Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Rating: 4.5/5

Unless you've been living in a cave on Alpha Centauri yourself, you should remember Sid Meier and his most famous brainchild, Civilization. It was the original explore, build, research and conquer game, taking you from a single stone age village to a global empire in 2000 years, and it and its sequels have sold like hot cakes. Civ and Civ II came out of Microprose, but Sid Meier and the lead designer for Civ II, Brian Reynolds left to form a new company, Firaxis, which has published their latest brainchild.

Don't let the different company, the fancier look or the sci-fi universe fool you, though - if you know Civilization, you'll quickly recognise Alpha Centauri - at least at first. You start with "formers" to build improvements and "scouts" to explore instead of "settlers" and "warriors", and your cities thrive on "nutrients, minerals and energy" instead of "food, raw materials and trade goods" but at the most basic level everything works very much the same as Civilization II. You may even find it easier to play at first because Sid and Brian have put in many more software "agents" who will make routine decisions for you on auto-pilot.

But despite all of the training wheels they have provided, you'll soon discover the game is fiendishly complex under the surface, with new wrinkles and trade-offs to keep you juggling variables into the wee hours.

According to the game's "history", in 2060 you and your fellow colonisers blasted off from earth to found a new colony on the closest star to ours - Alpha Centauri. Along the way, however, you argued and split into seven different factions, each with a distinct ideology. The factions range from Morgan Industries (capitalist industrialists) to the Spartans (warriors) to the Gaians (peaceful explorers who want to work with the planet).

While in Civilization II, there were several "leaders" you ended up negotiating with, the different between them was slim. In Alpha Centauri, your choice of faction is very important and the faction of the other people you meet will make a bigger difference to the way they work with you (or attack you).

Each of you lands in a different spot on the planet and founds a small city, then you fan out and explore the map, building new outposts and developing the ones you have as they grow, making sure that your people stay happy with your rule. At the same time you research technologies which let you improve your cities and weapons. Eventually you run into other players and can ally with them, maintain a truce, trade goods or technologies, spy on them or attack them (perhaps in alliance with others). There are several different ways to win - you can become the richest, the most technologically advanced, the most popular player... or if you are old-fashioned you can simply end up top of the heap by grinding the others under your iron heel.

The challenge in Alpha Centauri, as with Civilization II is to balance all of the conflicting objectives. If you build up a strong army early on, you won't have as many resources to put into research and development - if you are not careful, your hordes of infantry with lasers will be cut down by missile launchers. If you don't build new bases fast enough, you'll find all the best locations are already spoken for by other factions. And if you don't keep your people happy with the Alpha Centauri equivalent of bread and circuses - creches, recreation commons and the like - they'll revolt, disrupting production.

In many respects, Alpha Centauri is a kind of "Civilization Constructor Kit" - along similar lines, but much more flexible and customisable. In Civ II, for example you had to choose between seven different ideologies (some of which you have to research) ranging from anarchy to monarchy to capitalism. In Alpha Centauri you start with your core faction philosophy and can mix and match. You can be "green" and democratic but with a planned economy or you can have an "advanced" state based around mind control or any other mix of up to 12 different variables. (It does seem ridiculous that you would have "forgotten" how to set up, say, a democracy before you land, but there are a number of areas in which Alpha Centauri ends up looking silly in order to make for better game play).

Don't suppose that Alpha Centauri is nothing more than a souped up Civ II, though. It adds an important new and entirely different variable to the mix - the planet itself. Initially, the indigenous life-forms are just a nuisance. The native fungus that grows here and there has to be cleared away so you can farm, and every so often mind worms pop up and attack (they are too weak to destroy most units). Unless, that is, you choose to try to live in harmony with the planet. Those goody-goody Gaians and others who research the necessary technologies can breed their own aliens and send them against you. If, by contrast, you build a lot of farms and mines, kill off lots of fungus and the like, the planet itself will rise up and become a powerful adversary. If you have researched all kinds of awesome weaponry and think you cannot lose a battle, guess again. However tough your unit seems in regular combat, it may still be vulnerable to mental (psi) attack, which is what the alien lifeforms use.

In Civ II, there are over 50 different units, from AEGIS cruisers to triremes and warriors with pointed sticks. In Alpha Centauri, since the designers aren't constrained by what units like pikemen are really like you are encouraged to make your own, mixing weapons like gatling lasers with different transport systems, armour, reactors ("hit points") and special powers. As a result you can create mobile anti aircraft cannon, submarine transports, helicopter artillery - whatever you like (if you have the technology and can afford to pay for it). The combat system is still not terribly sophisticated - it boils down to your attack points versus their defence points - but at least you can now mix long-range artillery, air strikes, naval bombardment and missile strikes with more straightforward attacks. Unlike Civ II, Alpha Centauri keeps track of unit experience levels, which can go up with combat or depending on the kind of society you have - if two units are fairly equally armed, their morale levels can make a big difference to combat.

If you don't like the fact that you have to explore the planet each time, you can choose to see the whole map from the beginning. If you don't like being able to choose specific technologies, you can opt to only be able to research broad areas. In fact, practically every element of the game can be switched on or off or modified in some way through the profusion of options menus. The rules are even stored in a text file which you can meddle with manually (though the designers recommend caution!).

With all of the economic, military, technological and diplomatic work going on, you can be forgiven for thinking that Alpha Centauri is impossibly difficult. Well, sometimes it sure feels that way. But the software agents can help. There is a lot more control over units, for example (though it is still not as easy to use in this respect as Command and Conquer-style games). You can group units and move them (though the way this works can be awkward), you can set them to patrol, give them way points in their movement (to circle around enemy units or awkward terrain) and, of course, automatically explore. Instead of having to choose your own building queue for each city in your empire, you can give them broad objectives - research, building military units etc - and they will make reasonably sensible decisions.

There is a large online help system, of course, and some "tours" which talk you through the basics of city construction, research and other tasks. The tours are limited, though, and the help system suffers badly because it is missing a keyword search so you have to know where in the help file information on a term is filed. There is no easy way to search for information on how combat is resolved, for example or what good uranium does in a square. There is a 250 page manual, too, but you still have to know where to look. Of course, practice makes perfect! This is especially awkward because of the unfamiliarity of the futuristic scenario. In Civ II you might guess that you have to develop the wheel before you could build chariots (though why you need polytheism to make elephant troops is still a mystery). There is no way short of consulting the technology tree to know in advance that you need, say Ethical calculus before you can get gene splicing and I'm sure you'd never have guessed either was required before you could make jet fighters!

Alpha Centauri is so full of features I can only scratch the surface of it in this review (did I mention it has more multi-player options than you can shake a stick at?) This is both its strength and its weakness. It takes the already tried and tested Civ II design and pushes it to its limits. Because of its sheer depth and complexity (and the alien locale) it might be all a bit too much for a beginner to the genre. For the serious strategic gamer, however, this sets a new standard. The next "official" title - Civilization: Call to Power - will have a lot to live up to.