Secret Project: The Dream Twister

“Mary had a little lamb,
Little lamb little lamb,
Mary had a little lamb,
whose fleece was white as snow.”

— Assassins’ Redoubt, Final Transmission

The Dream Twister is based on The Will To Power. In addition to having a pretty awesome name, it has a single, simple mechanical effect: it grants a bonus to all the faction’s units when on the attack in psi combat. In essence, the effect is the inverse of the previous Neural Amplifier secret project, which provided a similar bonus to psionic defense.

This symmetry should explain the reasoning behind Reynolds’s choice to reuse many of the images from that previous video here. The terrified screaming person, the snake, and the spider are all reprised. But there are a few key changes that flip the valence this time around.

First, notice that there’s no voice reading a quote over the action. The only sound effect is this eerie, tinny pulse which repeats over and over as the images bombard the viewer. Neither is there repeated interjections of that trio of human faces as there were before. This time, nothing stands between the viewer and the madness.

Second, there is a new image of a cot in a bare room with what appears to be a rat. This is mildly creepy on its own. But I believe that it was chosen here as a reference to George Orwell’s 1984. In that book, Room 101 was the regime’s most diabolical torture chamber, in which they would use the victim’s deepest fear in order to break his mind. And our protagonist’s deepest fear – the one the reader sees them use in the book – just so happened to be rats.

Third, as the imagery escalates past what we had seen before, we are treated to a couple of repeated shots of a pile of skulls. These are interspersed with what appears to be a shot of a burnt corpse. There’s nothing too explicit here. But the implications are pretty horrifying.

Each one of those bleached, stacked skulls was a person. Hundreds upon hundreds of people, if the pile extends back into the room. Which happens to be just enough to be maximally creepy. Any more than that would get processed as a statistic. But there’s just enough here to give the imagination a handle to start to humanize each victim. Then the viewer is encouraged to attempt to multiply that out to all the skulls in the shot. Then once he tries to take into account all skulls that are implied to be behind the ones we see, and it just becomes impossible to process.

Then the video ends with what is, in my opinion, one of the very best quotes in the game. Which is quite the trick, given that on the surface, the quote doesn’t seem like it should be anything special. It’s just the first four lines of a traditional nursery rhyme.

Part of the genius is that it breaks the established pattern for these videos by refraining from reading it out loud. Instead, it’s just printed out in stark white text on a black background.

The rest of it comes from the context. Assassins’ Redoubt is a default Spartan base name. Why was this, of all things, their final transmission?

The beginning of the answer has to be that they were under psionic attack. Presumably by a faction employing the Dream Twister to overcome their Neural Amplified defense. We know that the Gaians have been associated with psionic attack up until now, and we know that they’ve been at war with the Spartans, so it is a safe bet that this was from the Gaian conquest of Assassins’ Redoubt.

Given that, why the nursery rhyme? Ever since the discovery of Secrets of the Human Brain at the beginning of the game, the player has been aware that hypnotic trances can serve as a defense against psionic attack. By now, even if they can’t afford to teach every unit to slip into a deep, collective trance, similar techniques must be part of standard army training. On the defense, you’re taught to repeat a calming, repetitive, safe mantra to keep yourself on your gun.

Nursery rhymes are therefore a natural fit. So it would seem a typical late-game psionic battle is made up of a collection of powerful cyborg-psychics on one hand, and a bunch of soldiers trying to hold fast to their weapons while desperately chanting nursery rhymes to themselves on the other. And the guy who made this last transmission is doing so as he’s feeling the last fraying threads of his sanity slip away.

Secret Project: The Nano Factory

“Industrial Grade Nano-Paste, Planet’s most valuable commodity, can also be one of its most dangerous. Simply pour out several canisters, slide in a programming transponder, and step well away while the stuff cooks. In under an hour the nano will use available materials to assemble a small factory, a hovertank, or enough impact rifles to equip a regiment.”

— Col. Corazon Santiago, “Planet: A Survivalist’s Guide”

This video is quite straightforward. Which is not intended as negative criticism. It’s a well-done illustration of Santiago’s description of the nano-paste. In particular, the visuals deliver some important context.

The camera begins by panning past a tattered flag while showing wreckage in the background. It’s clear after a few moments that this is intended to depict the aftermath of a futuristic battlefield.

Once the scene is set, we see the canisters deployed and the blue paste emerge. Next, we see the seemingly magical transmutation of the nearby scenery into brand-new military equipment. Notably, as this takes place, the camera makes sure to pick up a human hand getting consumed by the blue ooze along with the rest of the discarded and shattered machinery.

This little detail is actually a pretty interesting view into the Spartan future. Santiago warns her readers not to get too close to the paste. The threat is obvious; the nano paste doesn’t know or care while it’s cooking that you don’t want your body to get repurposed into a little piece of the new hovertank. It just sees matter to rearrange.

But the point worth pondering is that the Spartans don’t seem to have much veneration for the dead. The wreckage of both man and machine are equal fodder for the paste. This is kind of weird. Traditionally, warrior societies put a lot of emphasis on showing respect for those who were slain in battle. So it’s odd that the Spartans treat the battlefield more like the Borg from Star Trek than U.S. Marines.

There are a couple of possible explanations for this. We don’t have anything other than the loosest circumstantial evidence that the fallen soldier was a Spartan. Perhaps he was just an enemy soldier.

But I think the other possible explanation is a lot more fun. We have previously inferred that the Spartans were the faction in the implied canon to build the Cloning Vats. And we know that operating that secret project can have significant society-wide effects. In this light, this could be seen as evidence that the Spartans have come to hold life as cheap in the way that Chairman Yang predicted people would back in the first days after Planetfall.

In any event, SMAC models the new capacity so dramatically illustrated by the video with a couple of related bonuses. The faction that uses Industrial Nanorobotics to build the Nano Factory gets half-price unit upgrades and is able to repair all units to full health in one turn while out in the field. In addition to granting advantages over one’s rivals, these both have the effect of speeding up the perceived pace of the game.

Which actually brings up another intriguing point. What exactly is the Nano Factory, physically? What is represented by the minerals spent on the secret project? Why is it associated with a single base?

I think the answer to those questions is that the Nano Factory is actually a giant facility back home. What it does is to cheaply fill those canisters with vast quantities of nano paste. Given that Santiago says the stuff is Planet’s most valuable commodity, chances are that you can’t make more of it given a little bit of seed nano paste, waste materials, and time. There must be an irreducibly complicated or energy-intensive process to it.

Technology: Nanometallurgy

“Our scientists now use fractal theory to “teach” the molecules to assume, or resume, a particular form. Substances of amazing strength become simple once the formulae are properly computed.”

— Col. Corazon Santiago, “The Council of War”

Nanometallurgy is classified in the game as an eighth-tier exploration technology. It depends on Probability Mechanics and Doctrine: Initiative, the latter of which is interesting because it is so many tiers below. And all it does is to unlock a few really cool options for unit abilities.

First, a faction can now add the Deep Pressure Hull ability onto a ship. This turns that ship into a submarine. The ship becomes invisible to enemy units when it is out on the open ocean. Combat still happens if an enemy tries to move into the square occupied by the sub, but the enemy won’t see it coming until they blunder into it.

Second, the Carrier Deck can be added to a ship with a transport module. This allows the transport to serve as a mobile airbase, just as one would probably expect a carrier to be able to do. I believe this also enables ships to base and launch missiles, since missiles count as air units along with ‘copters and needlejets.

And, third, any unit with a transport module can be equipped with a Repair Bay. This allows the transport to repair any ground units that are currently being transported. Normally, units that are out in the open can rest and gain a little health, but when they are being transported they don’t count as idle.

The neat thing about these powers is that they can be mixed and matched to some extent in the unit designer. So, if the player so desires, he can make a fleet of undetectable, deadly submarine/carrier combinations. Or a speedy submarine transport that heals its commando squads between missions.

It’s no wonder that Colonel Santiago is so excited about the implications of this new technology. Although it is quite interesting to contemplate the fact that it seems to require such advanced technology to match feats that were comparatively rather trivial on Earth. It’s true that operating a carrier would bring with it some new challenges on Planet. For instance, since the crew can’t breathe on the surface, either there must be some really cool way to get the planes on and off the carrier, or everyone has to be wearing complicated breathers at all times. Perhaps this is why it requires the second-level forcefield technology as one of its prerequisites.

But, on net, I think that these problems should be soluble in a way that doesn’t require sci-fi nano-scale manipulation of the already-futuristic silksteel. Carriers and submarines are each at least a century old by now in real life, after all. And this technology usually comes too late on the tree to actually matter, given all the other even-more-amazing ways to crush one’s enemies that show up by the time a player could possibly deploy his new carrier fleet.

Were I to tweak this, I would make the tech that unlocks these powers a sixth-tier tech instead. The most straightforward implementation would be another doctrine technology that combines Doctrine: Air Power and Doctrine: Initiative. The idea being ships plus airplanes equal carriers. Seems to make sense. Then the carriers would come early enough to matter in many more games.

This would leave open the question as to what to do with this current technology. It’s a pretty cool quote, after all, and it occupies a place on the tech tree that makes a good deal of sense. So it’s a good idea to have the Nanometallurgy technology right where it is.

Therefore, my recommendation would be to keep the Repair Bay here and buff it some to make it more worthy of a full tech’s investment. Maybe it would heal more HP per turn? Then have the new tech (Doctrine: Carrier?) feed into Nanometallurgy as the prerequisite instead of Doctrine: Initiative, which would now be implied.

Honestly, though, it really doesn’t matter all that much. Most players wouldn’t even notice the change. Just like in the main Civilization line of games, carriers and submarines are mostly toys that the player gets to have fun with in that period between when the game is largely decided and when it actually comes to a conclusion.

Secret Project: The Cloning Vats

“We shall take only the greatest minds, the finest soldiers, the most faithful servants. We shall multiply them a thousandfold and release them to usher in a new era of glory.”

— Col. Corazon Santiago, “The Council of War”

This is one of the best secret project videos in the game, hands down. And, as usual, the genius is understated. On the surface, this video is just thirty seconds or so of footage of people sorting baby chicks by sex in a clean, industrial setting. To people who are not crusaders for animal rights, in the PETA mold, there’s very little that’s immediately offputting about the imagery.

The impact comes from the juxtaposition with Colonel Santiago’s quote. Obviously, Santiago is announcing the completion of the project to her council. And they intend to use the potential of this new technology as aggressively as they can.

Remember, it’s never been about raw quantity for her. The Spartans have always placed an extreme emphasis on the cultivation of the very best. So the main attraction to investing in this industrial-scale, society-wide cloning program is that it enables her to dispense with the typical quality/quantity tradeoff. She can set the bar as high as she wants and still come up with more than enough brilliant, brave, and faithful Spartans to fill her bases to bursting.

The gameplay reflects the implications of such an endeavor in a couple of dramatic ways. First, the faction that builds the Cloning Vats is permanently in population boom status, just as if it always had a +6 growth rating in the social engineering screen. This means that as long as any base in the faction has a nutrient surplus and is below the cap for base population, it will grow one point every turn without needing to wait for the nutrient box to fill.

And second, this project cancels out the downside for adopting Power as the organizing value of society. Along with this, it also negates the downside for using the Thought Control option, when the late-game Future Society choices become available. This makes this project huge for the Spartans, as the industry penalty for Power stacks with their inherent negative. With the Cloning Vats, Power fits the Spartans just as nicely as a Police State fits with the Hive.

The really interesting thing about this project is the way the bonuses combine together to influence the player’s social engineering decisions. Removing the negatives from Power and Thought Control obviously make those choices more attractive. But enabling the faction to ignore their growth rating significantly changes the balance among the remaining options.

When you look closely at it, the main attractions of Democracy or a Planned economy are that they improve the growth rating. When growth is no longer an issue, there isn’t much appeal remaining. Democracy becomes a straight trade-off of support for efficiency, while Planned trades an efficiency malus for just a small industry bonus. At the same time, the growth negative for Green economics is made completely irrelevant.

Following the logic onward, those two factors together then make Police State a more attractive option for the politics row. This is true even though nothing has changed with regard to that specific choice. That’s because a switch to Green economics yields an efficiency bonus that can be used to neatly cancel out the Police State penalty. And since the player is now looking for a reason to run the newly-free Power choice, the support and police bonuses line up nicely.

What’s going on here, thematically, is that SMAC generally models policies that are intended to improve or uplift the living standards for the lower classes with growth bonuses. When growth no longer matters, due to all the new people coming in an unending stream from industrial-sized cloning vats, there’s not a lot of incentive to care about their livelihood. The game doesn’t force the player to use this new capability for creepy, dystopian ends. It just arranges things so that the player finds himself naturally drawn in that direction.

With that context it becomes entirely clear why the video is so chilling. In the future, each one of those little chicks rolling down the line is a person. The ones that pass inspection get rolled down the line into the Cyborg Factory. And the ones that don’t meet the bar get casually tossed into the hopper that leads to the Recycling Tanks.

Base Facility: Tachyon Field

“The klaxon began to wail, but we felt the reassuring tingle of the Tachyon Field crackling to life around us, encasing the entire base in its impenetrable glow.”

— Spartan Kel, “The Fall of Sparta”

If the name were not sufficient, Kel’s statement is enough to confirm that Tachyon Fields are base-wide forcefields. They require Probability Mechanics to build. And they double the defensive strength of any unit defending the base. The bonus works like the older Perimeter Defenses, but it applies against attackers using any chassis type instead of just the land-based ones.

Because of the way the base strengths of weapons and armor diverge by the mid-game, Tachyon Fields are not just nice-to-have. They are virtually mandatory from the moment they become available. Without them, holding a front-line base against any serious attack is untenable.

This dependence on base facilities for cost-effective defense actually opens up an interesting spy mini-game. One of the key actions a probe team can take is to infiltrate a base and disable a facility. Taking out the Perimeter Defenses or the Tachyon Field is more difficult than aiming for any other target. But the AI very rarely defends its bases with spies, so using a couple of spy teams on a risky mission to break the siege can end up saving an entire army on the attack.

But from our critical perspective, by far the most interesting thing about this quote is the name of the work from which it is drawn. It would seem that, at some point, there was a Ragnarok-like final battle at the gates of Sparta Command. One in which the defenders were not triumphant. It’s very hard to imagine a memoir being written called “The Fall of Sparta” that wasn’t about the final collapse of the whole faction. It has to be an elegy for an empire.

It’s worth mentioning that, generally, the AI Spartans tend to end up at war with several different factions at once. Santiago has the same diplomatic problem as Yang: her preferred SE choice brings with it a serious penalty. This means that most other factions will tend to avoid it. Which will give her reasons to hate them. And as she is coded as an aggressive leader (for good reason), she’ll take any pretext she can find to kill them and take their bases for her own.

There are not any hints here as to which other factions caused the downfall. Nor are we entirely certain when in the timeline this work was written. Putting together the player’s typical experience outlined above with the fact that they are the one faction that doesn’t have an in-built opposite, the culprit could reasonably be anybody. Anybody except Yang, anyhow, since he’s almost certainly out first.

But based on what has come before, it’s a decent bet that the Gaians had a hand in the fall of Sparta. They’ve been at odds for what seems like the whole game, after all. So it would be something of an anti-climax if they weren’t there at the end.

Secret Project: The Cyborg Factory

“A handsome young Cyborg named Ace,
Wooed women at every base,
But once ladies glanced at
His special enhancement
They vanished with nary a trace.”

— Barracks Graffiti, Sparta Command

The Cyborg Factory is pretty cool. It’s a scaled-up application of the Mind/Machine Interface technology that acts as a free Bioenhancement Center in each base. This means that all units produced by any base in the faction will suddenly get a +2 morale bonus right off the line. Combine that with the previous morale-boosting buildings and the available morale increases from Social Engineering and it becomes possible to roll max-promoted Elite units off the line. Since Elite land troops get an extra movement point along with the expected strong combat bonus against all opponents, this is a very good thing.

As an aside, it turns out the morale subsystem in SMAC is buggy. It doesn’t deliver the right combat odds in some circumstances. The biggest variations seem to happen when very low morale units are defending bases with Children’s Creches. It’s also a little harder to build high-level units than it seems like it should be, since bonus morale from the SE screen tends to add (+) indicators to the morale level instead of just leveling the unit up. But most players don’t dig into the mechanics far enough to notice that, even after countless playthroughs, so it’s nowhere near fatal.

The video that accompanies the creation of the project is funny and memorable without needing to do a lot. It’s just a few shots of what looks like a robot assembly line. Since this is the Cyborg Factory, presumably there are highly-modified people either already inside or destined to be paired with these unfinished robotic components.

But, really, it’s the limerick that goes along with the video that makes it. It’s pretty funny just on its own. Outside of the obvious appeal, though, it’s illustrative of a couple of points that are worth mentioning. First, it would have been really easy to make the Spartans grim and serious all the time. But, like with Morgan, Reynolds goes out of his way to give a couple of the humor beats to the Spartan grunts. This is pretty inspired, as it is both more realistic and more entertaining.

And second, it serves as an intriguing counterpoint to Lal’s dire warnings about the human rights implications of the MMI technology. He concluded that the tech had made it possible for power brokers to create a private army of demons. In canon, he must have been referring to Santiago’s Power-focused Spartan faction creating the Cyborg Factory.

So it’s possible to piece together these clues into some conclusions about the context of the joke, as it would have been contemporaneously seen by the Spartan who wrote the graffiti. The cybernetic enhancements are so extensive that lots of people would much rather not go under the knife. Lal states they have to be drafted for it. And a big part of the reason why it’s unpopular even among macho, victory-focused Spartans is because they commonly reconstruct away the subject’s genitals as part of the procedure.

Now that’s quite a futuristic sort of problem to have! It’s yet another reminder that the game is barreling on into the future at an increasingly dizzying pace. But it’s portrayed in a way that demonstrates that while simultaneously showing deep links to the past. After all, smart-alecks writing graffiti on barracks walls has been a thing since the day the first barracks wall was built.

Technology: Orbital Spaceflight

“I have often been asked: if we have traveled between the stars, why can we not launch the simplest of orbital probes? These fools fail to understand the difficulty of finding the appropriate materials on this Planet, of developing adequate power supplies, and creating the infrastructure necessary to support such an effort. In short, we have struggled under the limitations of a colonial society on a virgin planet. Until now.”

— Col. Corazon Santiago, “Planet: A Survivalist’s Guide”

Colonel Santiago’s quote here is best seen as a companion to Lal’s comments on Fusion Power. The achievements represented by the sixth-tier Orbital Spaceflight technology, made possible on Planet by Pre-Sentient Algorithms and Doctrine: Air Power, show that the colonists have now well and truly established their colony. But just like with fusion power, the fruits of the struggle Santiago speaks of are borne out not in the creation of something entirely novel, but in the technical capacity to match humanity’s greatest achievement.

It’s fitting that Santiago is the one to introduce the player to this technology, as the main gameplay effect of Orbital Spaceflight is to open up space itself as a new dimension for conflict. A new form of base facility is made possible in the form of satellites, which are unique in that they spread their benefits out over every base in the faction instead of having their effects localized to the base in which they are constructed. At the same time, they are potentially vulnerable to being destroyed in orbit by enemy action, so a player now has to keep an eye on space as a new off-map theater of battle if he wants to keep reaping this boon.

The other major advance that comes with this technology is the ability to build missile units in the unit editor. Missiles are one-time use air units that can only carry two kinds of weapons and a reactor type. The first kind of missile is one topped with a high-strength conventional warhead. It’s intended to represent a stash of ’90s-style long-distance cruise missiles. In the game, they’re usually used to take out critical ground-based defenders. Like, say, a key AAA sentinel unit that’s potentially able to shoot down a few needlejets. But, all in all, they aren’t terribly useful.

The second kind of missile payload is called a Planet Buster. It’s the SMAC version of a nuclear ICBM. But it’s better. Not only is it capable of wiping whole stacks of units and bases from the map in one go, it also ties into the game’s terraforming model to smash lasting craters into the landscape. Instead of causing fallout, like in previous Civilization games, it literally destroys the land out from under the tile improvements. The better the reactor, the bigger the blast. From the player’s perspective, launching a Planet Buster on a hated foe is intensely satisfying.

Quite naturally, use of Planet Busters is considered the worst of atrocities. If the U.N. Charter is still in force, the player that goes nuclear is instantly considered a pariah. And, regardless, any faction that ends up on the wrong side of one will hate the faction that launched the missiles pretty much forever.

This means that repealing the Charter turns out to have a major impact on gameplay. In effect, it’s essentially an international agreement that intense nuclear wars are A-OK. And since the SDI missile-defense equivalent doesn’t come until the late game, that leaves a big chunk of time where the only real defense against having bases wiped off the map is the balance of terror.

Technology: Doctrine: Air Power

“Air Power rests at the apex of the first triad of victory, for it combines Mobility, Flexibility, and Initiative.”

— Spartan Battle Manual

Doctrine: Air Power is the last of the Doctrine line of technologies. It is a fifth-tier exploration technology that relies on Synthetic Fossil Fuels and Doctrine: Flexibility. As one might expect, it enables the creation of military units with the fixed-wing aircraft chassis, which are called needlejets by default. I always thought that was an evocative name. Anyway, they follow special rules compared to all of the other military units that have appeared thus far in SMAC. It’s worth going into them in detail to understand why this is such an epochal technology.

First off, by default air units have 10 movement points. That means that they move five times faster than rovers and even twice as fast as a loaded cruiser transport. Additionally, air units do not suffer any terrain penalties, as they can just fly straight over anything in the way at one point per square. This, alone, tremendously increases the reach and efficiency of a faction’s military.

Secondly, air units have limited fuel. They must return to a friendly base or airbase terrain improvement every other turn, in addition to costing minerals under their home base’s supply cap. This is in contrast to all other previous units, which can remain in the field indefinitely as long as they get their support minerals. Since an attack costs all the movement for that turn, this generally means, unless they are willing to sacrifice themselves kamikaze-style, a needlejet can only attack every other turn.

Third, air units in the air are immune to attack by all units that do not have the Air Superiority special ability. Air Superiority is enabled by Doctrine: Air Power, which means that if your faction doesn’t get it first, you get to watch all your guys get strafed and then see the jets hang there and taunt you for a turn before they fly home, re-arm, and dice you up again. It’s an intensely frustrating experience.

Fourth, if an air unit is built with the Air Superiority special ability, it reduces the speed of the aircraft by 2 per turn and applies a -50% modifier to attacking ground and sea targets. In exchange, it gets a +100% when attacking air units.

Fifth, when air units fight each other, both sides use their attack values. Unlike artillery, which also do this, they fight to the death. This means that needlejet units almost never have higher than 1 armor, since it greatly increases the cost of the aircraft and almost never comes into play.

So all of these rules together imply that after Doctrine: Air Power, factions build two kinds of aircraft: fighters with Air Superiority and bombers without. The fighters protect against enemy bombers and clear out enemy fighters, while the bombers do their work to destroy enemy land and sea forces. And this third-dimensional battlefield quickly becomes the critical one. The traditional attack forces based on cheap, lightly-armored rovers that had dominated Planet since the second-tier of the technology tree are completely obsoleted by swarms of aircraft. In fact, it is worth noting that even with the fighter penalty, a jet with a decent weapon can easily strafe an unarmored target outside of a base.

So when the Spartan Battle Manual states that air power is the combination of Mobility, Flexibility, and Initiative, the game rules richly support that interpretation. Air power wins on Planet. And it wins in exactly the way that the Spartans claim that it does. Needlejets are way faster than anything else, they can hit anything anywhere out of the blue, and they always get the jump on their targets, in that they get to apply their higher base attack value against their opponents’ lower base defense values.

Secret Project: The Maritime Control Center

“It is altogether fitting that we who have sailed the deeps of space now return again to the sea. This is in many ways a water planet, and it can be ruled from the waves. With sea power, rugged terrain can be bypassed and enemy strongholds isolated. Once naval superiority is achieved, Planet is ours for the taking.”

— Col. Corazon Santiago, “Planet: A Survivalist’s Guide”

In the game, The Maritime Control Center requires Doctrine: Initiative to build and acts as a Naval Yard in every base. Even better than that, it also adds two free movement points to every ship operated by the faction that possesses this project. This latter benefit essentially guarantees the faction naval dominance for the same reason that the jump from hoverfoils to cruiser hulls is such a big deal. The faction with the faster ships is the one that gets to decide when and how the battle is joined. And, in practice, this advantage matters far more than any realistic difference in weapons or armor.

But I find the video and the quote that accompanies it to be more interesting than the rather straightforward in-game effects. As we might expect from the Colonel by now, she values naval mastery for the same reason Alfred Mahan or Admiral Nimitz would. Speed and flexibility in the vector of attack let the faction with naval superiority pick and choose which enemy strongholds to take and which to allow to wither on the vine. This approach dovetails nicely with the rest of the Spartan philosophy of warfare, so it makes total sense that the Spartans would be the faction to construct this secret project in the implied canon.

However, the truly intriguing bit is how Santiago links the project back to the colonists’ spacefaring history. The video supports this point rather explicitly by beginning with a spaceship and then morphing it into a submarine cruising the oceans of Planet. The space navy is a common trope in science fiction, of course. It’s not just a coincidence; there’s a deep reason why they’re commonly called “spaceships”.

Still, it is worth noting that in real life, nations seem to have preferred to fold space operations in with their air forces instead of their navies. It is highly unlikely that this changed in the future history between the ’90s and the time the Unity was launched from Earth. So it is quite interesting to note that Santiago and the Spartans think of their voyage from Earth as analogous to a sea voyage instead of as a long flight.

The implication I draw from this is that the Spartans have already thought deeply about how they would go about organizing an interplanetary armed force. And they have come to the defensible conclusion that, when they have one, it should not be organized along modern lines and run through their equivalent of the USAF. Instead, it should be organized as a space navy.

This line of reasoning is exceptionally fascinating to me because armed spaceships don’t actually appear anywhere in the SMAC tech tree! Perhaps she dreams of returning to Earth with an interstellar armada? In any event, we can be certain that unlike Alexander, Santiago isn’t about to start weeping for the lack of worlds to conquer.

Secret Project: The Neural Amplifier

“Against such abominations, we organize our defenses on the principle that one strong and able mind can shield the many.”

— Spartan Battle Manual

This is a surprisingly solid secret project video.  On the surface, it’s just a series of disjointed, rather disturbing images, intercut with a few floating heads.  The overall effect is intended to be a little like reading the wrong sort of message board, where people go out of their way to post the craziest things they can find.  But – as with so many of these – the context is what makes it.

The video is obviously intended to give the viewer a taste of what it would be like to be on the wrong side of a psionic attack.  For one, it’s disorienting.  And, as we can see with the images of snakes and spiders, it is clearly intended to tap into widespread, inbuilt fears.

I think it is fair to presume from this that a typical effective psionic attack just overloads the sensory inputs of the target with a series of inchoate images, cycling through them until they find the one that the target is the most receptive to, and then hammering countless variations on that until the hapless victim drops his flamethrower and becomes a host to countless mind worm larvae.

In fact, it is likely that target’s memory is accessed as part of this operation, enabling the attacker to narrowly target the fears more precisely.  Since the native mind worms are the first to do this, and human minds must have been completely alien to them at Planetfall, it is pretty unlikely that they’d have Earth-like sensations to impart.  Although, to be fair, having a completely alien mind inside one’s head would be terrifying in its own way.

But the project is designed to help thwart this psionic vector.  How is this possible?  The quote and the repeated appearance of the three helmeted soldiers gives the answer.  It is possible to project a reassuring human presence into the minds of the victims, giving them the sensation that they are not alone under the psionic assault, while simultaneously transferring or redirecting the force of the attack to a subset of trained individuals who are much more capable of resisting the influence.

It is also worth noting that the quote for this psionic defense project comes from Colonel Santiago.  This leads one to conclude that the Spartans were the ones to build this project in the implied canon.

Remember, we know from previous quotes that the Gaians and the Spartans were in conflict.  And we know that the canon Gaians have chosen to use tame mind worm boils to attack enemy bases.  So, presumably, the Spartans were highly motivated to come up with a method by which they could better resist these psionic depredations, and the Neural Amplifier was the result of their efforts.