“Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded.”

— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”

Probability Mechanics is labeled as a seventh-tier economic technology. It combines Pre-Sentient Algorithms with the previous Photon/Wave Mechanics to allow second-generation forcefields. In the game, these take the form of the six-strength Probability Sheath unit armor and the Tachyon Field base facility, both of which combine to make it much easier to defend bases.

It is accompanied by an amusing and surprisingly effective quote by Chairman Yang. If the player was not familiar with Einstein’s famous assertion from before, the Supercollider secret project video from a couple of technologies prior may have reminded him of it. At that time, it was just presented as fact. But now we see that, according to SMAC, he was wrong.

But the quip that the dice are loaded isn’t just funny. It’s got to be the concept that underlies the technology. Using the knowledge of how the “dice” are loaded, it is possible to manipulate the temporal manifold in such a way as to better prevent, interrupt, or distort energy transfer through the region protected by force field. And this apparently makes it possible to scale the fields all the way up to encompass an entire base.

At the same time, Reynolds deserves credit for choosing his quote in such a way as to cleverly avoid pinning himself down to any detailed explanation of how his techno-magic works while simultaneously giving the player some familiar context. It’s completely believable that someone in the future who knew how this worked would make this observation. And that remains true regardless of how the real future or the alternate SMAC-future actually turns out, so it’s immune to looking dated.

During his first playthrough, that’s certainly enough for the player to get his money’s worth out of discovering this tech. But this quote also serves as critically important evidence for our ongoing project of teasing out the implied canonical version of events. That’s because I believe this is the last time Yang or his Hive is referenced in any of the quotes.

This is not an accident. I conclude from this lack that the Hive is the first of the factions to be completely defeated on Planet. They are wiped out sometime in the mid-game, before the truly futuristic late-game comes to pass.

It’s not clear which of the other factions is responsible, though it is logical to tag Lal and Miriam as the primary suspects. In most games they quite naturally hate Yang because of his penchant for running a Police State. Given his AI personality, he was likely engaged in a grinding war for a long time before the end came.

So it’s intriguing that he was still supposedly able to land The Ascetic Virtues and invent Genejack Factories. That implies that his tech rate and industrial capacity remained globally competitive until the very end. Combined with his native industry bonuses, those extra minerals would have been extremely valuable.

This means his final collapse must have been quite sudden. Perhaps he was on the wrong side of a wave of high-tech ‘copters. Or perhaps a crucial front-line base fell and then his mag tube network was used against him to hollow out his entire empire in just a couple of turns. We are not privy to any of these details, but it’s enough to know that SMAC provides several plausible alternatives for how such a rapid fall from grace could happen.

“I maintain nonetheless that yin-yang dualism can be overcome. With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower, not of physical strength.”

— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”

At the sixth-tier of the technology tree, as typically played, the game starts noticeably speeding up. The early game is fairly slow, characterized primarily by low tile yields. At the same time, technological progress is propped up by the fact that the early technologies are very cheap, exploration can yield free ones from pods, and it is usually pretty easy to trade low-level technologies with rival factions. It’s not until the advanced social models start coming out that the political lines start to harden.

As the early game fades into the mid-game, the early pace slows down some for the typical player. Technological breakthroughs come less frequently, wars are fought with largely the same technologies from start to finish, and secret projects are raced for. This phase of the game is the one which feels the most like a typical Civilization-style game.

But then the needlejets come, the energy caps get lifted, and the pace starts to accelerate. Wars happen at a higher tempo, there’s suddenly plenty of money to upgrade old units and engage in fun with probe teams, and the tech pace is still rocketing upward because of the cumulative effect of the energy multiplier buildings the game has encouraged the player to get in place by now. That’s because doubling the raw energy leads to maybe quadruple the effective energy for the typical faction with lots of Energy Banks, Network Nodes, Biology Labs, and the like.

The sixth-tier tech Monopole Magnets fit right in to this acceleration of pace. In game, they allow for the creation of mag tubes, which are an improvement to roads that cost no movement points to use. This serves as an earlier equivalent of railroads in prior games, with the same dramatic effects. Once a magtube net is constructed (which doesn’t usually take more than a dozen turns) it’s suddenly the case that freshly-built units can be rallied anywhere on a continent instantaneously. This includes rolling them right up into enemy bases if you can get the tube up there (or make use of the enemies’ network).

All of that is definitely important. But it’s also worth noticing how far into the science-fictional future we’ve come here. Monopole Magnets are an economic technology that rely on Silksteel Alloys and Superstring Theory, which makes quite a bit of sense if you think about what the technology is supposed to represent. The mag tubes presumably have to be built out of something as amazing as silksteel to protect the passengers and the sensitive equipment from marauding mind worms, while the magic that drives it comes from the discovery of a real, usable magnetic monopole. Right now, such a thing is relegated to theoretical speculation, but the new physics represented by Superstring Theory must make their creation possible.

On top of that, we get a quote from the Chairman that’s honestly genius. Because he doesn’t come out and say any of the preceding. Reynolds is counting on the curiosity or background knowledge of the player to know what a magnetic monopole is and why it’d be cool. So, instead, he has Chairman Yang philosophize a spell.

The philosophy itself is intriguing because it folds back into Yang’s odd idealism. He insists here that sufficient enlightenment is capable of bringing to life what would seem like logical impossibilities. These dualist terms are generally defined primarily in relation to each other, so how can one member of the pair exist in any meaningful way without necessarily implying the other? It’s worth some thought.

Especially in this context. Since one of his throwaway examples, “north without south”, is exactly what a magnetic monopole would be! The ends of magnetic dipoles are commonly referred to north and south following the convention imposed by the Earth’s field. So a monopole would be a physically real, anomalous north without a corresponding south. Created, of course, with sufficient technical enlightenment.

This quote is another huge win from the perspective of building and maintaining the player’s suspension of disbelief. Even when I’m analyzing this critically, it’s still hard for me to read this quote and believe that Reynolds wrote it just to introduce this technology. I’d almost swear that he didn’t make it up at all! Instead, in my mind’s eye, Reynolds just pulled down his well-worn copy of Chairman Yang’s collected Essays on Mind and Matter and popped in a cleverly chosen quote, in the exact same way he might do with Moby Dick.

“We sit together,
the mountain and I,
until only the mountain remains”

— Li Po, From the Yang Collection

Environmental Economics is a fifth-tier economic technology that relies on Industrial Economics and Ecological Engineering. It’s the last in the trinity of technologies that lift the per-tile resource caps. Where Gene Splicing allowed unlimited nutrient yields and Ecological Engineering allowed unlimited mineral yields, Environmental Economics allows unlimited energy yields per tile. This is a very big deal. When a faction gets this technology, the slower pace of the early economic game is unambiguously over.

In addition to all of that, it also allows terraformer units to raise and lower terrain by spending former turns along with some energy credits. This allows the player to fully engage with the surprisingly deep terraforming system. See, most other games of this type allow worker units to perform an action to improve the economic yield of the terrain. But the terrain itself is invariably static. A grassland tile will always be a grassland tile. An ocean tile will always be an ocean tile. And so on.

But that’s not true in SMAC. Instead of having a fixed character, every tile in SMAC has a few properties associated with it. There’s elevation, moisture, rockiness, and then any improvements that happen to be on the tile. It’s worth going into each of these in detail for a moment to get an idea of how simple, elegant, and powerful the system Reynolds put together actually is.

First off, elevation is the primary property. It’s displayed and calculated in the game in meters, but when it comes time to use the values for the game rules, it is usually treated in 1K blocks. It determines whether a tile is a water tile or a land tile by referencing it with the global sea level value, which means that it is possible to either reclaim or submerge land by raising or lowering land. When a tile is less than 1K under water, it is treated as shallows. When deeper, it is the deep ocean. Above water, high terrain gives high-ground bonuses for artillery firing on lower terrain. Additionally, it also grants a +1 energy bonus to all solar collectors for every 1K above sea level. This bonus rarely matters much until Environmental Economics, as the 2-energy cap is hit very early. But after that it can quickly become a pretty big deal.

Next comes moisture, which is intended to be a measure of average annual rainfall. A land tile can have three moisture states: rainy; moist; or dry. This establishes the base nutrient yield for the tile. Rainy tiles yield two nutrients, moist tiles only one, and dry tiles none at all. This is obviously very important given that the game rules require two nutrients for a citizen working a tile to break even. Terrain near rivers usually also gets a moisture bonus, so a river in the desert can support moist tiles even if there’s little presumed rainfall.

But the really cool thing about the moisture system is that it feeds off the elevation system by modeling rain shadows! For simplicity, the prevailing winds on Planet are always assumed to go from west to east, so the west side of a slope will get a big moisture bonus and the east side will get a penalty. And this updates dynamically. If the player creates a ridge by raising up terrain, it can change which tiles are considered rainy. And like all terraforming shenanigans, there’s nothing stopping a player from using it to help himself and harm his enemies. So, for instance, you can build a ridge on the east side of your domain to deny your neighbor the sweet life-giving rains.

The next tile property is rockiness. Like nutrients, it comes in three flavors. There’s rocky, rolling, and flat. And they sort of work like the moisture ratings for minerals. As before, flat yields no mineral output and rolling yields one. But rocky terrain is treated differently. It’s not an unambiguously better deal to have rockier terrain like it is to have moister tiles. That’s because rocky terrain slows unit movement, only yields one base mineral, and forces the nutrient yield to zero regardless of moisture. But in exchange, mines that are built on rocky terrain yield a bonus mineral, meaning that mines with roads on rocky terrain put out four minerals each. This is a very good deal when paired with supply crawlers.

Interestingly, formers can make terrain less rocky but cannot ever increase the rockiness of terrain. This means flat terrain will always be flat. But the player has the option to break down a rocky tile to get a more balanced tile yield, or to keep it and focus the tile on mineral production.

Finally, there’s improvements. The first ones are the biome improvements. Any tile, whether land or sea, can have native fungus on it. And all non-rocky land tiles can have Earth forests. Either of these is incompatible with any more man-made tile yield improvement and they set the yield to a fixed value that does not depend on the underlying terrain. At first, native fungus yields no yield at all (except for the Gaians, who get a single nutrient) and Earth forests yield one nutrient, two minerals, and an energy. But technology and base facilities like the Tree Farm – that Environmental Economics unlocks, incidentally – can improve these yields further.

The man-made improvements generally improve a particular yield. Farms give more nutrients and solar collectors give more energy. Some of the later, more extensive ones effect neighboring tiles as well. For instance, the condenser improves the nutrient yield of the central tile and, additionally, makes the tiles around it more rainy. Or how the echelon mirror not only serves as a solar collector but also enhances the yield of all adjacent solar collectors by one. In general, man-made improvements are better for tile specialization, which enables the player to get vast amounts of resources in a way that synergizes very nicely with supply crawlers, at the cost of increased ecological damage. This contrasts with the more “natural” approach, which relies more on citizens working the forest or fungus for balanced yields.

All of this loops back quite nicely into Yang’s treasured Li Po quote. The original meaning was almost certainly a reminder of the smallness of man and his concerns against the permanence of the mountain. One can see how Yang would love this. Li Po seeks to break the reader out of his natural, small-minded focus on his own concerns and get him to identify in some small way with the eternal mountain. Now, the mountain and I sit together. It is like me, in this moment. But soon there will only be the mountain. Yang would likely argue that the spark of enlightenment here is that, if I am to persist as the mountain persists, I must learn to identify with something outside of myself. Something that will abide when the individual will not.

But all of that could have fit in anywhere. Reynolds’s true genius is displayed by his choice to put this quote here. On Environmental Economics. Which, remember, is the technology that lets the player raise and lower the mountains themselves! By the fifth-tier of the technology tree, it would seem that the eternal verities themselves are no longer quite true.

“Why do you insist that the human genetic code is “sacred” or “taboo”? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.”

— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”

Previous to researching the fifth-tier Bio-Engineering technology, the people on Chiron had been restricted to making heavy-handed edits along the lines of those represented by the prerequisite technologies. With Gene Splicing, they had been able to perform large-scale, whole organism edits – such as creating new hybrid crops that would both grow efficiently in the alien environment while nourishing Earth humans. And with Neural Grafting, they had been able to crudely stitch together electronic components into human brains, which judging by the prerequisites had up until now been approached as a computer problem, with the nature of the brain being relevant only insofar as it was another electrical component in the design.

Bio-Engineering represents a major leap forward in the ability of the colonists to edit, design, and build up new organic machinery. In the game, this is reflected by the ability to add the Clean Reactor special ability to military units and to build the Longevity Vaccine secret project. The first is actually a really big deal, as it allows a faction to pay a mineral cost up front in order to create units that do not require minerals in upkeep. With this, it becomes possible for factions with a penalty to their military Support rating (like the Morganites or factions running Democracy) to maintain large standing armies.

Accordingly, we get another quote from Chairman Yang. As we’ve seen in previous quotes, genetic manipulation is a major focus for Yang. Which makes a lot of sense. He is correct in assessing that pre-existing human nature is a major barrier to the creation of his utopia. In this light, his radical social experiments are all inefficient hacks to coax out the proper enlightened behavior from quite flawed material. He wouldn’t need any of his police state machinery if people were just naturally inclined toward enlightenment.

The tone of Yang’s argumentation dovetails in with his previously demonstrated nihilist materialism. When he says that “we are chemical processes and nothing more”, he is not simply rejecting any concept of the soul or the supernatural in favor of a purely biological explanation for the behavior of the mind. This position itself already represents a pretty severe rejection of most prior philosophies, though as Yang previously predicted, the position is growing more and more popular as time goes on. But Yang goes farther still. He’s a pure reductionist: he’s saying that human identity, consciousness, and any other mental state really is nothing more than an arrangement of chemicals.

Given all of that, it then behooves you to arrange your chemicals in the way that best helps you accomplish your goals. As we have already seen, to those walking the Chairman’s enlightened path, these are the transcendent goals of the group and the greater race. To refrain out of concern for the continuity of your own individual identity – whether that is physical death or self-modification into something that you would no longer recognize as “you” – is to pointlessly cripple yourself.

And this chain of reasoning is why Reynolds chose to place this particular quote here. Before now, Yang’s differences on this point with the rest of the faction leaders were simply philosophical. But now, with the capabilities unlocked by Bio-Engineering, Yang now can take direct control over the key chemicals and find the mechanical arrangement of atoms that leads to true enlightenment.

“Technological advance is an inherently iterative process.  One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe.  We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.”

— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”

Polymorphic software is, as you might guess from the name, software that can rewrite itself in solving a problem.  The code changes along with the input data.  Modern-day algorithms like neural nets, where the connections between the neurons are determined by training, work like this.  This technology presumably represents finding economically and practically significant applications for this software on the new Planet.

In the game, this is a second-level pure scientific technology that relies on Industrial Base and Information Networks.  It provides a couple of benefits that don’t, at first glance, seem terribly related.  First, it enables the faction that discovers it to build units with the Heavy Artillery special.  Units with this power can attack at long range without fear of reprisal (except by other artillery units), but in exchange can only injure units instead of kill.  This is good for whittling down big enemy stacks.  And second, it grants Probe Teams fielded by the faction an extra level of experience right out of the gate, representing the advantage granted in hacking enemy systems with better software.

Naively, it’s kind of weird that the power to create heavy artillery would be tied up in a computer technology.  I mean, all you need to do to get indirect fire is to build a bigger gun, right?  But this is a lot less crazy that it seems when the history of firepower in the Information Age is taken into account.  See, it turns out that the effect of indirect fire (say from artillery tubes or aircraft) is greatly increased by accurate targeting.  So-called smart bombs are worth a hundred of their dumber brethren.

By tying artillery to an early computer technology, SMAC is modeling that on the early days of Planet, it is impossible to build the density of troops and guns necessary to make an effective industrial-era artillery barrage.  It’s just not practical without rebuilding the technical capacity to target efficiently.  And this requires new advances in software because the colonists aren’t able to sustain a network of GPS satellites for hyper-accurate positioning data, like we do on Earth today.

In this context, Yang’s quote above is really neat.  Just taken at face value, it’s intriguing and insightful.  He has to be right to some degree.  It really is impossible to build a complicated device with nothing but your bare hands and spare silicon.  So, if your task is to rebuild a technical civilization on an alien planet, there are some steps you just can’t skip.  Which, if you think about it, serves as a justification for the entire mechanic of the technology tree in the game.

But the quote has a cool double meaning when attached to this tech in particular.  Software of this type converges on a solution by iteratively reshaping itself.  There is a deep analogy between the broader society advancing technically up the tree step by step and a suite of polymorphic software rewriting itself to solve a given problem.  Civilization itself is a polymorphic algorithm.  It’s just implemented in people and capital equipment instead of silicon.

“If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life’s fundamental truth: that life’s only purpose is life itself.”

— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”

This is another one of those quotes that fit, in context, in a way that blows my mind.  I don’t see how it could be possible for Reynolds to have written this quote while thinking of Planetary Networks, based on what it represents or what it does in the game.  If I didn’t know better, I’d think that he actually wrote all these fictional books.  Then, when it came time to assign quotes, all he had to do was read through them and pick an appropriate passage.  After all these years, I almost really believe that “Looking God in the Eye” exists somewhere.  That’s some powerful suspension of disbelief.

Planetary Networks are the natural extension of Information Networks.  World-wide inter-networking: the Internet for a new Planet.  The faction that acquires this technology gets several advantages.  First off, that faction can build spies (what the game calls “Probe Teams”).  This is a big deal.  You can wreak lots of havoc, especially on a faction that don’t have spies of their own for counterespionage.

It also lets you build Hologram Theaters (entertainment helps with social stability) and the Virtual World (a secret project that makes all your Network Nodes also act as Hologram Theaters).  Since the University starts with Information Networks, has a drone problem, and gets free Network Nodes everywhere, this is an obvious match.

It also lets you assign specialists called Librarians.  Up until now, when not using population to work the land, it was only possible to assign doctors to add extra psych energy and technicians that generate energy.  Librarians are the first specialists that produce research.

Finally, it lets the faction who discovers it adopt the Planned economy social engineering choice.  This is supposed to represent something similar to what people hoped communism would be in the ’30s: an entire economy that’s managed like a firm or family instead of using market signals to coordinate everything.  But, in a nod toward Hayek, it requires super-powered futuristic computer networks in order to get everything going.

On Planet, the economy is planned with the goals of achieving growth in both industry and population, at the cost of a substantial efficiency penalty.  This makes a Planned economy really good in the early days of colonization.  But that efficiency penalty starts to bite with more angry citizens and more energy loss as it scales.

So let’s wrap it all back around to Yang and his quote.  It’s been quite obvious from his previous quotes that Yang’s a nihilist.  But it is interesting to learn that he sees his philosophy as a progression of sorts.  He sees the effect of technologies like the Internet as expanding the collective consciousness of humanity.  And he thinks that, as consciousness expands, it necessarily becomes more difficult to believe in the pleasing lies of the past.  Enlightenment necessarily leads to the conclusion that the only purpose of life is self-propagation.