Alpha centauri free full#
Alpha centauri free plus#
Alpha centauri free free#

Alpha centauri free free#

Some of the expansion secret projects are a little too one-right-path easy-mode (Planetary Energy Grid, Cloudbase Academy.) And I hate how the grandeur of Transcendence gets retconned into some kind of vague disaster about the aliens' home planet.Д«ut there is a workaround: it's very possible to edit base SMAC to use the Free Drones faction. Even if you play with the original seven factions, the tech tree still has the hokey garbage like 'resonance fields' that doesn't fit in at all with the hard speculative fiction. Most of the human factions aren't very interesting either, largely lame remixes of the first seven with weak ideological opinions. The alien factions terribly break the immersion about the progression of humanity. Alpha Centauri is all about the speculative-but-believable postulated future, and the Alien Crossfire stuff just totally kills that vibe for me. But I really don't like Alien Crossfire at all. Playing an expansion faction should mean using the expansion, of course. There's also one more line of play in mind that we'll get to shortly. Perfect, I can cover both of the angles I wanted to do with just one game with the Free Drones. And on top of that, the Drones faction even gets a drone solution too like the Peacekeepers, one fewer drone per base as a faction power.

Alpha centauri free plus#

Hey, there is: the Free Drones faction from the expansion! They get +2 Industry and -2 Research, but that latter doesn't stop using the maximal economic arrangement of Free Market plus Wealth. If only there were a faction with good industry and no economic penalty. That's just not better than a +3 Economy rating to add 5 energy per base which buys more minerals than that. So the Hive's industry is essentially equivalent to one mineral per turn per base.

+2 Industry rating saves 2 minerals out of every 10. A typical base working two forests will produce 5 minerals per turn. But that still doesn't really help even all that industry doesn't actually work out better than a faction with normal economy running Free Market plus Wealth. I'd love to do the PTS colony pod rushing for 21 minerals per pod instead of 27. They get +2 Industry over any other faction, inherently and by running Planned economics because Free Market is no use. The other angle I kept thinking about was the Hive. It would be the same terraforming and build order and tech and SE progression, just slower without those faction powers and the Peacekeepers' only other bonus, the extra base size, comes too late to matter. (I'll go over the details on page two of this report.) That's neat, but such a playthrough wouldn't really be any different than the University or Morgan.

but actually it turns out that the Peacekeepers also can, for bases at size 2, thanks to the free-talent faction power. Why the Peacekeepers? I talked about how only the University can do perfect drone control with the PTS.

Alpha centauri free full#

I thought about playing full PTS games with each of those, but neither seemed quite interesting enough to be worth doing all the way through. Those were the Hive which I played as a demonstration deliberately without using the most skewed mechanics, and the U.N. The genesis was that there were two factions I never took through a fully-powered game using the Planetary Transit System for expansion.

This idea came together as a coalescing of several lines of thought. This comes after several other games, as listed on the home menu here. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - The Free DronesДЇirst I'll state what this is: a playthrough of Alpha Centauri, with the base game not the Alien Crossfire expansion, but using an edited file to play as the Free Drones faction from the expansion.