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[Culise]

What I'm most curious about is the Emancipation ending. Who are you fighting back on Earth, and why? They built you a spaceship when you left, what happened in the meantime that would necessitate this kind of reaction?

On the one hand, Earth is dying, and the colony ship's launch is going to be one that requires power and wealth behind it in order to get it built in the first place.  Those people who put their power and wealth behind it are going to want to get something out of it, like a ticket out of that mess.  Basically, it's almost an ark for the "haves", while the "have-nots" end up with this decaying cinder.  That's bound to engender some resentment, especially if the situation on Earth continues to deteriorate. 

On the other hand, it's not necessarily the Earth that's changed.  The colonies that come to this new world are going to change and develop, come up with their own funny ideologies along the lines of the big three.  As the Supremacy victory option, Emancipation doesn't seem like it's necessarily going to be a straight liberation outside of PR snippets; it's going to be the subsumation of the remnants of Earth into the new political and ideological order created by yours truly.  Oh, and technological order, for that matter; if Supremacy is the path of the technological singularity, who is to say that the people back on Earth will even recognize you as human?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

And you think the others are going to be liberating anybody? Purity is an entire society unable to let go of losing Earth. Somehow, I don't think they're going to be exactly peachy when they find out they might actually be able to get it back, even though there are people still living there. It'll literally be dangling their Holy Grail in front of them. And as for Harmony, with Earth fairly fucked up and them having learned how to co-exist well with the new planet, they might figure it would be best to bring the new ecosystem back with them.

On the other hand, the Supremacists will have the technology to make everything good back on Earth, the Purists will have a vested interest in not botching their unexpected second chance, and the Harmonalists are all about not screwing up planets to begin with.

[Patchy]

Drone Riots have ended.

Oh geez, how I've waited for this day. Dunno how many of the original SMAC team is left at Firaxis, but here is hoping against all odds the game is as awesome as SMAC was and still is.

[Culise]

And you think the others are going to be liberating anybody? Purity is an entire society unable to let go of losing Earth. Somehow, I don't think they're going to be exactly peachy when they find out they might actually be able to get it back, even though there are people still living there. It'll literally be dangling their Holy Grail in front of them. And as for Harmony, with Earth fairly fucked up and them having learned how to co-exist well with the new planet, they might figure it would be best to bring the new ecosystem back with them.

On the other hand, the Supremacists will have the technology to make everything good back on Earth, the Purists will have a vested interest in not botching their unexpected second chance, and the Harmonalists are all about not screwing up planets to begin with.

Oh, heavens no; all of them have their own hang-ups.  That's part of the fun of SMAC, as everyone's discussion earlier in this thread's already demonstrated, and I definitely hope it gets carried over into CBE.  ^_^

[FritzPL]

The trailer had me instantly - this might be just the first game I preorder(am a stingy bastard) because I love Civilization and Sid Meier's games.

[Sinlessmoon]

ptw.

[Shadowlord]

I'm cautiously optimistic.

On SMAC, my favorite leader to play (at least in singleplayer) has been Lal.

[IronyOwl]

Knowledge is its own morality.

Also every last one of those thieving bastards is a warmongering punk who will shove in your territory with packed bases and then decide your empire belongs to them if you don't have the military to stop them. Or maybe I just play with randomized personalities too often.

[Baijiu]

The idea sounds good but... it looks like every other Civilization game and that really rubs me the wrong way. It's the huge unit sizes, they're ridiculous-looking and immersion-breaking. I don't get why they can't scale the map size up and the unit size down. I want to watch tiny armies marching across a vast terrain, instead of watching a stack of gigantic monoliths cross rivers and deserts and forests in the same turn.

[Neonivek]

The idea sounds good but... it looks like every other Civilization game and that really rubs me the wrong way. It's the huge unit sizes, they're ridiculous-looking and immersion-breaking. I don't get why they can't scale the map size up and the unit size down. I want to watch tiny armies marching across a vast terrain, instead of watching a stack of gigantic monoliths cross rivers and deserts and forests in the same turn.

I always assumed they were representative of an army.

[Svampapa]

The idea sounds good but... it looks like every other Civilization game and that really rubs me the wrong way. It's the huge unit sizes, they're ridiculous-looking and immersion-breaking. I don't get why they can't scale the map size up and the unit size down. I want to watch tiny armies marching across a vast terrain, instead of watching a stack of gigantic monoliths cross rivers and deserts and forests in the same turn.

These are not the games you are looking for. Move along.

[Niveras]

I should have been more clear on what I meant by terraforming, specifically changing the elevation of tiles. Building mountains and digging trenches.

I always felt the discrete elevation system of SMAC was a little pointless.  Raising mountains and blasting out seas is awesome and totally necessary to the game, but actually keeping track of height didn't add anything that the hill/plains/water system of the Civ series didn't do just as well.

Not that I'd prefer to see it one way or the other, and keeping the elevation-changing would speak well to the developers' attention to detail, but I won't miss it if its gone.

I think it should be there, if only because in a distinction between "functionally identical but cosmetically different" we should opt for variety. I'm glad they at least tried to do something different since the Civ mechanic of "water is commerce" wouldn't work on an empty world, and in that respect the "energy is commerce" and the resulting improvement in solar generation at higher elevations kind of makes sense (although I'm not really sure whether you actually get more sunlight 3km up compared to sea level).

.

As far as the armies are concerned, that aspect always annoyed me about Civ as well. I liked Call to Power's method where you don't have individual units per se (although you could) but instead small armies comprised of groups of units and units fall into classes that perform slightly different in combat based on those armies. It still had its flaws but it made a bit more sense than the "single units bumping each other" combat of the Civ games.

[BigD145]

It looks like it's just the Beyond the Sword expansion of 4. With hex's. Because it's an expansion for 5.

[Jopax]

Dammit guys, all this talk of SMAC really makes me want to play it again.

But:
a) don't have an install handy
b) don't have the time to pull a proper one-more-turn game

:C

Also yeah, yay for this and all that.

[Puzzlemaker]

I never played SMAC.  I just found out it's on GoG.

I am seriously considering buying it.  I am also afraid I will no longer have any free time if I do.

Also, I want this game.