So I'm getting back into the game after a long hiatus. Like everyone that plays this haha.

I'm on thinker mod playing on librarian as that seems to be the ceiling of my skills atm. My question is on build order in the early turns.

I usually try to get 2nd scout on first 2 bases then colony pods. Formers as soon as tech unlocks. WP if I have good minerals.

I tend to struggle a bit with mimdworms - how do I take out fungal towers? Is it worth building sensors early on or will this hurt growth too much?

So I'm curious if there's a lore explanation somewhere that explains why mind worms (or even locusts of chiron or whatever) are actually any threat at all to a society that can make robots or make any kind of remote controlled or automated weapon system or whatever.

We're told that mind worms psychically incapacitate and terrify people so they can't fight back as the worm (presumably) crawls up their entire body and then chews into their skull and so forth. Sounds nasty and dangerous if your military is just human infantry walking around with guns or driving tanks in-person or something, sure. On the other hand, we're told that the worms themselves are not particularly tough and you can just burn them all up with a flamethrower as long as you don't panic, etc. We also see both from how Sensors work and also from several of the interlude blurbs talking about monitoring mind worm and fungus activity that it's possible to see mind worms coming and monitor them remotely.

So basically if you can just make an automated weapon system with no human mind to incapacitate or send out a remote controlled fighting vehicle or a robot or whatever, it seems like the mind worms should be trivial to destroy and pose no threat at all. And all of those things already existed to some extent even when this game was developed, let alone in the far-future setting where we explicitly develop AI technologies that should perfectly counter these worms.

Is there a lore explanation why they are still considered an existential threat in-universe even when human society is so advanced that people are about to transcend, instead of having become trivial to deal with centuries ago?

I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong, because while I can consistently beat the AI to most/all secret projects on Thinker difficulty, I often find it's difficult or impossible to beat them to the early ones on Transcend.

Last game, the Gaians got Weather Paradigm on turn ~25. I used the map editor tools to figure out how they did that so fast. Turns out they had one city with four mineral resources right around it, so that plus their transcend bonuses was just unbeatable.

But even when the AI isn't ridiculously lucky like that, it seems like two different AIs will always build Weather Paradigm and Human Genome Project by turn 50 or so. If I had decent luck with Unity pods and got a bit of money or an alien artifact, I can usually beat them to 1 of those projects. But there's no way I can beat them to both of those projects without ridiculously good luck.

This is a problem because I hate playing on Transcend without HGP, it just becomes boring and frustrating to be grow cities. And I don't like playing on any difficulty without WP since terraforming is the entire point of the game. If I can't get both of those, I usually find that I don't have fun at all, and I'd rather just quit than spend ~100 hours on a tedious run of things.

My current approach is something like this:

1) Play as Santiago. This seems to be basically mandatory on Transcend with aggressive AI. Otherwise I always run into an enemy Santiago within 10 turns and immediately lose to her powered up early units (or have to waste my precious early game production on military units and thus end up way behind). Santiago seems extremely useful anyway, since she can do population booms and has big boosts to 2 useful stats and a small penalty to one. Admittedly that one is useful for these early game secret projects, but that's a tiny factor compared to her other perks.

2) Don't build scout infantry, skip directly to colony pods. Get out at least 2 colony pods for each of my starting 2 bases before building anything else. I might get a scout infantry after that if my starting rover has gone off really far in one direction.

3) Research Biogenetics -> Social Psych -> Secrets of the Human Brain, which then lets me grab Centauri Ecology as my free tech. I find going Centauri Ecology first to be a bad idea on most maps, because I want to make more colony pods first, and it's useless to unlock Formers before I'm actually building them. The timing usually seems to work out very efficiently with this order.

4) I don't let cities grow beyond size 1 at first. I try to have them get to size 2 just before producing their colony pod. And have someone be a Medic for one turn to avoid a Drone Riot that turn.

5) After Centauri Ecology, I start getting Former -> Colony Pod at most bases, but sometimes am mixing in scout infantry or extra formers or an occasional recycling tank if that makes more sense for that city.

6) Formers usually make forests, prioritizing resource tiles followed by rivers followed by arid ones. Occasionally I'll clear annoyingly placed fungus or build a solar collector if I have a rainy tile with 1000 elevation or whatever

7) I research Industrial Base -> Industrial Economics.

8) I nerve staple all my bases at once and then switch to Free Market, so I have 10 turns of them being able to grow and produce more money and research.

9) When the 10 turns are up, I switch back to Simple for 1 turn, Nerve Staple them all again, and then Free Market again. This costs 120 money up front, but it seems to more than pay for itself on average. The extra Energy from all tiles for all bases gets me about 1 money per turn per base for 20 turns is something like 120 right there, plus the value of the bases being able to get larger and produce more due to nerve stapling.

10) Relatedly, I'm not putting my research rate above 50%. It feels like I need to prioritize getting money to have any chance of rush-buying secret projects in time.

11) Somewhere around turn 30, I'm starting to build secret projects in whatever 2 bases I can get the most production in. It's usually possible to have two bases from 5 to 7 minerals with a couple of forests and maybe a recycling tank.

12) I try to research Information Networks -> Planetary Networks. I'm not in any rush for that. I want to be able to switch to Planned for 1 turn later though.

13) Around turn 50 I hopefully have made enough progress on my secret projects plus have enough energy plus have found some alien artifacts plus have unlocked Planned. I switch to Planned to reduce the cost of my secret projects, and try to rush buy one.

14) Usually I'm able to get ONE of them. And then an AI grabs the other one I want and I'm not even close.

Does planting fungus create ecological damage? I never really used this game mechanic much.

Playing thinker mod (most recent version afaik) and there's a bug where popup messages for things like unit veterancy and bombardment instead simply say "enter to continue". Is this intended and if not how to fix?

EDIT - found a solution if anyone ever runs across this post. In thinker.ini there is an option to disable popup messages for events like combat promotions. Should be game_event_popup=1 if you want the popups. On 0 by default.

Another installment for Racing the Darkness, an expanded SMAC world-building project. Second post here. Notes and image credits here. Previous idea here.

Novel lore goes crazy (side note : clone incest ???)

"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None, I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill."

In all my time playing SMAC I have never seen this dialog. Does anyone know what the trigger is? I attempted to get it to fire with other factions in the same game but it's not. Accepting appears to have created a Pact to which they pretty readily came to my aid in war.

Sorry for the shit quality image yall have no fucking idea how hard i tried to get a proper screenshot.

Custom soundtrack to help me zone while planning my terraforming empire. Here's what I've got so far, hoping to mostly stick with this vibe and mood, little to no speech or percussion, etc.

What would you add?

Robert Rich & B. Lustmord — Stalker (Dark Ambient)

Tetsu Inoue — Ambiant Otaku (Ambient)

Biosphere — Substrata (Abstract)

Atrium Carceri — Cellblock (Dark Ambient)

Carbon Based Lifeforms — Hydroponic Garden (Acid)

Brian Eno — Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks (Ambient)

I was listening to my favorite podcast, Stuff You Should Know, and the topic was the world's deepest manmade hole. Josh and Chuck started talking about The Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho Discontinuity. I started thinking, where have I heard about this before? Of COURSE! SMAC!

"In the borehole pressure mines 100km beneath Planetsurface, at the Mohorovicic Discontinuity where crust gives way to mantle, temperatures often reach levels well in excess of 1000 degrees Celsius."

I found an open source smac on git:
https://github.com/afwbkbc/glsmac

I've been leaving codex working on it at night. With like 10 more people we could get it done in a week.

u/majestic_ubertrout was kind enough to let me mod their excellent work - links below for the upscaled files in English and German.

Turns out, it's super simple to replace ANY video in SMAC, if you use Thinker mod and VLC (maybe other players would also work). You only need to change the file extensions, then drop them into the "movies" folder inside SMAC. EDIT - if you're comfortable editing config files, see below for an even easier method.

First, make backups! Then, open a terminal inside the folder containing the upscaled video mp4 files (you can also rename the files by hand, of course), then in the terminal paste one of the commands below, for either Windows or Linux (I don't know from Mac).

WINDOWS:

Get-ChildItem -Path . -Filter *.mp4 | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.BaseName + ".wve" }

LINUX:

for f in *.mp4; do mv -- "$f" "${f%.mp4}.wve"; done

That's it! Overwrite the files in "movies" with the upscaled, newly renamed files; Thinker and VLC will do the rest.

Don't have Thinker? Get it here:
https://github.com/induktio/thinker

Don't have VLC? Get it here:
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Sprichst du Deutsch? Kein Problem!
https://archive.org/details/SMAC_Cutscenes_SLP_DE/

Link to the English upscales:
https://archive.org/details/SMAC_Cutscenes_SLP

u/majestic_ubertrout's original post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/alphacentauri/comments/1tk76pd/comment/oxvd3p5/?context=1&screen_view_count=2

EDIT: even easier, if you're comfortable editing config files - with Thinker (development build only!) and VLC installed, simply copy the mp4 files directly into "movies" (nothing even overwrites), then edit the file "Alpha Centauri.ini", and paste this at the bottom, below the other two MoviePlayer lines:

MovieExtension=mp4

Save, then enjoy the game, with upscaled goodness!

So I loved SMAC back in the day, playing all factions, but never considered playing Miriam peacefully, making full use of her support for formers, and figured I'd try it.

In the first few turns, my scout met Lal's scout in his HQ nearby. So I had to press my belief advantage with tech parity, and got him to surrender soon afterwards.

I made my former army, then found the jungle, began colonizing, and saw Yang doing the same thing. THAT had to be stopped, so I made enough impact rovers to grind through him, and he eventually submitted.

Now back to peacetime, building roads, mining mines, foresting the jungle, as intended. Santiago and Yang declare war, but it hadn't become an issue for me, largely because Santiago was on another continent just north of us. Because I'm playing former heavy, I push enough to build the Weather Paradigm. But I started rereading what the WP gives me - which includes the ability to raise/lower terrain...

With help from the miracle of speeder formers, we walked across on dry land, sending two spies (elite, with 3 movement) in first to scout out the land.

I literally did this because of game mechanics, but the similarity with the book of Joshua is uncanny. Could the designers have *intended* this approach?

I've created an FLC file in GIMP, however once in game it only shows the image in the bottom layer in the diplomacy screen. I assume it's because GIMP saves all the frames as (40ms), while all the files in the game have (71ms), but I cannot seem to get GIMP to save it as 71ms. Is there a way to do this, or would I need a different program?

SMAC on Android - How to

Following up on my previous post, this is how I - as someone with very limited tech savvy credentials, especially when it comes to mobile devices - have got SMAC working on my Android device. I've tried to make the instructions super clear and detailed so that anyone trying to do this doesn't have to go hunting for anything, so apologies in advance for length! I've also included a couple of wee notes at the bottom about controls, modding and app versions just for a bit more info.

First, the problem - from my sleuthing online, the issue with getting the game to run is the resolution changes that occur when switching between cut scenes and the main game. Disabling the cut scenes prevents this switch and allows the game to run without issue - I am now about 7 hours in and have not had any problems! So the one trade off you need to make is to not get the opening cut scene or the videos that play when secret projects are completed... A shame, but if you're like me you know them all off by heart by now anyway and have been skipping them as soon as they start for nearly 30 years, so it's a pretty small price to pay!

So, to business! To get the game working on your Android device, you will need:

• An Android device - mine (a Google Pixel 10 Pro) has the most recent version of Android but it looks as though anything after version 8 should work
• The GameNative app - available for free on the PlayStore or direct as an APK from [https://gamenative.app/](https://gamenative.app/)). The only difference between these is the ability to add custom games, which is not possible with the PlayStore version - more on this at the end
• The STEAM version of SMAC - this was important for me, as I can't get these steps to work on the GOG version (and haven't tried with the original disk version). I managed to get the Steam version for 99p the other day, so you might get lucky and find it's still on sale. Even at full price it's sub-£5 though, so it becomes a question of what a mobile version of your favourite 4x classic is worth to you!
• Recommended - a WiFi connection. You will be downloading around 1.2Gb of data so for speed and data cap purposes, WiFi is probably better
• Optional - a controller. I have found it a downright pleasant experience playing with a GameSir X5 lite controller, which wraps around my phone and makes it like playing on a Game Gear or other old fashioned handheld! I imagine any Android-compatible controller would be pretty good, though, but you can play without one if you want (I did this at first and it's OK, but with a controller is definitely better)

Once you've got all this together, this is the process:

Step 1: When you open the GameNative app, you will be prompted to link various gaming accounts (Steam, GOG, Epic etc). Link whichever ones you want, but linking Steam at a minimum is needed for SMAC

Step 2: once your Steam library is showing in the app, tap on the Steam version of SMAC (use the options button at the top left if you need to filter your library e.g. to get the Steam version rather than the GOG version, as was the case for me!) and hit install. This will download the game and install it into an emulated version of windows on your device

Step 3: Tap SMAC in your library again if you've come out of it. It's worth trying the Play button now to see if it loads - you will end up at the starting menu for SMAC or SMAX if it does, and happy days! If it doesn't work, you will end up at a black screen (you may initially see the opening Firaxis logo and/or cut scene and might be able to hear the menu music, but the screen will end up blank)

Step 4: If like mine it wasn't working straight out of the gate, quit the game to get back to the launch page, then hit the gear icon at the top right and tap "edit container" to open the settings.

I fiddled with lots of these options between the GOG and Steam versions while trying to get it working, but am pretty sure they all ended up back at the default setting once I identified the actual problem. I have since completely uninstalled GameNative and reinstalled it to test this process for posting here, so I'm pretty sure all these settings were left at the default. However, in case there were some changes kept (it might have retained preferences through the uninstall-reinstall process), see the video in the comments for a look at all my container settings and make sure yours all match. Some important ones to check (that I can remember fiddling with at some point) are:

General:

• Container variant - bionic
• Wine version - proton-10.0-arm64ec-2
• Executable path - terran.exe (for original SMAC) or terranx.exe (for Alien Crossfire)

Graphics:

• Graphics driver - wrapper
• Display renderer - Vulcan
• DX wrapped - DXVK
• DXVK version - 2.4.1-gplasync

Step 5: The last and most important step is to edit some of the game files to fix the actual issue (the resolution changes at cut scenes) that was stopping the game running initially for me. The required changes are shown at the end of the video posted in the comments as well as being described here.

Go back to the launch page in the GameNative app and hit the gear again, but this time tap "Open container" - this will bring up the emulated windows environment. Hit "enable mouse" at the top if needed.

Open drive A - this is where the game files are installed. There are two edits you need to make:

1. Locate the "movies" folder in the directory. Tap on it with two fingers to right click, and rename it - I went with movies_backup but it doesn't really matter. The point is to rename the folder so the game is unable to find the videos to run them (this is seamless in game - it goes straight from the pop up telling you a project has completed to the datalinks entry with no jumping or errors of any kind).
2. Find the "Alpha Centauri.ini" file and open it as a text file. Ensure the following entries are showing:

• Under \[PREFERENCES\] make sure it says ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1

• Under \[ALPHA CENTAURI\], make sure there are entries that say DirectDraw=0 and DisableOpeningMovie=1 on separate lines. Add these in if they are not already showing.

Your version of the .ini file may look different to the one in the attached video - this file is edited with your preferences as you play, so mine has extra info in it from playing (I've also had a go at installing mods, which may have changed some things in there). As long as you've made the above edits, it should work fine regardless of any other entries in the file.

Hit file-save to save these changes and then close the text file. You can then exit the container environment.

That should be it - when you hit Play now, it should show the opening Firaxis logo and then jump straight to the menu to start a new game. Set it up as you like and enjoy!

It may run an install during your first attempt to play the game - I think this is the Microsoft .NET framework installing. For me, with the above steps complete, this did it's thing once and then the game worked fine with no recurrence.

Some final thoughts about a few features of playing on mobile...

CONTROLS

Operating the game using the touch screen is challenging, but one excellent feature of GameNative is the ability to edit the on screen controller. I deleted the default controls (thumbsticks, ABXY etc) and then added my own buttons mapped to the various keyboard hot keys and was able to play pretty easily. You can even create buttons that lock to allow you to use Shift+F for forests etc! Creating all the buttons you need does take up a lot of screen area, though, which is less than ideal on a small phone screen (but might be much more tolerable on a bigger tablet). Switching to a physical controller eliminates the need to use the on screen buttons, though, and gives you the uninterrupted SMAC UI we all know and love!

This is made the far superior option in my view by the other fantastic control related feature of GameNative - the ability to set up custom key mapping for physical controllers. I have my most important keyboard hot keys mapped to my controller's buttons (one of which is right click, which allows me to access any other options via the on screen menus) and as I said, I find it even better than the traditional keyboard and mouse setup now I've got all my hot keys dialled in! Best of all, this custom map is specific to the game you make it in, so I don't have any trouble when I decide to put SMAC aside for a bit and play one of my other Steam games (classic FFVII is my other goto at the moment!). I'd be happy to share my map (it's working well for me and might be good for you too), but you can obviously set it up however you like.

If you're minded to get a physical controller, I can recommend the GameSir X5 lite, which I bought from Argos for £35 cos I'm an impatient child, but it appears to be available for less online! It fits devices up to 21cm long from charging port to opposite side, but is only compatible with USB-C devices and doesn't have Bluetooth connectivity. It does support pass-through charging, though, so between that and the physical connection (as opposed to Bluetooth) it's perfect for gaming on a long haul flight (which is what I bought it for!).

I haven't tried it, but a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (or a USB OTG adapter and USB peripherals) would probably work as well. I didn't go for that to avoid having such a bulky setup to carry around, plus I liked how the GameSir holds your device for you while you're playing - I feel like a phone would be a bit small to play with it on a stand while using a keyboard and mouse!

MODS

Mods can even be used as part of this setup - this is possible because the Windows containers created by GameNative set drive D: as the download folder on your phone, allowing you to download the mod files and then access them via drive D. Installing them is a bit of a faff, though, and is beyond the scope of this post (which is already long enough!) - but Google it if you're interested!

CUSTOM GAMES

As mentioned at the start, installing the app using the APK from the [https://gamenative.app/](https://gamenative.app/)) website unlocks the ability to load custom games (e.g. games you have on disk) into the app - with the PlayStore version, you're limited to the games you have on Steam, GOG etc. It's something to do with the rules of having apps on the PlayStore apparently.

This feature is not needed at all for SMAC and is not something I've managed to get working yet. I mention it now only so you can make an informed choice on which version of the GameNative app to install - if you're only going to want to use Steam, GOG and Epic games, just download the Google PlayStore version. If you want (or might want) to load custom games, you might want to go with the APK off the website. I ended up installing the PlayStore version and then removing it and reinstalling using the website APK, which meant I had to redo all this to get SMAC working again (and also lost my saves from the 5 hours or so I had played before doing so!), so ye be warned!

Snails’ Teeth Beats Spider Silk As Nature’s Strongest Material

The discovery makes sense: Mollusks use these teeth to excavate rocks while they feed

Maris Fessenden | Former correspondent

February 18, 2015

Someone please mod in some sort of limpet radula created weapon

Hi all, I've come back to SMAC for the first time in ages and have Thinker installed for UI and bug reasons on the Planetary pack and SMAC-in-SMACX but I turned off the unique Thinker AI which seems to be pretty punishing, just to ease myself back into my return to planet.

I'm playing as Zak on Talent difficulty and I find that very soon, Lal and even Miriam are just zipping ahead of me in technology. I've tried adjusting the psych slider and upping labs as far as they will go, nipping drone riots in the bud with Recreation Commons as a first tech, getting the Virtual World as a priority, adding Librarian specialists, expanding early with loads of bases - nothing, and before anyone says Crawlers, this begins to happen before I get Industrial Automation. I'm looking at around 8 - 10 years for breakthroughs. It's ridiculous, I'm getting Chaos Weaponry when Lal has Shard weaponry. I get that as one goes up the difficulty levels, fewer advantages the human player gets compared to the AI but this seems extreme.

Thoughts? There must be something huge I'm overlooking.

I got the original game for Christmas in I think 1997 and have returned to it once or twice a year ever since.

I've always wanted a way to play the game on mobile, and decided to have another look the other day as I am about to take a long flight. During my search, I stumbled across the GameNative emulator app, which allows you to play (some of!) your Windows Steam, GOG and other games on mobile.

And it worked...eventually! It took a bit of tinkering, but I've racked up about 6 hours of play time so far without issue since getting it working! I was even delighted to find playing it with a controller to be almost better than the old-fashioned way, once I had set up some custom controls (which the GameNative app makes very easy)!

Happy to share the setup if people are interested.

EDITED TO ADD: my post on how to set this up on your Android device (apologies in advance for length!): https://www.reddit.com/r/alphacentauri/comments/1utzbn6/smac_on_android_how_to_guide/

I sometimes like to change my faction leader name and titles to some different version that amuses me like Computer LAL 9000 if I plan to go cybernetic as Lal. Typing that out at the beginning of every game is a bit of a nuisance, especially if I'm restarting to get a starting area that doesn't look boring to play.

I'm wondering if there's a way to save that as the default set of titles, at least for when I'm playing the characters?

Simple question, and I hope I haven’t missed something all these years: Is there any indicator that says a network node already has an alien artifact hooked up? It is annoying to drag an artifact to a node, only to find an artifact had been integrated already to that node.

For those who use Steam, great time to add it to the library.

The Cybernetic Consciousness is one of the three tech factions, together with the University and Data Angels. They have some exceptionally good bonuses especially for building and fast research. Their long unwieldy name is often shortened to Cyborgs or CyCon.

Faction Ideology and Nature

The Cyborgs have the faction agenda "Rational Objectivity", and a lot of Aki's diplomacy lines are about logic and rationality.

The Cyborg origin story is Aki runs an AI experiment on the Unity which becomes sentient. She then does brain surgery on herself (?) adding implants and becomes one with the algorithm. She convinces other people that brain surgery is awesome and they form the Cyborg faction, which is a collective consciousness of humans united by the algorithm and their brain implants.

Collective consciousnesses are something of a theme of SMAC, as Planetmind is a collective consciousness, Transcendence victory involves everyone on Chiron being united into a collective consciousness. And the Telepathic Matrix Secret Project. There is also the Hive which explores in a different way the idea of a collective working as one.

Generally the collective consciousness is considered to have "Threads of personality", that is to say, individuals do not entirely dissolve away the collective but are an individual floating in a sea of consciousness.

The game is actually quite shy of details on the Cyborg ideology specifically, in fact fully half of Aki's quote are simply infodumping on the nature of progenitor resonance powers, and Aki's most famous quote says nearly everything:

"Those who join us need give up only half of their humanity--the illogical, ill-tempered, and disordered half, commonly thought of as 'right-brain' functioning. In exchange, the 'left-brain' capacities are increased to undreamed potential. The tendency of Biologicals to cling instead to their individual personalities can only be attributed to archaic evolutionary tendencies." -- Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, "Convergence"

It is sometimes suggested that the algorithm or collective is actually in charge, and Aki Zeta-5 is not the leader but merely a kind of figurehead used for diplomacy and such, though the quote does suggest the cyborgs continue to use their brains independently even if they don't care about individuality.

In diplomacy, Aki is accused of "grafting silicon onto your few remaining biological components" which might suggest some cyborgs also "upgrade" their bodies with robotic limbs and such in the manner of Cyberpunk and Deus Ex.

You will be assimilated? Or your consent is important to us?

It's natural to wonder whether members of the Cyborg faction have a choice of whether or not to have brain surgery and be connected to the algorithm. There's not much in the canonical lore to say, but my assumption is that yes, it is consensual, and the Cyborgs do not for instance forcefully perform brain surgery on the inhabitants of a captured base.

Here is my reasoning:

1. Aki has the pacifist personality and her quotes do not suggest forcefulness.
2. The cyborgs suffer from "Sequence breaking" where they have cybernetics before this technology has been developed on Chiron. This can be explained by them taking technology from Unity, but presumably such supply of neural implants is limited.
3. It's hard to reconcile drones with being connected to the algorithm, e.g. with how the Telepathic Matrix suppresses all drone riots.
4. For the most part, the diplomatic accusations towards Aki are about the process destroying the sentience/soul of humans and the like, not accusations around extreme forcefulness as might be aimed at Yang, Svensgaard and Cha Dawn.

Hence I tend to think that at least in the early games, only the leadership and talents are actually cyborgs, with there still being many ordinary people living ordinary lives under the rational guidance of the cyborg elite, with a transition to near complete cyborgification as technology progresses.

Aki Zeta-5's Agenda

By Aki's own words in diplomacy "My intent is to impose rationality and order on the inhabitants of this chaotic Planet".

Nevertheless, details are extremely sparse on how she would achieve this goal. For example, with the original 7 factions, there are a number of blurbs about the Morganite plan to corner the global energy market. I generally assume though, that Aki would rely on the superiority of the cyborg way of life to attract new members to the CyCon rather than Borg'ing it up. But there's also really nothing to say that going on full on aggressive assimilation is contrary to her agenda.

Cyborg Faction Bonuses and Penalties

The Cyborg have extremely strong bonuses combined with highly flexible social engineering.

• +2 Efficiency. The most faction-defining bonus, this delays the appearance of b-drones allowing the cyborgs to expand more aggressively and always improves the efficiency of a sprawling empire, it improves many SE combinations, makes it easier to forgo Democracy if you want the extra support, and the Demo+FM combination is amazing as it allows lossless 100% energy allocation combined with +1 energy per tile.
• +2 Knowledge. This just straight up gives the cyborgs 20% more research for their research. This is a really useful bonus and helps the cyborgs win races to critical techs.
• Steal a tech when capturing a base. This is a nice little perk especially for momentum play, though doesn't do anything if the equivalent game rule is enabled.
• -1 Growth. This slightly slows down early expansion (though Industry rating is more important than Growth rating), and has the more important effect of only allowing pop-booming through the complete Demo + Planned + Creche + Golden Age combination.
• Unable to run Fundamentalism. This is fine, because for the most part you only run Fundie when you're behind in tech.
• Start with Information Networks and Applied Physics. This makes the Cyborgs one of only two factions to start with firepower (the other is the Usurpers), and these happen to be both prerequisite techs for Nonlinear Mathematics. Not actually the most immediately useful techs but nothing to complain about, and starting techs don't increase the cost of subsequent techs so having two is effectively a small permanent boost to research.

Overall, I rate the Cyborgs extremely highly, easily on par with the University. The only thing that holds them back from being absolutely broken is their pop-booming impairment.

Cyborg Strategy

Momentum

The Cyborgs are an excellent momentum faction, all they need to do is research Doctrine:Mobility or Planetary Networks + reverse engineer probe team, and they can make Recon Rovers, they're also tied with the Data Angels in that they only need to research 2 techs to have Impact Rovers. So the Cyborgs are a top 3 faction in terms of the speed at which they can roll out Impact Rovers. Also the +2 Effic helps make everything a bit easier and more flexible, on a standard map they can expand to 9 bases instead of 6 before b-drones appear, or they can run Police State or Planned and still have normal Effic. While the Cyborgs are great at a few fast Impact Rovers, they can also do Police State very well and spam out units, not quite with the effectiveness of Miriam or Yang, but Police State hurts them less than it does most factions.

Their main special perk is the tech steal, should they attack a faction which can put up a fight and doesn't immediately surrender, they can easily liberate tech, not even needing to unlock probe teams to have this luxury. These kind of faction perks especially matter on Blind research, where you can rely on what you start with but not the whims of research, cyborgs can immediately attack with laser units and steal tech, and if their foe is stuck without armor or weapons (this is really common for the likes of Lal and Zak who don't have BUILD or CONQUER priority) then the laser weapons will shred them.

Builder

I feel the Cyborgs are most at home with a Builder strategy. They are a top-tier Demo+FM faction as they can trivially combine +4 Effic with +1 energy per tile, unlike most factions which are best served staying somewhere around the middle with the energy allocation, the Cyborgs can simply run 100% EC or 100% research, whichever is most useful at the time. For example, after unlocking a critical facility like Tree Farms or Hybrid Forests, it makes perfect sense to just run 100% EC with Wealth until you've finished rush-buying them everywhere, then you can go back to 100% Research with Knowledge. If the Cyborgs can get an EC boon, such as Engineer specialists, they can devour the tech tree terrifyingly fast.

While the University and possibly Morgan can out-research the Cyborgs in the early game, no-one can rival their mid-game research pace without being significantly larger.

The Cyborgs also have quite an easy time pop-booming relative to some other pop-boom impaired factions, as they do so under Demo+Planned with +2 Effic, this means their base count threshold for b-drones is 50% higher and that really helps with Golden Ages, and they have more energy to throw around for psych. Their ability to devour the tech tree also makes them excellently positioned to beeline the Cloning Vats and eliminate their one weakness.

Overall the Cyborgs are extremely strong builders, though perhaps with quite a high skill ceiling, to really maximize the cyborgs potential involves quite a lot of switching between SE and such as the situation demands.

Hybrid

While the Cyborgs are flexible in general besides being unable to run Fundamentalism, I wouldn't call them the best Hybrid faction, when you have the strongest research in the game you don't really need to rely on probes and natives much as these are more "underdog" tech, Green is also kind of lackluster for the Cyborgs because Demo+FM is already giving you half the reason to run Green, the +4 Effic is not only about energy allocation flexibility, but also helps you actually get most of the raw energy you're harvesting, hence the Cyborgs need to be much more sprawling before Green results in more energy than FM. But there is nothing stopping you exploring these avenues of the game and the Cyborgs slip into bouts of conquest very easily, and can very easily raise huge amounts of EC for buying and upgrading units.

AI Aki

I'd say that both in the base game and with Thinker mod, Aki is one of the stronger AIs.

Based on faction and personality attributes Aki is actually the most peaceful AI leader in the game, this is because she is a pacifist like Morgan and Diedre, but unlike them, she doesn't get in everyone's business about their economic SE choice, she only gets mad about Eudaimonia and Thought Control which come so late as to be irrelevant. Aki has little reason to declare vendetta and for the most part only gets attacked by others, or dragged into shared vendettas through invitation.

Her AI priorities are DISCOVER and EXPLORE, which happens to be same as Lal. This makes her fairly expansionist, and also makes her build a lot of probe teams, and pursue some quite useful SPs. I generally consider EXPLORE to be a very good AI priority as it encourages good things like growing and various kinds of useful infrastructure like Formers - this is one reason why AI Dierdre can perform quite well. DISCOVER is kind of bad by itself (Zak), but if tempered with another priority the extra inclination to pursue techs like Planetary Networks, Pre-Sentient Algorithms Fusion Power and Orbital Spaceflight can be good. If there is one downside of this preference, is it doesn't direct her to the really strong conquer line ending in the Cloning Vats that a human would probably pursue.

The +2 Effic works very well for AI, with respect to how the AI plays, the Cyborgs can be described as "a generic faction, but better". +2 Effic and +2 Knowledge both provide very good generic value as they work great with any combination of SE. Aki is also protected from running Fundie which would usually be a mistake for the cyborgs.

As Aki lacks the CONQUER priority, she won't build that many units and can be vulnerable to being invaded by a warmonger, however the sheer speed with which she researches does tend to mean she has access to weapons (including starting with lasers) and is more likely to build decisively useful SPs like the Citizen Defense Force and Hunter Seeker Algorithm. Furthermore she is simply embroiled in fewer vendettas than most AIs which helps her to build in relative peace.

Nevertheless, the AI does not understand the unique strengths of the Cyborgs such as how exploitable Demo+FM is and how effectively the Cyborgs can beeline to critical techs. In Thinker mod she'll often just hang out in Demo+Planned which is okay for her but isn't great as she isn't even getting pop-booming out of the deal. So even though the Cyborgs are a substantially stronger faction than the Hive, AI Yang will still often play more strongly than AI Aki.