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|  | | Release: | UK 02-02-1999 | | NORDIC 02-02-1999 | | US 02-02-1999 |
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 | | A new setting is nice, but what makes Alpha Centauri is that the weak parts of the old Civilization design have been tightened up, while previously untouchable parts of the rules have been turned into new, complex decisions for the player to make. And complex decisions--weighing tradeoffs, making choices, allocating resources, based solely on the information at hand--is what strategy gaming is all about.
Here's an example. In the old Civs, you were stuck with the military units that came with particular technological discoveries. Invent wheels, get chariots. Invent gunpowder, get musketeers. Here, the components of a military unit--chassis, weapons, defense, and special abilities--are freed up, giving the enterprising player the ability to tailor appropriate units for particular circumstances.
How is this useful? Say you have unruly cities. Build cheap 1-1-1 units with the special ability "Police" and they will break out the nightsticks and lay down the law. Want a cheap, devastating attacker? Build air units with nerve gas pods. But be prepared for the ire of your rival leaders. There are some flaws in this system--the constant need to upgrade old units and the proliferation of unit designs grows tedious.
Here's another example: in the old Civs, governmental types were rigid and tied to technological discovery. Invent writing, you can have a Republic. Invent mass production, and you can practice Communism. Each governmental type had its plusses and minuses.
Here, it's different. There are no rigid governmental types. You can dictate different policies on differing facets of your nation's life at whim. You can practice Green economics while running a Police State. Or have a Fundamentalist government with a Free Market economy. The combinations are many, and they aren't merely window dressing--each choice has a serious, global effect on the science, happiness, military, etc., ratings for your cities.
But these elements are for the serious players who want to fine-tune their civilizations. The casual player needn't address them at all, and neatly offsetting these optional complexities are some really handy gameplay shortcuts that make the game more manageable.
For example, Alpha Centauri has something called Former units, which play the same role as the settlers or engineers of the past. But rather than being forced to micro-manage what improvements they make, turn after turn, you can set them to auto-run, letting them auto-improve just their home base, or globally improve your civilization in general. You can even order them to build a road from X to Y. This kind of design tweaking is made for the gamer, not just to fill out some feature set on a sales sheet.
And to speed up the "sagging middle" and the end game, when you have dozens and dozens of cities to manage, you can turn on governors and set them to auto-produce improvements and units. You can also specify what areas the governors should work on--science, industry, or military. The governors don't always build the most sensible things in the world, but you can always go in and change it.
And on and on it goes. The game has more features than can adequately be covered in a review. A great diplomacy system. An option to turn off acquiring technology through conquering a city. Working borders that the computer players tend to respect--that feature alone is almost enough to make this a better game than Civilization II.
And with so many optional rules that can be turned on or off, like permitting cooperative victories, restricting scientific advances, allowing economic or transcendent wins, even an "Iron Man" option that limits saved games--one is left with so many different possible styles of play that a reviewer has to talk about playing Alpha Centauri in the abstract. Suffice it to say if you want to play a military game, you can turn off all the other alternate paths to victory. If you want a huge, sprawling world with lots of space to expand in, it's there, or if you really want to change the rules around, simply edit the game's text files. So any player of Civilization can with the various custom options put together relatively quickly the kind of scenario that suits their style of play.
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