Be Excellent To Each Other

Yes, it appears the unofficial sequel to Alpha Centauri has been announced! Well, maybe, no game details have been revealed.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04 ... h-trailer/

Just the other day I was thinking how great it would be to have Alpha Centauri redone Civ V style. Clearly I have some sort of frightening power.

When civ 4 was current, I always wanted a civ 4 style colonisation.

Then they released it. And it was utter pap.

I never played Alpha Centauri, but I loved Civ 2: Test of Time where you could carry on after the space race and colonise an alien world.

Alpha Centaurs was excellent, so I hope they do a good job with this.

Yes, Centaurs.

It could've been amazing though, that's the really frustrating part. I've played it a few times and really, really enjoyed it right up to the part I declare independence and then get absolutely and entirely annihilated by the King's forces. I'm told it's bugged to shit, to the point that it's very easy to trick the game into only sending a pansy force to repel your independence, but I've not managed that myself.

This new one could be amazing though. I utterly loved Alpha Centauri back in the day. I'm wondering if this could possibly be a little different though - maybe a Master Of Orion style thing with multiple worlds or something?

Not so much bugged as appallingly balanced.

Me from 2009:
he AI is weak, and the only difficuly comes from the revolution. Which scales according to liberty bell production, so in order to win, just don't produce them.

If you want to win, fewer colonies is better. With fewer colonies, you need to produce fewer bells, and so reaching the required amount is easier. (I found one port and 3 inland towns to be best, 4 if the resource layout wasn't good enough)

The game should reward liberty bell production (founding fathers), and it should reward a large amount of colonies with a bustling economy, but it doesn't. It actively punishes you for both.

Civ4:colonisation sucked. They should have kept liberty bells as they were in the original, which is one of my favouritest games ever.

SMAC is also one of my favouritest games. Will this "lip service" game be anything like it? Will it feature a worm infestation? Raising and lowering terrain? Sea colonies? Making your own units? An interesting "blind tech" mode? An orthogonal government system? (Actually Civ4 and 5 had this).

It does have quests though, which weren't in SMAC. And narrative. I hate narrative. Read a bloody book if you want narrative.


Basically: I think it's going to be nothing like SMAC and SMAC is only being referenced for marketing hype.

Smac did have narrative too, mind

A couple of preview articles suggesting that this really isn't going to be much like Alpha Centauri at all, sadly. I can feel my interest waning.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014- ... th-preview
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05 ... interview/

I really REALLY cannot play these games, get so hooked into them & lose track of time. Once played till 6AM in the morning !!