Thalassicus
Bytes and Nibblers
No longer mere Civ-beings or Fan-beings are we, but bright children of the stars, and together we shall dance in and out of ten billion turns. Celebrating the gift of Civilization, until the next turns themselves grow cold and weary, and our thoughts turn again to the beginning of a new game.
Getting started with a new Civ has led my mind wandering back to that oh-so-wonderful offshoot and all the innovations, firsts, or great features it had. It's been over a decade and yet it seems the development of Civ can still learn from it. Consider what all it had to offer:
While reminiscing it reminded me of how long it took the core Civ series to adopt some of these innovative features. Civ III even took that backward step with governments for a while there, which was most surprising to me.
Getting started with a new Civ has led my mind wandering back to that oh-so-wonderful offshoot and all the innovations, firsts, or great features it had. It's been over a decade and yet it seems the development of Civ can still learn from it. Consider what all it had to offer:
- Social/government combinations.
- First with improved empire borders.
- Compelling leaders, first with unique traits.
- Asimov-level storytelling quality.
- Terrain modification, and not a fixed palette, but realistic variations of moisture, rockiness, altitude.
- Customizable units.
- Semi-nationalized resources via supply crawlers. You could ship food from a food-heavy city to a production-heavy city.
- Natural landmarks.
- Amazingly fun tech victory story.
- Some of the best wonder videos of a Civ game.
- Naval cities and improvements.
- Artillery bombardment.
- Most fun nukes in a Civ game. Kerplow! Your enemy's now literally a smoking crater.
- Game events (Perihelion).
- Meaningful global diplomacy organization.
- First decent city governors.
- Mindworms - more interesting than Barbarians have ever been!
While reminiscing it reminded me of how long it took the core Civ series to adopt some of these innovative features. Civ III even took that backward step with governments for a while there, which was most surprising to me.
OFC that SMAC had hugely unbalanced stuff, but it was pretty playable as a game and had some serious thought poured on the storylines. And in some sections it still beats any of the civ games ( the terrain scheme was hugely superior to any of the civ games and it had actual climate ... not mentioning that rivers actually flowed from high places to low places 
)
