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| From Tim Train, Producer: Hi everyone, and welcome to the first installment of Firaxis’ Designer Updates created to keep our web readers updated on the progress of Sid Meier’s most anticipated game ever, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. We’ve spent the past several weeks working feverishly on two key aspects of the product: gameplay and art. In gameplay, we’ve been working hard on several fronts: balancing the factions, developing the midgame AI, and working on multiplayer. For a full description of faction balancing, see GameSpot’s latest "Designer Diaries" entry for Alpha Centauri. Brian has spent a lot of time on the midgame AI, teaching it cool strategies including massed attacks and consistent Secret Project construction. Brian also took a special 'scorched-earth' strategy he developed against me in a multiplayer game, and taught the AI how to use it against hated enemies. With the ‘scorched-earth’ strategy, Brian would land a few great units near my frontier bases, take over that base, and then blow it up (‘obliterate’ is the game term). His troops would be on the boat again before I could organize a counterattack or rush reinforcements to the hapless base. Then he would hit me on some other area of the continent a few turns later, destroying another helpless base. The other leaders imposed economic sanctions as a result of this atrocity, but he ignored the hit he took to his trade and continued to whittle away at the edges of my empire. He certainly taught me the importance of a strong navy! The AI will now use this strategy against hated enemies—not on those who have merely gotten in their way, but on those who have used atrocities against that AI. In the multiplayer department, we are primarily concentrating on debugging, increasing the number of turns we can go without crashing. We are up to 125 turns or so without a fatal crash. Unfortunately, this means we can’t play the game strictly for fun—the program creates a full set of log files for debug each turn, which slows everything down considerable. Every few days, however, we turn off the log files and play for fun. At these times, the real excitement of multiplayer competition shines through. It’s wonderful to be able to play this Sid Meier turn-based style of game against challenging human opponents. We’ve also been working through the art at a terrific pace. Within the next month or two, we’ll be releasing screen shots with an all-new terrain system and an improved interface; we are also exploring the possibility of moving to 16-bit color. Much of the rest of the art effort is concentrated on interface functionality. In particular, we are plowing through the grunt work of the report screens (Operations, Labs, Secret Project Status, etc.) and constructing a new interface for the main map. Thanks for your support during this project, and we look forward to your comments after the game ships! Tim |
