Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

I played the heck out of this game back in the day, it was my favorite 4X for a long time, but this version doesn't do it justice on modern systems. I'm hearing of a lot of technical glitches with newer hardware and operating systems, and personally for me (running it in Windows 10 with an Intel 7700K CPU) the lovely movies that play when you complete a secret project or a number of other things always start hitching and break after a couple seconds.

I've sunk an impossible to think about amount of hours into this game for two decades, and I still keep coming back. The only thing missing is the DLC which adds extra factions.

It's well known that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is an incredibly designed game, from its mechanics to the world design to how it almost feels like it came out during the era of New Wave Sci-Fi(the era where sci-fi left John W. Campbell and his ilk in the dust and began to be about much more than just the "sci") despite being from the late 90's. This feeling could be chalked up to the focus placed on the human and environmental elements, but also in the way that it took a hammer to the standards that had come to define the 4X genre it hails from, just a few short years after those standards were codified. Though the best games are still a joy to play, the 4X genre is notorious for pushing some rather suspect narratives. Things like the consequences of imperialism and the pursuit of infinite growth probably weren't on Sid Meier's mind back when making Civilization, but the fact these conventions have rarely been questioned at all in the decades since speaks volumes. Hell, even the name of the genre(eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) paints a rather grim picture, and yet it goes unquestioned. Civilization tries to paint over this legacy with a thin veneer of performativity, and in doing so reduces this world's rich tapestry of cultures to a stat bonus for the race to the top. It's hard to believe this is the same studio that refuted the order of things in 1999. Where many games of Civ end with you building a ship to the stars to repeat the cycle again, SMAC opens with that ship being a last ditch effort built by a world that couldn't bother to save itself. Factions are driven by ideology, not nationality, in profoundly human ways. Your new home is secretly its own faction and by playing the "4X way", it becomes your enemy. You are forced to look at how you break the world in your pursuit of growth, at the consequences of playing the way an entire genre tells you to. You haven't saved humanity. The cycle will continue. It's amazing what changing the context does

This game is fantastic. There are so many different settings to be used in generating your game - from different map sizes, land volume, alien activity, even erosion levels. Not to mention what 8 different difficulty settings for the AI. So many different ways to play this game, different paths to take. It is a true gem of a program. I have played SMAC for many years. I just recently found GOG while looking for another tbs game - Masters of Magic. I had hoped that the expansion for SMAC would be available from this site after finding MoM here. So let us hope for Alien Crossfire.

If you like Civilization this gives you a great break from the series. The Sci-Fi setting and compelling story line are addicting. There is a downside... Replay is limited. However in Sid Meiers terms it will last years