Editing Alpha Centauri (section)

== The Video Game ==
It's the spiritual successor to Civilization 2, and direct predecessor to Civilization 3 since it shares much of of the same dev team.  One of the possible ending conditions of the Civilization games is to launch the first colony ship into space -- destination Alpha Centauri.  Once they find a habitable planet, the team leaders suffer a political breakdown, culminating in the assassination of the colony ship's captain.  Each team leader takes a part of the colony ship and some of the colonists in hibernation, and make planetfall.  The game starts with your faction arriving, reviving the colonists for labour, and exploring the new world.

The game was very-well received because the [[Dwarf Fortress|economy]] and diplomacy of the game were staggering even today. There were no "mountain hexes or squares" to speak of, what mattered was the terrain soil consistency, and its perfectly sculpted 3-D elevation: what was a 1-square mountain in Civilization series (even today), was a very large set of rocky squares forming upwards into a mountain with varying shapes that could be drilled into or raised, or lowered with explosives/engineering. Army units were modular, defining every stat with an individual component (gun(offense), armor (defense), power source(cost/HP), and movement module -foot/wheel/track/jet engine- for speed)which miraculously was well handled by the AI. Last but not least, the diplomacy system was near perfect, its properties began being used in Civilization 6 even now. Oh, and individual resource satellites(like moon miners, orbital solar pods and orbital farming greenhouses) could be built to boost EVERY city. Can't get that one resource square? Fuck new cities, build a supply crawler which will farm it and send to nearest city. See that mountain? I don't want to, nuke it. Oh wait, the explosion triggered a river and new rain patterns, time to harvest. ORBITAL DROP a colony pod to avoid 39 turns of slow crawl? Sure why not, establish a city to advance to a new continent in days, reinforcing with new citizens dropped from nearest city with space shuttles!

Politics are equally diverse, no longer does the player use "democracy" or "monarchy" but defines the governance(police state, democracy, fundamentalist), economy(Free Market, Planned, Green), societal values(Power, Wealth or Knowledge) and "futuristic societies"(the last one being end-game bonuses), each combination with its own gamestyle. 

The expansion pack brought some nuance to the game's [[Fluff]], but fucked the [[Crunch]] in the ass: The Progenitors who cultivated the planet's unique neural fungi are revealed to be two factions in a civil war. When our ship came in, two colony ships of each alien faction turn up as well, fight and disable each other before crashing. What we had were two [[Mary Sue|BULLSHIT-grade overpowered]] alien races who start with [[Cheese|a free expensive improvement in every new city, level 3 armor tech, self sustaining energy income in lieu of trade, rising with every extra building and have a 25% offense/defense bonus]]. If they dropped next to human players, restart or resort to every gamey tactic to steal their tech. If not, research nerve gas, helicopters and apply it liberally the moment you see their cities like an exterminator with helicopter-deployed bug spray. To top the CHEESE-cake, the worms are ''heavily improved'' as well; they now land in massive, well organized raiding parties from aquatic worm islands, deploy spore launcher artillery to annihilate your improvements and snipe noncombatants a-la-commando, falling back to fungal tower buildings to heal up. Don't even think of playing single player with the old factions in the expansion, they will slowly be whittled away by the [[Tyranids|well-organized worm army]].

Needless to say, neckbeards still cream over the game even today.