Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

I've heard a few people mention this game around here. I recently got a hold of the game and really enjoy it. It has a superb blend of city-building, combat, political manipulation, strategy, tactics, and a great setting to boot. It took me a while to get a handle of the interface, but once I recognized all the bits for what they were and learned the hot-keys I found just as serviceable as it would have been 10 years ago, though it could stand to have some improvements made. I personally enjoy creating and managing cities, balancing out their food, mineral and energy supplies, working to maximize the terra-forming space to full potential, all the while deflecting probe teams and putting down drone riots. Its great fun.

So who else around here plays SMAC?

'I'll show him a martyr! I'm going to do die SO HARD'

I do. It's great!

Feedback Of Heteronormative Gender Stereotypes in Anime

I got it and played it because of TV Tropes, myself. It's certainly interesting, but I just can't get too much into it. It's sort of a Seinfeld Is Unfunny problem - all it's "new" stuff has been done again by all the galactic empire games out there, except for the terraforming parts, and the "old" stuff is, well, Civilization all over again.

edit: bluelink

edited 8th Sep '09 8:23:42 PM by Wraith_Magus

It was one of my favorite games when it came out, and it still has some good nostalgia value. After I beat the game a few times, I started tweaking the game profiles to buff certain faction leaders and increase terrain values to see just how "broken" I could get the game. I actually managed to hit the city cap a few times.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I like this game, although...I need to play it again sometime soon.

I prefer the Peacekeeper or University factions, personally, probably because I'm more the builder-type player than a conquerer.

Oh yeah, I'm a Gaian by choice. Mindworm armies FTW. And what I said above about hitting the city cap is not entirely correct... there is no programmed limit to the number of cities you can have, but there's only so much memory allocated for them, because once you get past a certain number the game starts to break in interesting ways.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I'm liking it, but I'm pretty sure I'm missing some of the mechanics. Has a great world, with lots of detail, however.

I am intrigued. How so?

---

Kind of reminds me of Master Of Orion 3, where one of the major complaints was about people who would crank up the galaxy size to the absolute maximum, and then, because each settled planet would have a "migration" of population between each other every turn, after you have hundreds of planets with geometricly increasing interdependencies, the game would swallow your RAM whole, and turns would suddenly take hours to compute while playing off of virtual memory.

The simple answer was to just not play on maxed-out galaxy sizes, but some people want to scream "broken game".

edited 8th Sep '09 8:46:04 PM by Wraith_Magus

@Wraith Magus: Yeah I can understand that, I feel the same way about most RTS games.

Right now I'm trying to beat the game on Talent difficulty, its really annoying have to deal with the asshole factions who declare vendetta if you at them funny, which is part of the reason I want to get the expansion so I trade out the Spartans and Oceania Human Hive for Space Vikings or the Hacksters, maybe they won't hate me for prancing around in the forest nekkid or whatever else I always get accused of doing. Has anyone ever noticed that videogame leader and politicians use the most ridiculous insults? I always got a kick out the Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe slurs the AI spouted in Age of Empires 2. Something about wagons and sheep...

edited 8th Sep '09 9:29:58 PM by Bill

'I'll show him a martyr! I'm going to do die SO HARD'

It's Civilization...IN SPACE!!

Pretty enjoyable, the UN makes it easy (since you get free Talents, it's easier to manage).

INT is knowing a tomato is a fruit. WIS is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad. CHA is convincing people that it does.

What I noticed was the terrain getting glitchy. I'd see distorted blocks of land, especially around the northwest map boundary. This always happened in games where I deliberately set out to populate all of Planet rather than simply win.

@Black Friday: The game is enormously deep and took me several playthroughs to fully understand. Even now, looking back, I realize that I never took full advantage of my Formers' capabilities.

edited 9th Sep '09 6:07:09 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I worked my way up from Drone difficulty to Transcend over a period of years. Now playing at Transcend is the only thing I consider a real challenge — it's really sad about that.

My favourite factions were always the sciencey ones. Back before I got Alien Crossfire, I'd always play as the University. Once Alien Crossfire came out, it was Cybernetic Consciousness for me all the way.

Feedback Of Heteronormative Gender Stereotypes in Anime

Got into SMAC and SMAX recently. Quite a fun game, especially Alien Crossfire - I like the option to compose my competitors' factions as well. University, Peacekeepers and Free Drones have been my favourites so far.

I need some Mammal Sauce..

Alpha Centauri is l33tsauce. I wanna play it once I get my desktop running.

In b4 ragehate on the Believers.

Oh, and I added a SMAC quote (you probably can guess which one) to the Family-Unfriendly Death page.

I like the Believers, I'm just terrible at playing them. :( I'm the one who, on the Character Alignment pages a while back, proposed that Miriam is more Lawful Good, or at worst, Lawful Neutral, than the Lawful Evil a lot of folks look at her as.

Sadly, my favorite faction is the University, so I almost always end up at war with the Believers.

To be honest, Miriam is not TOO bad. Remember that she was friends with Lal back on the Unity. Compared to the real scum of Planet she's positively nice.

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent

Miriam is aggressive, not evil. It should help her image a lot (but doesn't for some reason) that the further along the tech-tree you get, the more potential for abuse there is; One thing is the datanode, which she acknowledges as non-evil; another thing is the Self-Aware Colony, weapons based entirely on Mind Rape, recycling tanks, killing people and then rebuilding them, etc. a present. Wanting to make sure that technology is understood before it is implemented (and stopping people from abusing it) is actually a pretty reasonable wish.

It just happens to be so that war is very very expensive in SMAC (like it should be) so war is unwanted, and as such, a constant aggressor is annoying to have as an enemy.

Things I like: Ghost In The Shell |Serial Experiments Lain |Eden: It's an Endless World! |Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri |Aeon Natum Engel

Expensive? Beeline for Industrial Automation and Gene Splicing (or whatever gets you clean reactors), make sure you nabbed the Weather Paradigm, and you're ready to roll out a nigh-infinite army on the cheap.

Although in one incredibly entertaining game, I, as the Data Angels, ended up allied with the Believers and together we ran roughshod over absolutely everyone else in the game between my shared research (and stolen tech-I put off taking out the Consciousness till last) and Miriam's combat bonuses, no one else stood much of a chance. Strange bedfellows indeed.

The issue is that Miriam has a preferred government-type only shared by Cha Dawn. (not sure if Knowledge actually ticks her off, I don't think so) everyone else prefers some other government, so she ends up at war constantly.

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent

Which is intentional on the part of the developers. Miriam always died first in my games — if not to me, then to the other AI players. The reason was because she always attacked with inferior technology.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The problem too is that it's the government civics she dislikes, and those are the oens you'll probably end up discovering first. The Spartans won't start hating you until mid-game, for instance.

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent

There's also the fact that Miriam's favored civic is, in my experience, the least popular of them all. That -2 Research would need a lot more than what Fundy offers to make it worthwhile. By virtue of her favored settings, she also immediately pisses of Yang (not good), Lal, Zakharov, Aki-Zeta, and Roze (I think). Three of the most powerful AI factions are in that list, and that does poor things for longevity.

There have been more than one occasion when Miriam kicked my pale Academician ass across Planet while I was still trying to beat Yang in a wonder race. Miriam and Santiago tend to be incredibly strong in the early game.

I always liked to gear my economy up with Democratic->Free Market->Wealth until Fusion tech. Then I'd switch to Planned->Power and run roughshod over the world for a while with X Fusion Needlejets, Copters, and Chaos Rovers and the like.

That always made things a bit unsafe early on, but usually if I had the fortune of being on an island, I could simply camp there for much of the early game while the other factions killed each other on the mainland.

edited 10th Sep '09 3:45:00 PM by [AOD]

Feedback Of Heteronormative Gender Stereotypes in Anime

Miriam is Lawful Crazy, really.

Pro tip: Cutting-edge weaponry isn't always worth it. Using the latest power sources with weaponry a generation or two older makes for insanely cheap units which you can pump out en masse and overwhelm your enemies. This is how you beat Miriam. Miriam relies on Zerg rushing, because she can't technologically race anyone. Rush a little technology and you can have an army of slightly better quality than Miriam's, but roughly the same size, for half the cost Miriam paid. This lets you resist and keep growing. The further you go into the game, the more her tech lag will drag her down.

edited 10th Sep '09 4:06:45 PM by BonSequitur

My latest liveblog.

I typically cover the costs of my high tech by building Skunkworks and having strong industry — this is oftentimes a leftover of my very aggressive early game drive for wonders. I figure that by driving to build the most crucial projects — Virtual World, Human Genome Project, Weather Paradigm, Planetary Energy Grid — the whole economy tends to turn extremely industrial in order to produce those supply rovers, minerals, and energy I need to rush out these projects.

Having built this crazy infrastructure and economy, I then use it to produce units.

I typically don't even guard my bases with very many units. I just rush one or two high defense units and build heavy defenses. That means the Citizen's Defense Force is crucial for me, as is building sensors with terraformers. Making my bases invincible, I can pretty much outlast any onslaught until those Shard Copters and Fusion Rovers come out — a handful of which can vaporize tons and tons of primitive units.

edited 10th Sep '09 4:20:26 PM by [AOD]

Feedback Of Heteronormative Gender Stereotypes in Anime