SMAC Game Basics

Unless you've never played a CIV game, you should know many of the basics. Units are moved with the mouse or directional keys on the keyboard.

Like Many Civ Games, you start off with just a base.

A build screen.

And F1 pulls up the datalinks:

Similar to the Civpedia you see in other games, The Help menus in SMAC are magnificent, coverign every aspect of the game. there are also cross-reference links within each page.

F2 pulls up

 The progress of research, very handy to see when you have infiltration. You can see where your enemy is planning to research and counter them.

F3 pulls up

Credit information, Loans, costs of army maintenance and facility maintenance.

F4 pulls up

Detailed City information. what each city is building, it's garrison, and the status of it's citizens.

F7 pulls up:

A detailed Unit listing. covering all units ever built, the status of the design, even how many have been lost.


If you can manage to get a Probe team into another players base and infiltrate their data-links, you can view the data for them as well. this makes long term planning a breeze. Whenever I play verse Human opponents the first thing I do is get infiltration, you never knwo when it will be handy. And the information is VERY handy in a long game.

Tomorrow I'll talk about the different factions that make up the game.