Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

If you are longing for the mixture of philosophy, strategy and unforgettable experience, just have this masterpiece installed. Otherwise, you might end up being nerve stapled!

Alpha Centauri was a game I first played when I was a young boy - around 7 or 8 years of age. It left a serious mark on me - being a game that despite its apparent surface-level simplicity is very deep. It is a strategy game where you fight on Planet - in the Alpha Centauri system. Set well into the future when the Earth has started to become uninhabitable for human life, the United Nations charters a mission to colonize this celestial body. But in the process of traveling to this distant star system, communication to Earth fails, and various factions splinter among the travelers to Alpha Centauri. Upon arrival in the system, they form their own empires seeking to impose their will on this new world. The game itself is played on a map grid. You build cities, construct units, construct structure, research technologies, terraform the surrounding environment, battle terrifying mind worms and similar wildlife, and ultimately aim yourself towards victory. You can play as a good variety of factions and no two games ever end up playing in the same way. You might play as the Gaians and seek to find unity with Planet - controlling swarms of mind worms and enriching the environment for an ecologically green future. Or you might play as Morgan Industries and seek to corner the new world's economy, regardless of the devastation your industrialization brings to the planet. You have many other factions to pick from as well, and you can interact with these factions via diplomacy and warfare and so on to build your narrative. The game systems are reasonably complex, yet at its core it maintains a "simple to learn, hard to master" aspect to it. For example - you can customize units based on unlocked technologies, perform espionage, and highly influence the environment by terraforming. Yet you can also automate these things. Overall, it is a very immersive setting and is a well executed game. I recommend it with mods such as PRACX or such for graphical improvements.

Too Amazing for words.

One of my favourite games of all time is now complete with the addition of the Alien Crossfire expansion! Thanks GOG!

This is the BEST. POSSIBLE. THING.