> 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 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!
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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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 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.
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 recommend the Floris mod for Mount & Blade, where you get exactly this (well, except that you can't really research radio).
Is this a little like King of Dragon Pass?
MOO3 was a bit like that and failed so badly is killed the franchise
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
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
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.
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 ;)
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
Ah X-COM! That brings back memories.
WARNING! WARNING! UFO DETECTED!
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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...
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.
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.
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!
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"
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