AC apparently translates into a lot of things. Advanced Civilization, a game I've played quite frequently is one (and it's related indirectly to the game I'm going to talk about today). Some might think of Armor Class, or Adam Curtis.** Another is Assassin's Creed, which is probably what most gamers think of when they see those two letters together (if not Air Conditioning).
Nah, I'm talking about Alpha Centauri.
I bought the game for about ten bucks after it was mentioned on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The transhuman themes appealed to me, and whatever problems I have with the aesthetics of Sid Meier's Civilization I don't have with AC, because you never have anachronistic units standing beside each other, or static empires that always seem to resemble their ancient founders. There are other problems that I have with the Civ system that are present in this game, but more on that in a bit.
Civ... in Spaaaaace! By Space, though, I Mean a Different Planet. Named Planet.
In AC you represent one of several factions who broadly mirror earth philosophies, or at least how one might imagine how they would act if caught in a 4x style strategy game. As your civilization grows and you plow through the expansive technology tree, you learn new ways to mod your society, and you can shift around the social order pretty quickly whether you ostensibly run a democracy or a dictatorship. All these factions find themselves on a planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri, escaping a troubled earth and trying to begin things a new. Naturally complications ensue, both from the planet itself and from the many factions who are often antagonistic toward one another in ways that are not always clear.
Each society is also static, unable to be influenced by its neighboring societies without express permission from the ruling dictators in the form of changes to social structure, or technological exchanges in the better-than-average diplomatic interface. This is, of course, not how real societies work. Often dictators wind up fighting their own populations to stop them from doing what seems natural: learning about things outside their little world and at the very least buying strange looking pottery at a flea market. This weirdly primitive, isolated view of the way human civilizations build as if in completely isolation, even in war, is nothing new in games like this, but it irks me nonetheless, at least on a conceptual level.
But the last thing Alpha Centauri needs is more complexity. I have never played a Civ game in my life, but I get the feeling they were sort of expecting some level of Civ experience going in. It was a bit overwhelming at first to learn about what to do, and although the tutorials (which you can turn off OR ON at will, which I wish more games would do instead of considering the tutorial to be content) helped me get my bearings as far as the basics, after a few games I realized there was a lot more going on in the game that the tutorials alluded to. This is one of those games where the manual is still king, but I'm not going to read the pdf through cover to cover-- I'll just look up how to do a few things and, only when I've managed to beat the thing maybe, I'll check to see if there's anything I've missed. The last thing I want to do is spoil some minor detail, because one of the nice things about playing this game is that I'm playing it fresh, with few preconceived notions about what I'm supposed to do about how things work.
"No! This One Goes here, That One Goes there!"
The game's complexity only really dawned on me on this attempt, my third (which I'm still in the middle of). The first two resulted in me getting wiped out by one of the more aggressive factions. This time I took control of probably the most aggressive faction so I didn't have to be attacked by them, and then proceeded to make a technology-focused island nation (wasn't my choice about the island, though. The random map sort of cheesed me, unless all that water is why I haven't been attacked very aggressively of yet). I learned to terraform the land to bring about different benefits, to find proper places to colonize, to develop advanced machines to fly around and spy on stuff. In other games of this type, Master of Orion 2 I'm thinking of specifically, I grow to hate micromanaging each world, but here each city has its own development history and resources, so they feel a bit more personalized and I actually enjoy developing them a lot more. It's still a chore to catch a new city up to its older peers, though. There are automated governors, but I haven't used them a whole lot except to show me how to best arrange workers so they don't riot on me and still give me the most material benefits.
For all this game's focus on hostilities, it's not terribly involved when you actually get in a fight, since most of the random rolls happen behind the veil. You see the results of the combat quickly, sometimes too quickly, and move on. Other than having to watch diligently while the enemy moves the game is turn-based, so I never feel like the game is running away from me (if there's any problem its due to my own decisions and luck, not where my camera happened to be), and each turn takes about a year of game time so that makes sense.
Since it's only a full day of playing, I have yet to figure out if this is a long-term game for me, but so far I know that for whatever blockheaded single-mindedness the game has with how it approaches civilization building, the actual building of a civilization is still fun and varied enough that I'll be able to experiment with different strategies for quite a while.
I Don't Wanna Know What Nerve Stapling Is
As for the aesthetics of the game, for all the nice transhumanism in Alpha Centauri you find a profound totalitarian streak in the way you run even the most lenient of societies, and this feeling is backed up by some of the brief narrative interludes the game supplies for flavor. I hope to Whatever that humanity never manages to be this horrible to itself, but if this tone is interpreted as a satire of unchecked ambition, it works well.
Anyone out there play Civ or Alpha Centauri? I'm sorta new to this whole thing, but I think I see why some people like it.
** or Asheron's Call, or Armored Core, or Ace Combat...
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