Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

I so want to love this game. Let me list the good aspects first. 1.) Great atmosphere. 2.) Engaging storyline. 3.) Interest setting featuring a sentient planet, your citizens evolving into brains in jars or transcendent beings, etc. Now the bad parts. 1.) TERRIBLY UNBALANCED FACTIONS. The Hive or Spartans wins almost every AI map. Just look up "Vel's SMAX Guide" for confirmation. Some factions (Morganites) are terribly weak. Starting off on the same landmass as either means near instant death. This KILLS the single player game. 2.) AI cheats and is a bully. All AI players will say "Give me money or tech, or die". Because of this the entire game breaks down into a wargame. At even middle difficulty (Talent) one AI player will start to expand exponentially. I've no way of knowing how they can grow so fast apart from cheating. At higher difficulty levels, the enemy does in fact cheat. 3.) Broken victory conditions. Transcendence is about the only way to win, because domination is insanely time consuming. You can't drag select a bunch of units and tell them "go to this base", but instead select units individually. This makes domination a lesson in mouse clicking. You can try to be planetary ruler. I tried this, and even won the election, but then the other factions either refused (and I had to conquer them to win) and the other faction wasn't interested in helping me win, so winning diplomatically is just another form of domination (even down to the ending text... not even a movie like in Transcendence). Don't get me started on the broken economic victory... I feel like this had such great potential, but wasn't play tested. There's a reason few play this in single player and upload to youtube; it is punishingly difficult if playing as anything but Spartan, Hive, or Academics, and it gets monotonous.

I loved SMAC and far later SMAX for a very long time now because the story as well as the gameplay are outstanding from day one and I might say even today. I used to play german localisation which many say is even better. However the bugs and crashes also were legion for this game. It was usually usefull to make use of serveral official and fanpaches to make the game do what it is intended to do. And I am not yet sure which patches are included in this pack. Further more when time went on SMAX got massive problems with newer OS like win7, there it was sometimes impossible to get it running at all. Now I tried this release for win7+, just I don't have a win7+ system at hand right now. Therefor I installed in Linux using vanilla wine which is horribly sensitive to bad, meaning buggy, program code. The GoG-release installed and started without a single problem. I take this nothing short of extraordinarily. Thank you very much GoG. This is obviously much more than a simple 'buy the lizens and sell it as it is'-release. This is very well done to run on current operating systems.

After spending many hours playing this game years ago, this was a instant purchase, however I was disappointed to see that Alien Crossfire was apparently not included. Imagine my surprise when installing it asks if I also want to install Alien Crossfire, and I was able to start and view the opening sequence to Alien Crossfire. Looks like it is included. Well, back to playing.

I never could get into Civilization, this however? The only game where I actually youtube up the cut-scenes to *this day*. And the gfx etc are still perfectly fine even by todays standard (well, not exactly cutting edge, but no eye cancer and such).

Alpha Centauri is one of the jewels of the gaming industry. It is true the game is a version of Civilization (I wouldn`t simply call it a clone). But much more than that... There are differences of the regular civilization game playing, like the map`s sea level system - a global warming could sink you low altitude cities. Also with the technological advantages you access components for the units, and you are able to plan own unit types depending on your need (weapon, armour type, chassis and the engine, plus special abilities - like psi training or non-lethal weapons, etc). If I remember this was the first Civilization clone using an UN like political system where the members could postpone international laws (like for example raising or lowering the sea level by melting the polar ice or cooling down the temperature). But aside of the innovative addition to the Civilization game experience there were the theme of the game with the awesome videos of the Secret Projects - the wonders of Alpha Centauri (some of them reminds me of the movie called Barakka). The Factions are well-thought with coherent philosophies of their own (often conflicting one or two other Factions). They also possess some innate modification of game statistic - like production, population growing, science bonus, etc. With this each Faction has it`s unique strategy which you can refine by selecting the different attributes of governmental and social approaches (much alike what the Civ 4 uses). There are also different ways to win the game: economical, military - domination, diplomatic, and the scientific/secret project which uncovers the past and the fate of the planet. I do recommend to any players who love civilization style games, who are ecological sensitive, who love science fiction (in an almost hard sci-fi setting). I envision my future free time would again filled by this game...