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Alpha Centauri
Page 3
Of course, none of this balancing means anything unless the faction powers are fun. For us, this means always giving the factions something cool to do with their attributes. For example, an old power for Gaia's Stepdaughters helped reduce ecological disruption resulting from base pollution. The Gaians gained protection against negative game effects resulting from ecological disruption - fewer bad things happened to them - but they still had nothing cool to do with themselves. This was not fun. Now, the Gaians can capture native Mindworms early in the game, giving them a weak but numerous military force of scouts and defenders. We are still experimenting to see if this makes the Gaians too powerful.
Happily, the only way to balance these powers is to play the game, repeatedly and in-depth, which is a rule at Firaxis. In single-player mode, we try all sorts of extreme strategies to find any sure-fire paths to victory We also note how often a particular AI faction ends up at the bottom of the heap - a dead giveaway that its powers are too weak. Of course, multiplayer games provide more insight into balance. A human's intelligence exploits loopholes in the game system more effectively than the AI does, since we train the AI to follow certain pathways. Of course, I've noticed that when I win using a particular strategy, it gets chalked up to "unbalanced powers" (and a new set of attribute rules soon follows); when designer Brian Reynolds wins, it's "superior gameplay."
The end result is a product of unprecedented depth, scope, replayability, and addictiveness, where the player is always challenged by the game to come up with new strategies. There are no all-powerful factions, no unstoppable tactics. If we've done our job, then Sid Meier fans across the world will be spending sleepless nights immersed in creating their own approaches for the future of mankind on a tiny planet warmed by Alpha Centauri.
Show me more Alpha Centauri Designer Diary entries
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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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