I've been playing this a bit lately. It is utterly transparent in its attempt to be a modernised Alpha Centauri, I mean there is zero attempt to hide it whatsoever. The factions are a complete cut-n-paste job (except they shafted poor Pravin Lal), the xenofungus, the techs, the quotes for everything, the unit workshop, etc. It's fairly stripped-back in comparison, but it's a small team with a small budget so it's understandable. However, the one thing I'm not sure it can ever have is the sheer character of Alpha Centauri - they did something really amazing with the writing of that game that made all the factions and the world ooze character, and I don't think a retread can possibly capture that.
And looking at their forums, the devs are actively adding new features (seems like more terraforming and supply crawlers are next), so I have some high hopes for it. That said, while it seems perfectly stable, it does feel a bit work-in-progress at the moment, with a bunch of stuff that could really use balancing or fleshing-out.
All that said, it does a lot of really interesting new things, and I really like a lot of what they've done that's different:
- First off, the planet hits back really fast and really hard. The aliens (they're more starship troopers-y aliens rather than mindworms) spawn massive hordes, some of which are way stronger than your forces, and they attack relentlessly. It's really a battle for survival where you have to prioritise military techs just to hold them off and then push back to destroy their hives. Expansion has a real calculus of "can I hold this city against the hordes?". Much harder than raging barbs in civ, and really cool. It's only really a short-lived threat at the moment though.
- Production is de-linked from cities in a really cool way. Citizens either farm or mine a tile, or act as worker or scientist specialists. Food goes into a civ-wide pool, and mining produces minerals that also go into a civ-wide pool, which can then be used by workers to convert into production in their own city. The result of this is that you can really specialise cities hard - one city can be producing nothing but food, feeding your whole empire; another can be producing only minerals; another can be the seat of production, etc. It also means that any city can throw all its people into worker jobs temporarily if you need to build something - this is a really nice change from the civ games where that city in the middle of the grassland is never going to be able to build anything without gold. This system works really fricking well.
- Perhaps a bit of a polarising one, but the tech tree is semi-randomised, so you can't just follow the same beelines every game (and by default you can only see a small way ahead). But beelining is really worthwhile, and it emphasises making the most of the random stuff you get along the way rather than trying to fill the whole tree. I like it.
- Combat is much more Civ IV than Civ V (despite the hexes), but has some interesting mechanics to try and make it less stack-of-doomy. There are pretty significant flanking bonuses, different unit types get different bonuses and penalties on different terrains, artillery can damage all units in a stack (and can attack without taking damage), and there are orbital bombardment attacks that can damage all units in an area. There's also all kinds of crazy rock-paper-scissors interactions going on with the five zillion weapon types you can equip units with. Not sure it all quite balances out at the moment, but it's interesting.
Anyway I'd probably still counsel holding off on this one for the moment unless you're an Alpha Centauri die-hard, but I'm really really interested to see where it'll be six months or so from now.
