By choosing to focus your energies on developing technology to help you "explore", "discover, "build" and/or "conquer", you can open up new unit types, new base enhancements, and all sorts of other interesting strategic advantages. Guiding you up the tech tree are your research priorities. The open-ended sandbox nature of the game rewards strategic experimentation, and is rarely entirely predictable. Or perhaps you might want to focus on enhancements to your bases, concentrate on population growth, or save up credits to fund plans further down the line. You can set about planning which units to build, which colony pods to set up more bases and expand your faction, which formers to manipulate the environment in your territory and build roads for fast movement, what military units to defend your base and borders, and which scout units you will use to explore the planet and attempt to make contact with the other factions.
You start off with one base, and perhaps a scout unit (depending on the faction), and from there it is fairly open ended. Scattered across an alien world, cut off entirely from the rest of humankind, and with - initially - no way of contacting the other factions, you build your new home on "Planet". The University of Planet is an interesting faction, it has strong faith in science and so receives a nice research bonuses, but I'm always drawn to the economic strength of the capitalist Morgan Savy Industries. Rather than perks loosely based on history, each faction has strengths and weaknesses that reflect the ideology of the leader, or indeed, the player. There are seven factions in the base game, seven more in the expansion, each with their own principles and beliefs. That's a core principle of Alpha Centauri. Watch this lovely looking intro video to get an idea of how much of a grown up game this is.ĭivided not by nationality, but by ideology. We never really find out exactly why they had to leave, but it's easy to imagine a dozen different ways that Earth could become uninhabitable in the next 100 years, and the reason doesn't actually matter much. 22nd Century Earth is dying, and rather than go down with the planet, a group of colonists escape on a UN ship.
The premise is as humanistic as they come. But it's also quite a lot more than just Civ in space. It's not available to buy digitally (EDIT: Now available on GOG.com), but it had a Complete Edition reissue on the Sold Out range, available on Amazon US/ UK. It's a sort of spin-off from the Civilisation series (but don't tell the lawyers), released way back in 1999. Alpha Centauri has a special place in my heart.
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