Episode: 3950
Title: HPR3950: Sid Meiers' Alpha Centauri
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3950/hpr3950.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:49:00

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3950 for Friday the 22nd of September 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
It is hosted by Ahokad and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, one of the best overlooked games.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in the series of my experiences in strategy gaming.
I'm going to start in more in-depth look at I think something that has been rather unjustly
overlooked by a lot of people.
And that is a game that goes by the name of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
Now in 1993, MicroPros, the company that Sid Meier's was co-founder of, was struggling
financially and it was bought by Spectrum Holobite.
And they let go of the UK personnel almost entirely and consolidated things.
While Civ 2 itself came out as a MicroPros game, it was clear that Spectrum Holobite had
other plans for the company than what long-term MicroPros people wanted.
So after the release of Civ 2 in 1996, Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds left
to form for Raxas Games.
The pros taught it along for a few more years, but it is no longer relevant to this story.
Jeff Briggs, who had been at MicroPros early on, would later lead the development of Civ
3.
And of course, Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds were the lead developers of Civ, the original
game, and Civ 2 respectively.
So there was a lot of Civ experience in the for-axis team, but they could not do another
Civ game yet for two reasons.
First Civ 2 had only recently been released and it was still selling well, and would continue
to do so for some time.
Secondly, MicroPros still owned the rights to the name civilization in the computer game
market.
Now, this lasted until Hasbro purchased MicroPros in the late 90s.
For Axas decided that they wanted to be a design studio and not a publisher.
So they could design a game for Hasbro to publish and could use the Civ name for Civ 3,
but in the meantime, they worked on Alpha Centauri.
That's not technically a part of the Civ series, but it is considered to be sold by many
fans.
And if you go to some of the online sites like Civilization Wiki, you will see an Alpha
Centauri section there.
Now it has all of the features that have been part of Civ since the beginning.
It is turn-based.
You build units and buildings.
You build wonders, you research a tech tree, and so on.
So there's a lot of similarities, also some interesting differences in that they made
what I thought were some fairly significant advances.
Now Alpha Centauri ended up being published by Electronic Arts.
So story of the game.
Now Civ games never needed to have a story behind them, because you are going through a
version of history to build your empire, and we all have at least a simple notion of
what that history is, which is enough to get going in the game.
But in moving to an alien world, there is no shared history we all know, so they had
to give it all a backstory to make sense.
So they started with the colonization ship from Earth, which of course you can think of
as that final step to a science victory in Civ 2.
So remember in those games you would send your colonization ship to Alpha Centauri and
that would get you a victory.
You know, but what happens when that colony ship arrives?
They give it a story here.
The colonists split up into factions.
Each faction having a different philosophy, a different set of objectives and so on.
And there is a mutiny on the ship, the captain is killed, and then when they get to the planet
Kairan in the Alpha Centauri system, you know, each of the factions lands in a different
place.
And then the planet itself becomes a player that reacts to your decisions.
This makes it an additional obstacle that in some ways takes the place of the barbarians
in the Civ games.
Only here it is the mind worms.
Now, as for the colonists' nationality is not the dividing principle here.
You will see members from different races, nations, etc. from Earth, but what defines
the factions is ideology.
Each faction has a different focus.
First one, Gaia's step-daughters.
This group wants to avoid the environmental mistakes that made that people made on Earth,
and they want to live at peace with the planet Kairan.
Then there is the human hive.
This is a harsh collectivist and authoritarian group which prizes loyalty above all else.
I kind of think of that as communist.
University of planet that is dedicated to research and the free exchange of information.
Morgan Industries, a laissez-faire free market group organized along corporate lines.
Spartan Federation, a militarist and survivalist group believing in the right and duty to
bear arms.
The lords believers, they seek a life of prayer and worship.
The peacekeeping forces.
They support the humanitarian goals of the United Nations, which sponsored the Starship
flight that brought the colonists.
Now, each of these factions has different strengths and weaknesses that affect the gameplay.
You can win with any of them, but you will need to adapt your strategy to the specifics
of the case.
Each faction starts out with a different technology.
For example, the daughters of Gaia start out with Centauri ecology, while Morgan Industries
start out with industrial base.
So the starting technology is one appropriate to the ideology, but that's just a starting
position.
As the game goes on, you need to make choices, and the choices you make will further push
your faction in one direction or another.
You can go further down the path your faction starts with, such as being Morgan Industries
and making a series of decisions that emphasize profit at the expense of the environment,
or you could try to push your faction in a different direction by making different choices.
As Brian Reynolds put it in an interview at GameSpot.com, he said,
In each case, we've gone out of our way to avoid promoting a single right answer.
As you create your vision of future society, each value choice has positive and negative
consequences, and the choice between good and evil will rarely be black and white.
You can create literally thousands of different societies in Alpha Centauri, an atheistic polluting
police state with a free market economy, universal education, and an all-volunteer military,
or perhaps a devoutly religious democracy with a heavily censored information network, conscript
army, and cradle to grave health care.
One way or another will make you think, and therein lies the secret to an addictive game.
And that was a very interesting view of this.
So Alpha Centauri built on Civ 2, but it pushed the Forex genre ahead in several ways.
First is the distinct personality of each faction, with their special proclivities and units.
Now you can see this develop in subsequent Civ games, up to the current, at the time as
I record this, which is Civ 6, they've just announced that Civ 7 is, at least we think
at Civ 7, they've said the next Civ game, so we're presuming that's what that means.
And so will that come out in 2024, maybe?
I don't know.
At any point, the thing is, we started to see this develop in the Civ games, the idea
that each player is subtly different, or maybe not so subtle, you know, they have different
motivations, different objectives, different strengths and weaknesses.
Now, the second big advance, I would say that Alpha Centauri made, was the AI, which
is significantly better than anything that came before it.
Now, when I say AI, I'm just saying the computer code that runs all of the other factions.
When I play these games, I play them as a single player, playing against computer opponents.
There are possibilities that, you know, you can have multiplayer, I think, they specifically
built that in with Civ 2, and it continues to be an option.
I don't do that because it just, you know, that would require coordinating with other people
and setting aside time that I may or may not have.
I like to be able to just play when I've got a little spare time, and I might put in a
couple hours and then save it and then not come back to it for a week, you know.
So anyway, that's how I do it.
So what is it about the AI that is better?
And again, I'm going to go back to Brian Reynolds and what he says is, so, what gives a game
the coveted replayability that turns a single player game into a classic?
Well, a lot of things, of course, but one of the most important is good AI, smart computer
opponents.
One of the most common reasons gamers give for preferring multiplayer games is that human
opponents are smarter and make more intelligent, unexpected moves, or conversely that in
single player games the AI is crappy.
Knowing this, some developers are ready to throw in the towel and single player AI and go
all multiplayer.
As a designer though, I take it as a challenge to try to create the kind of algorithms
that keep players coming back for more.
Now there's one final big advance, terrain.
Terrain matters in Alpha Centaurion away it hadn't before.
Notable is the idea of elevation, a new development.
You could actually raise a chain of mountains, and it would result in rainfall on one side
and drought on the other, just as it doesn't real life.
And if the side with rain is where your bases are and the drought side is where your opponent's
bases are, well, I don't need to draw you a diagram, do I?
Or maybe you sink the land connection between you and your opponent, providing it at a
defense.
Now there's also alien crossfire, because like with most games, there was an expansion
to Alpha Centaurion, and it was called alien crossfire.
It did of course bring in new tax and new buildings, but it also brought in new factions.
Five of the new factions are human, and the most interesting of these is a water only
faction called the pirates.
They have bases on the ocean and can potentially control all of the ocean, which adds some
interesting gameplay.
The other two factions are alien factions, and the twist here is that they're not the
least but interested in the human factions.
They are trying to eliminate each other, and the humans are just caught in the crossfire,
hence the name of the expansion.
Now along with this we get some new secret projects.
Secret projects in Alpha Centaurion are the analog of the wonders in Siv, and a couple
of new victory conditions.
Personally, I prefer to stick with the original, but it's nice to have options.
In terms of the gameplay, this is really a Siv type game, so most of the mechanics are
the same as Siv 2.
You build your first base when you land on the planet, and then you need to decide what
to do next.
Do you build another colony pod to expand right away, or build units to defend?
What do you want to research?
This is different from Siv 2, because instead of having the same text available to everyone,
you have to choose the direction your research will take.
Now in Siv 2 it didn't really matter which Siv you decided to be, they all played pretty
much the same, and at all of the same technologies available.
In Alpha Centaurion, there may be text you never research, though you might be able to trade
for them with another faction.
In Alpha Centaurion, it very much matters which faction you are, since you need to adopt
a strategy that fits with the faction.
Again, this does start to become important in future Siv games as well.
Where can you buy it?
They are available for purchase, so I like to buy my games whenever possible for the
same reason I like to support open source projects I use.
For older games, the price is usually minimal, and if the developers see that they can keep
getting sales and encourages them to make more games.
Now good old games is a site I have purchased games from, and you can purchase Sid Meier's
Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack, which contains both Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire from
good old games, and you can buy it for $5.99.
Like I said, this is really minimal.
Unfortunately, it is not available on Steam.
Myabandonware.com has Alpha Centauri, but not the Alien Crossfire expansion as far as
I can tell, and PlayClassic.Games does not have either of them.
So I would recommend finding $5.99 in your wallet and buying the Planetary Pack at good old
games.
And I'm going to say right now, I don't think you'll regret it if you have any interest
in these kind of forex strategy games.
So this is Huka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and is always encouraging you to
support free software.
Bye bye.
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