
Paean to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (2016) - Apocryphon
https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com
======
scotty79
Those voice-acted quotes after you finished research or build your first
building of given kind are little gems that stay with you for decades.

"The Academician’s private residences shall remain off-limits to the Genetic
Inspectors. We possess no retroviral capability, we are not researching
retroviral engineering, and we shall not allow this Council to violate faction
privileges in the name of this ridiculous witch hunt!”

—Fedor Petrov, Vice Provost for University Affairs

... spoken with official, assertive voice right after you completed research
on "Retroviral Engineering".

~~~
dccoolgai
Beware he who denies you access to information, for in his heart he dreams
himself your master. - Commissioner Pravin Lal

~~~
arjie
I wonder if our choice of favourite quote strongly determines our moral
foundations (in an MFT sense). Certainly this is the one I hold most dear.

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inetknght
SMAC is solidly in my top 10 games of all time, moreso than some of Sid's more
recent 4X games. SMAC has a lot of elements that I think are still unique from
the Civilization series: elevation, weather, terraforming, cities on water
tiles, useful satellites, more types of combat, and even the ability to create
your own unit types. It ties a story to "barbarians" (alien mind worms) and
technology advancement. It ties the difficulty of the aliens to how much
pollution you generate and what civic choices you make: is your government
pro-aliens or anti-aliens?

~~~
LMYahooTFY
Wow, yeah all of those elements are utterly absent from Civ 5 and 6.

~~~
rubinelli
The latest DLC added some environmental effects to the game, but nothing on
the scale that SMAC had.

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softwaredoug
Interesting, I just started playing this again in the last week. I found it
surprisingly accessible after all this time. _Especially_ the slightly
pessimistic hard sci-fi content given the current political / environmental
situation.

You can buy the game on gog.com relatively cheap, and there's a set of
community patches for things like widescreen, better AI, and other features at
([http://alphacentauri2.info](http://alphacentauri2.info)).

The biggest annoyance I've found is moving multiple units. I think other civs
have figured out grouping better. Alpha Centauri hasn't quite gotten this.

I definitely rank this in my Top 3 4X games (w/ Master of Orion II and Civ V)

~~~
evanweaver
Did they patch out the way supply crawlers completely break the end game? How
do you get started simply with these mods?

~~~
softwaredoug
Well I’ve only installed the widescreen patch. I’m not sure I have the time to
get into all the other stuff they have!

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john_moscow
For such a wonderful game SMAC is, it's a real pity it doesn't come with a
proper scripting engine or a mod SDK. Yes, you can edit the .txt files, but
that mostly limits you to constants and names (e.g. you cannot create a new
type of secret project, or a completely new special ability).

I wish the present copyright holders would consider publishing the source code
for the game under a license that still requires purchasing the original. I
don't think it would drop the sales by much (the pirated download link is #2
result in Google, so I would assume they don't care), but that would give a
massive boost to the modder community, and likely more PR/sales.

Realistically though, it probably relies on a bunch of 3rd-party components
and reviewing their licenses for each of them would be a massive headache...

~~~
nine_k
Just exposing the internal scripting interface / data format, without opening
any sources, would go a long way.

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swyx
Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than
what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We
long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and
in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes
on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he
must exist.

\- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted the Fruit" \- Accompanies
the Intellectual Integrity technology

so true.

------
AndrewBissell
There was some brief HN discussion around SMAC's 20th anniversary:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879088)

There I wrote: "It's interesting to examine Alpha Centauri's political
perspectives in light of the fact that it was released in 1999. The triumph of
'the old world's liberal order' seemed so permanent that public intellectuals
were writing paeans to 'the end of history,' yet here was a game premised on
the ultimate breakdown and fragmentation of that order."

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john_moscow
In case anyone else is playing the game in 2019 (2020?), here's a nice little
cheat that allows instant and unlimited terraforming:

1\. Open the alphax.txt file and locate the Chassis definitions. Set the
"Missile" flag for the Missile chassis to 0 (set it to 1 for Needlejet) and
change its range to 99.

2\. Replace the 'deleted' technology in alphax.txt with an arbitrary name and
link it to the 'missile' platform.

3\. Edit your faction txt file so that it starts with the missile technology
and the gravship technology.

4\. Open the unit designer, make a gravship former and switch the chassis to
missile (the gravship step is important). This will make you a "missile
former" capable of instant unlimited terraforming (i.e. terraforming doesn't
end the turn) and unlimited range (is gets reset to 99 once it reaches zero).

Kinda breaks the balance, but makes it possible to play for an otherwise weak
faction, while eliminating the grind.

~~~
forgotmypwd123
Which factions are so weak as to make this 'fair'?

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thrower123
I still haven't played a better 4X strategy game.

One of the best aspects was that it provided so many different ways to play
that were effective. Usually in Civ-games, no matter how they try to design
around it, there's no real alternative between just rushing technology and
pumping cities to snowball.

One of my favorite things to do was to use the terraforming abilities as
weapons, and build mountains or flood the low-lying land. Or you could
encourage the native life to go wild and take out the other players.

The unit designer was also fun; it's one of the few in games where I have
actually bothered to build out specialized units for different roles - usually
it's either pointless or too complicated to bother with.

~~~
softwaredoug
Yes you can literally rebuild the landscape, and the climate system will
redefine the raininess and other factors of the landscape.

I also like you can do ocean colonies, and working in the ocean isn't entirely
second class.

I enjoy the vision of the future split up into ideologies, and not nation
states, which seems to be closer to our current life.

------
domador
I loved this game! Having said that, the main change I'd make to this and
other similar games is to have an option to limit and adjust the number of
actions the AI player can perform on each turn. There always came a point
where the AI player would do tons of things each turn. Not only would the AI's
turns take ages, but on my own turn it'd take me a long time to catch up,
figure out what the AI did and play accordingly. Another, additional option
would be to limit the number of units and/or cities the AI player (or maybe
all players) can build. It became tedious to attack or deal with the dozens of
cities created by the AI players.

On a different note, I loved the quotes in the game that referenced a various
fictional books and speeches. Something similar happens in the book "Dune",
with quotes to nonexistent books set in Dune's future that referenced the
events in the Dune. There's something to be said for when a work of fiction
makes references to fictional works of nonfiction within the real work of
fiction's fictional universe. (Another book that exhibits this is "The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", a fiction book that makes references to the
nonexistent, nonfiction book after which the real book is named.) I like the
illusion of that the fictional universe is much larger than I can see, and the
desire to read the fictional works of nonfiction the author lets me peek into.

On a final note, I loved the parody books titles mentioned at the end of the
game. Has anyone found a list of the original book titles being parodied, or
does someone know all those cultural references? I'm referring to titles such
as "Boreholes I Have Known" or "I'm OK, You're a Drone" (the latter of which
parodies "I'm OK, You're OK". Yet I don't get what book title the former is
parodying, and there are others whose references I don't get.)

~~~
washadjeffmad
"$subject I Have Known" has been a popular title for personal and anecdotal
historical works in British and American literature. It's a likely play off
that and not one in particular.

I still play SMAC/X and find new campaigns from time to time. If you don't own
the GoG version, it's frequently on sale for <$5.

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chaostheory
I’m surprised EA hasn’t worked with Hollywood to develop Alpha Centauri into a
TV series yet

~~~
hhas01
Game of Rovers

 _fungus is coming_

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netghost
Does anyone know if anything comparable to SMAC these days? I probably spent
more time playing this game than anything else.

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CoolGuySteve
While the writing in Alpha Centauri is some of the best in video games, the
actual game itself is less fun than Civilization. The hostile terrain and
alien life you spend most of the game dealing with just isn't as interesting
as the enemy AI.

~~~
thaumasiotes
The enemy AI in every Civilization game is incredibly stupid. "Interesting"
isn't really the word.

~~~
evanweaver
There have been talks at GDC and elsewhere about this...my memory is that
humans don’t like being surprised by a smart AI that silently builds up
resources and suddenly and mercilessly betrays and annihilates them, which is
the obvious winning strategy. Humans don’t even like the random battle results
to be truly random but expect them to hew very closely to the outcome of the
odds as presented. The AI is grindy and unsophisticated on purpose.

~~~
rangibaby
> Humans don’t even like the random battle results to be truly random but
> expect them to hew very closely to the outcome of the odds as presented.

Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units, random battles
sometimes meant an ancient trireme could destroy a battleship, which is fun to
imagine...

~~~
thaumasiotes
The classic example is a militia (the weakest unit in the game, relying on no
technology at all) defeating a battleship bombarding it from the sea, causing
the battleship to sink. :D

~~~
inetknght
Warrior, actually. But yes. Militia required gunpowder.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This is not correct; the weakest unit in Civilization is the militia, and the
unit you get from gunpowder is the musketeer. There is no unit called
"warrior".

How do I know we're talking about Civilization?

> Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units

I think it's unlikely Civ II added stats in response to feedback from Civ III.

~~~
inetknght
You're right about musketeers.
[https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Musketeers_(Civ2)](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Musketeers_\(Civ2\))

I was thinking of Partisans which spawn when a city is captured,
[https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Partisans_(Civ2);](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Partisans_\(Civ2\);)
I think of militia when I think of Partisans.

However, the weakest unit in Civ 2 is definitely the Warrior:
[https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Warriors_(Civ2)](https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Warriors_\(Civ2\))

~~~
thaumasiotes
And the weakest unit in Civilization is the Militia. As I just said, there is
no Warrior.

In the same way that Civ II cannot have made changes in response to Civ III,
it also can't have made changes in response to itself.

------
b0rsuk
I very much like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, but this blog is some kind of
creepy personality cult. Reynolds this, Reynolds that...

Also, the author seems to be into conspiracy theories and extrapolates A LOT.
This is the latest quote by Chairman Yang, therefore in canon Yang must be
defeated by this point, therefore these factions must have defeated him
because canon-wise they don't like him, and those were probably the next to
go... I think s/he reads too much into it.

It reminds me of the "missing replicant" issue with first cuts of Blade
Runner, which was simply caused by reduced budget and removed scenes. They
just removed a character from the movie and forgot to update a few script
lines.

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kensai
Why no love for Civilization Beyond Earth? With its expansion (Rising Tide) I
think it got most things pretty much right as a reinterpretation of the
original Alpha Centauri.

~~~
antepodius
I heard a lot of it was because of how bland the characters and writing were.

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Jamwinner
I feel annoyed he launches into the minutae of 4x games, without defining
them? What is a 4x game? This article excludes anyone who hasnt already played
the game in a major way.

~~~
lixtra
Yes, the first mention should be a link to the Wikipedia page.

4x = eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X)

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Aperocky
Confused about the wording and the intent of the author, looks like it's
genuine.

The only other time I've seen paean used as a word is when a group of US navy
POWs in North Korea praised it saying 'we paean [Kim/NK]' while secretly meant
'pee on'

