Here's an overview as we move into the end-game. This date of year 2205 was when the Morgan game finished transcendence; of course these five bases weren't going to keep up with Morgan's 70. These Peacekeepers were still ahead of the Hive game at the same date, but that was just about as the Hive started to explode with food and energy satellites, which won't be a great help here.

This vertical game has the maximized super-science-center HQ, but little headroom beyond that. So let's make headroom.

After Fusion Power and satellites, my usual beeline to kick off the endgame is to Digital Sentience for Cybernetic Future Society. But I have a different plan this time. Cybernetic alone won't be enough to break past the one-tech-per-turn limit enforced by overflow truncation, I need more.

This time, my deep beeline (in green) was to Super Tensile Solids, to enable habitation domes, which allow unlimited population cap in each base. It never seems that can come early enough to be worthwhile; both the Hive and Morgan games got it only five turns before the end. But this game seemed to be the best shot I'd ever have at making use of hab domes, so let's try it out. Of course a 5CC needs them most as the only way to get more population.

And also I could get to S.T.S. relatively sooner than the other games. Note that yellow area in the tech tree. Most other games beeline that way up to genejacks and the Cloning Vats, and that's also half of the prerequisites to Digital Sentience. But this game had been able to skip the Vats by handling the population booming through normal methods. So I could get to S.T.S. about seven techs sooner than by first going for the Vats and Cybernetic. It probably wouldn't make more than a turn of difference on the finish date either way, but it was something out of the ordinary to try.

As this plan came into effect, I had yet another super satisfying intricate sequence of micromanagement.

Year 2208: Build Children's Creches in the bases that still lacked them. Raise the labs slider higher, to 80%; UN HQ will complete a tech as usual, then the downstream four bases will get about a third of the way to the next one, a necessary margin.

2209: Switch from Green to Planned economics, to boom the few bases that were still just below the max size 16. I also performed some heroic feats of juggling with laborers and supply crawlers, to get this result: eke out just enough labs to finish the remaining two-thirds of the current tech, while also running 30% psych slider, to start Golden Ages everywhere.

2210: Super Tensile Solids finished. Rush habitation domes in each base. And switch to Free Market economics. The best way to do the population boom was this: get the growth modifiers from the combination of Democratic + creche + Golden Age. Planned economics was a killer with the inefficiency; the unbalancing penalty would constrain me to no more than 60% labs slider, not enough for a tech per turn. In Free Market, I could run 70% labs with an acceptably small unbalancing loss, for enough to still finish a tech per turn.

2211: During production upkeep, now each base would boom past size 16 and continue to do so every turn as long as the food and Golden Age held.

Notes: I used that one turn of Planned economics to boom because I couldn't do Golden Age right then, because the bases were still just in their last turn of being nerve stapled. Then when I did need the Golden Ages, I built a quite belated Virtual World, since that would need the hologram theaters again. Finally, the beeline had turned out to have one step where I couldn't select any needed tech (Nanominiaturization, Nanometallurgy, and Adv Spaceflight all fall into the same modulus group to be unavailable all at the same time), so that's how Unified Field Theory worked to slot in there.

The tech path also went through Advanced Spaceflight, upon which we launched the solar shade. That led to this amusing message, with a sea level rise exactly counteracted by the shade.

Now back in Free Market, my bases were putting out loads of eco-damage again, also with the dome population working more forests, and during Alpha Centauri B's perihelion. As I related in the Hive game, here's how to profit from it. Eco-damage spawns a stack of worms on the affected tile and a single worm on each adjacent fungus tile. Killing any worm raises the lifecycle (morale) level of all adjacent worms. Killing any worm kills the whole stack. So in this situation, nibble around the edges killing the individual worms first to splash-buff the value of the main stack. Then kill the juiced-up main stack with your best attacker. I picked up payoffs of 300+ credits several times from eco-damage worms -- which I didn't need at all with all that labs overflow getting slidered to energy instead. I found myself with over 4000 energy credits and little to spend it on, since the bases were already building more formers and crawlers every turn.

Back to tech, Super Tensile Solids also enables the Space Elevator secret project, which seemed early enough to be worth doing here. The elevator doubles your production towards orbital improvements, which seemed to make energy satellites worthwhile even with only 5 bases, so I did do several of those.

The next beeline was to Digital Sentience for Cybernetic as usual. Next came Homo Superior -- which is two techs off the next usual target of Secrets of Alpha Centauri -- but Homo Superior enables the Universal Translator project to make that right back up, and also the Nanohospital base facility which is the next labs multiplier (although just an ordinary +50% additive to the network nodes and such.) That path finally went through the Cloning Vats, which I did finally build after all, so now I could turn off the Golden Ages that were now unnecessary for booming.

But all that STILL didn't get me past the problem of labs overflow. Look at what's going on here. My overall labs production is still close to the same ballpark as the Hive game, enough for more than two techs per turn. Except that overflow truncation costs me more than half of it to still be stuck at just one! UN HQ yields an astounding 5000 labs/turn from a single base... and loses 3400 of it beyond the current tech's cost. And then the remaining four bases still can't total up to enough for a tech between them, so the same thing happens again next and every turn. Only UN HQ could ever complete any tech, one per turn, the other four bases couldn't contribute anything. It's like I was doing an OCC anyway.

My intended solution was to start rehoming the energy-park crawlers to another base instead. I was watching the numbers to resolve this: for any crawler shifted away from the HQ, that energy would lose the double-double quadrupling from the SSC projects, so I could mentally subtract the HQ's overflow and add a quarter of that to the other bases. I was waiting for that to add up to enough for the four bases to do a tech in one turn. Which... just never happened. Booming the bases to size 26 didn't do it, Free Market didn't do it, dropping the Golden Age psych slider didn't do it, energy satellites didn't do it, even Cybernetic didn't get there.

The big mistake had been stacking up the labs doublers in the same city; I really should have split those to alleviate the overflow problems. I did that in the tiny-map speed-transcend game, but I thought this standard size map would have costs high enough to warrant the stacking, but it turned out to be wasted overkill.

I really didn't feel like reloading twenty turns back to fix that. And you guys will hate to hear this, but... I gave up. Finally at Secrets of Alpha Centauri for Transcend specialists, the numbers looked like two techs per turn might have been possible. But that was only seven techs from the end, and two of those would be freebies from the two Secrets techs. I really didn't feel like clicking through thirty crawlers on the energy park to save two turns on a transcendence date that was now already slower than the Hive game. So I just hit end-turn for the last few cycles until recording the transcendence victory. I set the bases to build orbital food satellites so at least they could keep booming with the hab-domes.

It was fun to see bases really get up to maximum size, as high as 32 here, twice the normal size 16. Those huge food tiles are stacked up rainy + farm + soil enricher + nutrient bonus all x1.5 for condensor. But really, as always, the far easier way to double your productivity is just twice as many bases rather than twice the size.

Transcendence victory in year 2227. Five turns slower than the Hive game, although the raw total of labs actually added up to more; the overflow limitation was the killer. Anyway, here's the victory screen, although it doesn't really show anything special. Thanks again for reading, and there may yet still be more chronicles in this space.