Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

Why no Alien Crossfire, GOG? As awesome as the first is, the expansion pack made it even more awesomerer. Still: instapurchase. You should do the same, and rue the loss of your free time.

This game is a fantastic purchase and far transcends anything in the Civilization series. It has a compelling story, great atmosphere, and some of the most fascinating and challenging ideas of science fiction. The greatest strength of the game for me is the unique feeling of every faction. Each of them represents a different ideology, whether it's the Spartans with unbeatable military discipline or the Believers, united and propelled by their religion. Compared to Civilization, the respective strengths and weaknesses of the factions in Alpha Centauri are overwhelmingly dramatic, ultimately dictating your play style. Similarly social engineering choices have enormous effects on your civilization. If you run a free market economy, you become immensely wealthy, very quickly, but at the cost of dramatic ecological destruction and the inability to engage opponents effectively outside your borders. Ultimately rather than merely being a recreation of human history, Alpha Centauri is a commentary on the ideals for society melded into the form of a game. If you pay attention there are many ideas and questions to ponder. If what you want is crazy sci-fi dramatic 4x strategy, it has that in great bounty. If there's any complaint I have, it is that this does not come with the expansion Alien Crossfire. The expansion adds a lot of new techs and secret projects to the game that dramatically effect how it plays out. I can only hope that it will be added to the library in time.

Alpha Centauri is my personal #1 favorite game ever. What made it so special was the effort they put into creating the atmosphere...sound effects, photo montages of the leader characters during younger days on Earth...and most of all the quotations that are voice-acted perfectly during each major advance in the game. Funny, thought-provoking, believable... I still see them referred to on the net all these years later. If you like science, science fiction, philosophy, social science, etc., you really owe it to yourself to get into this game and play it through.

... Glad to see this here. For those of you who haven't heard of this, Alpha Centauri is somewhat like Civilization - but unique as well. How, you ask? In the following ways: - Alpha Centauri has successfully integrated free-form gameplay with a tight plot involving exploration, conflict, ecology & science, awakening alien lifeforms, psy powers, planetary consciousness and human-alien transcendence. It's a great trip, too. - A fully costed and well-balanced unit design builder. You can keep things simple (and cheap!) or make super-duper units with lots of abilities... that cost an arm and a leg and ultimately take longer to produce. Bottom line: this game is one of those games that is more than the sum of its parts, and I'd highly recommend it.

Although inferior to Civ IV graphically and less intricate at some elements of gameplay, its tiny disk space (GOG, you could do a portable version!!!!), quick install/uninstall, quick computer opponent moves (with nowadays CPUs) just plays fantastic on a netbook when travelling on a train or plane and all the more on laptop at home. For all 4X strategy freaks this game has soul, and the plot engages us every time we start a scenario. After playing Civ IV for some time, I do not return to Civ II or III. I take Alien Crossfire instead and play until the urge to Civ IV returns. GOG, I am saving this tiny 6$ on a breakfast in Starbucks and give it to you as an incentive to placing Alien Crossfire in your portfolio so that young GOG fans can enjoy it as much as I do.