The antithesis of the Morganites is Chairman Yang’s Human Hive, a totalitarian nightmare that combines the most extreme aspects of communism and fascism to great effect, where the population lives and works crammed into gigantic underground settlements that are basically massively upscaled versions of ant colonies. Ironically for a big lefty like myself I’ve always been partial to Nwabudike Morgan’s ultra-capitalist settlements, where the enormous production outputs come at a cost of massive ecological damage and an increased upkeep cost due to pampered Morganite workers demanding the most opulent and wasteful settlements possible. This gives each of the seven factions a distinct thematic flavour in the way they play. The different factions that formed on the Unity did not do so along national or organisational lines instead they sprang up around charismatic leaders with their own personal ideologies about how future society should be run. Displaying even less imagination than I do when it comes to naming things, the colonists dub their new home “Planet” and start scrabbling together the basic niceties required to start rebuilding human civilisation.īut not human civilisation as we know it. Each faction escapes the ship in a landing craft and heads on down to the surface of the only inhabitable planet in the system. Just as the ship – the ironically-named Unity - comes to the end of its decades long journey and approaches the Alpha Centauri system, factional infighting amongst the ship’s crew comes to a head and the Unity is sabotaged. The premise of the game is that a near-future humanity, locked in its final death throes, has built and launched a massive colonisation spaceship towards the Alpha Centauri trinary star system in the hopes of preserving something of the human race. What it did do was seamlessly weave that formula into a coherent sci-fi universe in a way that no other game has before or since. Firaxis could have done much worse than base their game on Civ 2, but aside from a few bolted-on additions like the unit workshop and the social engineering interface replacing static forms of government, Alpha Centauri didn’t make any groundbreaking changes to the basic formula. This isn’t down to how it plays, particularly, since if you suck away the sci-fi coating what you’ll find inside looks very much like Civilization 2 in terms of mechanics.
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is spoken of in hushed, reverent tones amongst a certain segment of the 4X gaming community, and for good reason: if you happen to like sci-fi, like I do, it is hands-down the best Civ-a-like game ever released.
Ah, SMAC, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
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