Reviving this topic as a place for me to talk about alpha Centauri, if only even for one post.
Recently I bought this on GoG dot com. I was like "Wow, I've never played AC, but I love Civ! I should totally play that!" So I bought it for 6 bucks. At first I had some issued getting it to run well on a win7 netbook, but now it's fixed up all nice - and in windowed mode, too!
I started out on a regular game. It was frustrating at first because it was a little more complicated than regular Civ 2, but with the help of the Tour, I figured it out. Some things I still haven't completely solved (like when you're a land unit sandwiched between a vertical line of water on one side and an allied yet not owned unit on the other, you can't make any moves because all of the ones involving backing away from the unit are blocked by water!) and how to most effectively transport land units across continents (I'm guessing a Troop Transport unit but I haven't tried that.)
My first game ended in a spiral of disaster as both my bases were surrounded by mindworms and one faction had broken our treaty because I didn't get a low-move unit outside of their borders in enough time. My second game was better: I found an artifact in a monolith at the very start, made an alliance with a faction in the first two turns... and then two turns after that, the faction stole my artifact! You know what I did? I used two of the starting units and CRUSHED THAT FACTION into a small powdery substance.
In fact, I've found that eliminating at least one faction very early on in the game if I can somehow makes the game a little easier on me. I haven't gotten to the mid game yet, though. Meanwhile, I've discovered that armored units with laser or impact are wonderful for taking on wandering enemy aliens.
Things I love so far about SMAC:
1) Unit crafting. So many possibilities. I like to attempt to get the first armor as early as possible and then mostly only produce armored units.
2) The mindworms. Great way to level up a unit, and provides me with an actual reason to defend my bases when I'm not at war.
3) The vast amount of things you can just find lying around in pods, even on water. Like Civ 2 tribal villages on steroids.
Things I don't understand about SMAC:
1) What does leveling up a unit actually do? Or, ranking it up. I can see no visible stat difference between the first rank and Hardened, for example.
2) How do I choose which specific technology to work towards next? The tour never seemed to bring it up, maybe it's just a menu item I'm missing or a GUI element I haven't noticed.