SMAC thread - 20th anniversary edition

SMAC thread? SMAC thread.

Did you know that the game is 20 years old this month?

Did you know that if you download the demo and then apply the official patch to it, you end up with something fully playable?

f3.to/portfolio/games/smac/ Archive contains how to do it, too.

SMAC/X featured a multiplayer option, but apart from some stonebeards over at apolyton.net it's not something that ever got a lot of traction...

There was also a GURPS game, but it kinda stunk.

How does Veeky Forums feel about this venerable piece of interactive sci-fi?

Other urls found in this thread:

moddb.com/mods/planetfall
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13111584/
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/18615638/
paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/introduction/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_E._Zakharov
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive.html?tags=left beyond
forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/194215/smac-sid-meiers-alpha-centauri-multiplayer-and-planetary-chit-chat-thread
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReplacementGoldfish
steamcommunity.com/app/65980/workshop/
forums.civfanatics.com/threads/lalande-21185-civ2-test-of-time-sci-fi-game.313815/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Was great.

C:BE was meant to be a spiritual successor to it. How do you fuck up so hard?

Literally every leader was bland. Compare them to the wide spread of different leaders in Alpha Centauri and weep.
The metaplot would have been bad, if it existed. Beyond earth just had vague sense of "earth is in dire straits so some people are sent to other planet" instead of the colony ship crashes in atmosphere, leaving different members of the operation build their own civilisation according to their ideals.
The differientation of styles (Supremancy, purity, alienhugging) were not very interesting and ate up room for giving actual personality and style to the factions.

> remove modular units because can't make players think too much

> remove engaging, interesting faction leader characters because muh political correctness

> remove ecological model because who cares about terraforming anyway beyond getting more resource cubes per worker

> blandify the underlying story about Planet

C:BE would have been a good mod/TC. But instead we got to pay full game price for it.

moddb.com/mods/planetfall If they had made this official and expanded upon it, it'd have come out better.

More importantly. Where is the dawwwwtastic piece of post-transcendence Zak/Aki writefaggotry that floated around last time?

I mean it isn't exactly a mystery. They made a fiction with less interesting factions and a less interesting setting and the presented it in a less interesting way.
And then they attached it to a game which was a slightly worse version of something people had been playing for years.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13111584/ This is the story you seek.

In the "If X was made today" tradition, what would modern SMAC look like?

Hard mode: Published by EA.

"Planetpearls recovered from husks and added to Planetpearl Vault. Do you want to buy a loot crate?"

You know what could make a good game setting?

Planet as it was meant to be.

Unity lands safely, Cpt. Garland doesn't get his throat cut, city of First Landing established extremely quickly from the flat packs in storage and the cannibalized ship and a grand nation is established.

It's rule by board, more or less. Garland is the Chairman which just amounts to trying to put brakes on the crazy train. The original faction leaders make up the representatives of parts of the civilization.

Nation is growing fast and now it's political back stabbery time.

man iremember this game,it was great,i use to write fan fiction about it,it would indeed make fora great setting,you can make your players be all from teh same faction,and them you would choose an exting job for them,they could be explorers or soldiers,or a probe team,yes it would be great

Alternatively, a hybrid approach.

Most (let's say 60%) of humanity is in the one big city that grew out of the Unity landing stage, and the surrounding countryside. The faction leaders are there, a sort of city council with Lal nominally the governor/mayor.

The outlying settlements, ostensibly built to expand the core country, is where stuff happens. Each is pledged to a faction leader and there's constant prank/bullshit/troll wars going on between all the little villages, with the leaders stepping in to make sure that it doesn't turn into actual war.

Add tension between the core inhabitants and the homesteaders as the human territory expands.

Probe team shenanigans from 2012: suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/18615638/

> 1997
> 2017

Well fuck now I feel old.

I guess we did get the human genome project stuff done, so there's that.

paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/introduction/ This guy did an amazing analysis of the game's techs and secret projects.

Man, Veeky Forums sure has changed these past couple years.

Does Veeky Forums still get shit done?

That could work better.

Would still require the removal of Cpt. Garland. Killing the man in charge would be a pretty major thing so they would have to have had procedure in place to deal with it. Such procedures would take time so put his death out until about 5 years after the colony is first established and have his death be unquestionably accidental. having been awake for the entirety of the mission since it left Earth he would have been already pretty fucking old by the time they made landing, add to that the stress of setting up and running the new nation and then he get's cancer.

Cancer was almost certainly the result of inadequate shielding on the ships reactor plus decades of exposure. Everyone who was sleeping for the voyage or leapfrogging down the years was fine. He was more or less the only one who was awake for the entire thing so he got fucked for it. Hands over increasing responsibilities to Lal until the end when Lal takes over and barely anyone notices the difference.

Unity City set up on the shores of the unimaginatively named Landing Bay (Garland, as Cpt. was in charge of naming things and he couldn't name for shit).

Around the Bay is 100% unity controlled and managed by Lal and the Board (other original faction leaders). Lal is somewhat of a non entity politically speaking. He is, in the Discworld sense, Drumknott. But he is a good moderating influence on the others.

The other faction leaders are (except aliens because fuck that was dumb) from the outer townships on the other continents or far from the Bay Lands.

Except for the Data Angels who are just shit stirring assholes and are everywhere.

Big division is whether the long term goal should be to re-establish contact with Earth and try and save it or fuck it all and start again.

Radio echo of Earth indicates that shit has continued to fall apart after departure.

Modern Sci-Fi (BE) vs Classic Sci-Fi(AC)

Not nearly as often, sadly.
I miss old Veeky Forums.

I DON'T KNOW BUT I BEEN TOLD

And meanwhile, the Pirates are off building Rapture under the sea, and the Firaxians are being the Firaxians.

Boring, bland, uninspired setting that is as vague as possible for the sake of not putting effort into it

Human Hive was the best faction

>My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?
>Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"

if smac was made today i'd give each faction some unique ending instead of all of them becoming a giant planet consciousness which was the most in theme with Gaians.
either by faction unique quests lile endless space, or make the tech tree open up the evolution of humanity.
yang made humans who were genetically designed to be obedient creating the perfect society, aki zeta wanted everyone to have a hivemind etc etc.
you could even have an expanded social screen kinda showing what your current society looks like

...

>How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?
This sounds like a real not rhetoric question from Yang.
>'The lack of suffering is perceived as pleasure, the lack pleasure is perceived as suffering. The one who can't feel pain can still be tyrannized by denying him all things pleasurable except for the one you want him to do.'
>'Good, good, now go to gulag'

Pirate Sven has no need of cities

Rapture would be more a sort of Morgan Industries thing.

They set up a free port city on the tip of the Isle of Deianira pointing towards Landing Bay. close enough to the prosperous Bay and Unity City to get most of the benefits but far enough away to claim independence and have it stick.

Deianira is being colonized from Rapture outwards as Morgan is selling them supplies, maps and land rights. It is shaping up to be a rival nation in the infancy stage. rest of the board is pissed at this as he is the only one to set up his own nation.

The other infant nations are all set up by fringe groups and weirdos who were exiled in all but name. Aki and her brood for instance were "encouraged" to set up shop on an island in the middle of the Great Northern Ocean.

Should there be a threat of Alien Invasion and how far down the years should it be?

>childhood is thinking Miriam is a bitch and Deidre is sooo right
>adulthood is realizing Miriam is not merely a bitch but also completely in the right while Deidre is psycho bitch with no redeeming features

Deidre remains the only leader I don't and have never at any point liked.

>The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.
>Sister Miriam Godwinson, "The Blessed Struggle"

DEIRDRE'S GOT A NETWORK NODE

I can't play anything but University.
I dangle my tech-carrot and the puppets dance.
Fight each other for my pleasure!
Not really, just don't beat me up and I'll give you lasers.

This, desu.
Mind Worms are a fucking war crime and an absolutely horrific thing to use on another human being.

Anyone else ever use a SMAC quote in a school essay or similar?

If so, did you reference the game, or did you leave the character as the author?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_E._Zakharov

Deidre and Lal are the only ones I despise desu.

Believers are also good for tech if played right. Brute force the problem by weight of numbers after terraforming for MAXIMUM population.

Just keep on handing out lesser prizes to neighbours whilst rushing as many Secret Projects as possible.

Then once you hit the tipping point start telling them all to fuck off and laugh as they impotently tantrum.

WRONG.

For example, here's a SMAC prequel that got done this year on /qst/.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive.html?tags=left beyond

(Technically has room for Miriam, too)

I get tentacle rape girl, but why Lal? He's harmless, middle of the road.

Wait.

LAL IS A JERRY.

IT'S AN ENTIRE FACTION OF JERRYS.

Never mind planet bust away

Actually that's a complaint I have about SMAC, you can't really ever use planet busters. Not because everyone coalitions against you (although the factions you have already conquered should stay submissive) but because you get mindwormraped the turn after you unleash righteous quasi-nuclear fury.

Dammit that quest actually finished!? I missed the 2nd half

AND SO I PRAY
UNLIMITED POPULATION WORKS

>but why Lal?
Aside from him trying to re-institute the most worthless institution known to man (fitting given his ethnicity cuz it's basically an extension of Arabic and African ethnic supremacists at this point) and being portrayed as a "harmless middle of the road" who believes in peaceful resolutions while his sidestories show him to be an immoral cunt?

The fact that his institutional failings aren't shown as well as the others. I mean you can see how horrific most of the others are at a glance whereas his faction isn't portrayed as interesting or malicious enough. (even if it is in real life)

>not murdering the mindworms
>not having already pissed them off with dozens of boreholes

are you going for a diplomatic win? and why the crawlers if all these cities are close together?

You can use them. You just have to be prepared for the mindwormrape. It's a choice with consequences.

Oh god that quest. Not a bad way to run a 4X game in quest form, actually, but it was kinda weird.

> QM does not announce games
> occasionally makes mistakes in the math
> We stay up till 4AM anyway because the writing is good

The dice rolls were so bad that it really felt like we were fighting God.

> literally never got a break
> rolled 1 on a d1000
> it was for resisting Yahweh's blow-up-the-earth firestorm

However, it did go from "The Rapture happened, wat do" to sending a bunch of interestingly eclectic people to Alpha Centauri to escape God's judgement. And it worked because we, playing as basically the soul of the internet, sacrificed ourselves to Captain Kirk God at the end.

Ryan Andrews = Nwabudike Morgan, obviously.
Tethys = 50% Ulrik, 50% Deirdre.
Zak = Zak. Even used the same name
Vee = Lal I guess? Only sane man vibe. Or maybe Domai
The Only Light survivors = Human Hive given how they acted in the game.
Urist = Heh. Why not let's have a dwarf faction in there.

The believers were not intended to be on the ship but it was implied that they'd have snuck in.

Pinging geistklempner who said he'd do a sequel but then disappeared off the face of the earth.

It's an old image and it's not mine, so god if I know. Crawlers might be to send resources to specific colonies? Dunno.

Infinite City Sprawl. Auto-win in Civ1 and Civ2, SMAC added a hapPENIS penalty for implementing it, but it didn't go too far enough, so, it was viable. forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/194215/smac-sid-meiers-alpha-centauri-multiplayer-and-planetary-chit-chat-thread

Remember that Civ3 happened after SMAC.

Uh. What? There was a SMAC quest?

No, there was a quest based on the Left Behind books (Christfag literature) that ended with the survivors of the Judgement going to Alpha Centauri via hybernation ship. It was archived. It tries to be too edgy in a few places, but it's a decent read.

Right, but on non-babby difficulty you're looking at 20+ mindworm attacks per base per turn after a good hot nukin'.

If nothing else it slows down the game a lot because you have to watch a wormageddon for 5 minutes before you can take your turn.

That's why the turn when you turn Planet into swiss cheese should be the last one before a military victory anyway.

That should have been an extra victory condition... terraform away all the fungus.

"Provost Zakharov! We've done it! The Planetmind is dead!"

I disagree. Lal serially clones his concubines. It's in one of the tech blurbs. Now you might expect that from Morgan or Yang but what makes it hit home is that Lal is a massive hypocrite given his faction agenda.

> Arabic and African ethnic supremacists
Lal is Indian. Also 3edgy5me


tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReplacementGoldfish Here it is

"Morgan, we can't keep making more boreholes! The mind worms are going berserk! The Planet will kill every human on her!"
"Then we shall take the Planet with us."

>Lal is Indian.
I could hardly remember since he's so bland of a character beyond his vaguely "ethnic" portrait.
>Also 3edgy5me
There's nothing edgy about the UN being an extension of African and Arab supremacy at this point. The Saudis run most of the important councils (human rights for one, the same people who only let women drive this year and carte blanche kill people in the desert for pissing off any of their hundreds of ruling family members) and they and the African countries are allied in pushing what the UN refers to in official documents, completely unironically, as "Replacement Migration".
Unsurprisingly they're only committed that their Replacement Migration should occur in European countries, the Saudis themselves refuse refugees, don't hand out citizenship and only let de-facto visa-less slaves from poorer parts work in their country.

The UN was already terrrible when SMAC was written, now it's completely beyond the pale.

IDK, Morgan seems a bit too level headed for that.... Let's face it, the SMAC writers managed to do a Randian hero that is actually sympathetic.

Saudi is a shit hole (I did IT there for a bit) but saying that they are in charge of the UN is just stupid. Right now Saudis are scrambling to "modernize" because they're going to have to fess up to being almost out of oil in a couple years.

Also, I'll bite - what would you have replaced Lal with, in the game? I think he is supposed to be the generic faction since he has less bonuses/maluses than anyone else.

Here's the answer: steamcommunity.com/app/65980/workshop/

Look at the most subscribed mods. They are all stuff that SMAC had by default. The devs tried too hard to be different, same as every remake of every classic sci fi that we've had since Lens Flare Man took over Star Trek.

>but saying that they are in charge of the UN is just stupid.
They and their allies have been handed every important council but the military one, so yes they are de-facto in charge of the UN as-is. It rules over their social policy which is why you see shit like the UN overtly calling for replacement migration in Europe (incl Russia) and Japan.
>Right now Saudis are scrambling to "modernize" because they're going to have to fess up to being almost out of oil in a couple years.
They won't. They're throwing very small bones to get activist people to ignore them enough that they can stay the sweetspot ally of the US and Israel against the Shia states as well as get weapons deals with European states.
>what would you have replaced Lal with, in the game?
Literally nothing. His faction is a worthless waste of space.
If you insist on having something equivalent then have it be like the real UN and overtly have it have sidestories where it's obviously an excuse for collective powermongering over weaker members.
>I think he is supposed to be the generic faction
Just more of a reason why he sucks.

Not so much level headed, just not going to get rid of resources.

All those angry mindworms will leave behind planet pearls.

> found the /pol/enta

How about putting an aquatic faction in the base game then instead.

Only if you attack them... if they attack you and die, you get nothing. The problem is that when you have a lot of ecodamage, the worms will spawn next to your bases and attack your garrison, so you don't really get a chance to attack first.

>whining about /pol/
>rick and morty pic
What did it mean by this?

>How about putting an aquatic faction in the base game then instead.
How about blowing your own brains out?
Fucking Pirates are the worst balanced faction in the entire game even counting the Aliens.

Having some "guys guys let's not go off on crazy tangents" faction makes sense in-story, and since the project was originally UN sponsored, why not keep it named after the UN? What else would you name it?

I guess one thing you could do is say that the UN faction has no bonuses, no penalties, and no social engineering restrictions, so actually make it a generic faction and let the player play it flexibly. The NPC AI can be kept generic, which works because Lal has the least quotes in the game anyway.

And yes, the expansion factions aren't well balanced (or that compelling story wise... maybe the free drones).

It meant this.

Let's see...

Dictator = Yang.
Hippie = we have Deirdre and Fungusboy.
Survivalists = we have Santiago and Ulrik.
Science = we have Zak and Aki.
Capitalists = we have Morgan.
Religious = we have Miriam. Although it'd be nice if, should you go Fundamentalist, she went all DEUS VULT at you instead of making friends, since fundies of two different cultures generally want to fight.
> tfw Miriam is more progressive than today's christfags or muhammadfags

I guess that if you were to replace the Peacekeepers you'd have to add Domai to the base game. He'd be an interesting foil to both Yang and Morgan, actually...

So how would the DONALD TRUMP faction work? Might as well go there since we got /pol/acks in the thread.

Trump faction is already in the game.

Not really. Morgan is a competent businessman, whereas Trump went bankrupt multiple times. He doesn't give two fucks about ethnicity or nationality, whereas Trump is a nationalist. His core principle is the sanctity of contract, whereas Trump is known to fuck over subcontractors on the regular.

Morgan has a lot more in common with Bill Gates than with Donald Trump.

t. Brainlet.
Most of these are very off.
>Dictator = Yang
Collectivist Authoritarianism aka Maoism mixed with Transhumanism.
>Hippie = we have Deirdre
New Ager who genuinely worships Gaia theory and brings it to it's logical eco-terrorist conclusion.
>Survivalists = we have Santiago
Santiago is Militarist Autocracy and is obviously built along the lines of the Spartans.
>Science = Zak
>Capitalists = Morgan
Yes.
>Religious = we have Miriam. Although it'd be nice if, should you go Fundamentalist
She is fundamentalist, just not one of your ridiculous American ones who don't understand basic Christian theology.
> tfw Miriam is more progressive than today's christfags or muhammadfags
She's actually highly Conservative compared to most sunday Christians (i.e. barely Christians at all) and she's incredibly progressive compared to the most liberal Muslims due to the nature of Islam's teachings.
>So how would the DONALD TRUMP faction work?
It wouldn't since he's a bogstandard centrist with populist rethoric. Nothing to work off unless you're dumb enough to think the faction leaders are all it's about and not the underlying factions.
>Might as well go there since we got /pol/acks in the thread.
How about you stop whining about pol and start posting some content that doesn't amount to "let's push the garbage mechanics and lore of the expansion into the far superior base game!". Cause you sure as shit haven't done it so far.

> playing as yang

ishy ishy

> injecting IRL politics into sci fi game from the 90s

see picture

I don't disagree with you there. The question is, if you get rid of the Peacekeepers, whose ideology is basically the null hypothesis, what do you replace them with?

Maybe a sort of "earth culture curator" faction that specifically wants to get to the point where Earth can be recolonized?

You're regurgitating election talking points as if they're relevant, everyone knows Trump used bankruptcy rules to write-off enterprises that weren't profitable.
Bill Gates ought to trigger you as well considering he pioneered a shitton of shady business tactics at MS and now in his retirement thinks Europe shouldn't take in any more third-world immmigrants or fake refugees.

>Morgan is a competent businessman, whereas Trump went bankrupt multiple times
The problem here is your second sentence reveals that you don't even know what being a competent businessman is in the first place. Not all ventures are successful and if you're putting capital into a lot of different things some of them are going to go bust. It's not a strike against Trump at all and trying to use it as once just shows your financial illiteracy.Trump has never gone bankrupt. Ventures he has financed have gone bankrupt and that's something that happens to literally every single person who heavily invests in venture capital.

>what do you replace them with?
Nothing.
They're a faction that add absolutely nothing to the game in terms of playstyle, fluff or mechanics.

Look up his tax returns from 1995 and then we can talk. Anyway, this is a SMAC thread, not a Trump thread.

The problem is that the game is balanced for 7 factions. If you leave 6, whoever is next to the empty spawn spot dominates.

>Look up his tax returns from 1995
How 'bout you look up his filings for the presidential race and stop being retarded.
>The problem is that the game is balanced for 7 factions. If you leave 6, whoever is next to the empty spawn spot dominates.
We're not talking about removing Lal from the game as it is, now are we. Without him the devs would have had to make different maps obviously.

>So how would the DONALD TRUMP faction work?
It wouldn't since he's a bogstandard centrist with populist rethoric. Nothing to work off unless you're dumb enough to think the faction leaders are all it's about and not the underlying factions.

THIS.

> How about you stop whining about pol and start posting some content that doesn't amount to "let's push the garbage mechanics and lore of the expansion into the far superior base game!". Cause you sure as shit haven't done it so far.

Yeah, the expansion was a significant step down story wise. Although some mechanics were nice (HSA no longer ending the probe game).

If it was me I'd replace Lal with Domai and call it a day, it was the most sense-making expansion faction, and it's fairly balanced overall.

He never filed anything despite being asked to, because it's not mandatory. In fact, some states are going to make it mandatory starting 2020.

> (HSA no longer ending the probe game).

Less reason to nuke/conquer the HSA city, though. One thing that I would've liked to see at least as a game option, is make it so that the AI can start a nuclear war without the player doing so... it happened in Civ2 IIRC.

Seeing that this thread is veering close to a dam nannoying derail, I present you with a wuestion:

What kind of faction would you put in to a new version of Alpha Centauri. What kind of person would their leader be ? What is their background and what would their plans be ? What are the factions good and bad sides and how does your average person align in the factions society ?

Few things would have improved that game. Only ones I can think of

Ability to play more than 7 factions

Removal of the alien factions. I've heard people defend their favourite Crossfire human factions enough to know that there is at least one person who likes each faction. Even the spore sniffing doomsday cultists, unbelievable as that sounds. I have never heard anyone say anything good about either of the alien factions.

Easier to use faction editor.

More intuitive UI

Beyond that nothing but a graphical upgrade but even then the graphics are still acceptable even 20 years later.

>He never filed anything despite being asked to
Ignorant moron.
FEC filings are required of presidential candidates and he filed them before the presidental race even started.

Good wuestion!

If I was doing a remake, I'd just focus on updating the graphics and network - the crunch is starting to show its age, but the fluff is damn near perfect, so let's not fix what's broken.

I guess the thread has either one person posting the same thing over and over, or replacing Lal with Domai.

One thing I would do is have the expansion factions show up as NPC subfactions later in the game - for example, if we don't start with Domai, let's say that the player or another NPC engineers a series of drone riots in Morganic or Hive territory, and there's the Free Drones faction spawning. Same thing with University and Data Angels.

Interestingly enough Civ 1 on the Amiga had this mechanic! An AI empire could split into two if they stayed in anarchy for too long.

And yeah on the alien factions. That took away a lot of the mystique of Planet. Although I can see Zak getting along with the Progenitors just out of sheer admiration for such a large-scale experiment...

Possible faction ideas:

"Rebuild Earth" faction: Wins by doing a reverse Civ and sending a colony ship back home. Negative planet rating. Bonus to defungation.

"Country Farm" faction: As in a farm of countries, not a farm in the country. They specifically want to act as an umbrella org for people who want to keep their national culture. Ironically this makes them the most diverse faction.

I'd like to see a revolution mini-campaign in which it's midgame, you are, say, Sinder Roze, have hacked yourself a nice colony pod and put all your buddies in it, and now have to survive under the University or Morgan radar long enough to build enough military and political strength that they have to take you seriously.

Sort of like the first Colonizaton game, the one built on the Civ1 engine.

Borrow the multiple map system from Civ2:Test of Time.

Basically, you got pseudo-3d by having more than one map, stacked on top of each other, and special units (like teleporters or launch ramps) that let you travel on the Z axis.

For SMAC, this could be a Nessus colony, or an orbital layer that is more than just building satellites.

Interestingly, C2:TOT had their own SMAC-we-wish scenario called LaLande 21185.

forums.civfanatics.com/threads/lalande-21185-civ2-test-of-time-sci-fi-game.313815/

>For SMAC, this could be a Nessus colony, or an orbital layer that is more than just building satellites.
So CtP's space layer?
Let's bring in CtP's combat system while we're at it.

What's CtP?

There's almost nothing wrong with the mechanics.
The only thing that hasn't aged well is the UI.

UI is decent if you're used to it, but yes, there should be more civ-wide toggles.

And a "Set former to auto-remove-fungus". Please.

Call to Power.
Something Activision had made when they temporarily had the rights to the Civilization series. They even made two. The second fixes a lot of problems, desu. Too bad it shortens the game and gets rid of the space layer.
So yeah, there's a second layer over the normal map for space cities, captured asteroid mining, etc. The combat system isn't one unit at a time either, units fight as armies. And there are no workers, only public works; you just set how much of your money producing gets turned into public works points, and you use those to build improvements directly, much better than the worker system. There also were a shitload of non-combat units, like spies, diplomats, slavers, abolitionists, lawyers, advertising companies, eco terrorists, etc.
As far as end game goes, IIRC in the first one you eventually construct a wormhole in the space layer, send explorers through, and then they come back with some alien genetic material and the goal is to clone an alien or create a human/alien hybrid, I can't remember for sure. In the second one, you build a network of fancy satellites and obelisks on land to take absolute control of the weather, solve the pollution problem once and for all and live in relative harmony.

Oh right and yeah, I might be wrong but as I recall in ToT, the space layer was literally just a second map not really linked to the main land map, but in CtP, the space layer is literally exactly above the landmap, you can see everything through. Some units from space can interact with those on land and vice-versa. I think there's a few units that can move fast in space and drop down on Earth wherever you want, too.

ToT let you make four maps, whether they were actual height layers or different dimensions (or even different times in one scenario, in which you were invaded by well-intentioned utopians from the future) was up to the scenario designer.

I might give CtP a try, thank you!

You should know first though, the AI in both games is pretty poor (better in II), civilizations have no personality and leaders are just a line of text.

Show me on the doll where the mindworm touched you.

> expected trump salt
> did not expect xenofungus salt

Because the self-aware colony tazed me, Sister!

What if Garland just dies of old age shortly after Planetfall, just on account of having been awake the whole time (and nobody has life extension stuff yet).

Miriam would probably appreciate the Moses parallel.

That could work but it would have to happen a few years after founding to avoid chaos. So the parallel isn't perfect.

Also how long was the voyage and how old was the captain?

Hello, Left Beyond QM here.

In LBQ, the voyage was 16 years long, which is pretty much the high end of realistic (the Reach, the game's version of the Unity, used a fission fragment engine to achieve constant acceleration throughout the voyage). Most of the crew had cybernetic implants that would let them enter a dreamlike slow metabolism mode, but the captain didn't. The captain was also a head in a jar.

And in the official AC fluff?

40 years according to the GURPS splatbook, which you can find here.

Serious question: Are the Cybernetic faction supposed to be high functioning autistic?

Also what's the UI in this screenshot?

Everything I have seen says yes.

Nobody proposed a SMAC/Avatar crossover yet? For shame!

> sentient natives replace the Progenitors
> psionic queue thing and wildlife control actually fits well with Planet's ecosystem
> they have to copy at least some human tech to keep up

> 1998 game
> 2009 movie
> 2017 original content donut steel

ishy ishy

The Ayy Lmaos were not only fairly boring, but also a death sentence for whoever they ended up starting near most of the time.
The concept of two advanced ayy factions fighting each other Ur-Quan style while the pitiful humans squabble amongst themselves is cool in theory, but it was badly executed.

It would have worked better (and be closer to the fluff) if they'd showed up even 40 turns into the game rather than at the beginning.

Well, there we go then.

Heh, half tempted to fire up the faction editor and make this....

>Well, there we go then

Despite playing as the token autists they are still my second favorite faction.

Who's first?

Also, one random event I would add: A rogue mad scientist / pirate / criminal / terrorist. Basically, a powerful unit spawns somewhere, and must be defeated. Or you can bribe it to go bug someone else by a diplomacy-like dialogue.

Imagine Prokhor Zakharov facing off against Rick Sanchez...

>Who's first?

The Believers.