PC Gamer Vol. 5 No. 2 - February 1998 pages 72 - 75, 78 - 80. A Star is born Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - /finally, the rightful heir to the/ Civilization /legacy/... By James Bates /Civilization/ For strategy gamers, it's a word with almost magical connotations, and one that evokes fond memories of long hours of intense gaming. It was about taking a small tribe from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age, of negotiating with the likes of Genghis Khan and Josef Stalin, of fighting desperate, brutal wars or of launching that first colony ship into space - but more than anything else, /Civilization/ was about being absolutely unable to full yourself away from the compter without playing just one more turn. Perhaps even more remarkable, its successor, /Civilization II/, was much more than just a sequel as we've come to expect them. It carefully expanded the original, adding new elements, updating the graphics, throwing in a host of custom options, and all the while managing to feel like a brand new game even as it preserved intact the core gameplay of the original. Both games were published by MicroProse, but Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds - the designers of /Civilization/ and /Civilization II/ respectively - have long since left (along with 13 members of the /Civ II/ team) and founded their own company, Firaxis games. In leaving, they lost the rights to the name Civilization, but they took with them something more important - the talent that made the name synonymous with gaming excellence. With such games under their collective belts as /Colonization/, /Railroad Tycoon/, and /Pirates!/, in addition to /Civilization/ and its sequel, they are arguably the top strategy team working today. Firaxis Games' debut was the excellent /Sid Meier's Gettysburg!/; this time around, Brian Reynolds steps to the fore as the design lead on /Alpha Centauri/, which is already being described as "/Civilization/ in Space." Brian Reynolds may stand in the shadow of Sid in the minds of many gamers (tellingly, the game's full title is /Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/, with "A Brian Reynolds Design" beneath), but it should not be forgotten that he is the designer of not only /Colonization/ - the under-rated /Civilization/ follow-up - but also of /Civilization II/, which scored a 97 percent in /PC Gamer/ (our highest rating ever) and won our 1997 Game of the Year award. GAME BASICS So what exactly is /Alpha Centauri/? You may remember the victory screen from the /Civilization/ games, in which you won by sending off a colonist spaceship to our nearest neighboring star. Whatever happened to those brave souls? /Alpha Centauri/ answers that question. "It's kind of logical that since /Civilization/ leaves off colonizing the stars, that we would pick up there," says Brian Reynolds. "There have been a lot of games that have been called '/Civilization/ in Space.' We thought, if there's going to be one, maybe we ought to be the ones to do it." Does that mean /Alpha Centauri/ is the next /Master of Orion/? Do we conquer whole swathes of the galaxy - gas giants, moons, distant stars? Actually, no. /Alpha Centauri/ looks and plays a /lot/ like /Civilization II/. It's not a new /Master of Orion/, or even a /Colonization/ played out across several solar systems; gameplay is confined to a single planet, Alpha Centauri, with no contact or trade with Earth. Veteran strategy gamers might think on first glance that it's just /Civilization II/ with sci-fi graphics. But it's much more than that. Reynolds explains that the single-world setting was a conscious decision - that the idea for /Alpha Centauri/ was to first preserve what made the older games great. "One of the things we thought made /Civilization II/ successful was that we put a lot of effort into preserving what was cool about the original," he says. "We asked ourselves, what are the things that make this game so addictive, why it is that people love this game. And we made sure we kept those things." The same principle - what Sid Meier calls "continuity of innovation" - is being applied to /Alpha Centauri/. "It's very easy to break a good game system by throwing in everything and the kitchen sink - too many new things that distract from the old things that were fun," says Reynolds. "And there's some magic in that turn-based format, where you've got all these little projects going, and you want to play a few more turns just to see what happens. Because that was such a key, addictive part of /Civilization II/, we thought it made sense to go with a ground-based game rather than a space-based game, so then we could preserve the heart of the game - the basic game mechanic." But you're not going to be playing /Civ/ all over again, Reynolds says. /Alpha Centauri/ is a game for people who liked /Civilization/, who liked making the kind of decisions required in that game, but taking it one step further, with new decisions, new technologies, and new elements that subtly enhance, not radically rewrite, the basic premise of the /Civilization/ genre. And these new elements - custom military units, terraforming, a new government model, and the alien landscape itself - are significant. But before we get into them, let's pick up the tale of our colonists. STORYLINE The ship taking the first humans to Alpha Centauri had a long, tortuous journey of many decades before it could alignt on the new planet. During that extended flight, there was a mutiny, the original group split into different factions, and contact with Earth was ultimately lost - it's intimated the mother planet finally did destroy itself in nuclear Armageddon. Each of the factions is organized not by national origins but along ethical and philosophical lines. So instead of the Aztecs and Babylonians and the like, we have the Conclavists (a religious group), the Stepdaughters of Gaia (an environmentalist movement), the Morgan Conglomerate (arch-capitalists), and the Spartans (military-oriented), amongst others - there are seven factions in all. And unlike /Civilization/'s civs, each of the seven different factions has its own strengths and weaknesses, with different bonuses or penalties for combat, research, economy, and the like. Reynolds gives one example: "The industrial mogul is quite wealthy and has a high-income level, but his followers are more spoiled and demand a higher standard of living, so it's more difficult for him to grow his population." The factions and their leaders also have personal grudges and rivalries that add interest and flair usually missing from enemy leaders in strategy games - after all, these people spent decades together on the flight to the new world. "Since we're doing a future history instead of a past history, we give the characters a backstory that's loose enough and broad enough to let the player write their own history, but gives you a basis and some characters to start with," Reynolds says. "A lot of our history is conveyed through quotations from the major characters when discoveries are made." (Some of these quotations are shown in the sidebar, at right.) THE ALIEN OTHER The quotations Reynolds mentions also convey something of the exotic nature of Alpha Centauri itself, which is the game's ultimate antagonist. A dangerous new Eden, the planet (or "Planet", as the colonists refer to it reverently), is ripe with alien fungus and a hostile and tenacious fauna. Mine worms will attack your settlements periodically, often when you disturb a "goodies hut", much like the barbarians of /Civilization/ did. The alien fungus is there from the beginning of the game, but it has a tendency to grow uncontrollably when your society's expansion starts to become detrimental to the planet, not unlike pollution in the original. But these examples of indigenous life are only part of a grander conceit; the true alien presence in the game is the planet itself. That's because Reynolds deliberately chose not to include tool-using, civilization-building aliens, instead going for a more abstract concept of first contact. "There are no sentient alien races in the sense of another player," he says. "We can't assume we're going to meet six different alien races on one planet. That's not plausible. We want you to feel like you're encountering an alien presence, but we don't want it to be just the same as encountering another race of humans. We thought it would be more interesting and more plausible to be competing with your fellow humans directly, but also have this interaction with the alien environment, the ecology and the sentient mind of the planet itself." Reynolds drew this idea from his wide reading of science fiction, which he immersed himself in over the last year as he researched and planned the game. "I've always been a science fiction fan, but have been particularly buried in it the last year," he says. "I think some of the most imaginative science fiction stories are the ones that deal with first contact with alien races, and the good stories are the ones that are really imaginative in coming up with something that's truly alien, not just humans with funny looking heads, glue-on noses and ears," Reynolds says, noting that some sci-fi writers whose work influenced his include: Frank Herbert, Greg Bear, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Giving the planet an exotic look is an entirely new terrain engine. /Civilization/ had set terrain types and was essentially flat, but each square of /Alpha Centauri/ has several different values - altitude, rainfall, temperature and rockiness. This creates much more varied (and realistic) terrain, and gives the game a new, three-dimensional look and feel (the land-seeding algorithms are new as well). But more importantly, you can terraform the land, raising and lowering it, thus altering its temperature and the amount of resources gathered from that square. Serious terraforming projects can raise entire mountain ranges, having drastic effects on the rainfall of whole continents. "For instance, the hotter an area is, the more solar energy you can collect," says Reynolds. "The wetter it is, the more food you can grow there. The rockier it is, the more minerals you can mine. Those interact in complex ways, but you can use your terraforming to have an effect on that." INVENTING THE FUTURE Terraforming is only one of the new technologies in the game - there's a brand new tech tree here, one that begins with foreseeable technologies and moves on into the realm of the purely speculative; after all, the game spans ten centuries. Sample technology advances include quantum machinery, temporal mechanics, and matter transmission. Reynolds feels that part of this project's strength has been careful, painstaking research (evident in all their past games), and that this kind of research will help make /Alpha Centauri/ feel believable. "We've traditionally been strong in history, and we thought maybe we could bring some of our historical strength to bear on science fiction, so that we have a more coherent and solid future history than people are used to," he says. "I'm not going to say realistic in the sense that we can definitely prove are possible. We're starting with a believable base and letting the player kind of write the history of the future." Nor does Reynolds intend to get bogged down with pedantic scientific detail. "We're not going to be managing the oxygen content in the atmosphere," he says. One way the future differs is the nature of money. "We assume it's an energy-based economy, which is a pretty valid speculative tact to take on the future," says Reynolds. So energy collection is vitally important, through solar collectors built on adjoining land squares, tidal generators in the oceans, and various advancements and city improvements that let you gather, store, and even steal energy ever more efficiently. The governmental model of /Civilization/ has also been replaced by something more flexible. In /Civilization/ you chose a government type, and it had a whole array of pluses and minuses. This time, new discoveries bring up new menus, allowing you to set different levels of social control, economic freedom, environmental sensitivity, and the like. "Here the choice may be more like, how is the economy going to work - a ruthless, free market economy or an idealistic, planned economy? You're trading off between more population growth or more economic growth," Reynolds explains. "If you have an idealistic economy, you probably have more social services and health care, for example, so we might give you more population growth. Whereas on the other side you'd get the monetary bonuses of capitalism. "But we separate that choice from personal liberties - you could have idealistic, personal liberties on one hand or the ruthless police state on the other hand. So you could have a driving market economy and a ruthless police state combined, and that's a new combination that wasn't available in /Civilization/." As you do more research in social areas, the more variables you can adjust, and the number of potential combinations multiplies. WAR WITHOUT END Conflict is integral to history and just as /Civilization/ reflected that, so will /Alpha Centauri/, since Reynolds doesn't seem to envision war going away any time soon. What has changed is the way armies are made, as the new military units can be custom built. The way it works is this - the more scientific discoveries you make, the more options you have when designing a new unit type. Research Alpha Lasers, and the more powerful laser is available to new units. Research gravitronics, and you can build anti-grav vehicles. You can choose a movement rate, a power plant, defenses, weapons, and even a special ability for each unit, though keep in mind each new ability you add to a unit drives up its cost. Initial prototypes cost 50 percent more than production models (and so take longer to build), and prototypes can be traded or captured between the different factions. Weapons of mass destruction - the nukes of /Civilization/ - are also present, though they're more likely to incur the wrath of the other players than befre. These range from chemical and genetic weapons, whose use will damage your reputation, to extremelyy advanced singularity weaponry that can destroy whole cities, and (because of the terraforming engine) have drastic effects on the landscape. A first use of the singularity bombs will normally unite all of the factions against you. "In /Civilization/, the AI felt free to rain nukes down on you more or less on a whim, but here we have the idea of the original pact never to use weapons of mass destruction," says Reynolds. In the storyline, there is a covenant assumed among the colonists not to use these weapons, since what happened to Earth is fresh in their minds. Use of such taboo weaponry has a detrimental effect on your economy as well, since the others will cancel their treaties with you. (Treaties and the more binding "blood pacts" add economically beneficial trade routes to other factions - another new design tweak.) BEYOND WAR Global thermonuclear warfare was not necessarily the best way to win in /Civilization/, the peaceful route was to launch colonists to Alpha Centauri; now that they're there, where can they go? It's something Reynolds calls the "Ascent to Transcendence," and without divulging specifics, let's just say it involves some of the higher concepts and serious thinking behind the game. "One of the questions that this game asks is where are we going as a species," says Reynolds. "It's kind of philosophical, quasi-religious kind of question." And after all, if technology progress continues to grow exponentially, by the 30th century humans may hardly be human anymore. There's pleny more to talk about in /Alpha Centauri/ - for example the fact that all of the customizability of /Civilization II/ will be included ("We're very much committed to the text file method of hacking the rules," Reynolds says), the multi-player options (seven players, LAN, modem, TCP/IP, serial connect), and, of course, a brand new game engine. "Since we started a new company that meant we're writing a whole new engine, and that is, in one sense, a chore," says Reynolds. "But on the other hand, once you set out to do it, it gives you a chance to start from scratch on certain things, and put the experiences you had before into something new and fresh and things come out better. The AI will be better for it, I think." But this new engine won't require a 3Dfx, MMX, USB, AGP, or any of the other alphabet soup of technology acronyms. A simple P133 with 16MB of RAM should run the game just fine when it comes out sometime in the summer of fall this year. /Alpha Centauri/ is not a revolutionary new game; it's a careful evolution of a proven design concept with significant, yet subtle new features. It is the heir apparent to the grand tradition that is /Civilization/, and as Activision and MicroProse fight a legal battle for the rights to use the Civilization name, who will win hardly seems to matter. After all, Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds are the guys who made /Civ/, and are the only people who can really produce a true follow-up. And /Alpha Centauri/ is it. [Sidebar 1] NEW TECHNOLOGIES The discovery of each no technology in /Alpha Centauri/ is accompanied by a quote from one of the leaders of the seven factions. Lending a wonderful ambience to the game, these quotes help flesh out the personalities of the different leaders and give important clues about the planet itself, but also ask a broad range of interesting, speculative questions about technology and the future. CENTAURI ECOLOGY Observe the Razorbeak as it tends so carefully the fungal blooms; just the right bit from the yellow, then a swatch from the pink. Follow the Glow Mites as they gather and organize the fallen spores. What higher order guides their work? Mark my words: someone or something is managing the ecology of this planet. - Lady Deirdre, "Planet Dreams" BIO-ENGINEERING Why do you insist the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter, we are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of you mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself - Chairman Yang, "God in the Eye" APPLIED RELATIVITY Who cares if you are here, and I am there, and we move past and with and through and around each other, if there's not some gain to be made from it? - Director Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed" MATTER TRANSMISSION The first lving thing to go through the device was a small white rat. I still have him, in fact. As you can see, the damage was not so great as they say. - Academician Sorov, "The Gating Fallacy" DOCTRINE: TOTAL WAR Man has killed man from the begining of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Should a world of pure thought be so different? - Marshal Joachim Ortega, "The Council of War" RECYCLING TANKS It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people. - Chairman Yang, "Ethics for Tomorrow" [Sidebar 2] SID SPEAKS! "Someday I want to do a real multi-player game. With the exception of /Ultima Online/, I don't think we've really figured out how to use the new medium to do really cool games." "Our new slogan is: 'We put the "real" in real-time gaming.'" PC GAMER: YOU'VE BEEN MAKING GAMES FOR 15 YEARS. HAS THE GAMING INDUSTRY CHANGED MUCH IN THAT TIME? SID: It has and it hasn't. Certainly the technology has changed a lot, so the games themselves look better, they sound better, they run faster - but there's a core, a thread that runs through all the best games that you can really follow. I think that if some of the older games like /Pirates!/ and /Seven Cities of Gold/ were brought up to today's level of technology, they'd still be great fun to play. It's only because many of those computers aren't around anymore that makes those games obsolete, not that those games aren't a lot of fun to play. The only revolutionary thing is probably the multi-player Internet thing. That will be a major change. But apart from that, I think you can see a common thread through the evolution of games over the last 15 years. For example, a lot of my games take ideas from other games, and then someone takes something I've done and builds on it, so there's a certain continuity in terms of the content that goes back a long way. WHAT ABOUT THIS SHIFT AWAY FROM IN-HOUSE PRODUCTION TOWARD SMALL, INDEPENDENT DEVELOPERS? It makes a lot of sense. In order to have a strong presence at retail, you need to be part of a large company. A large company has a lot of strength in sales and marketing. But from a developer's point of view, it makes sense to be small. Marketing people and development people run on a totall different rhythm. For a marketing person every month there's something new, they change gears, where for a development person, you're talking a year, a year and a half. My theory is that five years ago when we started using CD-ROMs, a lot of companies said, 'Look at all the art, all the sound, all the video we have to do, so we have to create these big staffs to do all this,' and they did that. /Myst/ came out and everybody tried to do theyr /Myst/ and they found they were spending millions of dollars to do these multimedia extravaganzas - and the first one was successful and everything else stayed on the shelf. Then they looked to the left - here's id Software with a shareware product and six guys, and they're selling zillions of them. So then they said, 'Wait a minute. Maybe we've gone in totally the wrong direction. Let's get rid of these giant in-house staffs and find these little creative groups.' So the time was right for where publishers were really interesteed in small development groups and we were ready to put something together. Things converged. We're part of a trend that has a fair amoung of logic behind it. SO YOU NEVER BOUGHT INTO THE WHOLE MULTIMEDIA REVOLUTION? I was very skeptical. My feeling has always been that if you want to see amovie, you go to a movie; if you want to hear great sound, you buy a CD. What people come to games for is interactivity, and just because we have a CD-ROM instead of a floppy disk, it doesn't really change the total nature of interactivity. It means we can do some neat new things, but the basics of what we're doing remains the same. I remember the year, at a game developer's conference, where it was said that Hollywood and Silicon Valley were going to get together, and if you didn't have an interactive story your game was just not happening. And the next year, thoese people didn't show up. AND NOW EVERYONE IS SAYING THE SAME THING ABOUT INTERNET GAMING. I think there's a difference. CD-ROM was a new way of presenting the same game. With the Internet and multi-player, there's something fundamentally different about the game itself: There's other people playing, and that's a quantum step, not a small step. So I think the idea of massively multi-player games has a potential for being pretty revolutionary, but we're still feeling our way. HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT HOW STRATEGY GAMES MAY MOVE ONTO THE INTERNET? I think the most intriguing thing is the persistent world idea. Letting people play whenever they want to play, for as long as they want to play, interacting a lot more naturally, cooperating, planning, creating allegiances. There's a lot of things that just can't happen in single player games. But whether that will be strategy or what the genre will be called, I'm not really sure. HOW DO YOU SEE THE STRATEGY MARKET TODAY? The strategy market seems to be very strong. Certainly, the definition of strategy has broadened to where there's strategy with a big "S" and strategy with a small "s." Most of the games in the strategy category are not strategy at all, they're tactical, they're action. I wouldn't call /WarCraft/ a strategy game in the traditional sense, but it's strategy in the sense that it's not just an action/reflex game. There is a lot of life in those kinds of games, and they keep re-inventing themselves. A neat thing about the industry is that over the last couple of years we've been creating these new genres: first person shooters with Doom, real-time strategy games with /WarCraft/. A while back it looked like we were running out of ideas. We were doing the ultimately detailed flight simulator, 24-bit color adventure games, and we were just trying to do more and more complicated versions of what we knew how to do. Then we discovered people liked to play /Doom/ and /WarCraft/-style games. But before /Civilization/ came out, strategy was a dirty word to apply to a game. If you were doing a strategy game, it implied something boring with square counters and hexes and it took the computer five minutes to make a move. Strategy was something you didn't want your game to be called. And then games like /SimCity/ and /Civ/ and a couple of others came along that said strategy can be fun; it's fun to plan and think and work on a bunch of different things at the same time. DO YOU THINK WARGAMES ARE GOING THROUGH A SIMILAR EVOLUTION? I think wargames /per se/ have always been a niche type of game. I see /Gettysburg!/ as part wargame but not targeted at the traditional wargamer. /Gettysburg!/ is the kind of game that anyone with a passing familiarity with the Civil War can play. It teaches you what you need to know to play. So I think the traditional wargame where you need to be really knowledgeable about the topic to get started, where you have to imagine that that square with a seven on it is a cavalry brigade, and that square with a three on it is artillery - those kind of wargames are always going to be a niche marget. With /Gettysburg!/ we tried to give you a very visual view of the battlefield, and I think that approach to real-time gaming is a kind of natural evolution from games like /WarCraft/ and /Command & Conquer/, which are fun to play but really don't represent anything real. They're deliberately simplified to make them playable as real-time games. This is kind of an evolution where we keep the action and excitement and the fluid gameplay of real-time but we add the depth of a historical topic to make it kind of the next step. Our new slogan is 'We put the 'real' in real-time gamling.'" The Civil War was a real-time event, so we're not cheating to make it real-time. We put a lot of work into the interface. That was a concern. The reason games like /C&C/ and /WarCraft/ simplify and create artificial situations is because of the very real danger of overwhelming the player, once you add time pressure to all of the other things the player needs to think about. So we were very careful about what we tried to simulate; how big and how complicated it would get. I think that's why many companies have shied away from doing a 'real' real-time game. A few have tried in the past few years - /Fields of Glory/ and a couple of others - that never solved the inherent problems. WHAT'S NEXT FOR YOU? We're thinking about a couple of different things. Right now our focus is on /Alpha Centauri/, but we're keeping our ear to the ground as far as /Gettysburg!/ is concerned, and we're trawling the newsgroups and things like that to see what people are liking and what they're not liking and what the kind of reaction is and what they want us to do next. I'd like to pursue this particular style of battleground gaming and take it somewhere. When we get a little lull I'll start to put together some new things. So the quick answer is I don't know, and probably won't know for a couple of months. I enjoyed /Gettysburg!/, I'm really happy with the way it turned out, so one possibility is pursuing that type of game. There are all sorts of possibilities. More Civil War games if we wanted to, and we got a lot of requests for Napoleonic games. The system could probably handle anything from ancients all the way up to the Civil War. Someday I want to do a real multi-player game. The question is whether the time is right, when the infrastructure is there. I think right now we're dabbling with multi-player; we're adding multi-player to our single player games, but we're not really writing online games, and, with the exception of /Ultima Online/, which tries to be a design based on the multi-player idea, I don't think we've really figured out how to use the new medium to do really cool games. WILL YOU EVER DO ANOTHER FLIGHT SIM? For me, the flight sim market is pretty much adding one more dial or gauge, doing things that aren't that much fun anymore. I think we've squeezed most of the fun out of flight simulators. People still like to play them and there are some good ones out there, but pretty much all of my ideas about flight simulation have gone into the products I've done, and I don't have any more good ideas or new ideas about what to do with flight simulators. And the 3D graphics bar is up pretty high. Just to get into the flight simulator market you need a pretty intense 3D engine, and that's probably not an area we'd get into. ANY INTEREST IN REVIVING OR UPDATING SOME OF YOUR OTHER GAMES? There are a bunch of titles, like /Pirates!/ and /Railroad Tycoon/, which would be great fun to bring into the '90s. It's a touch call. It's been done in a sense, but it could be done better, so I have not lost my interest in those games. They were a lot of fun and could be fun again. HOW IS FIRAXIS DIFFERENT FROM MICROPROSE? It's a lot different. It's reminiscent of the early days of MicroProse. We're kind of a small group; we're all very avid game players. We don't have a lot of management overhead. Our relationship of Electronic Arts is very pleasant in that they are very flexible as far as release schedules. They're a big enough company that if a game comes out a month later it's not a life or death situation for them. We've all been through bad situations where games didn't come out the way we wanted, and we didn't have good working environments. We're not going to grow for the sake of growing. You don't need a cast of thousands to do computer games anymore. In the CD-ROM days we thought we had to make movies and multimedia extravaganzas and everything, but the id guys showed us that that wasn't erally necessary, that a small group focused and with a vision of what they wanted to do could do some quality stuff. And we want to be in that category. WORKING PRIMARILY IN STRATEGY, NOT ACTION, DO YOU THINK THERE IS LESS PRESSURE ON FIRAXIS TO HAVE THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY IN YOUR GAMES? It probably turns out that way. We do games that we want to play, so we're not trying to project a year from now about where's our little niche in the market that we can sneak into and have the least amount of competition. With /Gettysburg!/, it wasn't like we sayd, 'Everyone else has a real-time game, we've got to do a real-time game, let's find a topic', it was 'A Civil War game sounds like fun, what's the best way to really bring that to life?' But I think because of our interests we tend to do games that are a little different from what everyone else is doing. We don't worry about what everyone else is doing, or where the market is. [Illustrations] Nwabuoike Morgan Morgan Conglomerate Morgan, leader of the industrial faction. Menu Spartan Federation: Mission Year 2183, Energy: 11874 Gaia's Landing Garden of Harmony Gardion of the Mother Garden of Sisterhood DATA READOUT Nutrients: 0 (1 with farm) Minerals: 2 (3 with mine) Energy: 0 (1 with solar) MISSION STATUS: Elev: 1000m, Rocky Climate: Mild The world of /Alpha Centauri/. Morgan's leadership quarters DATALINK WEAPONS PROJECTILE GUN PARTICLE IMPACTOR FLUX BASTER GRAVITRON GUN TEMPORAL DISRUPTOR LASER ALPHA LASER FUSION LASER QUANTUM LASER SINGULARITY LASER MODE: ENERGY FIREPOWER: 12 COST: 12 PREREQUISITE: CONTROLLED SINGULARITY PSI TWISTER MISSILE LAUNCHER NANOMISSILE BATTERY USER WEAPON 00 USER WEAPON 01 USER WEAPON 02 USER WEAPON 03 COMMAND POD TERRAFORMING UNIT TROOP TRANSPORT The Datalink acts as a Civilopedia. Your war room. DESIGN NEW UNIT CHASSIS Speeder Movement: 2 WEAPON Alpha Laser Level: Energy 4 SHIELDING Steel Armor Level: Defense 2 REACTOR Fission Plant Power: 1 SP ABILITY 1 Hypnotic Trance: 2x Verses Psi Units SP ABILITY 2 Blink Displacer: Bypass Base Defenses ALPHA ROVER Data Readout A: E4 D: P2 M: G2 R: 1 SP1: HT SP2: BD Prototype Cost: 270 Cost: 180 PRESETS Defensive Assault Heavy Assault Fast Assault Fast Scout Naval Transport Bomber Fighter One new feature is the ability to design your own, custom military units. Spartan Federation: Mission Year 2162: Energy 11824 Gaia's Landing Garden of Harmony Garden of the Mother Garden of Sisterhood DATA READOUT Nutrients: 1 (2 with farm) Minerals: 1 (2 with mine) Energy: 1 MISSION STATUS: Elev: 1000m, Rough Climate: Cool, Moise Gaia's Landing (0) Minor Gaian Base Gaian Conscript (*) Scout Crawler (0) No Defense The rolling terrain of Alpha Centauri can be terraformed. Clips from the Supercollider Secret Project movie. Multimedia will be used each time a new wonder - or Secret Project - is created. Lady Deirdre Gaia's Stepdaughters The Stepdaughters of Gaia are motivated by environmental ethics. Concept art for /Alpha Centauri/. Here, ideasfor colonies and equipment are shown. Showing the Particle Impactor in both wireframe and fully-textured. Spartan Federation: Mission Year 2120, Energy 21019 DATA READOUT WHO'S WHO Tech: Brother Lal Mil: Sister Minam Pop: Sister Minam Wealth: Lord Deirdre Overall: Sisterm Minam MISSION STATUS: Elev: 1000m, Rough Climate: Hot, Moise Xenofungus A zoomed-out view of a game in progress. Doctor Lal Keepers of Wisdom The tribes of /Civilization/ have been replaced by seven specific factions. The One and Prime Tetrogram Nexus A tank on the move. To its right is a Colony Pod, which, like the earlier Settlers unit, can found a new city. Doctor Yang The Labyrinth The quotable Doctor Yang, whose Labyrinth faction values science above all. Spartan Federation: Mission Year 2270, Energy: 6270 DATA READOUT: Spartan Federation Marshal Ortega Society Pia MISSION STATUS: Sparta Command Formers Moves: 1 Elev: 100m, Rough Climate: Mild, Arid /Alpha Centauri/ will feel familiar to /Civ/ veterans, but brings substantial new elements to the mix. --------------------------------------------------------