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[Robsoie]

Alpha Centauri has always been my favorite Civ game, i think the reason is not the actual setting (despite it plays a lot in the game with Planet being sentient and having then an impact on the actual gameplay depending on your actions/researches) but how they designed the AI.

It's the one in the Civ genre in which i felt the AI had an actual personnality and was making sense in their betrayal or friendship with me and why they were murdering each other and why they were talking to me the way they were doing.

It's hard to say why specificallt AC, because there are plenty other Civ and 4X games in which the AI has some background story and personnality in their dialogue and trait influencing how they play. But Alpha Centauri is the one in which i really felt they weren't just random opponents with only assigned traits.
Is it the quality of the writing or that there are actual books featuring those characters that make their game version feeling they're a lot more "real" ?
I am not sure, but the result is that AC is my favorite Civ of them all and in all those years i replay with it from time to time.

I usually play with Scient Patch 2.1 for all the bug and crash fixes :
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=365

and to solve some high CPU usage for nothing (due to AC being so old that it does not know it does not need to eat so much of your modern CPU) , this very good "smac cpu fix" :
https://github.com/vinceho/smac-cpu-fix
but you'll need to edit a file ( loader.ini ) to prevent the AI being slower to think :
https://github.com/vinceho/smac-cpu-fix/issues/3#issuecomment-577926220

[ChairmanPoo]

And the gameplay, too. I agree, I've not been comfortable with any other civ gsme after smac. FFH2 mod for civ4 was decent. Some other niche ones. But SMAC was special

[Niveras]

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.)

Agreed, the various quotes and having different voice actors pop up with every building and tech and secret project was a great immersion factor.

Civ4 took the idea, but they messed up the best part by having one guy do all the quotes. Now there's no variety or character; you could argue Nimoy's deadpan "beep beep beep" was funny because it was deadpan, but there's no real inflection or character to the rest. Even AC had two different "generic" people (one male, one female) for quotes that didn't come from AC leaders.

What they should have done is split techs/projects according to category and era. Then either choose an appropriate leader to voice them (you wouldn't necessarily need to have a VA for every leader), or more generally have different actor for different categories (even if they aren't civ leaders), to read the quotes. It wouldn't be quite as clean since so many of AC's quotes are from the leaders themselves - whereas the Civ quotes are historical figures that aren't among the choice of leaders - so you couldn't cleanly attribute voice doing the quote from the source of the quote itself, but it would help mix things up.

I would need to check Beyond Earth to remind myself how they handled it, but I think they went with 1, maybe 2, generic voices rather than voiced leaders again.

[Damiac]

I don't know if it's just nostalgia talking, but I seem to remember the AI in AC not being hilariously terrible at the game.  That's a big problem in civ 6.

I also agree that the game was just bursting with personality.  Civ feels so generic now.

[Iduno]

I think the one faction I could never win as was the church faction. Malus to research and bonus to spying sounded like the MOO2 spies, which was cool. I'm not sure I ever sent in an agent who wasn't immediately found and killed.

[Robsoie]

Probably some difficulty setting too high, with Miriam i had a lot of fun in the probe game , and probe teams surely helped to overcome the research malus
edit : there were also some bugs with probes that are solved by the Scient Patch i linked up there.

[martinuzz]

AC was great fun indeed. If there's ever a GOG giveaway of it I'll be sure to grab it. I tended to either go University or Gaia.

For the rest of the Civ series, I have two favourites share a first place, civ2 (test of time edition), and civ 4, for all the glorious perk-levelling doomstacks and total conversion mods. Fall from Heaven 2, Caveman to Cosmos, Realism Invictus, just to name a few.

Ofcourse civ1 is a classic I should not forget to mention, I had lots of fun with that on a 8086 XT back in the days.  Civ 3 kinda sucked. Civ 5, WHERE'S MY DOOMSTAX?Civ 6, not sure yet, grabbed it for free, not mightily impressed, kinda feels the same as Civ 5.

[Rolan7]

I also played Civ 2 Test of Time!  It had an incredible amount of modability and came with some really interesting mods, including a sort of "Alpha Centauri lite" where the Civ spaceship project actually unlocks a new planet to explore and exploit.  And I think one set on an alien world with biotech where there are three other planets/moons to expand to early on.  And I think a mod where you build an empire in Hell?  It was really something, and I liked messing with the scripts.

I think the one faction I could never win as was the church faction. Malus to research and bonus to spying sounded like the MOO2 spies, which was cool. I'm not sure I ever sent in an agent who wasn't immediately found and killed.

It's tough, particularly since you have to research probe teams but you can't even start researching for like 10 turns!  No research whatsoever!  And mindworms, the typical way to overcome someone's combat tech advantage, will always be a bit weaker due to the faction's Planet penalty.  You certainly won't be capturing wild ones from turn 1 like the Gaians can.

(Pro tip I didn't notice myself:  Moving into any fungus squares can spawn new mindworms, which is typically a good thing as Gaians.  Having a captured mindworm frolick in the fungus is high-level strategic thinking)

[E. Albright]

I guess there are fewer nerds and lower average IQ among the computer populace now.

I'd hesitate to phrase this as "lower average IQ" - the more likely explanation seems to me to be shorter attention spans. Some of that is directly a result of increased democratization of gaming, with its related increase in more people casually gaming, with less free time to devote to particular games.

[George_Chickens]

I don't know if it's just nostalgia talking, but I seem to remember the AI in AC not being hilariously terrible at the game.  That's a big problem in civ 6

I'd say that the AI is better than 6, but not quite as good as 4 or 5.

I think the one faction I could never win as was the church faction. Malus to research and bonus to spying sounded like the MOO2 spies, which was cool. I'm not sure I ever sent in an agent who wasn't immediately found and killed.

The trick is to subjugate an AI as soon as possible for the early game advantage.

[Sharp]

SMAC is the best Civ game, maybe even the best 4X game, just everything about it, the game design, the art, the dialogue and story! All the various rules were brilliant! Nervestapling!

The AI still needs work but I don't think I've seen a Civ game with better AI anyway.

It had some mechanics that were abusable but it was great, it never felt like you were waiting for turns to pass, there was usually something to do.

I can't really get into Stellaris because a lot of it just feels like you are constantly just waiting, you get a decision to make every year or so, constant fast forwarding.

[Robsoie]

About AI improvement for Alpha Centauri, there's the Thinker mod that does just that :
https://github.com/induktio/thinker
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=21013.0

Thinker is an AI improvement mod for Alpha Centauri: Alien Crossfire. By patching the game to use an additional dll, new functionality can be developed in C++. This mod increases the level of challenge in single player while providing many gameplay enhancements. Some of the features include:

    Vastly improved production/terraforming AI
    Rewritten code for AI social engineering choices
    AI terraformers prioritize condenser-farms, boreholes and forests
    AI builds more crawlers and deploys them better
    AI deploys colony pods much sooner instead of wandering on the map
    Unit auto design feature creates improved probe teams and AAA garrisons
    Many enhancements to random map generation/spawn locations
    Does not affect player-run factions (with some exceptions)
    Minimal changes to vanilla game mechanics
    Game binary includes Scient's patches

[Aoi]

I can't really get into Stellaris because a lot of it just feels like you are constantly just waiting, you get a decision to make every year or so, constant fast forwarding.

What made Stellaris finally 'click' for me was somebody pointing out that it's a political simulator, as opposed to... whatever you'd call stuff like Civilization that clearly delineates the two styles of play (4X doesn't quite work).

[EuchreJack]

I think the one faction I could never win as was the church faction. Malus to research and bonus to spying sounded like the MOO2 spies, which was cool. I'm not sure I ever sent in an agent who wasn't immediately found and killed.

The trick is to subjugate an AI as soon as possible for the early game advantage.

Miriam was the only faction with which I actually won.  I sorta went in expecting to lose due to research, so I just militarized and crushed everyone.  Waiting 10 years to start research isn't such a handicap when you've vassalized a third of the other factions.
Don't forget their Special bonuses: When attacking, units gain a +25% attack bonus
That makes up for poor tech, especially early on.

[George_Chickens]

I think the one faction I could never win as was the church faction. Malus to research and bonus to spying sounded like the MOO2 spies, which was cool. I'm not sure I ever sent in an agent who wasn't immediately found and killed.

The trick is to subjugate an AI as soon as possible for the early game advantage.

Miriam was the only faction with which I actually won.  I sorta went in expecting to lose due to research, so I just militarized and crushed everyone.  Waiting 10 years to start research isn't such a handicap when you've vassalized a third of the other factions.
Don't forget their Special bonuses: When attacking, units gain a +25% attack bonus
That makes up for poor tech, especially early on.

Not only do you get the attack bonus, you should be able to crap out units at a rate only surpassed by the Hive. It's very, very easy to overwhelm pretty much anyone in the early game and get that sweet, sweet advantage that you need.