Alpha Centauri

   My, oh, my!
   Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is here. It is one of the most anticipated releases in gaming history. And it doesn't disappoint. Not a bit.
   Alpha Centauri is a truly great game. Be prepared to spend countless hours with it.
   We did. We missed the basketball game. We Miriam ate in front of the computer screen. We didn't get our work done. But we played our first game of Alpha Centauri one weekend and, at 4 a.m. on Sunday/Monday, when we finally conquered the pesty Lord's Believers faction and that nasty Sister Miriam Godwinson, we collapsed into bed in triumph!.
   The comparison between Alpha Centauri and Civilization II (on which Designer Brian Reynolds and Sid Meier also collaborated) will be obvious. But Alpha Centauri is an entirely different game, set in the near future, with many different challenges and innovative concepts. Then there is the eye candy: gosh. In addition to being a great game to play, its a great game to look at.

Eye Candy On Alpha Centauri

The similarities and the differences between Alpha Centauri and Civ II are obvious right at the start. Getting into things you can "make" your own world – with things like amount of land mass, rainfall (read vegetation), quantity of native life forms and the like. Then you choose your faction. No, Alpha Centauri is not race-based (Romans, Egyptians, etcetera), but social agenda oriented. You can follow the environmentalists, the capitalists, the survivalists or any of four others. This is very plausible given the scenario of the game – humankind migrating to a nearby planet – a melding of national and racial charastics into philosophical elements.
   It also makes for a terrific new dimension in game play. The AI adjusts itself to the vision of the leaders of these factions. On simple terms, there are some things each faction is good at and some things they cannot do at all; on the more complicated level, each goes about doing things based on its leader's vision. Quite an impressive programming accomplishment.
   Since this is a review, not a play guide, we won't even try to get into the nitty-gritty of Alpha Centauri. Check the Electronic Arts site and we'll bet there are already links to a couple of "how-to" guides.
   Rather, here's what makes Alpha Centauri a magnificent gaming experience:
   Terraforming: With a wild and alien planet (full of mind worms, by the way, this is more than just building mines and roads. As you get more and more into technology, you gain the ability to re-form the land itself. This has a bunch of advantages, such as building cities on ocean shelves, placing energy-grabbers in higher places to get more energy and the like. You can raise and lower land.
   Units: You can configure your own units. Frankly, there are a huge number of "standard" units available, but if you just have to have something that flies, shoots and can stay aloft forever, you can probably build it. I love the graphics for the units – they are animated in the game, they are three dimensional in the design stages, and they are really pretty nifty. Oh, you can rename your units, too.
   Technology Tree: You cannot play one of these games without technology being an important factor. If you think about it, the paradigm of technology advances is pretty much set: you have to discover one thing to discover something better. This is the case in Alpha Centauri, too. But by dividing the technologies up into general categories, you are pretty free to pursue one kind of technology area without bothering (too much) with all of the others.
   Yes, the tech is intertwined, of course, but this is a rather interesting concept that enhances the playability of Alpha Centauri.
   The other thing which has the potential of greatly improving playability is the option of letting your city governors determine what to build next. While that is similar to the "auto-build" in

Rainbow-PCM sat down with Alpha Centauri Designer Brian Reynolds of Firaxis Games for this exclusive interview.

R-PCM: What did you feel was the most difficult challenge in producing the game?

Reynolds: Up until now, all of the games Sid (Meier) and I have done have been "history" games; we'd never done a science fiction or fantasy game. With Alpha Centauri, we decided to do a futuristic game, but apply our strength in history to make a kind of realistic "future history" rather than just a space opera. The biggest challenge was creating a future world which players could relate to--whereas with history games most players come pre-wired with their "Schoolhouse Rock" notions of how history went, the future is all new and must be introduced carefully.

R-PCM: What do you feel is the greatest innovation in the game?

Reynolds: Hmmm, it's hard to pick a specific one since we were trying to improve things all across the board. Some of my favorites are (a) a "terraformable" world which can change as the game progresses (b) social engineering to allow players to enact their own visions of future utopia, and (c) multiplayer--full net support is not often seen in complex turn-based games like Alpha Centauri, especially in the original version.

R-PCM: Given that you worked with Sid Meier and that many will compare Alpha Centauri with Civilization II, aside from the obvious eye candy-type advances in the game, how do you think Alpha Centauri improves the genre of the "world conquest" type game?

Reynolds: Well, all of the things mentioned above, plus some of the strongest AI we've done to date. The individual differences between factions, and the bonuses and penalties which they lead to, also add a lot of flavor to the play.

R-PCM: If you had it to do all over again, what would you change?

Reynolds: If I was writing Alpha Centauri knowing all that I know now, I'd have realized sooner just how cool the individualized factions and backstory are, and spent even more time making those stand out.

R-PCM: Your comments on turn-based games would be very appreciated: do you believe turn-based games are more strategic, can pack more "thought" into the code and/or have a more sophisticated future than real-time games. As the designer of several of these type of games, what do you think the future of turn-based games is?

Reynolds: I think turn-based games have a long and glorious future ahead of them.
Real-time games have been the fad lately, and what they have going for them is the time-pressure they entail--time pressure can be exciting.
But when you're pressed for time, you can only keep track of so many things going on at once--sooner or later, you are forced to forget about some of your pieces, and you miss out on a lot of what's going on. In a turn based game, you have time to keep complete control over all of your pieces, and a lot of players really like that. We think real-time games are cool--after all, our first game, Sid Meier's Gettysburg, was real-time, but we see a strong market for turn-based games as well, and we will continue to produce them as long as our fans continue to demand them--and that demand shows no signs of abating.

Civilization, in Alpha Centauri you can tell your governor what kind of things to build. If you need to do more discovering, set a few of the governors to "discover" projects. Nasty person close buy, switch them to "conquer." Of course, you can also micromanage each city. Its up to you.
   Interface: An A+ for interface design. Generally, you can play the game on the game screen, seeing all sorts of information about cities, units and the like, without having to go clicking someplace else. This speeds up game play, gives you a more emersing experience while playing and saves time. In a game which takes as long as this one can to play, time-saving is welcomed.
   Look at the screen to the right. As you can easily see, this is a well-developed area with a number of units scattered about and a lot of improvements. We'd like to call your attention to the unit just to the right of this line with the green flag. Look carefully, and you will see the flag is striped. This indicates the unit has already moved this turn. The flag staff tells you the health of the unit (green, yellow, red). The numbers in the squares show the size of the cities. At the top, the city with the skull has a problem.
   If you'll look in the upper left corner of the screen shot, you will see part of a dotted green line. These lines mark the limit of your own faction's territory. Hey, when you walk into someone else's turf, you'll know it.
   While this is a highly developed area (note the roads) also see how the lighting effects change depending on the height of the terrain. Because terrain affects movement and offensive and defensive abilities, this is really helpful.
   Despite the complexity of Alpha Centauri, I found the interface was a great help in playing the game. Interfaces are supposed to do this, not have to be "conquered."
   Options: Options abound. You can tailor this game to play pretty much as you wish. Despite the routine things such as difficulty levels and showing or hiding each city's extended control area, you can view the game on a flattened map, have a "fog of war" setting to dim areas which are out of view, set defaults for what happens when you click a unit or a city, toggle all sorts of audio-visual effects and automate different units in different ways.
   The new Alpha Centauri player also has several tutorial scenarios and can turn on "hints" during the game. You can turn 'em off, too, they become annoying, but you really need them to get started. You can even adjust the game's gamma setting, to make things brighter or darker.
   Alpha Centauri is a turn-based game. Hurrah. As Brian Reynolds points out in his exclusive interview with Rainbow-PCM Reviews On-Line, real-time games are cool but they are different, too: there the emphasis is on making decisions in time-frame situations. With turn-based games like Alpha Centauri, you have the luxury to contemplate how you are going to build your world and what you're going to do next. We believe this lends itself to more complex gaming.
   This is a rave review of a game well-deserving of a rave review. It is complex, imaginative, innovative and delightful. All that means it is fun. You should play it. Today.

Link to the Alpha Centauri Web site. . . You can Order Alpha Centauri Direct here!