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[Rolan7]

Humanity is tearing itself apart.  Ecological collapse and mismanagement cause widespread famine and other resource shortages, causing the people to riot in protest.  Resource wars intensify worldwide and the threat of nuclear oblivion is ever on the horizon. 

Despite these hardships, a project is launched to find somewhere better.  A colony ship.  People are chosen from across the globe to be incased in iron and ice for a century.

A discontinuity- riding shakey pods into an alien world covered in unnatural magenta.  A shattering landing, coughing up the liquid substrate, only to look up to their savior-
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri thread.

Initial hook:  None of the faction leaders are really wrong, which is a beautiful bit of narrative design.
But that includes Yang.

[Starver]

What was my old tactic? Something like getting the ability to dome my cities ASAP and doing whatever I can to make the sea-levels rise, I think. Naturally, I also preferred the hover-chassis on all my vehicles for automatic amphibious ambivalence.

(That was to blindside most of the Human AIs only, of course.)

[Rolan7]

Guessing you were Academy like young me.  Or Morgan's "efficient" economy.

Or you were playing Expansion?  That is valid as well.
Nautilus Pirates are OP as fuck, on their face.

[Starver]

I think I tried every faction, for completeness, but it is sooo long since I played (it'll be on my P133 machine, or the CD is buried on a shelf I haven't cleared in years) that I can't remember the details, and whether the eco-faction was super-good at changing the environment (so this is where I excelled) or was effectively prevented from it...

I'll squirrel around and try to work out how my vague memories actually relate to reality. The possibility of it being an Expansion version on the install media is ringing bells, but not enough to form a reasonable melody...

*dives into spare-room*

[Aoi]

I really liked turtling University until you get the Planet units and you can rampage around with them. Cheap and surprisingly strong, since PSI defense isn't something available in spades... especially if you managed to snatch up all the secret projects that buffed them.

One of my proudest moments was being the first to everything on my monument (like first to air power, first into space, etc.), having personally constructed every secret project (I sort of had to declare war a few times when somebody was close to finishing one though...), and a score high enough to have every book unlocked.

[Iduno]

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri thread.

Initial hook:  None of the faction leaders are really wrong, which is a beautiful bit of narrative design.

Or they all are wrong, to some degree. Sometimes for good reasons, but still flawed.

[Frumple]

Don't remember if I ever actually finished a game, but I seem to remember gravitating towards the plant-y factions. Whoever the green one was in the base, alien in the expansions. Been ages since I played, though, and nowadays I have trouble seeing myself really firing up a civ game unless it's some fall from heaven type stuff, so it's pretty unlikely I ever get around to finishing a game, either, heh.

E: Though that said, without a doubt Alpha Centauri's my favorite Civ game up 'till four came out and the fall from heaven mod line developed. Just way more interesting than the preceding games in the Civ series, or most of what came after, for that matter.

[Radsoc]

I'm just sad they don't make this kind of games anymore. Everything is simplified for console users.

[Frumple]

I mean, whoever owns the civ franchise more or less doesn't, I guess. Haven't played the newest ones to be able to say.

Indie/non-major developers are still putting out stuff as or more complicated than AC was, though. Even if the presence of that sort of thing has shrunk as a proportion of the market, the absolute numbers have either been pretty steady or expanded, so far as I've noticed.

I don't know of many kinds of games they don't still make these days (except friggin' ogre battle clones, damn everyone's collective eyes), really. What mainstream publishers don't put out smaller ones or hobby projects do.

[Radsoc]

They do, but it's also about the quality, studio size etc. Alpha Centauri was an AAA-game in a time when the computer user segment was a bit different. I guess there are fewer nerds and lower average IQ among the computer populace now. Games and everything else like the OS needs to be tailored. Not only user experience, but also the systems themselves, to include quick rewards etc etc. And with a decent market proportion you could always find some ordinary people who played the same game.

[Ant]

Grabbed it on GOG for nostalgia's sake last year, and had some good ole times. Had it on my first own computer ages ago, back then logged far more hours on it than on homework I've had no probs running it directly from GOG installation, and the game isn't choppy or too fast either.

In comparison to free Civ6, I have opened the AC far more times, mainly due to better overall design. I think it has something to do with less mana mechanisms and more compelling personae, like the incidental Civ1 Gandhi style, instead of just Blahblah Heads- Those can be easily seen IRL by opening TV. Love to hate Yang... Even when playing as him

[Aoi]

One thing that keeps driving me away from newer Civilization games is that I could never wrap my head around how city capture has worked since Civ...3? The inability to stack units has made anti-city warfare a ridiculously awful slog. I remember in one game of Civ6 that, due to incredibly awkward terrain, it took me around 100 turns to move my infantry+artillery into position to attack a city, and lay siege to it for another "forever"... over three hundred years. I had to cycle my infantry in and out while my artillery slooooowly pounded it down. Eventually, I just out-tech'd it by multiple generations which finally gave me enough oomph to overcome it. It wasn't even a militaristic threat; I just couldn't field enough offensive power to punch through the baseline city defenses before it regenerated because it was surrounded by impassable terrain.

And the quotes. The quotes are bloody fantastic. (Double checked-- I got Zharkov's quote dead on, but Morgan's was mangled. Same intent, but way off on language.)

[Hanzoku]

My general experience (Pirates aside) is whichever faction manages to control the rainforests gets a massive lead - that food/growth bonus leads to some amazingly outsized cities.

Probably my easiest Vanilla game was one where due to the random distribution, there were only two civs on the center continent with the crater - and I had happened to corner Deirdre early by my own natural expansion. Four civs were clustered around the lake on the west continent and basically stayed as a bunch of squabbling city states the whole game.

Not having to devote resources to more then a basic self defense military and playing university meant that I out-teched everyone else handily by the time we could get in contact with each other.

[Starver]

As far as "My favourite Civ game", I'd be hard-pressed to choose between AC and Colonisation[1].

So Col had less starting-nation choices (the major European Powers) than either Civ (Americans to Zulus[2]) or AC, and it was Civ1-level graphics[3] compared to AC's fine isometric(+) artwork, but rather than 'just' a bonus to horse unit/free additional diplomat/whatever, the nation-advantages seemed more meaningful. And I've just reinfected myself with the earworm music by shear recollection alone.

AC impressed me, I think, by being Col-level factionally divergent, bonus/mallus-wise. More so than the graphics (though the overlaid "chassis+body" unit construction thing was a revelation to me at the time, I think; at least in terms of sprite-based graphics). It gave, notwithstanding my "'always' flood the world" half-memories, different ways to play the game, that didn't just give a slightly different initial impetus towards the inevitable pursuit of whatever's next in the Ironclad/Roailroad/Tank/Nukes list, whether personifying Gandhi or Ghengiz.

(English, under Col, were better for their colonist pool/training situation as you organically expand, Dutch for trading opportunities, Spanish of course promoted the warfare element. Definitely a vastly different game - at least until you eventually severed links to your home nation.)


I've not really touched the main Civ series post-3 (maybe VI?), so maybe I've missed out on that. I've got UnCiv on the Android tablet (from the comments in the Updates, it seems to be a cross-platform thing) that I presume echoes the latest 'true' Civ in the way many Open fan-recreations do (for XCom, Transport Tycoon, Elite, etc, but also with extra inbuilt modability) and it disappoints me with the non-stackability/-tile-sharability of allied units which seems like a retrograde step forced on the game by programmatical concerns. And there seems no way not to annoy the AI nations (move units towards their territory they dislike you; fortify units/build cities across their approach and wait for them to discover you and they also dislike you; expand away from your founding city in the opposite direction and they encounter your capital first... they dislike you). Yes, there's an appeasement/paying-off mechanism, but either it's broken or I am.


Or it may just be that I've gone past the basic plasticity of my brain that I had three or four decades ago and, goshdarnit!, why are they messing with things that used to work! (Things that were themselves tweaks of things that worked well enough, but at the time I appreciated the jump from Doom to DoomII far more than I felt the advantage of what came after - Duke Nukem 3D excepted, the shrill sound of the subway train squeal background atmospheric effect also now coming to mind alongside the colonial piping of Col...)



[1] An 's' because I'd often be the English (at least at first), goddamnit!

[2] Ironically, my two favourite starting nations on Earth-map. Zulus if I could quickly get a unit up to blockade the block that was badically Suez before any other nation got into Africa by land, the USof Americans something similar but with Panama or thereabouts, so I didn't immediately have the Aztecs to worry about (just Barbarians).

[3] Being on the DF fora here with me, I know you'll all appreciate that a game can be primitive-looking but not primitive-playing!

[Majestic7]

This was a wonderful game, easily the best of all Civ series and the writing was excellent, all the quotes for technology and so forth... I'm sad the space civilization remake thing just sucks in comparison. Same with Pandora, which is basically a remake with the names filed off. In both, writing is just miles off.