Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

Sid's Civilization and Alpha games are just plain addictive. You can set them for whatever level of difficulty you want and just keep coming back for more.

This is one of the best games ever created. I love the post by a guy a few pages back where he complains that the AI is on him right from the start. Yes, it is and if it doesn't like you then you better figure out how to kill them or hold them off. :)

This is simply the best civ-like game ever made. The most accurate key word to describe its strength is freedom. Individualize your units, individualize the landscape, individualize your way of governing... you name it. You can even spend a fair amount of time here by individualizing any base, as its worked tiles can affect each others output depending on what improvement you build or how you terraform them. So to 4X-junkies it's a feast. But what might make it even more outstanding is the atmosphere it builds around the actual gameplay. The factions deriving from the failed UN-Mission are traceable, their traits differ them reasonable. But besides the player writing his own story of ideological competition and its eventual outcomes, there's the living planet interfering, affecting and enriching this story. The wonder videos still transport a unique and classy atmosphere, as does the believable tech tree with its excellently written and dubbed datalink quotations. Some may disagree, but I think the even then (1998) cheesy graphics still add to the atmosphere, just because of transporting the feeling of actually playing on an exoplanet. Look at Beyond Earth or Pandora and you'll know what I mean. The ingame sound - not sure if one can label it music - is not spectacular, but nonetheless adds to the futuristic atmosphere. Well, I just should add the word "atmosphere" to the initial mentioned "freedom" to describe this gem best. :-)

This one is masterpiece. After all years, AC is still The Definitive Civilization Experience. Get it. Just get it.

Even though it doesn't hold up graphically on modern systems, Alpha Centauri is still an incredible game. It's like Civilization, on an Alien Planet with hostile alien life forms, where you control one of many very unique factions, with custom units.