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Alpha Centauri
by Tim Trian
August 10, 1998
Factional Strife - Balancing a Masterpiece
Often, when I have to tell people what I do for a living, I get a similar response: "So you sit around and play games all day, right?" As the producer on Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the best days of my job are when I can actually sit at my desk for eight hours straight and just play the game, occasionally tabbing over to MS Word to note some mistake the AI had just made. The completely addictive quality of Alpha Centauri just makes these days all the sweeter. At 6:30pm I look up glassy-eyed and think, "Where did the day go?" We've been doing a lot of that lately at Firaxis, as we work to balance each of the seven factions you can play in the game.
Each faction in Alpha Centauri is founded on an ideology, with strengths and weaknesses related to its beliefs. We have several goals in balancing those attributes: Each faction should have certain strategies suggested by its culture. However, the faction should not be "locked in" to those strategies - if the game situation warrants it, a faction should be able to deviate from its optimal path. Also, the faction strengths should give the player interesting things to do without unbalancing the game. Finally, and most important, the faction must be fun to play, ensuring the player has a new and different series of interesting and challenging decisions to make each time he or she plays.
How the factions function
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Copyright © 1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express permission of GameSpot Inc. is prohibited. GameSpot, videogames.com, and VideoGameSpot are trademarks of GameSpot Inc. Computer Gaming World and Electronic Gaming Monthly are trademarks, EGM and EGM2 are registered trademarks of Ziff-Davis Inc., and are used by GameSpot Inc. under license. The Official U.S. Playstation Magazine is licensed by Sony Computer Entertainment America. PlayStation and the PlayStation logos are the trademarks of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Certain articles are reprinted from Computer Gaming World and Family PC. Copyright © 1998 ZD Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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