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Jan 28th, 2012 at 13:28:49 - Alpha Centauri (PC) |
First, here is a brief summary of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (SMAC) is an oft-overlooked game. SMAC deals with creating your own empire by building cities and military units, exploring, researching new technologies, and dealing with other empires. SMAC does all this in much the same way Civilization II does. However, SMAC also incorporates new elements into the classic Civilization mixture. For one, the game occurs on a distant planet and, as a result, most of the military units and technologies are the stuff of science fiction. Naturally, this means that there are some units that can do things that modern science has not yet discovered or explained. Also, unlike the early Civilization games, the player’s faction of choice has a massive impact on gameplay and strategy. Each faction has their own unique bonuses and deficiencies. For example, one faction’s military units are twice as effective when attacking, but that same faction also has vastly reduced research capabilities. Additionally, as the player advances through the technology tree, he or she can select one of several “social engineering” choices in the areas of politics, economics, values, or future society. Like the initial faction choice at the beginning of the game, social engineering choices have upsides and downsides. As an example, free market is one of the social engineering choices in economics; it increases the monetary and scientific production of an empire, but also increases ecological disruption and makes cities harder to control for that empire. Each of the game’s choices can be combined to give an empire a unique set of advantages and disadvantages, which further leads to a wide variety of effective play styles for SMAC. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri stands among the best of the Civilization games and, certainly, provides the most depth of play within the series.
Now, here is my first SMAC gamelog:
So, I begin playing SMAC. At the start of the game, my first major choice is which of the six factions I want to play. I select the Gaians, a group of people who are defined by their ecological sensitivity. They choose to adapt to the native ecology of Alpha Centauri and look down on empires that choose to exploit or disrupt the native ecology. In terms of gameplay, playing as the Gaians gives me two advantages. First, the Gaians are more effective at training and capturing native lifeforms, called “mindworms.” When captured or trained, mindworms can be used like any other military unit; however, instead of traditional combat, they engage in psi combat which ignores all technology-based combat bonuses. Second, the Gaians are more effective than other empires at managing large numbers of cities. Since I fully intend to develop a massive empire, the Gaians seem like an ideal choice.
The game begins with my ship crash-landing on Alpha Centauri, on the edge of a small continent. This leaves me with one city and a couple of units with which to begin exploring the planet. I spend the next several turns building more military units to explore the continent and some economic units to build more cities and to improve the cities I already have.
All this is going swimmingly until I encounter CEO Nwabudike Morgan, leader of the Morganites. As his title implies, he is the leader of a faction that prioritizes wealth above all else. As a result, his cities tend to be both fabulously rich and poorly defended. I decide, then, that it would be a fantastic idea to separate Morgan from his money, and I immediately declare war on him. Unfortunately, for me, Morgan has a bigger and more technologically advanced military than I do and handily trounces all the (admittedly weak) units I send after him. Seeing the rough shape my army is in, I contact Morgan and request a truce, which he is quite willing to accept (for the right price, of course). I haven’t finished with Morgan yet, but my ambitions can wait until my military is strong enough to finish the job.
Shortly after signing the truce, I unlock the ability to train mindworms. As mentioned previously, mindworms ignore technological combat bonuses, meaning that they will do just as well against Morgan’s more advanced troops as they would against other units. This plays to my faction’s strengths and will give me something of an edge against Morgan next time around.
Once I am satisfied that I have enough mindworms, I contact Morgan and demand that he transmit some of his research data to me. Predictably, this enrages him, and he declares war on me. We once again start fighting, and my units clearly have a significant advantage, winning most individual fights. However, Morgan has a significant stockpile of troops, which keeps me from conquering any of his cities for some time. Also, due to his faction’s economic strength, he has plenty of money with which to rush the production of his military units, allowing him to build units much more quickly than I can.
It is during this second war with Morgan that I encounter several of the other factions. After trading maps with one of the factions, the Believers, I find out that I am alone with Morgan on a medium-sized continent. All of the remaining factions are scattered about on three large continents. I also find out that the faction that’s currently in first place, the Hive, has significantly more cities, technology, and Secret Projects than any of the other empires, including my own. I resolve, once the war with Morgan ends, to “deal with” the growing power of the Hive. In the next gamelog, I will provide some background on Secret Projects, finish my war with Morgan, and confront the Hive.
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