Not this. Alpha Centauri is the work of a master vintner; it's been carefully crafted, each ingredient examined, every process mulled over. Its design has been aged and distilled by worried, loving cellarers; the result is gaming bliss, mead for the connoisseur's glass.
In other words, Alpha Centauri is far more than just Civilization III, and while it was made by the same team that did Civilization I and II and shares all of those games' conventions and designs, it goes far enough beyond the old ones that I'm not likely to go back.
Story
For starters, the setting's changed: in Alpha Centauri you colonize an unknown, alien planet rather than explore the broad sweep of Earth history. Firaxis lavished attention on the background of Alpha Centauri itself; took great care in fleshing out a plot and the protagonists and the setting, making a believable and so a more immersive and compelling game.
Far too many games simply assume that by drawing landscape, tossing in some laser guns and big-eared aliens, you somehow end up with authentic science fiction. What you really end up with is a shapeless mish-mash of cliches, just so much sci fi gibberish.
But Brian Reynolds certainly did his homework. Alpha Centauri has the scientific plausibility you'd expect from Firaxis, designers known for historical games like Gettysburg and Railroad Tycoon. For example, the back of this game's manual has a short essay on the dynamics of planet building and solar system formation, which offers a justification of why the "Planet" at Alpha Centauri is the way it is. While this kind of thing is common in essays about science fiction world-building or in pen-and-paper roleplaying games, it is gallingly rare in strategy games, even on the PC, which is supposed to be a bastion for factual accuracy; in contrast, look at the painstaking realism of flight sims and wargames. (Now if only these guys would tackle the Master of Orion genre with an empire-building game that spans the stars...)
Even more remarkable, is that for a strategy game, Alpha Centauri has a lot of personality and mood. The craftsmanship really shines through. It is hard to convey a sense of story in an open-ended strategy game like this, as these type of games use a set of semi-rigid rules on randomly generated worlds, but Alpha Centauri--probably more than any other strategy game I can think of apart from X-COM--really pulls it off, largely through excellent in-game writing and art direction.
It's through the writing that the personalities of the faction leaders come alive, not only in their negotiations with the player but also in the speeches that accompany each new technological discovery. But this is more than a set of wacky characters. Each faction leader represents a point of view; references to philosophy, religion, ideology and the like permeate the game, something usually not found in games.
Of course after you play it a dozen times, the Secret Project movies, clever snippets of text, and the philosophical facades of the factions fade in importance compared to the core gameplay. But that's where Alpha Centauri truly shines: after all, it stands on the shoulders of the giant: Civilization.
Gameplay
A new setting is nice, but what makes Alpha Centauri is that the weak parts of the old Civilization design have been tightened up, while previously untouchable parts of the rules have been turned into new, complex decisions for the player to make. And complex decisions--weighing tradeoffs, making choices, allocating resources, based solely on the information at hand--is what strategy gaming is all about.
Here's an example. In the old Civs, you were stuck with the military units that came with particular technological discoveries. Invent wheels, get chariots. Invent gunpowder, get musketeers. Here, the components of a military unit--chassis, weapons, defense, and special abilities--are freed up, giving the enterprising player the ability to tailor appropriate units for particular circumstances.
How is this useful? Say you have unruly cities. Build cheap 1-1-1 units with the special ability "Police" and they will break out the nightsticks and lay down the law. Want a cheap, devastating attacker? Build air units with nerve gas pods. But be prepared for the ire of your rival leaders. There are some flaws in this system--the constant need to upgrade old units and the proliferation of unit designs grows tedious.
Here's another example: in the old Civs, governmental types were rigid and tied to technological discovery. Invent writing, you can have a Republic. Invent mass production, and you can practice Communism. Each governmental type had its plusses and minuses.
Here, it's different. There are no rigid governmental types. You can dictate different policies on differing facets of your nation's life at whim. You can practice Green economics while running a Police State. Or have a Fundamentalist government with a Free Market economy. The combinations are many, and they aren't merely window dressing--each choice has a serious, global effect on the science, happiness, military, etc., ratings for your cities.
But these elements are for the serious players who want to fine-tune their civilizations. The casual player needn't address them at all, and neatly offsetting these optional complexities are some really handy gameplay shortcuts that make the game more manageable.
For example, Alpha Centauri has something called Former units, which play the same role as the settlers or engineers of the past. But rather than being forced to micro-manage what improvements they make, turn after turn, you can set them to auto-run, letting them auto-improve just their home base, or globally improve your civilization in general. You can even order them to build a road from X to Y. This kind of design tweaking is made for the gamer, not just to fill out some feature set on a sales sheet.
And to speed up the "sagging middle" and the end game, when you have dozens and dozens of cities to manage, you can turn on governors and set them to auto-produce improvements and units. You can also specify what areas the governors should work on--science, industry, or military. The governors don't always build the most sensible things in the world, but you can always go in and change it.
And on and on it goes. The game has more features than can adequately be covered in a review. A great diplomacy system. An option to turn off acquiring technology through conquering a city. Working borders that the computer players tend to respect--that feature alone is almost enough to make this a better game than Civilization II.
And with so many optional rules that can be turned on or off, like permitting cooperative victories, restricting scientific advances, allowing economic or transcendent wins, even an "Iron Man" option that limits saved games--one is left with so many different possible styles of play that a reviewer has to talk about playing Alpha Centauri in the abstract. Suffice it to say if you want to play a military game, you can turn off all the other alternate paths to victory. If you want a huge, sprawling world with lots of space to expand in, it's there, or if you really want to change the rules around, simply edit the game's text files. So any player of Civilization can with the various custom options put together relatively quickly the kind of scenario that suits their style of play.
Loose Ends
There are points to quibble over, of course, as there is with anything. Rainfall patterns apparently play a role in the productivity of a given swatch of terrain, but I haven't figured out how to get an overall rainfall pattern on the map.
The game's weakest point is probably its multiplayer mode. Turn-based games like this don't lend themselves readily to Internet play--and really, can do fine without it. We tried it here over the LAN of course, but experienced random disconnects. And one of the multiplayer options--simultaneous moves--proved to be very frustrating: whenever you wanted to move a piece, the odds were great the game was processing someone else's turn. If and when Alpha Centauri takes hold as a multiplayer game, I expect players will prefer the turn-based mode. After all, while you're waiting to move your units, you can still tweak individual city settings, so it's not like you're totally unoccupied.
I was also disappointed with the scope of customization. Yes, it's more than what's offered in the previous games, but there's no way to make an ice planet, a desert planet, to make a Tatooine or a Hoth, a Yavin or a Dagobah, whether such planets are scientifically accurate or not. The terrain set graphics are too limited; it might be fun to find Alpha Centauri's sole inhabitable planet an airless rock or a frigid, Martian wasteland, once in a while.
And while pre-game conditions like victory conditions are very broad and flexible, certain underlying presumptions--like the presence of seven factions, the presence of alien fungus, etc.--are rather rigid. This wouldn't be worth remarking on except that the numerous Microprose Civ II expansions--as well as fan-created scenarios--have turned Civilization II into a computer gaming system, rather than just a game--given the inclination, any fan with a graphics program and some imagination can create a Civ II scenario in any period in history, real or imagined: I've played Civ II scenarios set during the Norman Conquest, the War of the Worlds, in a Master of Magic campaign, etc., etc.
Though Alpha Centauri currently lacks this capability, it's possible that with an expansion set from EA or, more simply, tools created by some Alpha Centauri fan community that this "customization gap" could be overcome. And it'd be fun to see someone hack SMAC into a swords & sorcery game, where terrain is altered by spells, not technology. Everything has been set up to allow this--the voiceovers are in MP3 format, the art is largely PCX files.
So while some will knock the game by saying, "It's just what Civilization did before", that's true of most things. Half-Life is just an elaborate form of Wolfenstein 3D. Baldur's Gate is just Dungeons & Dragons. So it goes.
So such complaints are minor at best and to me irrelevant. It'd be nice to see customization and flexibility along the lines of the Civ II line, but what Firaxis has here is remarkable. Alpha Centauri is a better game than Civilization II; it's deep, rich, rewarding, thought-provoking in almost every way. It's not for everyone, but for those who want to drink deeply in the well of gaming, raise a glass.
--Jason Bates