Alfa Centauri - is it worth it?

[Anodyne]

Hmm... It's just a shame that I cannot find SMAX anywhere...
Nowhere to be found in shops, not even a pirate *shiver* version around....

[Adalbertus]

Ade, SMAX is very difficult to get hands on. I bought mine in an attack of panic at SoftwareFirst or so. You should have a look in the FAQ thread, I think there is some information about how to get it.

[Clear Skies]

Wow. That poll's pretty damn conclusive

[Adalbertus]

I like the poll, too . But I think there are mostly die-hard SMAC/X fans on the forum at the moment. At least until Civ3 has become a normal game and the hype has settled. Which traitors rated only 4???

[Straybow]

Who rates SMAC 4? Me, for one. I saw that such a poll would be biased by the die-hards, just as you said. I couldn't find an old thread I'd posted in so I thought I'd chip in my two bits worth… here and in hi, is AC really that great?. I address SMAC itself there, I'll address the comparison to Civ3 here.

Civ3 city-flipping is the real killer ('nuff said). A close second, for me, was trade. Automatically generating luxury trade between your own cities connected by road was really good, but killing traditional Civ2 trade was a major mistake. The strategic resource model sucks, too. The third strike was espionage.

As a threadmaster from the Civ3 List project my hopes were high and my disappointment higher. These aren't bugs that can be fixed; Firaxis' hasty retuning of the culture model didn't help. "Something for nothing" just doesn't cut it, nor the "nothing for something" of trade and espionage/diplomatic contact.

SMAC shares one of the three Civ3 strikes: lack of decent trade model. I thought Firaxis would have learned from that one, but no, they took it one step farther in Civ3. SMAC Social Engineering is a tremendous advance in the way a Civlike game handles government and related factors. Again Civ3 is a step backwards. (At least Sid realized how dreadfully unbalanced Fundamentalism is; unfortunately he amputated instead of correcting the problem.)

The span-of-history format renders SMAC-style unit design a problem. Again, instead of rising to the challenge Civ3 drops back to punt. It was a good punt, mind you: civ-unique units and Golden Age are good ideas. IMO SMAC and Civ3 could use help in that department.

Verdict: I don't play Civ3; I do play SMAC until I get bored pushing formers around and lobbing missiles.

PS: Sonic, you can hack out half of the url in your sig. Post #1206967 is on page 1, so http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=58710 will get there.

[CEO Aaron]

Wasn't me.

On the Civ3 AI: I utterly deny that the Civ3 AI is any better than the SMAX AI. The fact is that the culture mechanics and horrible battle resolution made it so the equally idiotic AI was much harder to put down.

I can't tell you how many times I'd wade in and crush a city only to have my entire invading army suddenly become French. Not to mention all the games that were completely hopeless because I never wound up with any iron deposits. Are such situations realistic? Certainly? Do they make for a good game? Not so much.

Conclusion: SMAX is a much more robust game that better rewards shrewd decision-making. You won't regret owning it.

[Grrease]

Originally posted by CEO Aaron
On the Civ3 AI: I utterly deny that the Civ3 AI is any better than the SMAX AI. The fact is that the culture mechanics and horrible battle resolution made it so the equally idiotic AI was much harder to put down.

I second that.

[Pandemoniak]

Just a small taste of social engineering will damn you forever and bound you to SMAC.

[Straybow]

Yes, probably the greatest feature of SMAC.

[Andemagne]

SMAC is better than Civ3 but dunno how much.

[ProfessorChaos]

I would choose CIV3 over SMAC but before CIV3 came around SMAC was one of the greatest turn based games to be developed

[Todd Hawks]

I am not so sure that you should buy the game. I think it is better than Civ 3 BUT:

The graphics are worse than CtP.
No city view at all.
You don't like future themes.... SMAC is ALL about future.

I don't know how important these points are for you.
If you think you can cope with it then by all means go and buy it before someone else does.

(Btw: The AI in Civ3 is waaay better than in SMAC... I wish there was a game with the "richness" of SMAC and the AI of Civ3)

[Straybow]

It will take some Great Leap Forward in theory and programming to make AI that can handle a Civlike game anywhere near a moderate human player without cheats. We may see it in our lifetimes.

[Adalbertus]

Straybow, in the effect, you're probably right, it's impossible to have a good AI in a "rich" game in forseeable future. But unless there is a way to create a "play-everything-AI", it's simply quality vs. money. You can get a better AI when you are optimizing more, even with today's computing power, and today's programming skills. But it takes longer, and in the effect you will have to pay $100 instead of $50 for a new game.

[Sikander]

The problems with SMAC are really the problems with Civ 2. The vast majority of the changes from Civ 2 to SMAC were positive IMO, while the vast majority of the problems in SMAC come directly from it's Civ lineage. I have always felt that the Civ series of games were terrible wargames. As someone who has owned and played hundreds of wargames over almost 30 years I feel like I have enough experience to tell the difference.

The problems with Civ as a wargame are legion, but here are a few starters for example:

Movement Scale: Why does it take a year for a modern unit to move one tile the map? Even ancient units were capable of moving much further, yet they are limited to 1 tile every x years. Movement limitations in reality have a lot less to do with the actual capabilities of the units IRL than they do with the limitations of supply. However there is no means of showing this in the Civ series other than to handcuff every unit which is moving within it's own well-supplied areas while at the same time allowing your legion to move another 200 miles into the wastes of Siberia living on god knows what, having left 1000 years ago. By the modern era it gets truly ridiculous. World War Two would take (game) decades to fight out using Civ as the simulator.

Rigid Zones of Control, Tactical Units on the Strategic Map, and Another Humongous Scale Problem:

Why Sid ever decided it would be cool to have tactical units on the strategic map I have never figured out. Especially when he is using the clunkiest wargame engine seen since the early 1960's to regulate movement and combat. This device ends up destroying much of the value of the game, as all historical techniques are completely lost on the player, who builds only the best units, builds a lot of them and engages the AI in a very simplistic form of attrition, whereby the player's advantage is to trick the AI into falling into simple traps, traps which the AI is completely blind to due to it's inability to move it's forces in any order it chooses to. There is no tactical game in Civ worthy of the name, and the attempt to crowd the board to deliver the appearance of one simply obstructs whatever capability the game might have had to skip over tactics as beneath the scope of the game and simply show strategic and operational level details.

Other games have managed this with much more success. Master of Magic and Master of Orion 2 for instance take a better approach by assuming that all combat occurs in one square, and they resolve combats on a tactical map of roughly the same terrain as the tile had on the strategic map. This is not only fun (you can allow the computer to fight the battle if you don't enjoy it), but it gives additional benefits. Firstly you can see and utilize the advantages of combined arms in tactical combat. This adds a lot into the strategy element of the game, as you can build forces which are properly balanced to carry out your sort of tactical combat. Secondly you are not penalized for massing troops, in fact like all sensible generals have advised for millenia concentrating your troops gives them a distinct advantage most of the time. Finally the ZOC clutter on the main board is cleared up a lot. No longer can a militia unit armed with hunting spears (which was built in an urban area only containing only 10,000 persons) ZOC block a Panzer Korps containing more than 10,000 highly mobile troops with a staggering array of firepower!

Many complain that tactical combat gives the player too great of an advantage over the computer player, and I tend to agree. This is one of the reasons that most of the games that use this method are very easy to beat on even the hardest levels. My only caveat is that the AI has a much better chance of being a challenge to the player tactically than strategically. Chess is perhaps an unfair example, as simple as it is it is orders of magnitude simpler than any of the tactical combat modules I have seen. Still, chess programs for 286 era computers gave me all I could handle (I'm not a student of the game), which is much more than I can say for the AI of any other game. With time, proper programming, and the continuing growth in computational speed it does seem that eventually these tactical submodules could provide an extremely satisfying "game within a game" challenge which might reverse the current situation where it is to the human player's advantage to use tactical combat.

This would solve or begin to solve two lingering problems in all strategic computer games. The first problem is that AI really has no business formulating strategy at all. This is why is doesn't actually do so, but follows certain complicated scripts to pretend that it is actually thinking every turn. The concept of grand strategy is far too complex for the AI, period. If we are someday capable of creating an AI which is capable of this level of imagination, I am sure that I will have been a long time in the ground. The best we are going to have for the foreseeable future is either a great AI tactical engine which to some extent makes up for good but ultimately hopeless AI strategic scripts, or another game design entirely that abandons the (always wobbly) concept that states that the computer must play the same game as the player does.

I realize that computer cheating is frustrating, but it can be done better than simply cranking up AI production etc. Games where there is a bit of roleplaying involved to simulate the player's attempts to rule his empire through whatever it's internal political methods are would certainly be much more realistic (as any fairly astute observer of history will note that the vast majority of rulers spent the vast majority of their time trying to keep their own house in order, and relatively little time plotting the downfall of their neighbors). In such a game a rich internal political environment could provide quite a challenge to the human player, with potentially rebellious subjects or troops, military leaders and governors, or unwilling merchants who refuse to see the value in going out of business while the entire industrial capacity of the empire is used to suddenly build newfangled "supply crawlers", whatever those are. This portion of the game could be simplified or removed entirely from the AI, in order to allow it's strategy scripts to plod forward without too much trouble.

This is the sort of thing that I would like to see in a game at any rate. My favorite part of the Civ type games is the strategic scale, and particularly the economics. It's not that I don't enjoy a good wargame, I do enjoy a good wargame, but Civ and it's direct decendents are not good wargames. I would enjoy a game like Master of Magic with improved graphics and a better (more stable, better AI) tactical engine. Add on a "ruler interface" (the internal political game within the game) in order to give the poor AI a chance to compete strategically and it would be one hell of a game.


Finally, what the hell are Civ 3's fans thinking? That game is a step back from Civ 2. The main improvement is to the portion of the game engine that should have been tossed out years ago (tactical units on the strategic map = bad strategy and no tactics), while the more interesting strategic play was emasculated so that you could not get too far ahead of the AI qualitatively, and are forced to meet the AI in a slogging match for all of eternity. It makes Warcraft seem like inspired genius in comparison.