Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

Game runs flawlessly under 64 bit operating systems with the movies. Has all the fan tweaks to make the game run on modern systems and now with the expansion bundled there is no reason not to buy it.

I have to admit, I played SMAC when it first came out in the late 1990's and loved the theme of Civ in Space so when I found it on sale on gog, I bought it. Yes, I now have a 40 inch display, rather than my 17 inch back then, so was limited to 1024x768 but the gameplay was and still is the reason to play. However, I had to modify the Alpha Centauri.Ini file with settings Video Mode=1024 DirectDraw=0 in order for it to work in windows7 64bit. Gog had its own general tips on making "old" games work, but only these specific setting worked for me and hopefully, they will help other people who have a similar problem. SMAC installed fine, but before the changed settings in its ini file, the graphics look corrupted and barely navigable. Needless to say, if you don't know how to edit a text file, like Alpha Centauri.Ini, then you will have to first learn how do do that.

I so want to love this game. Let me list the good aspects first. 1.) Great atmosphere. 2.) Engaging storyline. 3.) Interest setting featuring a sentient planet, your citizens evolving into brains in jars or transcendent beings, etc. Now the bad parts. 1.) TERRIBLY UNBALANCED FACTIONS. The Hive or Spartans wins almost every AI map. Just look up "Vel's SMAX Guide" for confirmation. Some factions (Morganites) are terribly weak. Starting off on the same landmass as either means near instant death. This KILLS the single player game. 2.) AI cheats and is a bully. All AI players will say "Give me money or tech, or die". Because of this the entire game breaks down into a wargame. At even middle difficulty (Talent) one AI player will start to expand exponentially. I've no way of knowing how they can grow so fast apart from cheating. At higher difficulty levels, the enemy does in fact cheat. 3.) Broken victory conditions. Transcendence is about the only way to win, because domination is insanely time consuming. You can't drag select a bunch of units and tell them "go to this base", but instead select units individually. This makes domination a lesson in mouse clicking. You can try to be planetary ruler. I tried this, and even won the election, but then the other factions either refused (and I had to conquer them to win) and the other faction wasn't interested in helping me win, so winning diplomatically is just another form of domination (even down to the ending text... not even a movie like in Transcendence). Don't get me started on the broken economic victory... I feel like this had such great potential, but wasn't play tested. There's a reason few play this in single player and upload to youtube; it is punishingly difficult if playing as anything but Spartan, Hive, or Academics, and it gets monotonous.

I loved SMAC and far later SMAX for a very long time now because the story as well as the gameplay are outstanding from day one and I might say even today. I used to play german localisation which many say is even better. However the bugs and crashes also were legion for this game. It was usually usefull to make use of serveral official and fanpaches to make the game do what it is intended to do. And I am not yet sure which patches are included in this pack. Further more when time went on SMAX got massive problems with newer OS like win7, there it was sometimes impossible to get it running at all. Now I tried this release for win7+, just I don't have a win7+ system at hand right now. Therefor I installed in Linux using vanilla wine which is horribly sensitive to bad, meaning buggy, program code. The GoG-release installed and started without a single problem. I take this nothing short of extraordinarily. Thank you very much GoG. This is obviously much more than a simple 'buy the lizens and sell it as it is'-release. This is very well done to run on current operating systems.

After spending many hours playing this game years ago, this was a instant purchase, however I was disappointed to see that Alien Crossfire was apparently not included. Imagine my surprise when installing it asks if I also want to install Alien Crossfire, and I was able to start and view the opening sequence to Alien Crossfire. Looks like it is included. Well, back to playing.