler: What Deidre Doesn’t Want You to Know!

Hey you!

(What, me?)

Are you tired of being a STAIN on the face of Planet?

(Huh? Yeah!)

Tired of being less than a MINDWORM?

(Uh… I guess…)

Wanna build secret projects like THIS?

(Yeah!)

Wanna look like this guy?

(Hell no!)

Well did you know that this guy built that secret project?
Sooooo….
Wanna look like this guy!?

(Yes!)

Alright!!!! Just follow these easy steps and you’ll be rolling in the energy credits in no time!

So here’s the low down. You can only support so large of a population before the workers need a hundred doc’s worth of Psych to prevent them from droning out. But there is a top secret way to harvest resources… without working for them!!!

(For real? No cap?)

What happened to the other..? Uh, yeah… It’s simple. After you discover Industrial Automation, a tier 3 tech, you can start building these things. Supply Crawlers will harvest all of one kind of resource per tile.
Always add a Clean Reactor, you’re never going to sell or lose these things so every mineral counts when they’re harvesting for hundreds of turns. Did I forget to mention that these things never run out of juice or anything? Supply Crawlers will take the resources to the city forever. (Or, until Yang shoots a Planetbuster at you and annihilates it)

(Ong, that’s skibid.)

Uh-huh… anyways, look at this base for a moment.
You can see that right now, we have two supply crawlers, each are on a essentially worthless 2 food, 1 mineral 0 energy tiles with farms. Sending a worker to one of these would be massively inefficient, so instead the two crawlers will each harvest the food while I can put my manpower towards something more productive. As soon as it finishes, I’m going to send a foil supply crawler to that titdal harness on an energy source; the tile is only worth the energy points. Tiles rich in one resource should always be crawled.

On another turn, I brought a land supply crawler from another city to show you what NOT to do with these things. Right here we’ve got a mighty fine crawler from another city and it is crawling our thermal borehole. Instead of getting both a ton of minerals and energy, I’m only getting the former. I can’t think of any reason why you would pass up the 6 energy, maybe if you’ve got some weirdo strategy you might. Tiles which are rich in two or three resources generally should not be crawled.

(Sheesh, that’s on fleek. I’m going to take phat W’s in all of my Alpha Centauri games now!)

Can someone call Yang? Seems like a genejack escaped The Hive.