Or have a Fundamentalist government with a Free Market economy. You can practice Green economics while running a Police State.
You can dictate different policies on differing facets of your nation's life at whim. Each governmental type had its plusses and minuses. Invent mass production, and you can practice Communism. Here's another example: in the old Civs, governmental types were rigid and tied to technological discovery.
#Planet centauri cheats upgrade#
There are some flaws in this system-the constant need to upgrade old units and the proliferation of unit designs grows tedious. But be prepared for the ire of your rival leaders. Want a cheap, devastating attacker? Build air units with nerve gas pods. Build cheap 1-1-1 units with the special ability "Police" and they will break out the nightsticks and lay down the law. How is this useful? Say you have unruly cities. 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. In the old Civs, you were stuck with the military units that came with particular technological discoveries. And complex decisions-weighing tradeoffs, making choices, allocating resources, based solely on the information at hand-is what strategy gaming is all about. But that's where Alpha Centauri truly shines: after all, it stands on the shoulders of the giant: Civilization.Ī 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. Of course after you play it a dozen times, the Secret Project movies, clever snippets of text, and the philosophical facades of the factions fade in importance compared to the core gameplay. Each faction leader represents a point of view references to philosophy, religion, ideology and the like permeate the game, something usually not found in games.
But this is more than a set of wacky characters. It's through the writing that the personalities of the faction leaders come alive, not only in their negotiations with the player but also in the speeches that accompany each new technological discovery. It is hard to convey a sense of story in an open-ended strategy game like this, as these type of games use a set of semi-rigid rules on randomly generated worlds, but Alpha Centauri-probably more than any other strategy game I can think of apart from X-COM-really pulls it off, largely through excellent in-game writing and art direction. (Now if only these guys would tackle the Master of Orion genre with an empire-building game that spans the stars.)Įven more remarkable, is that for a strategy game, Alpha Centauri has a lot of personality and mood. While this kind of thing is common in essays about science fiction world-building or in pen-and-paper roleplaying games, it is gallingly rare in strategy games, even on the PC, which is supposed to be a bastion for factual accuracy in contrast, look at the painstaking realism of flight sims and wargames.
#Planet centauri cheats manual#
For example, the back of this game's manual has a short essay on the dynamics of planet building and solar system formation, which offers a justification of why the "Planet" at Alpha Centauri is the way it is. Alpha Centauri has the scientific plausibility you'd expect from Firaxis, designers known for historical games like Gettysburg and Railroad Tycoon. What you really end up with is a shapeless mish-mash of cliches, just so much sci fi gibberish.īut Brian Reynolds certainly did his homework. Firaxis lavished attention on the background of Alpha Centauri itself took great care in fleshing out a plot and the protagonists and the setting, making a believable and so a more immersive and compelling game.įar too many games simply assume that by drawing landscape, tossing in some laser guns and big-eared aliens, you somehow end up with authentic science fiction. In other words, Alpha Centauri is far more than just Civilization III, and while it was made by the same team that did Civilization I and II and shares all of those games' conventions and designs, it goes far enough beyond the old ones that I'm not likely to go back.įor starters, the setting's changed: in Alpha Centauri you colonize an unknown, alien planet rather than explore the broad sweep of Earth history. Its design has been aged and distilled by worried, loving cellarers the result is gaming bliss, mead for the connoisseur's glass.
Alpha Centauri is the work of a master vintner it's been carefully crafted, each ingredient examined, every process mulled over.
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