Thread:Shadow at Morning/@comment-25555436-20150729023326/@comment-25555436-20150729134644

Shadow at Morning wrote: Civ II, admittedly a number of years after release. Civ2? Huh. And have you played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? It uses almost the same concepts but adds many more that give you an outstanding level of customization even compared to moden Civ games.

For example, you can customize your Social Engineering, like the type of government you have on your colonies (Democracy, Police State....), or what type of Economy you have (Free Market, Planned...), and all of them affect your colonies and your success at diplomacy, since there are some people that won't like it that you're a Democratic colony with Planned Economy instead of a Police State with Free Market (a bit ironic combining these 2).

You also instead of getting new units with your upgrades, you get new parts. You design your own units, choosing the Chassis which also decides if it's Infantry or a Land/Water/Air Vehicle along with their Mov-points, the weapon which decides the Attack, the Armor, and even give them abilities to make them stronger or allow them to use things they couldn't before such as attacking 2 tiles ahead.

And it actually has a plot, believe it or not. Though told in an inconvenient way, it's pretty interesting and deep. And pessimistic. Very pessimistic. Basically, the Earth is doomed because humans are bastards and warmongers. Knowing they are going to die, the remaining governments put all their resources into 1 ship, the Unity, and launch it to Chyron in Alpha Centauri with a crew filled with outstanding people in multiple areas, like economics, physics, biology, and even cultural things like religion and ecology.

The ship launches in 2060 and takes about 40 years to reach AC. The crew sleeps in cryo until a reactor failure wakes them up. The Captain heads to the reactor to fix it, but he's assassinated by someone. Without their captain, the crew quickly divides as they all hold very different, extreme ideals. Instead of being divided by Nationality like in normal Civs, they are divided by Ideologies, and each group takes a Colony Pod and heads to Chyron, renamed Planet.

But then, you realize Planet is a Death World. The atmosphere is filled with nitrogen and not enough oxygen, even the most fertile lands look like wastelands, and the planet is filled with fungus that not only are annoying for expansion, but deploy Mindworms, telepathic worms that cause intense fear in the target before crawling through their ear into their brain, planting their larva, and carving through the skull, with the victim still alive. And they can even swim and fly. The objectives are the same though: Diplomatic, Economic, Technological or Conquest victory.

If you haven't played it, trust me, you must. It's widely regarded as among the best 4X games, for a very good reason.