Considering buying SMAC, due to my addiction to Civ 3 and 4, but I was wondering if Alien Crossfire will work with the GOG version or will installing it revert all system compatibility fixes GOG made for Vista?

I have read from others that it works, but there is no reason to play Alien Crossfire. The factions on it are worse and generally won against more easily. The cyborgs have negative growth, and the planet cult has negative industry. If the drones don't get enough cities they can't research enough and just end up making synthemetals. The aliens only start with a small technological advantage and cannot trade; if they take a city, they lose it's population. It does not add anything except for secret projects that unbalance the game, like one to give morale to all air units when air is already unbalanced.

Thanks for the reply. Are there no mods that fix the bad ai, or negative factors about these new civs?

SMAC 444, but it is made for the first one. Besides the second one having worse factions in terms of their stats, and unbalanced secret projects, it also has worse programming and does not support all the AI functions, according to kyrub. There was talk about trying to bring over some of the AI improvements to the expansion, I think by scient, but I have not heard anything further about that. I personally hope that he takes over the AI patch for the original instead, if there is anything he can do with it.

You're completely off your nut, dude.

Alien Crossfire was fantastic and quite well balanced and brought many welcome changes.

I've never seen a community so divided on an expansion. Expansions are usually considered as must haves.

The aliens really hurt the atmosphere. I've always thought, that the story behind AC was quite intelligent. It tries to be minimalistic and stresses the conflicts and the suspense between the characters. That's a major part of the story: interacting characters. In that regard, it was not mainly a Sci-Fi plot, but a story about these factions colonizing new terrain. Introducing aliens just ruins it and does not make sense. Where have they been, why did they leave?

Apart from that, some secret projects are questionable and the introduction of more indigenous life-forms was unnecessary. A few bugs have been fixed, but fan-made patches would do the same. I think Alien Crossfire also runs technically better. I wasn't able to run AC on XP in a different resolution without a battered interface. I don't remember it perfectly. I also had to manipulate language files by myself, because the patch is exclusively in English. Nope, so many add-ons of acclaimed titles were utter trash, due to people leaving the team, conflicts between publishers and developers and so on. They often threw lots and lots of new scenarios at you without a nice campaign in the style of its main game. I remember Red Alert having only average expansions. The Deeper Dungeons did not have its main campaign speaker. Shadow of Death received mediocre critics. The Total Annihilation add-ons were deteriorating in campaign quality, too. And don't forget garbage like all of those The Sims continuations.

Just get Alien Crossfire, its good. Can't honestly say I noticed the AI being bad because the AI was terrible at everything anyway. I don't know where all these weird people with specific version nostalgia were back when I was an active multiplayer on apolyton, because all we ever played was Crossfire.

I took both sides into account, and decided to just get the complete version on Amazon. That way I have the core game to revert back to if I find it lacking, or the full one if I don't find it too bad. Thanks for the comments, everyone.

The AI can't actually deal with the fungal artillery in the expansion.

Again, the cyborgs have negative growth, and the planet cult has negative industry. Cyborgs actually perform worse than Univsersity. Drones can do well, but only if they start with a favorable position.

Would it be okay if I just opted to not use the new factions, as most of them, to me, don't seem very interesting? I think I'd do the core factions minus the religious fundies, putting the Usurpers in their place? It's unfortunate about the fungal stalks, but I've seen AI struggle with the most simple of functions/features with Civ 3, Civ CTP, Civ 4, Gal Civ 2; so I'm kind of unphased by most AI short comings. They suck, but I've come to accept them.

You can, but I haven't found the aliens to be any more challenging than the Spartans.
Remember to download SMAC 444 after you've become decent with the game.

The new SMAX factions are mechanically interesting at least and you can see what the design goals were. Cyborgs as a flexible research faction with more leaning towards momentum than University, Angels as an extremely vanilla diplomacy faction similar to Peacekeepers but based on deception than treaties, we don't speak of the Planet Cult ever, while the Pirates are the exploration faction than the Spartans wish they could be. The kinds of features that you basically can't yet teach an AI to use effectively.

Cyborgs have faster research but their negative growth makes them too impotent to do anything with it; AI makes fine use of probes defensively already. AI cannot use probes offensively.

A player might be able to use Planet Cult well on a tiny map.