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Civ in Space (follow the ship you launched in Civ 1)

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: September 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Great game, if you like Civilization. It basically picks up with the colony ship you launched in Civilization, as it arrives at Alpha Centauri.

The best part about the game is the movies that play whenever you build a Wonder of the World. They're entertaining and even a bit educational.

The zenith of strategy gaming. kudos to Reynolds.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is the only turn-based strategy game one would ever need.
It has everything one would want out of a strategy game and SO much more.
The story is epic. The world is fully realised. The gameplay is deep. The literary references(not only Sci-Fi but philosophical and ethical and social) are many and profound. The factions are compelling. The possibilities are endless.

The including of multiplayer only sweetens the deal.

The only (minor) flaws here, which only present themselves to the diehard gamer, is the apparent lack of challenge from the AI, as well as the seemingly lacklustre graphics(but given the budget of Firaxis at the time, the art direction is still amazing).

Get This Game. It's one of those classics which you will keeping coming back for more. Even having owned this masterpiece for more than 5 years, I still play Alpha Centauri every 3 months or so, and it STILL retains its freshness and playability. This one is a definite keeper.

Also, as a parting word, I want to make it clear that, despite the "Sid Meier" name on the package, designer Brian Reynolds(who has since left Firaxis I believe) was the man behind Alpha Centauri and as such deserves the kudoes.
It is THIS game which deserves the title of "true sequel to Civilization II", and not Civ III which has none of the depth that this game has in spades.

Buy it.

A masterpiece...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 26, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I must admit, that when I first played Alpha Centauri I did'nt think too much of it. I got it of a friend, so I had to learn all of the controls without an instruction book. Now THAT is challenging. When I learned to play, however, I realised that this game could not have been made less complex than it is without slicing away some important pieces of the gameplay. The complexity is fascinating in itself, and the fact that the game is turn-based provides a relaxed feeling which is well needed in the current computer game climate. Alpha Centauri is an amazingly good game, on the border to perfection. It's time consuming, no doubt, but anyone with a bit of patience has countless hours of interesting gaming ahead of them.

If only days and nights were longer..

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: January 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

so I could play this masterpiece more often! When I ended my long and profound relationship with civ2, having attained one
of the first monster scores on the net, I thought that nothing would ever come close to the feeling I got out of diving deep
into the perplexity of Sid Mayer's classic.
I bought AC out of curiosity. I first went through the manual. Magic! I then started studying the game. More magic!
The offspring of the Mayer-Reynolds collaboration was nothing short of miraculous. The game had all the stengths of civ2 and none of its weaknesses! Micromanagement was introduced abolishing the tedious bits of civ. Customizing land,sea&air units was an absolute killer. The sound was smooth as silk.The overall display was devine.
And then it was the concept... That game's concept could easily stand alone as a great read in the sci-fi bookmarket.
Making some very simple changes in the text files such as city names, gender, quotes etc. the player can personalize a faction and actually become part of the story; and what a beautiful story it is. The living planet, the fantastic future science tree along with its mind-twisting excerpts from the "datalinks", a word that inevidably sends one back,momentarily, to the haunting intro movie, the combination of socio-political models producing incredibly unusual types of goverment, the eery peace emanating from the alien atmosphere... No matter how violent your strategy may be, the nature of the game is such that it will eventually force you to think more, kill less and try harder.
All of the above and much more will be experienced to their full extent ONLY by those who will invest time and effort in getting to know all the subtleties of this hard-to-master gem and not by those who think that they know the game because,after a few reloads, they finally managed to win at deity level.
Finishing this well deserved encomium I would like to point out the only flaw I found in AC. That is the use of a single
wav. file for all hand-held/turret mounted weapons regardless of class, power and age. Big no-no. The amount of research and attention to detail that ,evidently, the designers put into this game just goes to prove that this one just slipped under their noses.
Ah well, nothing's perfect after all...

I don't think this is as good as some others say

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 8
Date: November 24, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I played all the other Civ like games and this is the type of game I like, but I just didn't get Alpha Centauri. I played this one enought to get good, but the whole feel was just too much like Civ II and I seemed to get into Civ II like end games too easily.
Having now played CivIII for six months I given it a 5 start rating I don't understand my own review, but that was the feel I had.
I guess if you can get it for $10 now then it should be worth a try.
Maybe I'll try this again another day.

The original sequel to Civilization 2

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: November 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

If you ever played Civil 2 you might have built a huge empire and launched your spaceship to colonize Alpha Centauri... but what happened next???
This game is the sequel of the award winning game Civilization 2 and starts where the other ended.
The spacechip desintegrates before the arrival in Alpha C. and the colonists are disgregated all over the planet.
You can choose any of the surviving group of colonists to found your base and start building your new civilization.
Each of the groups or "tribes" has their own peculiarities: warrior, scientific, diplomatic, etc...

The game is pretty much the same as Civilization 2 regarding building cities and colonizing the world but brings some features within that will later be available in Civilization 3 such as diplomatic victory for instance. Plus the possibility of customizing your units.

I really recommend it and assure hours of fun and joy.

The rumors are true

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: September 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I had heard from a number of people beforehand that SMAC was better than Civilization. I now believe that.

What is better is difficult to sum up, but the easiest thing to put a finger on is the variety of improvements that can be made to cities, terrain, and even troops. In Civ you had the occasional chance to update your troops to one standard breed of soldier. Now, along with the ability to create troops and vehicles from the ground up, a person can pick and choose what sort of force they want to create, down to even fairly small details.

Another thing I feel is an improvement is the research system. What is researched is not a simple selection of a technology, the existance of which the player and his civ should not even know about to begin with. Instead, players select what sort of advance they want, such as military or construction technologies, and let things go from there. This helps to some degree keep things interesting, as there are no absolute garantees that you get what you wanted.

The planetary UN-type convention is another interesting feature. This should probably have been included in Civ 3, as well, as it gives a very good way to see how an individual is fairing in international relations, and also opens a door to new diplomatic ties not possible with simple one-on-one talks.

Many enjoy the story line given in the game, but this is something the game did not absolutely need. That is, through the discovery of technologies and information about the world, the story could have unfolded on its own. Instead, a person is yanked from play in order to read a story line supposedly centered on the player's character. If they were going to go this far, it would have been nice to have more personalized stories and endings for each player, rather than having in the end everyone with the same fate in store.

All in all, I can find no real problems with the game. It went beyond my expectations, and made it just that more difficult for me to be impressed by even Sid Meyer's other work.

Okay

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 9
Date: June 29, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Alphacent is an okay game that answers the question of what happened to the colony ship sent to alpha centuari in the civ series. The back story is well done, 7 different fations from the ship with differing political views decide to seperate upon arrival at the planet, and start their own civilisations.
The game is similar to the civ games, but if offers numerous improvements upon civ2. The controls are far more streamlined, and the computer interacts with you far more than in previous civ games. If you want, you can automate every unit and just manage city production, or vice versa, which saves times for those players with little.
The entire story and details of the game are a little weird to get your head around, this game starts off from a very high technology level, so naturally higher levels are hard to understand.
One thing I had a problem with in the game was that one of the political factions was a religious fundamnetalist group called 'The Believers', who's religion was christianity. So if you went to war with them, you were effectively fighting christianity, by destroying cities with names like 'The Hand of God' and 'New Eden'. As a christian, I had a problem with this, and it was one of the reasons I only gave this game 3 stars. It was my understanding that game designers tended to steer away from involving christianity heavily in their work, particularly in opposing it, simply out of respect for the religion. ...
Overall though, the game isn't too bad, but its simply too complex and full on for a newcomer to the civ universe to understand. Only for the die hard civ fanatics, if you're a casual strategy player, leave this one be.

Very fun, if you like this type of game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: June 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game was (correction, is) fun. It's more fun, of course, if you like this type of game. If you've ever played another one of Sid Meier's games, i.e. Civilazation I, II, and III, then you know what this game is like.

The difference between AC and the Civ games is that Civilizations take place in the past on Earth, and Alpha Centauri takes place in the (distant?) future, on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system that the colonists unimaginatively named Planet.

If it ever gets boring, as unlikely as this is, then the game is cheater-friendly, allowing, and, indeed, helping, the player to tinker with the different factions, giving the player advantage(s), or disvantage(s) if the game is too easy, or giving the enemy factions advantage(s)/disvantage(s).

I highly suggest that you buy this game. I like it much more than Sid Meier's other games, and it has replayability.

comparison to Civilization 2

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: May 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a fun game. The AI is good and the graphics are good for its time. The story line is a little bit choppy but I think it is better than Civilization 2. First of all you can automate all your units not just the setterlers, The computer interacts more with you, and there is a great diversity amung land sea and air units. The barbariens have been replaced with native life, and the native plants can be harmful. There are random events (volcanos, sun spot activites.ect) and it is sometimes hard to predict what the computer will do next. I have read in other reveiws that the game gets boring after a while, that may be true, but there are several ways to win the game. I find that if I play and then dont play for a while I still find the game fun. Multiplayer games are some of the best games to play, but the computer is still a good opponent. If you get bored with the current AI setup you can randomize there personalities. This game is definatly superior to Civilizaton 2

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