Episode: 3970
Title: HPR3970: Playing Alpha Centauri, Part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3970/hpr3970.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:07:27

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,970 for Friday the 20th of October 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Alpha Centauri Part 1.
It is hosted by Ahuka and is about 17 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Part 1 of Tips on Playing Alpha Centauri.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our series on strategy games that I have played over time and I'm going to start
an in-depth look at Alpha Centauri. This will be the first of a number of episodes
digging into this because I think it's an unjustly neglected masterpiece of a game.
While Hasbro had microprose and was building test of time, the team that created Siv
had moved to their new company for access and they developed Alpha Centauri
with Brian Reynolds again serving as the lead developer.
But this is not just Siv 2 in space, there were some very real improvements worth checking out.
Now I have the CDs for Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire,
but these were designed for Windows 95, 98, and so on.
My only Windows box right now is a Windows 10 and they won't work there.
But I found the Good Old Games has them together in the planetary pack and it runs
in their platform, Good Old Games Galaxy, which is designed to run older games
in platforms from Windows 8 and above. And it was only $5.99 in a bargain,
so that's what I used to compile these tips.
Now, the first thing I want to talk about here is something called Governors.
Alpha Centauri has a pretty sophisticated governor system for all of the bases that you build.
You can micromanage as much as you like, but if you prefer to hand off
some of that Alpha Centauri is ready to help you with it.
And it's pretty fine tuned in letting you pick which things the AI will manage
and which ones you want to manage.
Now I would suggest that if you're new to the game, you turn over a lot to the AI
while you learn other aspects, then as you get some experience, you can decide to take some of the management back.
Now, you'll find out more about the Governors if you go to Alpha Centauri.Fandom.com
and I'll put this link in the show notes as well.
But the basic idea is that you can tell the governor to focus on a specific area
when building units, projects, and buildings.
The four choices for the governor are explore, discover, build, and conquer.
Now, if you set the governor to explore, the base will focus on scouts, colony pods, and transports.
This is useful for expanding your territory in the beginning.
Discover will put the focus on science and results in building network nodes, secret projects, and so on.
Build will focus on infrastructure and growth and result in formers and facilities.
And conquer will lead to military units which you will want if you are under attack or preparing an attack yourself.
Now, you don't have to use governors, of course.
You can turn off the governor in the base screen and micromanage to your hearts to light.
But they do a decent job.
Governors work off the list of suitable items to build.
But you can go to advanced governor to fine tune this even more.
And also in the base operations in the HQ, which we'll talk about later.
Now, I like governors in general.
I can always override what they pick in the base screen.
But if I'm on the attack, and my bases are cranking out my best units automatically, why would I object?
Now, in case it wasn't clear, you get a separate governor for every base.
So, that's how detailed you can get with this.
You might have, you know, I've been in games where I've got, you know, 20 or 30 bases.
And so having each one specialized in various ways is an interesting approach.
Now, the victory conditions.
This is another development here.
Okay, in the previous versions of Civ, your victories were science or conquest.
Now, Alpha Centauri added economic victory and diplomatic victory.
And this is something that we start to see developing in Civ as well that there are various ways of achieving victory.
And as the Civ games progress, you get more options.
Now, this has a science victory. It's called transcendence.
But it's essentially what you get from researching a bunch of stuff.
So, it's best thought of as a science victory.
Conquest is the usual wipe out all opposition.
But an interesting difference is that you can have allies.
So, up to three factions can join together to share a conquest victory if they are what the game calls packed brothers.
Diplomatic victory happens if you get 75% of the vote in the planetary council.
But if any factions refuse to accept this, they have to be wiped out before you win.
Economic victory comes if one player gets enough energy reserves.
In this game, energy is the money unit.
So, if you get enough energy reserves to control all the cities, they can corner the energy market,
which then takes about 20 turns after you have achieved that level of energy.
So, in other words, you have to hold that for a 20 turn period.
I've done it. It's a fun way to do things.
Now, factions, we talked about them in our previous episode.
And that the choice of faction really matters in terms of the strategy you're going to play.
Or to turn it around, if you take a random faction, you need to adapt to your strategy.
So, you need to think about what the strengths and weaknesses are.
Now, there is a discussion in the civilization wiki about all of that.
I'm going to read just a little bit of the first entry.
And that says, true to its namesake, the militaristic Spartan faction places the highest priority on strength, discipline, and combat readiness.
Colonel Corazon Santiago, a survivalist from Puerto Rico, and a UNS unity security officer.
Now, the UNS unity is the colony ship sent by the United Nations.
So, she was a security officer on that ship and then was part of the mutiny.
She's the leader of this faction and she led the initial mutiny on board the ship.
Now, Spartan units receive morale upgrades, which makes them better fighters.
And their discipline society is naturally tolerant of martial law, allowing two military units to help suppress a colony's drones.
Drones are just very unhappy citizens.
The Spartans skilled military expertise allows them to build prototype units without extra mineral cost.
However, the society's devotion to military imposes a 10% penalty to industrial production.
The Spartans prefer the power social engineering choice and may not pursue wealth, and we're going to talk about social engineering later.
All the while remaining wary of those who don't choose an emphasis on power.
Now, they make planet fall with the doctrine mobility technology.
Remember last time we said every faction starts with one technology, so the one they start with is doctrine mobility.
The Spartans are likely to press a vendetta against the university.
Now, the alien crossfire expansion added seven more factions, two of which are aliens, the manifold caretakers and the manifold usurpers.
And one of the new factions, Nautilus Pirates, is a sea-based faction.
The point is that from the start, you want to have a strategy that fits your faction.
If you're going for a conquest victory, that will be a little easier with the Spartans.
But if you're playing Lady Deirdre of the Giants, you have a skill no one else has, which is that you can sometimes capture a group of mindworms and develop them into a very formidable fighting force.
And the Lord's believers have an advantage from their fanaticism, which resulted in 25% attack bonus, high morale, and the ability to support up to four units from each city without incurring a mineral support cost.
On the other side, they don't do well with research.
So, can you win with any faction? Sure. You can win, but you should adapt to each faction's strengths and weaknesses.
I have seen some interesting discussions online about which faction is best, but there's always disagreement.
Still, in 1999, this was a major step forward, and in the Civilization series, I don't think we got to this level of differentiation until Civ V or Civ VI.
Note that while the alien factions in Alien Crossfire are pretty strong, they're also constantly at war with each other, which can be a bit of handicap.
Now, HQ. This is a section of screens that you have in the game, and it has a lot of stuff that you should get familiar with.
Now, you get there by going to the menu button on the left, and then HQ.
And when you open up HQ, you will see social engineering.
I said, well, we'll talk about that. It's an important choice. Set research priorities.
Now, this is the screen that also occasionally pops up where you can choose which area is to focus on.
When I say occasionally pops up, you're just going about the game, moving units around blah, blah, and suddenly it'll pop up something saying, all right, it's time to make your choice.
But you can go into HQ at any time and do it by going into the set research priorities.
So, that's something to bear in mind. Then another option, design workshop.
Now, this is the screen that comes up when you get new unit designs to look at.
You can also design your units here, and we'll discuss that in more detail later on.
Data links. Now, this is the equivalent of SIV's Civil Appedia.
IE, the system that will explain what all of the units, buildings, advances, and so on are.
So, if you're ever puzzled by what does that mean, you should consult the data links.
All right, so that's the in-game help system, basically.
Another option, laboratory status. Here you see how your research is coming along.
In the lower left, you can see what technologies you have already learned, and how each of your bases is doing on generating research.
On the right, you can see your progress in researching in the four areas, which are, as we mentioned before, explore, discover, build, and conquer.
And on top, you can see what is currently being researched.
Another option is energy banks. Now, energy functions as the money in this game.
So, this is where you will see how much you are generating and where it is going.
And should you find yourself starting to run short, go here and start analyzing to see what you need to do to fix it.
You do need energy to support the various buildings that you build, so that's the limiting factor.
Now, unlike in other games, the units are not supported by energy, but are actually supported by minerals.
Another option, base operations status. This is where you see to glance what each base is doing.
And we'll get into this more later on.
And there's secret project data.
Now, secret projects are like the wonders in Siv. Here you can see which ones have been built and by whom.
And you can also see which ones are under construction.
And there's orbital and space status.
Now, you can research up to achieving space flight, and that will let you build orbital facilities.
And this screen will help you manage them.
Orbital facilities, you can have orbital energy, orbital mining, and orbital farming.
And that can be a real boost to your faction when you start building them.
Now, there's also warfare in space, so you may need to build some defense to prevent your enemy from killing your orbital satellites, or maybe offensively you want to take out some of the years.
Next screen is there's military command nexus, and this is where you get a summary of all the units you have running around.
Then there's Alpha Centauri score. You can see your current score here.
Now, this mostly matters for computing, where you will be in the Hall of Fame, and how good of a leader you are.
So, the score is it just sort of keeps track of things. You can win with a low score and lose with a high score.
It's not directly correlated, but if you win with a high score, you can get into the Hall of Fame with something good.
View monuments. Now, you get a monument for being the first to do something in the game, or sometimes you get one for the first time you do it, even if someone else has done it first.
Now, on the screen, you can review the monuments you have earned by clicking on any of the symbols you see in the stone edifice.
Then view Hall of Fame. You can see the top scores you have achieved in the Hall of Fame.
And finally, communications and protocol. This allows you to initiate a conversation with any of the other factions.
So, in other words, HQ is the main place you want to go to control what is happening in your faction.
There's a lot of important information, a lot of options. So, you want to take some time to get to know what's going on in here.
This is the ultimate goody location for this game.
So, with that, this is a hook-up for Acrepublic Radio signing off and is always encouraging you to support Free Software. Bye-bye.
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