Oh yes, a real successor to SMAC would be terrific. I liked Beyond Earth but it wasn't Alpha Centauri.
I tried playing SMAC the other day but I had trouble adjusting myself to the dated interface, even though I spent so many hours playing it years back. I'd be happy with a remake of SMAC with the same gameplay but updated graphics and interface (especially the ability to give move orders that take several turns).
No Civ game comes close to Alpha Centauri for atmosphere.
It's funny, I stopped playing Civ V because the interface seemed so clunky compared to SMAC. Maybe it's just that I haven't had 10 years to get the Civ V hotkeys wired into my brain, but it seems like the keyboard is less of a concern these days.
Both games share a similar problem of repetitiveness, but being able to use the keyboard and muscle memory makes SMAC a lot less tedious for me.
The atmosphere? Oh man, so good. I loved the little quotes in the descriptions of new technology. They got darker as the tech got higher up the tree. I still remember the gist of the one for human cloning:
"She's gone. She said she wants nothing more to do with me. But I saved a lock of her hair. She will be mine again..."
No game has lived up to SMAC for me. I feel that was the first game that was 'art' and showed me what games could become. I am glad to hear that others feel the same way. 13 year old me was obsessed with it. This quote helped change my life and made me look at myself in a different way, a revolutionary thing back in those days:
"I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment." -Anonymous, Datalinks (played when the player first constructs the hab dome building).
I loved my chosen. How then to face the day when she left me? So I took from her body a single cell, perhaps to love her again.
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Time of Bereavement"
I didn't consider until now that it might be a little ambiguous, but I'm pretty sure the implication is not that Lal's chosen broke up with him, but that she died.
Those quotes added a lot of atmosphere to it (from techs). And also from secret projects. Those blurbs are so memorable...Not to mention the encounters with Planet! All those fancy sequels of Civ seem empty after playing SMAC.
I tried playing SMAC the other day but I had trouble adjusting myself to the dated interface, even though I spent so many hours playing it years back. I'd be happy with a remake of SMAC with the same gameplay but updated graphics and interface (especially the ability to give move orders that take several turns).
No Civ game comes close to Alpha Centauri for atmosphere.