Oh. My. God.

I only just bothered to read the EA news post. Bought the three games while the stream was still on and didn't realise they had announced more games.

SMAC is one of my most wanted games! Been desperate for a no-drm version of this. Goodbye, real world.

Guys...buy this when it comes and show EA we need a sequel. I read a quote a while back from someone at Firaxis who said they'd love to do it, but do not own the rights so they are dependent on the rights holder (who presumably must be EA) to back it.

I do have fond memories of this game and plan to buy it the day it comes out. Not sure I want a sequel or not though... Alpha Centauri was based on the Civ 2 engine, which I still believe was the best game in that series. A new one would probably be based on the Civ 5 engine which could be good or bad depending on who you ask.

I do like the hex based tiles, but the unique units and abilities for each Civ makes Civ 5 rather unbalanced. Also, a new Alpha Centauri would need to carry over the unit creation mechanics from the first game. I greatly enjoyed creating custom units from the different parts unlocked by the different techs.

I haven't played Civ5 and can't speak for the hex tiles, other than to say that I've frequently been put off (and somewhat bewildered) by their absence in earlier Civ titles.

I completely agree about the need for custom units a la the original SMAC. That was one of the most fun parts of that game.

I've always liked SMAC better than any Civ game, mainly because I find it to be much more immersive. (How odd that it should be easier to suspend disbelief for a science fiction game than for one based on actual history!) So whereas I still haven't gotten around to wondering whether I want to think about buying Civ 5, I would definitely snap up an SMAC sequel.

So: although I already have a couple copies of SMAC+SMACX, I may well do as Deadfolk says and pick up a DRM-free copy from GOG, in hopes that EA will get the message and put Firaxis to work on SMAC2.

The Civ series doesn't even pretend to simulate history or alternative history. It just uses history as a basis for the different factions ect.

If you want games that try to replicate history and create plausible what ifs, I would suggest looking at the strategy games made by Paradox Interactive.

I'll be getting it the day GOG puts it up.

I played Civ II a long time ago, it was quite good. Briefly played Civ IV and hated it. I tried Call to Power II but really hated the look of it (though the research stuff etc were quite interesting).
I am massive Civ III junkie though.

How does SMAC compare? How similar are the games? What are the differences?

The difference is huge. You have to learn the game from the basics.

I'll be getting it on Day One as well!

I hadn't thought about how the sales here on GOG might motivate EA to explore a remake. Ideally Sid Meier would directly take the lead on this one. But Firaxis is pwned by 2k. I've pretty much written them off because of that. If they did do SMAC2, then I'd wonder if it would also require steam like Civ5 did. If so, I'll pass. I also wonder how free Firaxis would be to craft a great game versus churning out another cash cow for their overlords.


This would be a good time for Firaxis to get back to their roots and build a deep and complex game for the diehard 4x TBS'r. After Civ4, the games have gotten increasingly shallow. It's time for Firaxis to do one for the diehards. And what better game to do it with than SMAC!? (But please lower the priority of graphics to focus the attention on depth and variety. And please please Please don't include steamworks!)

SMAC plays somewhat similarly to Civ 2 and I feel is the direction the Civ series should have gone. It introduced new ideas, such as each faction haveing its own strengths and weaknesses, as well as personality. The fact that there were only seven factions, made it easy to balance however, so no faction felt more powerful than the others. Also, technologies would unlock different parts which you could then use to create units to your own design. There were default designs as well, but I rarely used those.

There was some sort of budgeting system for unit creation so you couldn't create a unit that was fast, had huge guns and heavy armor. You would have to make compromises. Usually by way of heavier armor and weapons having a negative impact on speed. It was fun though to mess around with it and be able to fine tune units to specific purposes.

I almost forgot about the terraform features. On top of the normal tile improvements, such as roads, you can terraform to raise or lover the elevation or the terrain type of a tile. So... If you are on a penninsula, you could lower some of the terrain to create a bottle neck or even turn it into an island.

There is only 1 important question, will it come with Alien Crossfire?

Turns out that my brother had it so I actually played a game - yep there went my revision day. To be honest, I really liked it but I don't think it was as polished as Civ III. Oh and by the way, I played with the unofficial patch that came out last year, and I played Crossfire. And I would disagree with your statement, I believe that it's pretty much Civ 3.3 or so.


The unit upgrading thing is pretty much akin to Civ IV in the sense that your units can go in different directions. Yeah it's quite cool, but I felt that in the end it was quite arbitrary? Sure I played on the easiest because I wanted to have a quick playthrough, but I just don't think I could be bothered to constantly customise every single unit? The workers are enough (though I did have them automated this game since I'm not fully aware of the worker mechanics). Anyway, it's not a biggie since you can streamline it fairly quickly, and you had unit upgrading in Civ III anyway.

I somewhat like the new research thing because there are less gaps as a result, i.e. in Civ III the difference between Knights -> Cavalry (4->6) is just such so huge and that's how you time your attacks, also taking into account that Knights were an optional technology. The marginal upgrades lead to a more balanced game, but also make it more difficult to capitalise on your edge.

I liked the improved policy and diplomacy tabs, though I had a very difficult time getting out of wars and spent the entire later half of the game at war. It was ok, since I was playing on easy so I could hold them off with minimal forces but I just wanted to tech in the end and see how it ends up like. Basically, every time I would make peace with someone, another faction would declare war on me as a result of that, which made it basically impossible to get out of wars towards the end. I even ended up bribing them, or taking some of their cities, but they would still immediately declare war on me even after having accepted the reparations. Pretty annoying. Oh and then another one would simply just declare war on me because he was a commie bastard and didn't like my wealth building nation.

The politics, economy etc tradeoffs were quite cool, but it's ultimately the same in Civ III, just a little less customisable.

So sure this diplomacy based politics thing seems like a nifty idea but I don't think it worked out as well as it could have.

The building trees were pretty much the same, equivalent to the Library -> University -> Research Lab tree, and equivalents, as in Civ III.

Population management was virtually identical to Civ III, i.e. need Aqueduct, Hospital to grow beyond a certain number. Need to balance happiness (psyche) with research, taking into account the unhappy citizens (drones) and happy citizens (talent) balance, using entertainers (whatever they were called), etc, etc. Virtually the same.

City management with tiles was virtually the same as well.

As far as the different civilisations go, I'd say it's not different from Civ III. Depending on who you pick, you will have a hugely different game, even more than in SMAX I believe, since it's possible to marginalise bonuses quite decently in this game it seems.

So to the pros:
I quite liked that there was a storyline in the back of all the things and it was also refreshing to only play in the future, which I felt was something that Civ III somewhat lacked at.
I liked the random alien invasions etc, those were quite cool, since Barbarians became obsolete very early on in Civ III.
Building in the sea is also cool, very nifty idea indeed and the Pirates "race" must lead to quite a varied gameplay.

Cons:
The "advisor" overview things I found extremely unsatisfactory and lacking.
There was no single screen that showed for example, my shield production (whatever the equivalent was in SMAX). I simply had to cycle through my cities on by one to see how well they produced. Yes, it shows how far done they were with a particular project, but it didn't show production per turn. Is it possible to turn that on somehow?

Territory and picking a place where to build a city were cryptic as well, would have been much better if it showed simply clear values with numbers besides them.

Upgrading was a bitch due to (even under the F4) tab having to individually click every single unit to activate it, in order to repair it, which if course meant that you had to fortify it again the following round. Units didn't show above cities but I'm pretty sure you can turn that on somewhere.

I felt that some of the concepts weren't explained quite as well, i.e. like Planet Status, or whatever it was called. How do I see my value for that? Nothing on it in the databank. Also, my workers didn't tell me why they were discontent? War weariness? Is that even a mechanic in the game? Overcrowding? Oppression?


Overall, the game is conceptually very very similar to Civ 3 with mainly arbitrary differences, which I find a shame. I really enjoyed playing it but I very much missed a proper overview tab that would have enabled me to have more control over my "empire".

Of course Alpha Centauri came out 2 years before Civ 3, so any similarities are because Civ 3 borrowed from Alpha Centauri.

A lot of the mechanics from SMAC were used later on in CIv games (according to an official guide that came with a collectors edition). Nevertheless the game is a little dated because of the time it was made. There's a mod for Civ 4 that tries to emulate SMAC that you may prefer but you have to give a game as old as SMAC certain leeway because of it's age. It's a brilliant iconic game but no game is perfect. This comes about as close as you can get.