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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Alpha Centauri is a really hideously ugly game that's kind of like Civilization but in space, making it one of the least appealing repackaged games ever made.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: While searching for images for this feature, one of the nicer looking screens was filed under the heading "Best Games with the Worst Graphics." The reddish brown and brownish red color scheme of the maps just is not pleasant to look at.
Why I Like It Anyway: Alpha Centauri is, in my opinion, still the best of the Civilization games, and by extension, is one of the deepest, most enjoyable games ever made. It is, however, an incredibly difficult game to describe without direct comparisons to Civilization 2 and 3, so to truly discuss its merits, we'll have to break from our usual formatting and explain a bit about the Civilization series up front.
Civilization was one of the most original and ambitious strategy games ever created. Starting with a single settler, with which to build your first town, and a warrior to either defend it or start exploring, you set that city's population to work in the surrounding areas, harvesting food, construction materials, and economic growth for the people. Food increases the population, allowing for more map spaces to be worked for resources, materials add to the progression of buildings or units to give bonuses to the city, and explore about, fight your enemies, and found new cities. Economic growth meanwhile is pooled between all cities, yielding funds for paying various upkeep costs, contributing to scientific research, and providing public entertainment to keep the work force from revolting, shutting cities down or worse.
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The real selling point is the discovery of new technologies. As you progress up a very large and complex tech tree, you move from club wielding cavemen to a modern society and beyond, unlocking new unit types, new city improvements, new forms of government which have a profound effect on your infrastructure, and unique world wonders which provide huge bonuses, but can only be built by a single faction. The game continues with an addictive pacing which has actually been studied for insights into what can keep a person playing a game for an entire day without a break, until you have lost, conquered the world, or sent a space ship to colonize Alpha Centauri.
Civilization 2 is generally agreed to be a huge improvement over the original, making combat less random by giving each unit HP and one of several levels of experience, improving the fickle AI of computer controlled factions, expanding the tech tree, and adding a panel of advisors, embodied by very cheesy clips of live actors, which was extremely amusing, but sadly dropped from all later sequels. Some time after its release, creator Sid Meier left MicroProse to form his own company, Firaxis, and unofficially create a sequel which picks up right where the previous games left off, as you reach Alpha Centauri.
The most important difference between Alpha Centauri and the earlier games is in the factions. In the rest of the Civilization games, you play one of a number of famous historical leaders, controlling a real world country, with an assortment of others under AI control. While there is some degree of variation between them, in the form of free starting technologies, how aggression-prone AI will be, and some notable special perks in later games, they are all fairly interchangeable. Whether your neighbor is Ghengis Khan or Gandhi, he's still going to be friendly and polite early on, then turn into a warmongering jerk some time later in the game, demanding you share the secrets of banking with him.
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The factions of Alpha Centauri on the other hand (or SMAC to use the official acronym) are split along ideological lines, and have unique personal perks which tend to have a profound effect on how you play the game. There's the University, with a massive bonus to their scientific research, the Spartans, with a huge production bonus, the Peacekeepers, whose name is actually not ironic, gaining a huge edge in global political matters, Morgan Industries, an economic powerhouse, the Believers, Christian fundamentalists with incentives to play a very aggressive game, the Human Hive, with rapid expansion and the freedom to use some of the more horrible methods of governing their population without the usual drawbacks, and finally my personal favorite, Gaia's Stepdaughters, a bunch of hippies who actually appreciate the planet's native biosphere of infrastructure destroying fungus and brain eating psychic worms.
Fun as it is to play the field, racing for a tech win as the University, then switching over to the Gaians the next time you play and dominating the world by taming mind worms and farming fungus, the real appeal of this system is the personality it breathes into diplomacy. The University and Believers just plain don't get along. The leader of the Gaians will either be your best friend or worst enemy depending on whether you adopt a Green economic model. The Peacekeepers really will strive for peace. What amuses me the most however is all the personalized insults, like the leader of the Believers calling me a witch and asking if I've been too busy dancing naked through the trees to help her deal with the University encroaching on her turf. The amount of personality and the ties it has to play style will spill over to real life at times too I find. I am not inclined to spend time in the same room as players who strongly favor the Believers or Hive if I can help it, and most of my nerdiest friends can't give up the University.
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There are a fair number of other improvements and innovations to be found in SMAC, only a handful of which have since seeped back into the main Civilization franchise. While individual governmental policies instead of broad governmental models and an expanded range of victory conditions have carried through to Civilization 4, only Alpha Centauri boasts an optional blind tech tree, where research is focused in general fields of interest rather than on specific technologies, and the complexities of the diplomacy screen have since been replaced with a simple bargaining table. More importantly, Alpha Centauri featured fully customizable units, allowing players to combine any weapon, armor, form of locomotion, and set of special abilities they desired and were willing to pay for in construction costs. This was coupled, at higher difficulties, with a prototyping penalty, where the first unit created with a particular design had a significantly increased cost. All of this on top of the more obvious losses from abandoning the sci-fi setting. Underwater city construction, psychic units (such as the aforementioned mind worms) which ignore normal combat stats and work primarily off relative experience level, and various interesting late game technologies.
After a very nice expansion, doubling the list of factions, and introducing two non-human factions with a different tech victory condition and an inherent opposition to humanity, with a language barrier and the prevention of certain victory conditions while present, the talent behind SMAC returned to work on future Civilization games, including the also excellent Civilization 4, but the complexity of the series peaked here, in the bizarre sci-fi spin-off.
