Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

The level of predictive programming and legitimate scientific and geopolitical insights in this game are stellar and stunning. The gameplay has always been a top ten for me.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri allows you to do something future 4X games don't have: Terraforming. Not just changing land to forest, you can straight up raise mountains and lower lands. Your nukes will also shape the land. Your mines and boreholes will raise the sea level. The Planet itself will go hellbent against you and your (humanity's) destructive nature. Combine that with the freedom of modelling your units with VALUABLE choices instead of just numbers, then combine that with social engineering AND diplomacy that ties it with. Truly a 4X ahead of its time. The control and UI are dated. Simple control, such as left click to choose and right click to move, was novel and groundbreaking that unfortunately doesn't exist in this game. The graphics become very cluttered, stacked, and messy as the game goes on. You are constantly fighting against the UI and it hides several key information. But, those are just about it for the cons. Everything else in the game? Chef's kiss, 5 michelin stars, simply amazing. Oh, I don't forget about the lore alright. The characters are alive, well written with their ideologies fully fleshed out and are clashed together, forming natural and very human conflict. What technologies and predictions this game brings into the table very well reflects the current state of the world. Makes you think whether we will have to forcefully launch off from Earth in search of our own Planet in Alpha Centauri. DLC is... not as fully fleshed out. I play without them, but it is a bunch of new content that some people can enjoy.

as ab0ve

SMAC is often, and rightly, considered one of the best 'Civilistion' games ever. I would go further and say it is one of the best games ever. If you can get your mind past the aging and slightly clunky controls (that are no-where near as bad as I remembered) there is a deep strategy game, with peerless enemy AI and some of the best lore and environmental storytelling of any 4X game. If you like hard sci-fi, Civ games or missiles that can double as terrain modifiers (amoungst many other horrendous war-crimes) you owe it to yourself to try this game.