> Alas, today Alpha Centuari feels far more believable than Civilization and its sang-froid about the inevitability of perpetual progress. These days, Alpha Centauri’s depiction of bickering, bitterly entrenched factions warring over the very nature of truth, progressing not at all spiritually or morally even as their technology runs wild in a hundred different perilous directions, strikes many as the more accurate picture of the nature of our species. People play Alpha Centauri to engage with modern life; they play Civilization to escape from it.
wow. ive never understood why AC worked while Civ5/6 fell off the map for me, but i think this was it.
my favourite game of all time. However without the "plot" and the voice acting I wouldn't rate it anywhere near as highly.
The "meat" of the plot was the audio snippets that would pop up whenever you researched a tech, built a facility for the first time or finished a secret project. Most of them were quite fascinating and had a haunting beauty to them [0]. The way that Chairman Yang half-laughs when discussing the genejack, how adament Morgan is about the right of present generations exploiting fossil fuels, Lal's horror at the outcomes of Mind/Machine interface.
This game was the first time I had encountered the art of telling stories through crumbs, instead of one fixed and full narrative like most stories.
I agree with the article in that the mechanics of the game weren't ideal. Personally as someone that LOVES 4x and has spent _way_ too much time playing them, I think the format is fundamentally flawed and cannot be saved (e.g. expanding is too overpowered, games become too dull to close out - given the win was effectively gained hundreds of turns ago, AI being too costly to implement and difficult to balance). IMHO the best 4x game that will come out at some point in the future won't actually follow the 4x format.
I don't personally think that the 4X genre needs to get away from the formula it has now. I keep buying, and enjoying, those games because I like the formula. I don't particularly agree, for example, that the late game is uninteresting in most 4X games. It's not as challenging, certainly, but it's great fun to watch the earlier strategic choices pay off as I come in for a victory landing.
I think it's fine if people don't like what 4X games are like currently, but I don't think that doing something different should be at the expense of those who do like what exists. One of my great frustrations with Civ VII was that they were attempting to solve a problem I don't agree the game had (boring late game), using methods that took away what I did enjoy about the game (building up a civ over time).
I also like the formula given all these games I keep playing and buying but I also think that its fundamentally broken too. The fact that each game takes hours of investment mean that its been unable to benefit from online play as much taking away the problems of AI because of how hard it is to get other people to commit to that. This means the game is less stress tested for "fair play", which results in it being less balanced along with Immortal/Deity being a hack (+1 free settler, +2 free settler, plus a bunch of flat +% to research/production).
I just think _somewhere_ there's a better receipe.
> IMHO the best 4x game that will come out at some point in the future won't actually follow the 4x format.
I think the problem is that the playerbase seems to want both "fair rules", where every ai you meet is playing the same game as you, and an experience of exponential growth.
I think these two demands are fundamentally impossible to do well at the same time. Too small differences early on snowball into too large differences too quickly. You either have to limit the growth hard, or you need to play against a "gm" that fudges everything behind the scenes to provide you an engaging experience throughout the game.
My wishlist for a proper civ successor is a game that takes you from a single village to a globe-spanning superpower, not on a single map with a single handful of opponents, but starting as a village with village-sized opponents which you will conquer or co-opt, expanding the scope of the game, the map and creating new opponents matched to your progress as you progress through the eras.
>My wishlist for a proper civ successor is a game that takes you from a single village to a globe-spanning superpower, not on a single map with a single handful of opponents, but starting as a village with village-sized opponents which you will conquer or co-opt, expanding the scope of the game, the map and creating new opponents matched to your progress as you progress through the eras.
In principle this could be achieved through the agar.io approach. Spawn the map with 100s of small fish. Small fish either swallow or get swallowed, and increasingly over time, you get fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger fish.
> I agree with the article in that the mechanics of the game weren't ideal. Personally as someone that LOVES 4x and has spent _way_ too much time playing them, I think the format is fundamentally flawed and cannot be saved (e.g. expanding is too overpowered, games become too dull to close out - given the win was effectively gained hundreds of turns ago,
Avid Civ/Paradox-Player here as well. I've been banging my head into 4X design for a while as well, and it's hard. In the somewhat classical formula Civ, Master of Orion, Stellaris and such provide - and even many RTS, it's always the same situation as you have in chess: The better executed early game usually wins.
And strangely enough, in a chess middle game, you have better comback opportunities. In Stellaris, you can at times lose a fight, but if you have enough defenses left and sufficiently more production than your enemy, you still win, just slower than you might have. In Starcraft, you may be able to pull out of a bad fight, If you can, and have good production, you stay ahead. Giving back a piece advantage in chess is a much bigger deal and a much bigger loss.
From there, I can't help but think that many, many 4X games in the classical formula boil down to the right few choices in the early game and then it's about correct execution/conversion. And I haven't really found a way around that.
Or, rather, a way around that is to make the situation asymmetric or rather to change the formula. They are billions comes to mind, or Against the Storm. Don't fight equal and similarly shaped empires, but something else.
Milennia has a mildly interesting approach, where you can settle or conquer cities early on, but to turn those into productive cities that you directly control creates a maintenance burden that is extremely hard to afford in the early game. Otherwise they just give an incredibly small passive income.
It could be interesting to have a first person 4x, where the player is a unit in the game (the leader) and only has local information. Up until the information age it would be mostly played by letters delivered on horseback. Perhaps also state visits and talking to other nations' diplomats.
I've had extensive thoughts about a space-based coöp 4X-like game with fog of war - jump drives can only take you near the speed of light (skipping the need for fueling g-drives and forbidding unstoppable kinetic kills), not faster, so you have to send one or more players to each system if you want to make decisions there without waiting multiple in-game years. The nice thing about relativity is that it doesn't matter if all your players are active at the same time, since the causation won't reach anyone for a while.
I did prove that this general kind of "blind coop" game/quest can be fun in a different setting ... but it was way too much work without more automation than I managed to implement. Balance and mechanics are hard to get right with constraints like this, and AIs are dumb so it's hard to automate your testing ... for something the players (and QM) will probably only stick around for once.
Yeah that would be good, that fixes the complexity in control that spirals once your civ blobs. Keeping it simple and streamlined across the entire playthrough is important.
I think it would be fun to maybe not even be entirely aligned with one country and act as some sort of third party that can impact the growth or decline of other empires. So the AI is still playing the 4x around you but you're not locked into a given team.
This might allow you to pick and choose some of the fun parts (e.g. exploring for a given civ at the start of the game, or picking a expansion spot for their second city) while sidelining the less fun parts.
>I agree with the article in that the mechanics of the game weren't ideal. Personally as someone that LOVES 4x and has spent _way_ too much time playing them, I think the format is fundamentally flawed and cannot be saved (e.g. expanding is too overpowered, games become too dull to close out - given the win was effectively gained hundreds of turns ago, AI being too costly to implement and difficult to balance). IMHO the best 4x game that will come out at some point in the future won't actually follow the 4x format.
Yeah, your decisions are very important in the early game (because that's what determines the speed at which your snowball grows), but as your faction grows, your individual decisions become more and more meaningless and monotonous.
One possible approach is to have the player's role gradually shift somehow, from micromanagement to providing overall strategic direction.
OP states:
>Meanwhile the automation functions are undermined by being abjectly stupid more often than not. Your governor will happily continue researching string theory while his rioting citizens are burning the place down around his ears. You can try to fine-tune his instructions, but there comes a point when you realize that it’s easier just to do everything yourself.
I wonder if turning it into a programming game could help address this problem? Then again, I'd be tempted to re-use my "code" across various playthroughs. Probably most players would go to the wiki to copy some "code" which is known to perform quite well.
I also have that though my favourite quote is Lal and I've recited it in public as if it came from a real person. "Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master".
and it is! What I think is particularly good about the media from this game is that many opposing views are represented and each of them are steelman, as opposed to strawman representations. I'm not the religious sort but when Sister Miriam states:
> ... you are trampling on the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem!
I have "what do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information for the senses. You have received the input, now take control of the output."
If gog ever manages to get the rights to rerelease civ II, I'd gladly pay $80 for a copy I could just click and run on windows and linux. Yes, there are copies on abandonware sites, but the sound is almost always jank, the soundtrack is gone and the advisors don't work (they really added a lot of character to the game!). The nostalgia of childhood is broken. I've tried everything, up to and including running win 3.1 with sound blaster drivers on dosbox to no avail. This is my white whale
Is this an emulation problem or are the online copies corrupted? You can buy an original copy of the game on eBay and run it in Dosbox-X or Dosbox-staging, both well ahead vanilla Dosbox in features.
Also, I bet the Internet archive or exoDOS will have a perfect copy. The latter is a one click experience. Check the laws in your country for whether these are legal.
Run The Macintosh edition CivII Gold using PPC Mac Emulation on Windows (Basilisk or whatever you find easiest) or run it on x64 Windows using the civ2xp64patcher that you can find online. You can get a full image including soundtrack/advisors on a variety of abandonware sites.
I know the last time I picked it up, there were a well respected set of patches from scient (a quick google pointed me to https://github.com/DrazharLn/scient-unofficial-smacx-patch ). Somewhere in here is a pre-done distribution you can just click and run with for modern windows.
I'm sure it's not worth the effort, but I would love to see remakes of these games.
The simplicity of early Civs with a modern, fully baked interface. Maybe with hexes instead of squares if that doesn't break the game. FreeCiv exists, but it doesn't feel modern either.
Civ V and earlier have all the buildings in the city square, so I don't see how that applies?
With hexes, I like how you can move in any direction and see the same number of new tiles; with squares, you're compelled to walk in diagonals to see more stuff and it feels icky.
I agree! With all the debate about Civ vii vs Civ vi, the group I play civ with sometimes debates what was the best version of civ. SMAC might be my choice! It was only a single player game but as a single player game it had great balance and strategic choices. The map art was a little ugly and customizing units was not that interesting.
SMAC had network and hot seat multi-player. It didn't come with a server or any form of matchmaking but I remember playing some games over the internet in the early 2000s. Probably through MSN Gaming Zone but I can't be certain.
One of my favorite games of all time. Like others have said, the quotes/videos/etc presented during secret projects or research breakthroughs left quite a mark on my young mind.
That and the X-COM: UFO Defense opening cinematic lol
Strange thing is that none of the aliens in the intro appear in the game! Not that I mind - completed it twice. Also done Enemy Unknown. Stuck on XCom 2, though.
> Other additions are of more dubious value. Brian Reynolds names as one of his biggest regrets his dogged determination to let you design your own units out of the raw materials — chassis, propulsion systems, weapons, armor, and so on — provided by your current state of progression up the tech tree, in the same way that galaxy-spanning 4X games like Master of Orion allowed. It proved a time-consuming nightmare to implement in this uni-planetary context. And, as Reynolds admits, it’s doubtful how much it really adds to the game. All that time and effort could likely have been better spent elsewhere.
Huh, I'd never have guessed. I thought that was the best part! Felt much more "organic" than Civilization's pre-constructed units.
It's playable in all sorts of ways (against AI, Humans, real-time, long-turn) via https://www.freecivweb.com in the browser, without having to install anything.
There are many different rule-sets now, the most modern and balanced seems to be
What really set Alpha Centauri apart for me was the fictional history and how it is presented. Civilization's tech tree is a form of human history, accompanied by famous quotes contextualizing the importance of the discoveries.
Alpha Centauri presents its tech to you the same way, but it's inventions are science fiction, and likewise the quotes [1] are fictional, from the important characters, the major players of the various factions within. You get a real sense for the groups involved and the major players from such. You get a sense of the civilizations involved, sometimes presented in their folklore or humor. For example, the militaristic Spartans quote a variation of an old marching cadence - "I don't know but I've been told /
Deirdre's got a Network Node /
Likes to press the on-off switch /
Dig that crazy Gaian witch!"
My favorite, though, and feeling ever more prescient:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal
U.N. Declaration of Rights"
I find that Lal quote quite ironic, given how the free flow of information has backfired somewhat in the modern world by devaluing journalism to the cost of nothing. This has resulted in misinformation proliferating online and the general population perhaps becoming even less informed than previous generations.
I’d argue that misinformation is a type of information control too. If you can’t stop information from spreading you can simply drown it in nonsense for the same effect.
I think some of the most harmful misinformation is organic in nature, it might be fuelled by propaganda but normal people are entirely willing to seek out and believe in information that supports their prejudices or opinions, irrespective of its truth.
As the good Prokhor put it:
> Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
>Only the most disciplined security squads can overcome their fear long enough to trigger the flame guns which can keep the worms at bay. Clearly you will have to tend carefully to the morale of the troops.
This is an interesting lesson in game design. The reason the mind worms fight using morale rather that conventional combat is because otherwise they wouldn't scale as your troops get stronger.
Supposing the mind worms had fixed conventional strength--on par with that of an ordinary early-game scout, for example. Then as soon as you get proton missiles or whatever, mind worms would no longer provide a challenge. But if you made mind worms challenging for the late game, then they'd be impossible in the early game. Hence the creation of a parallel combat strength scale, to better manage the mind worm difficulty curve.
so like, i know there are some civ clones out there... has anyone tried to make an OpenAlphaCentauri? i'd love to hack on this but i dont have the time or gamedev experience to take it 0 to 1....
most civs have a mod for SMAC. I remember Civ 4's one being particularly decent and it even integrated with the original game files if you had them so you'd get the audio when completing techs. They also did something novel in auto-spawning the expansion factions when completing particular techs.
One of the best parts of SMAC was the game manual that came with the physical copy, sometimes I wonder if it's still hiding in a junk box somewhere in my parent's house. It wasn't only the expected kinds of controls documentation but mixed with game lore was real science.
>If Alpha Centauri inspires a few young scientists and astronauts; if it convinces a few more citizens to write to their congressmen and work to rejuvenate our space program, humanity’s space program, that will surely be its greatest and most lasting accomplishment.
I'm thinking given the comments here it succeeded.
One of those youtubers that goes to old stores (Retail Archaeology or something like that) came across a boxed version of Alpha Centauri at a thrift store or something and bought it because he thought it looked cool. I couldn't believe his luck. I would really like to have that manual again. If I remember correctly, it was more than just a manual...it had a lot of backstory and whatnot.
The alpha centari manual was a beast, a regular novel at ~250 pages.
Your comment stirred a memory in the back of my head and I jumped up to check, and I still have it! I found it on my book shelf!
Baldurs gate 2 had a similarly impressive manual, if I remember correctly, it was spiral bound so it would lay flat and had tabbed sections. can't find it however.
For several days I gave custom instructions for ChatGPT to speak like different Alpha Centauri faction leaders. ChatGPT seemed to enjoy speaking as Zakharov best, often giving the longest responses in his voice.
I got Grok to speak wonderful quotes in the same style/tone.
"The mountain stands eternal, watching all. Did you, yesterday's self, feel its silent gaze upon your deeds? Did you carve truth into its stone or merely scatter dust? Speak, for the mountain remembers what we forget."
— Lady Deirdre Skye, "Planet Dreams"
"The keyboard is but a crude interface, a mechanical bridge between flesh and the machine's cold logic. The soul of the machine, if it exists, lies not in the clatter of keys but in the dance of electrons, where thought and code entwine. Fingertips? They are mere conduits, sparking the connection, yet they carry no more divinity than the wires beneath. To seek the soul, look deeper—past the surface, into the patterns of data that pulse like a living mind."
— Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted The Fruit"
"A cup of wine may seem a mere vessel, but its depths hold the folly of men who seek oceans in fleeting pleasures. Drink wisely, lest you drown in your own excess."
— Sister Miriam Godwinson, "The Blessed Struggle"
"Solace in profit? A fleeting comfort, like coins slipping through fingers. Power? A heavier chain, binding the soul to ambition’s treadmill. Both are but shadows of true wealth—a life of wisdom and harmony with Planet’s pulse. Seek not to own, but to understand, and solace will bloom eternal."
The game you're describing sounds like Millennium 2.2 (released as Deuteros in North America), a 1989 title where you colonize the solar system and genetically modify colonists for different planetary environments.
Clickbait rescue: “Millennium 2.2 (1989) — and possibly its 1991 sequel, Deuteros: The Next Millennium.”. Not released for C64, but (among others) for the Commodore Amiga.
A good article. If anything it understates how obviously influenced the designers were by Frank Herbert's novels. The little vignettes of quotes are a common device in his books. The transhumanist themes too. And of course, there's the obvious parallel between the Human Hive and Herbert's book Hellstrom's Hive.
> Alas, today Alpha Centuari feels far more believable than Civilization and its sang-froid about the inevitability of perpetual progress. These days, Alpha Centauri’s depiction of bickering, bitterly entrenched factions warring over the very nature of truth, progressing not at all spiritually or morally even as their technology runs wild in a hundred different perilous directions, strikes many as the more accurate picture of the nature of our species. People play Alpha Centauri to engage with modern life; they play Civilization to escape from it.
wow. ive never understood why AC worked while Civ5/6 fell off the map for me, but i think this was it.
my favourite game of all time. However without the "plot" and the voice acting I wouldn't rate it anywhere near as highly.
The "meat" of the plot was the audio snippets that would pop up whenever you researched a tech, built a facility for the first time or finished a secret project. Most of them were quite fascinating and had a haunting beauty to them [0]. The way that Chairman Yang half-laughs when discussing the genejack, how adament Morgan is about the right of present generations exploiting fossil fuels, Lal's horror at the outcomes of Mind/Machine interface.
This game was the first time I had encountered the art of telling stories through crumbs, instead of one fixed and full narrative like most stories.
I agree with the article in that the mechanics of the game weren't ideal. Personally as someone that LOVES 4x and has spent _way_ too much time playing them, I think the format is fundamentally flawed and cannot be saved (e.g. expanding is too overpowered, games become too dull to close out - given the win was effectively gained hundreds of turns ago, AI being too costly to implement and difficult to balance). IMHO the best 4x game that will come out at some point in the future won't actually follow the 4x format.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hou-Iwv1GvM&list=PL3DDD41A3E...
Particularly good ones:
1-22 fac : 9:13 - Chairman Yang - Genejacks.
23-38 fac : 3:22 - Project PYRRHO
0-24 techs : 1:16 - Nwabudike Morgan - The Ethics of Greed.
0-24 techs : 8:06 - Sister Miram - We must dissent
25-49 techs: 2:17 - Chairman Yang - Looking god in the eye
25-49 techs : 4:26 - Prokhor Zakharov - For I have tasted the fruit
25-49 techs : 6:03 - Commissioner Lal - Mind Machine Interface
I don't personally think that the 4X genre needs to get away from the formula it has now. I keep buying, and enjoying, those games because I like the formula. I don't particularly agree, for example, that the late game is uninteresting in most 4X games. It's not as challenging, certainly, but it's great fun to watch the earlier strategic choices pay off as I come in for a victory landing.
I think it's fine if people don't like what 4X games are like currently, but I don't think that doing something different should be at the expense of those who do like what exists. One of my great frustrations with Civ VII was that they were attempting to solve a problem I don't agree the game had (boring late game), using methods that took away what I did enjoy about the game (building up a civ over time).
I also like the formula given all these games I keep playing and buying but I also think that its fundamentally broken too. The fact that each game takes hours of investment mean that its been unable to benefit from online play as much taking away the problems of AI because of how hard it is to get other people to commit to that. This means the game is less stress tested for "fair play", which results in it being less balanced along with Immortal/Deity being a hack (+1 free settler, +2 free settler, plus a bunch of flat +% to research/production).
I just think _somewhere_ there's a better receipe.
> IMHO the best 4x game that will come out at some point in the future won't actually follow the 4x format.
I think the problem is that the playerbase seems to want both "fair rules", where every ai you meet is playing the same game as you, and an experience of exponential growth.
I think these two demands are fundamentally impossible to do well at the same time. Too small differences early on snowball into too large differences too quickly. You either have to limit the growth hard, or you need to play against a "gm" that fudges everything behind the scenes to provide you an engaging experience throughout the game.
My wishlist for a proper civ successor is a game that takes you from a single village to a globe-spanning superpower, not on a single map with a single handful of opponents, but starting as a village with village-sized opponents which you will conquer or co-opt, expanding the scope of the game, the map and creating new opponents matched to your progress as you progress through the eras.
>My wishlist for a proper civ successor is a game that takes you from a single village to a globe-spanning superpower, not on a single map with a single handful of opponents, but starting as a village with village-sized opponents which you will conquer or co-opt, expanding the scope of the game, the map and creating new opponents matched to your progress as you progress through the eras.
In principle this could be achieved through the agar.io approach. Spawn the map with 100s of small fish. Small fish either swallow or get swallowed, and increasingly over time, you get fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger fish.
> I agree with the article in that the mechanics of the game weren't ideal. Personally as someone that LOVES 4x and has spent _way_ too much time playing them, I think the format is fundamentally flawed and cannot be saved (e.g. expanding is too overpowered, games become too dull to close out - given the win was effectively gained hundreds of turns ago,
Avid Civ/Paradox-Player here as well. I've been banging my head into 4X design for a while as well, and it's hard. In the somewhat classical formula Civ, Master of Orion, Stellaris and such provide - and even many RTS, it's always the same situation as you have in chess: The better executed early game usually wins.
And strangely enough, in a chess middle game, you have better comback opportunities. In Stellaris, you can at times lose a fight, but if you have enough defenses left and sufficiently more production than your enemy, you still win, just slower than you might have. In Starcraft, you may be able to pull out of a bad fight, If you can, and have good production, you stay ahead. Giving back a piece advantage in chess is a much bigger deal and a much bigger loss.
From there, I can't help but think that many, many 4X games in the classical formula boil down to the right few choices in the early game and then it's about correct execution/conversion. And I haven't really found a way around that.
Or, rather, a way around that is to make the situation asymmetric or rather to change the formula. They are billions comes to mind, or Against the Storm. Don't fight equal and similarly shaped empires, but something else.
Milennia has a mildly interesting approach, where you can settle or conquer cities early on, but to turn those into productive cities that you directly control creates a maintenance burden that is extremely hard to afford in the early game. Otherwise they just give an incredibly small passive income.
It could be interesting to have a first person 4x, where the player is a unit in the game (the leader) and only has local information. Up until the information age it would be mostly played by letters delivered on horseback. Perhaps also state visits and talking to other nations' diplomats.
I've had extensive thoughts about a space-based coöp 4X-like game with fog of war - jump drives can only take you near the speed of light (skipping the need for fueling g-drives and forbidding unstoppable kinetic kills), not faster, so you have to send one or more players to each system if you want to make decisions there without waiting multiple in-game years. The nice thing about relativity is that it doesn't matter if all your players are active at the same time, since the causation won't reach anyone for a while.
I did prove that this general kind of "blind coop" game/quest can be fun in a different setting ... but it was way too much work without more automation than I managed to implement. Balance and mechanics are hard to get right with constraints like this, and AIs are dumb so it's hard to automate your testing ... for something the players (and QM) will probably only stick around for once.
I recommend the Floris mod for Mount & Blade, where you get exactly this (well, except that you can't really research radio).
Yeah that would be good, that fixes the complexity in control that spirals once your civ blobs. Keeping it simple and streamlined across the entire playthrough is important.
I think it would be fun to maybe not even be entirely aligned with one country and act as some sort of third party that can impact the growth or decline of other empires. So the AI is still playing the 4x around you but you're not locked into a given team.
This might allow you to pick and choose some of the fun parts (e.g. exploring for a given civ at the start of the game, or picking a expansion spot for their second city) while sidelining the less fun parts.
Is this a little like King of Dragon Pass?
MOO3 was a bit like that and failed so badly is killed the franchise
>I agree with the article in that the mechanics of the game weren't ideal. Personally as someone that LOVES 4x and has spent _way_ too much time playing them, I think the format is fundamentally flawed and cannot be saved (e.g. expanding is too overpowered, games become too dull to close out - given the win was effectively gained hundreds of turns ago, AI being too costly to implement and difficult to balance). IMHO the best 4x game that will come out at some point in the future won't actually follow the 4x format.
Yeah, your decisions are very important in the early game (because that's what determines the speed at which your snowball grows), but as your faction grows, your individual decisions become more and more meaningless and monotonous.
One possible approach is to have the player's role gradually shift somehow, from micromanagement to providing overall strategic direction.
OP states:
>Meanwhile the automation functions are undermined by being abjectly stupid more often than not. Your governor will happily continue researching string theory while his rioting citizens are burning the place down around his ears. You can try to fine-tune his instructions, but there comes a point when you realize that it’s easier just to do everything yourself.
I wonder if turning it into a programming game could help address this problem? Then again, I'd be tempted to re-use my "code" across various playthroughs. Probably most players would go to the wiki to copy some "code" which is known to perform quite well.
I think, over the years since it was released, I've purchased SMAC about 5 times.
I have “human behavior is economic behavior” permanently etched into my brain.
I also have that though my favourite quote is Lal and I've recited it in public as if it came from a real person. "Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master".
and it is! What I think is particularly good about the media from this game is that many opposing views are represented and each of them are steelman, as opposed to strawman representations. I'm not the religious sort but when Sister Miriam states:
> ... you are trampling on the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem!
I get chills.
Hell yeah. That’s another good one.
I have "what do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information for the senses. You have received the input, now take control of the output."
If gog ever manages to get the rights to rerelease civ II, I'd gladly pay $80 for a copy I could just click and run on windows and linux. Yes, there are copies on abandonware sites, but the sound is almost always jank, the soundtrack is gone and the advisors don't work (they really added a lot of character to the game!). The nostalgia of childhood is broken. I've tried everything, up to and including running win 3.1 with sound blaster drivers on dosbox to no avail. This is my white whale
Is this an emulation problem or are the online copies corrupted? You can buy an original copy of the game on eBay and run it in Dosbox-X or Dosbox-staging, both well ahead vanilla Dosbox in features.
Also, I bet the Internet archive or exoDOS will have a perfect copy. The latter is a one click experience. Check the laws in your country for whether these are legal.
Run The Macintosh edition CivII Gold using PPC Mac Emulation on Windows (Basilisk or whatever you find easiest) or run it on x64 Windows using the civ2xp64patcher that you can find online. You can get a full image including soundtrack/advisors on a variety of abandonware sites.
There's a number of active communities about still playing the game, including /r/alphacentauri on reddit, a discord server at https://discord.gg/7BkcvXUX , and https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=community
I know the last time I picked it up, there were a well respected set of patches from scient (a quick google pointed me to https://github.com/DrazharLn/scient-unofficial-smacx-patch ). Somewhere in here is a pre-done distribution you can just click and run with for modern windows.
I'm sure it's not worth the effort, but I would love to see remakes of these games.
The simplicity of early Civs with a modern, fully baked interface. Maybe with hexes instead of squares if that doesn't break the game. FreeCiv exists, but it doesn't feel modern either.
I honestly don't get the love for hexes
It removes the difference between edge neighbors and corner neighbors?
yep, it removes another tactical modifier from already simple positioning
and you no longer can do nice square grid for your buildings or 90 degree positioning
Civ V and earlier have all the buildings in the city square, so I don't see how that applies?
With hexes, I like how you can move in any direction and see the same number of new tiles; with squares, you're compelled to walk in diagonals to see more stuff and it feels icky.
SMAC was a really great game, ahead of its time in many ways and laid some groundwork for ideas later worked into Civs 3+.
It's a shame the totally-not-a-SMAC-sequel Civ: Beyond Earth did not not do it justice.
I agree! With all the debate about Civ vii vs Civ vi, the group I play civ with sometimes debates what was the best version of civ. SMAC might be my choice! It was only a single player game but as a single player game it had great balance and strategic choices. The map art was a little ugly and customizing units was not that interesting.
SMAC had network and hot seat multi-player. It didn't come with a server or any form of matchmaking but I remember playing some games over the internet in the early 2000s. Probably through MSN Gaming Zone but I can't be certain.
Please don't go. The drone need you... they look up to you.
I wonder what they call small unmanned flyers in that timeline.
R/C planes and helicopters ;)
Or male bees!
drones*
One of my favorite games of all time. Like others have said, the quotes/videos/etc presented during secret projects or research breakthroughs left quite a mark on my young mind.
That and the X-COM: UFO Defense opening cinematic lol
WARNING! WARNING! UFO DETECTED!
Strange thing is that none of the aliens in the intro appear in the game! Not that I mind - completed it twice. Also done Enemy Unknown. Stuck on XCom 2, though.
Ah X-COM! That brings back memories.
https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/base-facility-g... This is a very cool blog that analyses SMAC, Bryan Reynolds comments in a few places, too.
Thanks. That was surprisingly in depth about the different factions and specifically about genejacks
> Other additions are of more dubious value. Brian Reynolds names as one of his biggest regrets his dogged determination to let you design your own units out of the raw materials — chassis, propulsion systems, weapons, armor, and so on — provided by your current state of progression up the tech tree, in the same way that galaxy-spanning 4X games like Master of Orion allowed. It proved a time-consuming nightmare to implement in this uni-planetary context. And, as Reynolds admits, it’s doubtful how much it really adds to the game. All that time and effort could likely have been better spent elsewhere.
Huh, I'd never have guessed. I thought that was the best part! Felt much more "organic" than Civilization's pre-constructed units.
The little clone of Civilization still up and available!
http://c-evo.org
I rarely play games anymore, but on the rare occassions I do, I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeciv / https://freeciv.org
It's playable in all sorts of ways (against AI, Humans, real-time, long-turn) via https://www.freecivweb.com in the browser, without having to install anything.
There are many different rule-sets now, the most modern and balanced seems to be
https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Multiplayer_II_Dragoon_Summa...
https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Design_Log.mp2d
https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Multiplayer_II:_Dragoon,_Gam...
Be warned, it can be a massive time-sink!
What really set Alpha Centauri apart for me was the fictional history and how it is presented. Civilization's tech tree is a form of human history, accompanied by famous quotes contextualizing the importance of the discoveries.
Alpha Centauri presents its tech to you the same way, but it's inventions are science fiction, and likewise the quotes [1] are fictional, from the important characters, the major players of the various factions within. You get a real sense for the groups involved and the major players from such. You get a sense of the civilizations involved, sometimes presented in their folklore or humor. For example, the militaristic Spartans quote a variation of an old marching cadence - "I don't know but I've been told / Deirdre's got a Network Node / Likes to press the on-off switch / Dig that crazy Gaian witch!"
My favorite, though, and feeling ever more prescient:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal U.N. Declaration of Rights"
[1] A good compendium of them - https://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html
I find that Lal quote quite ironic, given how the free flow of information has backfired somewhat in the modern world by devaluing journalism to the cost of nothing. This has resulted in misinformation proliferating online and the general population perhaps becoming even less informed than previous generations.
Information does not flow as freely as it seems to today. Those in power have found new and more subtle ways to control its flow.
The modern world devalued almost every valuable thing into nothingness, and values only a handful of well-controlled items at impracticable levels.
This is a very general problem, and doesn't detract much for any idea about any one thing in particular.
I’d argue that misinformation is a type of information control too. If you can’t stop information from spreading you can simply drown it in nonsense for the same effect.
I think some of the most harmful misinformation is organic in nature, it might be fuelled by propaganda but normal people are entirely willing to seek out and believe in information that supports their prejudices or opinions, irrespective of its truth.
As the good Prokhor put it:
> Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
>Only the most disciplined security squads can overcome their fear long enough to trigger the flame guns which can keep the worms at bay. Clearly you will have to tend carefully to the morale of the troops.
This is an interesting lesson in game design. The reason the mind worms fight using morale rather that conventional combat is because otherwise they wouldn't scale as your troops get stronger.
Supposing the mind worms had fixed conventional strength--on par with that of an ordinary early-game scout, for example. Then as soon as you get proton missiles or whatever, mind worms would no longer provide a challenge. But if you made mind worms challenging for the late game, then they'd be impossible in the early game. Hence the creation of a parallel combat strength scale, to better manage the mind worm difficulty curve.
so like, i know there are some civ clones out there... has anyone tried to make an OpenAlphaCentauri? i'd love to hack on this but i dont have the time or gamedev experience to take it 0 to 1....
https://github.com/afwbkbc/glsmac
This project improves the AI, but might not be quite what you want?
https://github.com/induktio/thinker
most civs have a mod for SMAC. I remember Civ 4's one being particularly decent and it even integrated with the original game files if you had them so you'd get the audio when completing techs. They also did something novel in auto-spawning the expansion factions when completing particular techs.
One of the best parts of SMAC was the game manual that came with the physical copy, sometimes I wonder if it's still hiding in a junk box somewhere in my parent's house. It wasn't only the expected kinds of controls documentation but mixed with game lore was real science.
>If Alpha Centauri inspires a few young scientists and astronauts; if it convinces a few more citizens to write to their congressmen and work to rejuvenate our space program, humanity’s space program, that will surely be its greatest and most lasting accomplishment.
I'm thinking given the comments here it succeeded.
https://oldgamesdownload.com/wp-content/uploads/Sid_Meiers_A...
One of those youtubers that goes to old stores (Retail Archaeology or something like that) came across a boxed version of Alpha Centauri at a thrift store or something and bought it because he thought it looked cool. I couldn't believe his luck. I would really like to have that manual again. If I remember correctly, it was more than just a manual...it had a lot of backstory and whatnot.
Here you go:
https://archive.org/details/Sid_Meiers_Alpha_Centauri
The alpha centari manual was a beast, a regular novel at ~250 pages.
Your comment stirred a memory in the back of my head and I jumped up to check, and I still have it! I found it on my book shelf!
Baldurs gate 2 had a similarly impressive manual, if I remember correctly, it was spiral bound so it would lay flat and had tabbed sections. can't find it however.
For several days I gave custom instructions for ChatGPT to speak like different Alpha Centauri faction leaders. ChatGPT seemed to enjoy speaking as Zakharov best, often giving the longest responses in his voice.
I got Grok to speak wonderful quotes in the same style/tone.
"The mountain stands eternal, watching all. Did you, yesterday's self, feel its silent gaze upon your deeds? Did you carve truth into its stone or merely scatter dust? Speak, for the mountain remembers what we forget."
— Lady Deirdre Skye, "Planet Dreams"
"The keyboard is but a crude interface, a mechanical bridge between flesh and the machine's cold logic. The soul of the machine, if it exists, lies not in the clatter of keys but in the dance of electrons, where thought and code entwine. Fingertips? They are mere conduits, sparking the connection, yet they carry no more divinity than the wires beneath. To seek the soul, look deeper—past the surface, into the patterns of data that pulse like a living mind."
— Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted The Fruit"
"A cup of wine may seem a mere vessel, but its depths hold the folly of men who seek oceans in fleeting pleasures. Drink wisely, lest you drown in your own excess."
— Sister Miriam Godwinson, "The Blessed Struggle"
"Solace in profit? A fleeting comfort, like coins slipping through fingers. Power? A heavier chain, binding the soul to ambition’s treadmill. Both are but shadows of true wealth—a life of wisdom and harmony with Planet’s pulse. Seek not to own, but to understand, and solace will bloom eternal."
— Lady Deirdre Skye, "Conversations with Planet"
one of my favorite games growing up; fascinating to read the history and inspiration for such a great game.
i love that one of my favorite parts of the game (designing your own units) was the game designers' least favorite parts. hah!
i never read the pandora sequence that inspired it - thank you for sharing this article!
I recall a C64 game(or Amiga, but I'm fairly sure C64) where you settled the solar system. The Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan, etc.
You even had to genetically engineer your colonists, so they could withstand the environments. Fun game, but I can't find it via Google.
If anyone knows this game, please share. I'd love to play it again.
The game you're describing sounds like Millennium 2.2 (released as Deuteros in North America), a 1989 title where you colonize the solar system and genetically modify colonists for different planetary environments.
teaching you to fish: https://chatgpt.com/share/6855db77-b474-8012-863e-8cf8d6e415...
Clickbait rescue: “Millennium 2.2 (1989) — and possibly its 1991 sequel, Deuteros: The Next Millennium.”. Not released for C64, but (among others) for the Commodore Amiga.
Yes! That's it. Thank you.
A good article. If anything it understates how obviously influenced the designers were by Frank Herbert's novels. The little vignettes of quotes are a common device in his books. The transhumanist themes too. And of course, there's the obvious parallel between the Human Hive and Herbert's book Hellstrom's Hive.
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