While the writing in Alpha Centauri is some of the best in video games, the actual game itself is less fun than Civilization. The hostile terrain and alien life you spend most of the game dealing with just isn't as interesting as the enemy AI.
Two things make a great narrative game, the narrative and the game mechanics. As one would expect Alpha Centauri's game mechanics have been significantly improved on since it came out, however the narrative and setting is so strong that poor mechanics connect you to the nature of that reality. For instance mindworms (Alpha Centauri) vs barbarians (Civ). The mindworms should be annoying but because the game shares stories of mindworms attacks the annoyance is transmuted into a feeling of sympathy with the settlers of the game. You never get that sense with barbarians in Civ.
The best example is horror games like Amnesia. They are essentially "walking simulators" with almost no game mechanics beyond movement. Yet the atmosphere is so good that the players don't notice.
Personally I think too much attention in the game industry has been placed on flow and artificial-sweeteners such as RPC leveling reward systems at the cost of neglecting atmosphere and as a sense real presence.
It had some great ideas, though. The planet had prevailing winds, and you could terraform mountains so that your cities had lush farmland while your competitors were left with arid deserts. And the terrain didn't have to be hostile in the late game, depending on how you treated Planet. It was also cool how you could mix and match technologies to make different units.
But it was sort of overambitious, and a lot of the features were ridiculously opaque. I think it's a sci-fi gem, but it definitely takes a bit of patience.
If you don't have patience or time, most of the pithy quotes are here:
creating mountain to get more precipitation sounds good until you realise that the optimum strategy is either forest spam or getting weather control and then borehole and condensor spam.
If you compare SMAC to the contemporary Civ2, SMAC is a much deeper game in many ways. The terrain and alien life is not really something to be conquered, more like a natural hasard like barbarian raids in Civ, it never really goes away.
Civ 3 came after Firaxis got the Civ trademark. They made SMAC in part because they didn’t have the TM after breaking away from Microprose. The contemporaries to SMAC are the Civ: Call To Power games.
I picked up Call to Power recently, and despite playing hundreds of hours of Civ 2, I just couldn't get into it. Probably in an earlier era, where I'd buy a game or get it as a Christmas present and spend the time until I could actually get home to install and play it reading the manual cover to cover, I'd have handled it. But I just don't have the tolerance for the opaque complexity and clunky UI anymore.
There have been talks at GDC and elsewhere about this...my memory is that humans don’t like being surprised by a smart AI that silently builds up resources and suddenly and mercilessly betrays and annihilates them, which is the obvious winning strategy. Humans don’t even like the random battle results to be truly random but expect them to hew very closely to the outcome of the odds as presented. The AI is grindy and unsophisticated on purpose.
I believe you're thinking of Sid Meier's GDC 2010 keynote "Everything You Know Is Wrong" [1]. The entire talk is interesting, but section on player perception of probability is about 20 minutes in.
One takeaway is to be careful about how strength numbers translate into odds. If your strength is 100 and mine is 1, does that mean I have a 1% chance to out-and-out beat you? Your armored tank shouldn't have an even 1% chance of being completely annihilated by my club-wielding warrior (that's somehow still around by then).
The later Civ games have taken odds out of the equation, and I think it's for the better. Instead, the amount of damage each unit takes per combat depends on the difference in their strength deterministically. From my own perspective, this is overall more fun than 'randomly' having really strong units lose against weak units occasionally.
> Humans don’t even like the random battle results to be truly random but expect them to hew very closely to the outcome of the odds as presented.
Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units, random battles sometimes meant an ancient trireme could destroy a battleship, which is fun to imagine...
The classic example is a militia (the weakest unit in the game, relying on no technology at all) defeating a battleship bombarding it from the sea, causing the battleship to sink. :D
Warriors should never be able to defeat a battleship in Civ2 because of the new combat system. The AI cheats (of course); I have had armor go down to knights on deity level
This is not correct; the weakest unit in Civilization is the militia, and the unit you get from gunpowder is the musketeer. There is no unit called "warrior".
How do I know we're talking about Civilization?
> Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units
I think it's unlikely Civ II added stats in response to feedback from Civ III.
You are more than welcome to create a game with better AI and therefore better playability. The rules of Civ games are complex enough imo. It’s just a game after all.
I've played a lot of civilization, mostly 2 and 3, but before I ever played those, I played a lot of alpha centauri. It was my first 4x game. The thing is, I don't really remember much about it at all. I remember it being harder than civ and I remember not really being able to figure things out and even when I did, it was still kind of confusing in comparison to civilization.
But, I'm pretty sure i got to the end game at least once and when I think about it, I remember still having fun and I still spent a lot of time on it. It's actually one i've thought about going back to play as an adult, just because I feel like I'd have a better time of it now.
