Hi all. Not seeing any other threads at this moment, here’s the news: Video Game News & Reviews | Engadget
New Civ game in Fall '14, set on another planet, following a global catastrophe of undefined nature.
I’m in.
I like it.
I have to admit, I would prefer it was a Civ V addon, I’d really, really, really love to go from caveman to spacefaring race, but I recognize it would just blow the campaign way out of proportion, especially since a lot of players tend to win before they even hit the information age.
Looking at the trailer, it seems it’s just climate change, pollution, overcrowding, running out of resources and so on instead of a single catastrophe.
Looks good to me, I’m among those who actually liked CiV over Civ 4 even back at the launch so I expect to like this too.
Wow
My computer just wet it’s pants and I’m weeping.
I read the thread title and assumed it was an add on to CIV but it is instead a modern Alpha Centauri. Nice!
I’m not sure how to react to this. On the one hand, Alpha Centauri is one of my all-time favorite games. They’re clearly going for SMAC II with this (I’m told that EA still holds the rights to the name), and if they do a good job it could really knock my socks off.
On the other hand, Firaxis is just coming off of Civ V, which for my taste is the second-weakest installment of the series (and that long string of patches just kept making it worse). If this new game is too much like Civ V, I will be very sad.
Still, it seems like a promising game. The screenshots look great, and this purity/harmony/supremacy business looks like it could make for good replay value.
The most exciting thing I’ve heard about this is that the tech tree will be a “web” and a lot less linear than the regular Civ tree. So you can go down on branch really deep without having to research techs in the other branches. They were saying that most of the time you won’t have everything researched when the game ends, so you have to make a lot more choices.
I was at the panel at PAX East this morning… and I can report very little other than what’s out there in the various articles on the web. Very by-the-book and hewed closely to what the PR people wanted them to say. That said, the design team was clearly enthusiastic about the project, and the recurring theme was “now we can try out a bunch of design/art/etc ideas that we’ve had that we couldn’t use because we were constricted by, well, history”. They also pretty explicitly said “we don’t own the rights to SMAC, so this is definitely not SMAC 2!.. but yes, it’s our vision for a SMAC 2”. As if that wasn’t obvious enough.
I am cautiously optimistic; like some others, I think Civ V was a relatively disappointing entry in the series, but I do think it’s gotten better as they’ve built the expansions. If all of these ideas turn into some interesting gameplay, it could absolutely turn into something worthwhile even with the same engine underneath.
I’m pretty stoked about the fact you can customize your faction (or whatever) even before the game starts.
Is it that much like SMAC? Are all of the Earth ships going to land on the same planet? Isn’t part of the new game trying to find “the right planet” in the first place?
The one thing I didn’t like about SMAC - or Outpost, for that matter - was that you were forced to compete against other colonies. I was hoping SimMars wouldn’t be like that, but they never got around to finishing it (presumably they took people off of the project to work on the expansions for The Sims).
Yep. Alpha Centauri II, not Civ whatever.
I’d like to be optimistic, but the 2008 version of Colonization was a disappointment to me. So was Civ V for that matter, and even Civ IV needed two expansions to reach “really good”, although it was still pretty good as released.
Speaking of Colonization, how did it manage an 83 on Metacritic? Reviewers seem to have a lot trouble gauging strategy titles. A way to check this theory could be to look at the relative gap between user scores and pro scores by genre. Unfortunately, I’m not able to figure out how to get Metacritic to display by genre with both pro and user scores, if there is one.
The Colonization remake, IMO, is fun if you crack open the XML files and do away with all of the escalating-costs-for-everything nonsense.
I really wanted to like SMAC, but it just never really clicked for me. I think that the biggest reason is that none of the techs meant anything to me. When I’m playing a Civ game, I can say to myself “Woohoo, I’m laying down railroads in 1300! I’m sending a man to the Moon in 1650! Look how far ahead I am!”. When all of the techs are fictional, though… Is monopole magnets in year 100 good? I dunno.
More on this game from Gamescon 2014; I note that the article claims a release date of 24 October 2014. 
ETA: Steam also lists the game now with the 24 October release date. No Mac specs yet, I see. 
SMAC was my favorite game until the Europa Universalis series started (though I mostly stick to Sims 3 nowadays).
I might get this if the early reviews say it’s decent and not too buggy.
I like this and will have to check this out.