Alpha Centuri, for the sake of those who don’t know what that is, it is Civ2’s unofficial sequel, set on the planet of Alpha Centuri. Where you would have hopefully completed the aforementioned game several times and sent many ship loads to. It starts with a mutiny of warring factions that cause the ship to crash land. You take control of one of these factions and stack out your home on this fauna-smothered planet. The entire system is exactly like Civ2. Turn based, isometric grid map, and only a few differences separate the two, hold instead of fortify. If you haven’t played Civ2, well go away and buy it, you’ll thank me for it.

On the whole things are a lot better than Civ2, you do start ion the future which does annoy some people, as you never know what you are researching. But there are a few great additions, satellites for one, although when you are the only player with a couple of the wonders, (sorry, secret projects) which deal with satellites. Space elevator and one that allows sky bases in each of your cities, you do kind of control everything. Imagine your Civ2 Empire with 50 cities, (reasonable size) and those two wonders (SP) with satellites that do not need support of any sort 20 food, 20 resources, 20 trade (energy), and they supply, 20 food, 20 resources, and 20 trade arrows to each city, 100, 100, 100 in total. That does give an unfair advantage.

Diplomacy in Alpha Centuri works great with computer players and with human, you can bargain with cities, gives money, technology, and other such frivolities. So why do I say it doesn’t work, only when you save it reverts to cheat mode and all players have access to the cheat menu, and reveals the entire map. This ruined a perfectly good game for me especially, since this type of game is perfect for multi-player. There may have course been a patch that I missed but it still said one thing. They do not spend enough time in development to warrants such a great g
ame, even better so in Multi-player, when you can save it that is.