Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

This has always been one of my favorite strategy games of all time! It plays like any other Sid Meier game, but it is much better. The different faction leaders have different personalities, and unlike what often happens in the Civ games, the ones in Alpha Centauri actually behave in a manner that makes sense for their faction! The political options are expansive, you can trade technologies with other factions, make lasting pacts, and participate in UN votes such as to limit pollution (to stop rising seas in the late game), and ban nuclear weapons. You also have extensive spy options. Spies in this game are units that can be moved around the board and killed if they are caught. If you get one to an enemy city they have a list of options. You can steal a tech, steal resources, poison food stores to lower population of city, sabotage buildings, etc. After playing this game you will definitely understand that the only real improvement Civ 5 made was combat, everything else was watered down. This is to me the flagship of all strategy games.

Fantastic game, desperatly needs a remaster.

This game is absolute perfection. I still play it at least once a year. I first played it when it was released about twenty years ago. This game has the potential to completely eliminate your spare time and cause many sleepless nights, but, it still sits on my PC and still gets played.

Holds up amazingly well after all these years, one of the few strategy games of it's type to really sell a compelling 'story' and create a universe that was far grander than the sum of it's parts (or the parts of a thousand generic space operas). Sid doesn't really deserve to have his name in the title seeing as Brian Reynolds was responsible for the design, and his background in moral philosophy really shines through, accompanying events with some amazingly incisive quotations (both classic and original). This is one of the few 'works' of anything that has genuinely challenged several of my long-held moral beliefs enough to make me re-evaluate the wider world and my place in it. Come for the strategy game, stay for the amazing experience. This one really does deserve all the acclaim it's showered with.

I can't believe I still return to this game after all this time. Even though the graphics look "rough" and the wonder movies, sorry special projects animations, are equally quaint, bonkers, scary and cheesy, the concept and execution remains one of the best 4x games ever written. Yes really. The alient planet feels exactly that with it's living fungus and PSI attacks. The humans naturally spent the journey here arguing resulting in seven factions with distinct advantages and drawbacks that are able to define themselves (and hint at corresponding gameplay) on their own without subtracting from or relying on anyone else (save the actual alien races in the CrossFire expansion). Eventually the human can copy the PSI ability, capture or breed Mind Worms and shit really gets going then. The under-rated part of this game is actually the unit building part. Yes you can leave that on auto and still have a first rate game. However plugging together different parts that you've researched, building said monstrosities and sending them over the map has never lost it's appeal. In case you're not sold the game lets you build Buster weapons, which in their finally incarnation literally wipeout 25-ish squares including any units and cities on them and the land too. Of course you've just committed an atrocity which causes everyone to declare war on you but then with a few more Buster weapons there won't be anyone around to complain and you can spend the rest of the game with your pet Mind Worms, launching the terraforming buster to replace the land for them to play on. If I had to have one gripe it's that the hardest difficulty isn't that hard, but maybe that's because I've played it a lot.