I’m not able to get Alpha Centauri to play on my WinXP machine, so I’m forced to play it on my laptop if I want to play it at all.
My take on Alien Crossfire is sort of meh. I liked it because I’d played a lot (loooot) of Alpha Centauri and I appreciated the variety it provided. But it didn’t really upgrade the game any at all. It just provided some new characters and new technologies (or names for technologies).
One thing that I saw mentioned earlier in this thread was national borders – this is present in AC. Also, something that you don’t see in any of the Civ variants is the Unit Workshop. You can design your own units combining any of the technologies you’ve discovered to date. Occasionally this provides some useful flexibility.
Alpha Centauri was the best computer game ever, for a first play. It was, in many ways, one of the best games ever, period, though I didn’t like the static nature of the game once you had the seven factions down, and the aliens from Alien Crossfire were simply too much.
Civ 2, however, in the end run was more delicious than any other game, for no other reason than the tremendous number of mods available, something none of the other Civ games have managed to duplicate.
Indeed, and it won’t work with modern Windows systems.
However, I still have a disc with the expansion pack on it, and I’m getting a copy of windows 98 and gonna partition my harddrive so I can run some old games.
I run SMAC on my modern, patched with the latest updates, Windows system with no problems whatsoever. I don’t have SMAX, despite my having recommended it, due to the aforementioned rarity.
Not to hijack an old thread, but I just installed Civ IV. Let me just say that Firaxis Games (recently acquired by Take 2) won’t be getting any more of my money. It runs fine on my step-son’s machine, but why bother? The graphics are way behind the graphics in the Age of Empires franchise (Age of Mythology was better!), and compared to, say Railroad Tycoon III, they suck. Game play is a bit different, but, let’s face it, they’ve gone about as fur as they can go with the basic concept.
Interestingly, I’ve been dinking around with SMAX for the last few days. I think I’ll finish that game before I bother much with the new one. And I know it won’t be pulling me away from my regular Wed. night multi-player Europa Universalis game!!!
As long as DSYoungEsq revived my thread, let me just thank everyone who made suggestions here. But special thanks to DSYoungEsq and Askance for their recommendation: Europa Universalis II freaking rocks!!!
I’ve also just started playing Hearts of Iron II…which is essentially WWII for Europa Universalis. I’ve juuuust about figured out combat now, on my fourth game.
