This mod is designed for a Huge map with 30%.50% land mass.
Choosing 30%.50% land mass yields substantial continents, but still plenty of ocean for the Pirates.
The world generator is tweaked to give the AI factions more land to grow in. Factions are better rounded, and most don't have penalties. I got the AI to stop overproducing defensive units by adding other predefined units. I made Social Engineering choices that the AI actually likes, uses, and does well with. I changed the faction research foci because they determine AI early game colonization.
If you try out multiple combos of binary patches and various mods, I suggest you install the game separately for each of them, in distinctly named directories, to keep them all straight. They're small and won't interfere with each other. You can have many installations of SMAC on your computer. I don't playtest or do bugfixing for unofficial binary patches. If you see my mod causing a problem in the official game binary, then I want to fix it. My goal is to get the most I can out of it, without any unofficial patches at all. I do bugfixing support and playtesting of the official game binary.
Some unofficial binary patches are in active development and what they will do is unknown. The PRACX graphics patch works fine, because it doesn't affect gameplay and doesn't use alphax.txt at all. For instance, Scient's patch is known to work because all its changes to alphax.txt are optional. Some unofficial binary patches did a good job NOT messing with alphax.txt. For instance, Yitzi's patch is broken in 3 places and one of them causes a crash. Some unofficial binary patches messed with alphax.txt and changed how various things are encoded. This mod will work with unofficial binary patches, if they do not REQUIRE changes to alphax.txt. To play THIS mod, use the alphax.txt and faction *.txt files I have provided. Unzip the files and drop them on top of your SMAC installation, overwriting ANY existing files that have the same name. This mod contains alphax.txt, the 14 faction *.txt files, and this readme_mod.txt Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri with Alien Crossfire expansion is required. Thanks to playtesters fihttf, gehennaliving, zoneplate, ih8regin, kaminiwa, Douglas, Rocky, Jade Dragon, Vidsek, and Esper for finding important bugs! And to modders Douglas, Nexii, Tim Nevolin, JNM444, vonbach, PvtHudson, and Mart for ideas borrowed from their own work. Please let me know if you find any bugs or omissions. I hope people will try and enjoy it, as that validates the effort spent. This mod aspires to professionalism, to be substantially better than the original game. I still play my mod, and I trickle out a "long tail" of minor improvements over time. Now the project is stable, mature, and in maintenance mode. It was 2.5 years of psychological engagement. In some other universe where I made money, this could have been more than a year's salary. Its design, and all the playtesting needed to improve it, has taken 14 PERSON MONTHS of full time work to produce.