Yeah. Everyone making Alpha Centauri clones seem to forget that the biggest thing that made AC, AC was the huge amount of personality from all the faction leaders, quotes, and voicework.
This game doesn't have that.
One thing that I noticed is that I really can't be arsed to read any of the flavor text this time around. Maybe it's because there's so much nonsensical "sci-fi" speak or maybe it's because the font is too small. For example, if you look at their, what-is-essentially-Facebook, wonder. Holy crap. Who on earth wrote that?!
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Everything I'm about to say here is based on Gemini difficulty (I think it's equivalent to monarch in Civ 5).
Trade still can't be automated and is still a massive pain in the ass. You can't ignore it because the bonuses are so huge so the beginning of every turn is spent micromanaging a few dozen freighters.
Espionage is nice and also dumb. There's a lot of options and they have huge impact. Also the fact that you can't just mass produce spies makes it riskier. However, the game refuses to tell you anything about what ranks do... which actions generate XP... how big a bonus you get to improve the odds of success are when you put your agents in HQ... things like that. It's very annoying. Also I don't know if it's just me but I have not managed to succeed at a single difficulty 4 mission yet even after 6 hours of the same game.
The air combat animations are just as stupidly, pointlessly long as ever. There's also a very annoying bug where if an air unit is bombing an embarked unit, it has to fly round and round and round it about 20 times before the animation can end.
There's no governors for cities for some reason so no city automation.
I wish the aliens were more interesting. Snake in sea. Snake on land. Flying bugs. Running bugs. Kraken. That's about it.
I actually like the unit system. It's challenging and balanced. However, I think the sea combat is retarded. You only get two kinds of boats. A cruiser / destroyer / tiny boat and a carrier. You don't get the carrier to way later either. So most of the time is spent fiddling around with the cruiser. Except cruisers kill each other in one hit. This is because their HP is garbage while their attack is huge. So all your cruisers are just constantly dying to everything. If you fight a naval war, you better strike first if not all your boats are going to sink on the first turn. Not to matter though, as you can sink all his boats right after that too.
I'm kinda mixed about the diplomacy. It's basically a cookie cutter copy of Civ 5 though. However, I've managed to have alternating alliances with different faction members, even ones I've been at war with in the past, which is something I could never do in Civ 5. Also, the faction leaders really try to ambush me now which is very amusing. For example, the Brazilians hid a huge task force from my sight until one turn before they declared war. However, you still need to do that stupid-ass refreshing of deals every time they expire. Also they do that stupid, "no personality whatsoever", mannequin thing from Civ 5.
The tech tree is way too small.
I like the art design.
I haven't really used any of my strategic resources. Nothing much in the game demands them. Really takes the fun out of racing to claim things like uranium. I have a full late game army and I think I'm only using 2 petroleum and 1 geothermal.