Alpha Centauri retrospective by The Digital Antiquarian

[MysticWind]

A long piece by Jimmy Maher

https://www.filfre.net/2025/06/alpha-centauri/

[Geo]

Long indeed.

[MysticWind]

Scintillating commentary. Great opinion, truly substantiative.

[MysticWind]

The essay provides a great account of how MicroProse became Firaxis, and how Civ II became SMAC. Like many of the other retrospectives on this blog (the Blade Runner one comes to mind) it's errs on the side of criticism, but I can dig it. Like Brian Reynolds himself, the author considers the Unit Workshop wasted resources, though they don't think it's an actually bad mechanic. Lot of good discussion in the comments as well, with people pointing out the neat specialized units you can design with special abilities. I thought these passages were most interesting.

First, a philosophical view of the times:

Indeed, if anything, the game’s themes and atmosphere resonate more strongly today than they did when it first came out in February of 1999, at which time the American economy was booming, our world was as peaceful and open as it has ever been, and the fantasy that liberal democracy had won the day and we had reached the end of history could be easily maintained by the optimistic and the complacent. Alas, today Alpha Centauri feels far more believable than Civilization and its sang-froid about the inevitability of perpetual progress. These days, Alpha Centauri’s depiction of bickering, bitterly entrenched factions warring over the very nature of truth, progressing not at all spiritually or morally even as their technology runs wild in a hundred different perilous directions, strikes many as the more accurate picture of the nature of our species. People play Alpha Centauri to engage with modern life; they play Civilization to escape from it.

...

For what it’s worth, though, in his “Designer’s Notes” at the back of the Alpha Centauri manual, the one message that Brian Reynolds explicitly states that he wishes for the game to convey is a very different one: that we ought to be getting on with the space race. “Are we content to stew in our collective juices, to turn inward as our planet runs inexorably out of resources?” he asks. “The stars are waiting for us. We have only to decide that it’s worth the effort to go there.” Personally, although I have nothing against space exploration in the abstract, I must say that I find the idea of space colonization as the solution to the problem of a beleaguered Planet Earth shallow if not actively dangerous. Even in the best-case scenario, many, many generations will pass before a significant number of humans will be able to call another celestial object their permanent home. In the meantime, there is in fact nothing “inexorable” about polluting our own planet and bleeding it dry; we have the means to stop doing so. To steal a phrase from Reynolds, we have only to decide that it’s worth the effort.

A decent critique about how games just get too dang complex as they drag on. I really oughta check out Master of Orion and its sequel; perhaps more Civ and SMAC players should as well.

When I look at it in a more holistic sense, it strikes me that Alpha Centauri got itself caught up in what had perchance become a self-defeating cycle for grand-strategy games by the end of the 1990s. Earlier games had had their scope and complexity strictly limited by the restrictions of the relatively primitive hardware on which they ran. Far from being a problem, these limits often served to keep the game manageable for the player. One thinks of 1990’s Railroad Tycoon, another Sid Meier classic, which only had memory enough for 35 trains and 35 stations; as a result, the growth of your railroad empire was stopped just before it started to become too unwieldy to micro-manage. Even the original Civilization was arguably more a beneficiary than a victim of similar constraints. By the time Brian Reynolds made Civilization II, however, strategy games could become a whole lot bigger and more complex, even as less progress had been made on finding ways to hide some of their complexity from the player who didn’t want to see it and to give her ways of automating the more routine tasks of empire management. Grand-strategy games became ever huger, more intricate machines, whose every valve and dial still had to be manipulated by hand. Some players love this sort of thing, and more power to them. But for a lot of them — a group that includes me — it becomes much, much too much.

To its credit, Alpha Centauri is aware of this problem, and does what it can to address it. If you start a new game at one of the two lowest of the six difficulty levels, it assumes you are probably new to the game as a whole, and takes you through a little tutorial when you access each screen for the first time. More thoroughgoingly, it gives you a suite of automation tools that at least nod in the direction of letting you set the high-level direction for your faction while your underlings sweat the details. You can decide whether each of your cities… err, bases should focus on “exploring,” “building,” “discovering,” or “conquering” and leave the rest to its “governor”; you can tell your terraforming units to just, well, terraform in whatever way they think best; you can even tell a unit just to go out and “explore” the blank spaces on your map.

Sadly, though, these tools are more limited than they might first appear. The tutorials do a decent job of telling you what the different stuff on each screen is and does, but do almost nothing to explain the concepts that underlie them; that is to say, they tell you how to twiddle a variety of knobs, but don’t tell you why you might want to twiddle them. Meanwhile the automation functions are undermined by being abjectly stupid more often than not. Your governor will happily continue researching string theory while his rioting citizens are burning the place down around his ears. You can try to fine-tune his instructions, but there comes a point when you realize that it’s easier just to do everything yourself. The same applies to most of the automated unit functions. The supreme booby prize has to go to the aforementioned “explore” function. As far as I can determine, it just causes your unit to move in a random direction every turn, which tends to result in it chasing its tail like a dog that sat down in peanut butter rather than charging boldly into the unknown.

This, then, is the contradiction at the heart of Alpha Centauri, which is the same one that bothers me in Civilization II. A game that purports to be about Big Ideas demands that you spend most of your time engaged in the most fiddly sort of busywork. I hasten to state once again that this is not automatically a bad thing; again, some people enjoy that sort of micro-management very much. For my own part, I can get into it a bit at the outset, but once I have a dozen bases all demanding constant attention and 50 or 60 units pursuing their various objectives all over the map, I start to lose heart. For me, this problem is the bane of the 4X genre. I’m not enough of an expert on the field to know whether anyone has really come close to solving it; I look forward to finding out as we continue our journey through gaming history. As of this writing, though, my 4X gold standards remain Civilization I and Master of Orion I, because their core systems are simple enough that the late game never becomes completely overwhelming.

There's also a great discussion that suggests that SMAC is more designed for competition over immersion-

As you’ve probably gathered from the tone of this article, Alpha Centauri leaves me with mixed feelings. I’m already getting annoyed by the micro-management by the time I get into the mid-game, even as I miss a certain magic sauce that is part and parcel of Civilization. There’s something almost mythical or allegorical about going from inventing the wheel to sending a colony ship on its way out to the stars. Going from Biogenetics to the “Threshold of Transcendence” in Alpha Centauri is less relatable. And while the story and the additional philosophical textures that Alpha Centauri brings to the table are thought-provoking, they can only be fully appreciated once. After that, you’re mostly just clicking past the interludes and epigrams to get on to building the next thing you need for your extraterrestrial empire.

In fact, it seems to me that Alpha Centauri at the gameplay level favors the competitive player more than the experiential one; being firmly in the experiential camp myself, this may explain why it doesn’t completely agree with me. It’s a more fiercely zero-sum affair than Civilization. Those players most interested in the development side of things can’t ensure a long period of peaceful growth by choosing to play against only one or two rivals. All seven factions are always in this game, and they seem to me far more prone to conflict than those of Civilization, what with the collection of mutually antithetical ideologies that are such inseparable parts of their identities. Suffice to say that the other faction leaders are exactly the self-righteous jerks that rigid ideological extremists tend to be in real life. This does not lend itself to peace and harmony on Planet even before the mind worms start to rise up en masse. Even when playing as the Peacekeepers, I found myself spending a lot more time fighting wars in Alpha Centauri than I ever did in Civilization, where I was generally able to set up a peaceful, trustworthy democracy, forge strong diplomatic and trading links with my neighbors, and ride my strong economy and happy and prosperous citizenry to the stars. Playing Alpha Centauri, by contrast, is more like being one of seven piranhas in a fishbowl than a valued member of a community of nations. If you can find one reliable ally, you’re doing pretty darn well on the diplomatic front. Intervals of peace tend to be the disruption in the status quo of war rather than the other way around.

Finally, it makes a good observation that Alien Crossfire was seemingly "Patched together by a committee of no fewer than eight designers, with the name of Brian Reynolds the very last one listed." 'nuff said!

[Nexii]

It was a very good read.

I think the unit workshop was a great idea actually, but they didn't make it intuitive how unit costing was calculated. It also wasn't obvious to the player that fast unarmored units with no abilities are the only ones worth making. That has made me mod more in favor of free abilities, and cheaper armor costs. Offense already has a 2:1 advantage which is a bit higher than CIV2 before it.

Unit spam is a problem that arises from city production growing at a rate much higher than unit costs. CIV2 had this same problem as well. There are a few other factors here like that a single unit can only ever attack once (except choppers). And that reactors keep unit costs very low all game. Making unit costs go up faster helps some here, but there is the issue that native life and formers are always a constant (as you can opt for earlier reactor). ICS is its cousin and almost as bad. ICS can be fixed a bit with cheaper facilities, more expensive pods, and nerfing crawlers to encourage vertical growth.

ICS and unit spam are definitely the worst part of SMAC and difficult to fix with mere alpha.txt modding. Historically I spent a lot of time thinking about Social Engineering tweaks, as the bonuses always felt a bit off and have big impacts. Unit spam and ICS are going to be more of my focus going forward with respect to modding.