Fuck this has to be one of my favourite games of all time - If I had a PC still and the discs I'd be playing it right now. Sadly neither are true. This is one of those games (like Goldeneye) where I'd put down $ for a simple reissue that worked easily on new hardware.
My favourite bits -
1) Customisation and unit upgrading - To be able to closely tailor a unit to your enemy's weaknesses was a thing of beauty - if I was attacking the Gaians late game then I'd max out psi, or if I just wanted to go for a quick and cheap knock out blow I could build maxed offence/no defence units. Not to mention the unit design/upgrade console was amazingly easy to use
2) Government/civics - I loved the options/ease of change and how the interface set out the costs of each option which was nice. Gogo cybernetics!
3) The Factions - As said by others the fact that these factions actually seemed genuinely distinct as fantastic - Civ factions never really had the same personality, imo. I used to play Peacekeepers/University/ Spartans and the Free Drones the most, but they were all pretty good fun - hey, even an atheist enjoys a good holy crusade right?
4) The story - I really liked both the original then the xpac - I even read some of the novelisations later on, which I rarely do.
I remembered my login info to pop in and say that this game has my favorite sound ever. The procedurally generated music was awesome. (did anyone else think of SMAC during the Spore podcast rant?)
Also, every PC and cell phone I've had since owning this game has had every system sound replaced with sounds from the game (which are all in .WAV's with plain-text names in a single directory).
"New data recieved!"
"Datapod recovered!"
"Indigenous Lifeforms!"
"Cannot execute order"
<3<3
Also, i just found my CD floating around in a binder full of 90's music. This weekend is shot.
University was always crazy overpowered in the original. Free Network Nodes made alien artifacts awesome, and all you need is to get yourself Virtual World, and you get free hologram theaters as well in every base.
Then you just rush Hunter-Seeker Algorithm and win with your maxed-out Drop Grav-Tanks of Doom that you built the Space Elevator for and can now airdrop anywhere on Planet. (Extra points if you also have the secret project that allows them to repair anywhere).
Fixed. Had one game where that happened, I basically dominated my continent, then towards the end it was the Believers and the Morganites on the other continent, when they vendetta'd each other I just airdropped tanks in the middle, vendetta against both and proceeded to go to town.
I am so down for any sort of multiplayer SMAC, I do like the idea of getting folks on Skype for the first couple dozen turns.
Someone should do a Let's Play of this. Maybe I will, if I can pick this game up someplace.
Damn this forum for making me pick up my ancient, awesome games.
Someone on SA did one. It was pretty sweet, lots of player participation if I remember correctly. Nothing like leaving, "Nerve staple the bitches" to a vote. You can find its archive here. I don't think that'll have the viewer's comments, however.
I had never gotten to play it until Gametap. When it was on Gametap, I found it to be an amazing experience, and so so great, especially since I was a civ fan, and a huge fan of Civ2 in particular. So after my friend "discovered" Civ4 and played through a couple of multi-player games, I explained to him how Alpha Centauri is so good. Told him we could probably play a multiplayer game on Gamtap. Turns out that Gametap lost the license in December when they restructured some contracts and EA backed out or some shit. Fuck.
piL on
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
Sid's grown to greatly favor games with more real life groundings since it makes it more accessible to a wider audience. Everyone knows about pirates, railroads, and that aggressive warmonger known as Ghandi after all.
I can understand where he's coming from especially given his general philosophy on games, but it still makes us all sad that no one has really done a terrestial sci-fi turn based strategy game. I never got a chance to play the original, it was before I was into PC gaming.
Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
edited February 2008
Steel: The gameplay still held up pretty well if you're a fan of the general civ games. Try your hardest to find it. Maybe I can find a copy of mine around my place.
The COMPLETE Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire story, as posted on the Firaxis website long ago. This was officially released by Firaxis just to give the series more of a story to it. Enjoy!
It's not really in English, but the idea is easy to understand. Press the + icon and add the terran.exe or terranx.exe, then press the name then the old-school my computer icon to run it. If you're in Vista, you'll need to run the program in XP or Win2k compat mode. Cheers!
I'd be a lot bigger of a fan if the AI wasn't simply fucking terrible. A lot of the factions are hideously powerful if you play them correctly, but the AI just goes "durr durr, Gaian, University, Pirates, whatever" and goes on its merry way playing them all more or less the same, which makes anything but multiplayer absolutely pathetic. And don't get me started on how broken the espionage mechanics are, especially on small maps.
Amazing writing and whatnot, but I see it as kind of the Psychonauts of the TBS world.
Funny, I never played Multiplayer, and on the hard difficulties, I had a great time. Sometimes I would lose sometimes not.
This game also had HotSeat play, Aka instant awesome.
I have good news for one of you who does not own the game (or perhaps the expansion). I have found my disc, which just so happens to be the Planetary Pack with the original game and expansion on one CD! Unfortunately, I did not find the guide or manuals that came with it.
What's the good news, you ask?
I'm willing to part with it. Why? I enjoyed the game, but I have a huge backlog and being a new dad doesn't give me much spare time to work through it, let alone games I've played before that deserve a replay.
So what do you have to do?
PM me. I do ask for something to cover shipping costs, but it's a CD, it shouldn't cost much to ship.
Extra good news:
I tried it out on my Dell Latitude D620, and it ran perfectly fine without any patches or mods on WinXP SP2. So if you're running XP, you shouldn't have any problems with this, unless you want to do anything extra, perhaps. Though I didn't do much other than install and start a game and play through a bunch of turns, so I'm not sure about some of the later things. It does seem to read off the CD during the game, despite having installed the "complete" version.
So if you want to play Alpha Centauri, but don't have the game, PM me. We'll see if I can't remedy that.
ArcSyn on
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
edited February 2008
Oops disregard that PM.
Obviously I've played the game, so I shouldn't get it. Someone who hasn't played it before should.
Part of the reason that AC is so good is that it is like Civ 2, only with fun combat.
Combat being the one thing that really drags the Civ series down.
Also some of the faction leaders are pretty hilarious.
It's a shame how hard it is to get this game to work on modern rigs.
This game really needs a Vista port. Yes port. I can't really think of anything I'd change.
Maybe things were changed with the planetary pack, but I just installed it on XP and ran it perfectly fine without any work. I didn't even ask it to run in compatibility mode.
But yes, from what I remember of this game, they could update the graphics and support some higher resolutions, perhaps change the AI so it doesn't threaten you with 2-1-1 when you have 3-2-3 and sell it.
I found my disk and I have installed it. Good bye weekend. One of the nice things of having the linux version is all the movies are just normal mpgs and the sounds are all mp3. The bad part is it didn't come with paper manuals. (Just pdfs) Not sure who to play as... I think I might just let the computer choose.
I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because fuck you is why.
Yang is so awesome. No inefficiency is retardedly good. It means you can pick all those -eff SE choices and laugh at the negatives. Sure, you won't be making bucketloads of money like Morgan, but t'ever. You can steamroll anyone. They might have a better army, but yours will be so much bigger. Oh yes. So much bigger. The bonuses you get are just icing. If they just had no inefficiency I'd still be loving them.
Really, all of the factions can be rediculously good (maybe not the belivers), just in different areas. This is why it rocks more than the interchangable benefits in civ4
Well, fuck you all. I am hooked on this game again, and it is delicious. I forgot one of my favorite features of the game... random tech discoveries. It makes it a lot more interesting.
Anyways, currently I'm playing as the Cybernetic Consciousness on Huge Map of Planet...
Yang got murdered by Cha Dawn's mindworm army, Zhakarov got wasted by my rover horde, the Believers are hiding up on a stupid little island, Santiago is getting crushed by my Chaos guns, and Deirdre has just come under attack from Cha Dawn. It looks like it's going to come down to me, Miriam, and Cha. Should be an interesting game.
It's all about the pirates. Three-front war? Sure, why not? You'll never get within three squares of any of my floating doom fortresses anyway. Stealing ships for fun and profit!
Military conquests become downright unfair once you get planetary drops.
Every time I start this up, I vow to myself that this next playthrough will be different. I tell myself I'll focus more on industry, more on my military, more on my research, and for the most part I manage to do this for the first part of the game. But no matter how I try to play the game, it always ends the same way: me degenerating into a mind-controlling mad scientist, scouring the entire planet of my enemies (and whoever gets in my way) with my massive swarms of psychic locusts.
After reading this thread, I went home, found my discs, and installed... didnt work. Installed the WinXp comp patch, then got a fun message saying my CPU wasn't supported.
I cried a little, then remembered I was a big boy and this is the internet, and found the solution.
Then I promptly lost track of 7(!) hours.
Seriously, I looked up at one point and wondered why it was do dark and why I was so hungry....
...Note to self: If you are allied with the Gaians, don't use Planet Busters.
I truly cannot imagine why. Surely the Gaians of all factions would be totally OK with you committing all sorts of atrocities against both mankind and Planet's ecology. :P
WotanAnubis on
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
Ahh, reading this thread brings me back. Such an awesome game. Never played the expansion, though. As I recall, the main problem was that the AI really had no finesse, they would just brute force everything. Bigger, the better. Which meant that AI Yang and Miriam were always big and treacherous, while Lal was just big... and Morgan and Santiago and Deidre and Zharkov would just languish, and eventually get crushed by either Miriam or Yang. (Usually Yang). Which meant, unless I was playing the Hive, I would end up fighting them in long, bitter wars...
dojango on
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
Yang makes the best AI opponent by far, simply because of his ability to ignore negative efficiency mods on the SE screen. Means he can do some hideous things. Police State and Yang really work out well.
Just finished a game as Yang. Ended up on the middle continent with the Data Jocks, 40 years later it was only me. Cha was on the eastern continent along with Zhakarov and Aki. 50 years later it was only him over there. Morgan started on the island and was a non-issue, though treatying him gave me tons o cash. Santiago was solo on the wester continent but she never got off properly, losing base after base to mind worms. Snagged a diplomatic victory the turn I got the tech. All my bases being size 16 due to ample psych spending and a lot of Orbital KFCs meant I had three times the pop of the rest of the world combined. 30 Orbital gardens means all your bases get 1 food per pop. Add golden ages from psych spending and a new base will go from 1 to 16 in no time.
Man, I remember playing this in multi on a LAN once. 7 of us. The amount of backstabbing and underhand deals going down was astounding. The guy who won was playing Miriam and he managed to pull of an economic victory. What Morgan was doing that game I never found out.
I remember way back when this first came out, I was pretty young, not nearly old enough to understand it. But my Dad would play it every day, and I'd sit and watch, and we'd discuss tactics for almost every move. It was a really great time.
Oh hey, there is an Alpha Centurai thread here, fantastic (i realise its 3 months old)
Got a few questions that I don't think warranted recreating this thread anyway
1. What the hell do Supply Crawlers do? I cannot figure it out
2. How do I get the game to slow the hell down? Everything zips around the screen at a million miles a second
and
3. Would anybody like to play a game later?
Posts
Knowing what my rivals are up to at all times helps a great deal. Especially when trying to snatch other Secret Projects away from under their noses.
My favourite bits -
1) Customisation and unit upgrading - To be able to closely tailor a unit to your enemy's weaknesses was a thing of beauty - if I was attacking the Gaians late game then I'd max out psi, or if I just wanted to go for a quick and cheap knock out blow I could build maxed offence/no defence units. Not to mention the unit design/upgrade console was amazingly easy to use
2) Government/civics - I loved the options/ease of change and how the interface set out the costs of each option which was nice. Gogo cybernetics!
3) The Factions - As said by others the fact that these factions actually seemed genuinely distinct as fantastic - Civ factions never really had the same personality, imo. I used to play Peacekeepers/University/ Spartans and the Free Drones the most, but they were all pretty good fun - hey, even an atheist enjoys a good holy crusade right?
4) The story - I really liked both the original then the xpac - I even read some of the novelisations later on, which I rarely do.
I'd so kill for a mac OSX version:(
Also, every PC and cell phone I've had since owning this game has had every system sound replaced with sounds from the game (which are all in .WAV's with plain-text names in a single directory).
"New data recieved!"
"Datapod recovered!"
"Indigenous Lifeforms!"
"Cannot execute order"
Also, i just found my CD floating around in a binder full of 90's music. This weekend is shot.
http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html
Or maybe I'm blind.
Fixed. Had one game where that happened, I basically dominated my continent, then towards the end it was the Believers and the Morganites on the other continent, when they vendetta'd each other I just airdropped tanks in the middle, vendetta against both and proceeded to go to town.
I am so down for any sort of multiplayer SMAC, I do like the idea of getting folks on Skype for the first couple dozen turns.
Someone on SA did one. It was pretty sweet, lots of player participation if I remember correctly. Nothing like leaving, "Nerve staple the bitches" to a vote. You can find its archive here. I don't think that'll have the viewer's comments, however.
I had never gotten to play it until Gametap. When it was on Gametap, I found it to be an amazing experience, and so so great, especially since I was a civ fan, and a huge fan of Civ2 in particular. So after my friend "discovered" Civ4 and played through a couple of multi-player games, I explained to him how Alpha Centauri is so good. Told him we could probably play a multiplayer game on Gamtap. Turns out that Gametap lost the license in December when they restructured some contracts and EA backed out or some shit. Fuck.
Sid's grown to greatly favor games with more real life groundings since it makes it more accessible to a wider audience. Everyone knows about pirates, railroads, and that aggressive warmonger known as Ghandi after all.
I can understand where he's coming from especially given his general philosophy on games, but it still makes us all sad that no one has really done a terrestial sci-fi turn based strategy game. I never got a chance to play the original, it was before I was into PC gaming.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Since we're quoting stuff, may as well drop this in:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/96102/7985
http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/198636/8315
The COMPLETE Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire story, as posted on the Firaxis website long ago. This was officially released by Firaxis just to give the series more of a story to it. Enjoy!
http://files.filefront.com/D3DWindower+Englishrar/;7453735;/fileinfo.html
It's not really in English, but the idea is easy to understand. Press the + icon and add the terran.exe or terranx.exe, then press the name then the old-school my computer icon to run it. If you're in Vista, you'll need to run the program in XP or Win2k compat mode. Cheers!
Funny, I never played Multiplayer, and on the hard difficulties, I had a great time. Sometimes I would lose sometimes not.
This game also had HotSeat play, Aka instant awesome.
I have good news for one of you who does not own the game (or perhaps the expansion). I have found my disc, which just so happens to be the Planetary Pack with the original game and expansion on one CD! Unfortunately, I did not find the guide or manuals that came with it.
What's the good news, you ask?
I'm willing to part with it. Why? I enjoyed the game, but I have a huge backlog and being a new dad doesn't give me much spare time to work through it, let alone games I've played before that deserve a replay.
So what do you have to do?
PM me. I do ask for something to cover shipping costs, but it's a CD, it shouldn't cost much to ship.
Extra good news:
I tried it out on my Dell Latitude D620, and it ran perfectly fine without any patches or mods on WinXP SP2. So if you're running XP, you shouldn't have any problems with this, unless you want to do anything extra, perhaps. Though I didn't do much other than install and start a game and play through a bunch of turns, so I'm not sure about some of the later things. It does seem to read off the CD during the game, despite having installed the "complete" version.
So if you want to play Alpha Centauri, but don't have the game, PM me. We'll see if I can't remedy that.
Obviously I've played the game, so I shouldn't get it. Someone who hasn't played it before should.
Well if no one who hasn't played the game asks for it, you have dibs.
Combat being the one thing that really drags the Civ series down.
Also some of the faction leaders are pretty hilarious.
It's a shame how hard it is to get this game to work on modern rigs.
This game really needs a Vista port. Yes port. I can't really think of anything I'd change.
Maybe things were changed with the planetary pack, but I just installed it on XP and ran it perfectly fine without any work. I didn't even ask it to run in compatibility mode.
But yes, from what I remember of this game, they could update the graphics and support some higher resolutions, perhaps change the AI so it doesn't threaten you with 2-1-1 when you have 3-2-3 and sell it.
Let me tell you about Demon's Souls....
Anyways, currently I'm playing as the Cybernetic Consciousness on Huge Map of Planet...
Yang got murdered by Cha Dawn's mindworm army, Zhakarov got wasted by my rover horde, the Believers are hiding up on a stupid little island, Santiago is getting crushed by my Chaos guns, and Deirdre has just come under attack from Cha Dawn. It looks like it's going to come down to me, Miriam, and Cha. Should be an interesting game.
Military conquests become downright unfair once you get planetary drops.
It was glorious frying Sparta Command, but the ensuing waves of mindworms and the breaking of my alliance(and loss of an ocean base) really hurt.
I cried a little, then remembered I was a big boy and this is the internet, and found the solution.
Then I promptly lost track of 7(!) hours.
But it doesn't have the expansion.
Freaking. Spore. Towers.
It's bad enough that fungus grows everywhere, but when it randomly destroys your terrain improvements it's a huge pain in the ass.
But damn does the original game have some freakin' depth. It plays like a novel basically.
I wanna transcend too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGCaACqy1Ro
Thats where my chickens will come from in the future.
I don't know if this is all of them but I think it is.
Just finished a game as Yang. Ended up on the middle continent with the Data Jocks, 40 years later it was only me. Cha was on the eastern continent along with Zhakarov and Aki. 50 years later it was only him over there. Morgan started on the island and was a non-issue, though treatying him gave me tons o cash. Santiago was solo on the wester continent but she never got off properly, losing base after base to mind worms. Snagged a diplomatic victory the turn I got the tech. All my bases being size 16 due to ample psych spending and a lot of Orbital KFCs meant I had three times the pop of the rest of the world combined. 30 Orbital gardens means all your bases get 1 food per pop. Add golden ages from psych spending and a new base will go from 1 to 16 in no time.
Man, I remember playing this in multi on a LAN once. 7 of us. The amount of backstabbing and underhand deals going down was astounding. The guy who won was playing Miriam and he managed to pull of an economic victory. What Morgan was doing that game I never found out.
Got a few questions that I don't think warranted recreating this thread anyway
1. What the hell do Supply Crawlers do? I cannot figure it out
2. How do I get the game to slow the hell down? Everything zips around the screen at a million miles a second
and
3. Would anybody like to play a game later?