Will there be alpha centuari II

[WaxonWaxov]

Sh!t, in my opinion, Pac-Man is better than Civ 3.

 

[BlackAdder60]

Lets face it folks...

AC is great and you can replay it any number of times.

So it really doesnt matter if an AC-2 is released, just keep on playing AC-1 , theres so much to this game.

And...

Theres a LOT of other games too.

Though AC2 would be nice...

 

[The Person]

Though AC2 would be nice...

As long as Firaxis doesn't screw it up royally. But knowing their reputation I doubt they will as long as Take2 doesn't get too greedy.

 

[garfio55]

Instead of AC II y really prefer another expansión. I really couldn´t care less about the graphics, I just want a better AI, tech, buildings, I do think an aerial view of the cities is needed, and keep working on units and the ability to have formations, apply combined arms strategies, and more interactions with the other factions. What I mean is more of what we love of this game, the graphics can be the way it is because it isn´t important, or we are still playing civ II or colonization because of its beautifull 2d landscapes?

 

[Good Ash]

I've read this thread with much interest. I have to agree with most of the comments posted on the declining quality of the Civ franchise. I bought Civ 3 with much anticipation (with SMAC in mind) only to be bitterly disappointed. With no unit modification, economic/political options severly limited and a host of other issues I returned the game within 2 days bitter and angry. Afterall my hopes were set incredibly high by Brian Reynolds magnum opus, SMAC. I haven't dared touch CIV 4, although it looks much improved over Civ 3, it's still just a pale shade compared to SMAC from what I can tell. Anyway I'm not bringing up anything which hasn't been hashed over countless times by SMAC fans.

I wanted to share some details of what I've heard over the last few years regarding SMAC and why there will probably not be a sequel. First off I believe SMAC was a commercial failure, it never gained wide acceptence perhaps because of the theme. This remains the biggest mystery too me especially after the stunning success of the ground breaking Civ franchise up to that point. Forgive me for being dramatic, but that such genius go unrecognized by the gaming market was the biggest tragedy of the situation. Not only that the marketing that went into this game was enourmous as well with several novels being published to help reinforce the story line. How many games come out with novels as part of marketing before they are successful.

Clearly Fraxis knew they had a genius concept, but it seems the market wasn't ready. If I were to speculate, I would say the commercial failure of the game was a big component in the blood letting that ensued at Fraxis. And is a big reason why the company has stayed the course with the current Civ series, sadly mostly issuing minor tweaks and upgraded graphics.

I agree that Alpha Centauri 2 will probably not come out. Although Firaxis recently had poll on which product people would like to see remade and SMAC has a comanding lead, so don't lose hope yet. In reality why would they risk it, especially if it's not nessary.

I think the crux of the issue is use of the game mechanics and design concepts and their transfer to other TBS games. The game design is what made the game shine, the theme is disposable. The licensing must be at the core of the issue, if licensing could be resolved the a whole new generation of TBS games could finally be released based on the SMAC model which is really what we were all hoping for in Civ 3 (and Civ 4).

I'm assuming a whole lot here and an alternate senario could be that both Reynolds and Meiers are so pissed off at the whole SMAC ordeal that they want nothing to do with it. It's time they get into therapy and get over it! An improved SMAC engine dressed in Civ clothing is the path to glory!

The Civ franchise could once again hold it's head high.

 

[Hellfire]

I'm reading this thread and it's very interesting. The history of the demand for SMAC is quite fun

I too would throw my hat into the ring for a SMAC2. The biggest reason is because I'm a mac user. The original SMAC was done for classic and it's hard to get classic games to work sometimes in Mac OS X. Updating the game means updating the code.

As a side note, There are more Civ3 haters in this forum methinks than in the civ2 forum I think all three games have their strengths and weaknesses. Ironically it wasn't until Civ3 that I really got out of the "chieftain" basement of playing the game. Civ3 actually gave me things and motivation to improve my play, finally.

A SMAC conversion of Civ4 would be great, and in fact I urge Firaxis to do it. They have the most skill and resources to do it. Yes they could sell it, but it would be ideal. Use an existing engine which has a lot of the SMAC features, but builds on and improves and is already highly extensible.

Some issues I had with SMAC:

1) Too many buildings, reduce the number of buildings just a bit. One of the advantages of Civ3 (yes I like Civ3, it's not perfect but hey Civ1 had it's share of imbalance issues and problems) was that the game complexity was reduced a bit. The smaller micromanaging concepts were replaced by some easier civ wide concepts (such as upkeep) making overall management a little simplier.

2) Better graphics. Much better graphics. At that point the graphics looked sickly. The game play more than made up for it, but it would be nice if it was more eye-candy-like and didn't make me want to wretch once in a while.

3) Never did like the 7 faction limit, but that can easily be handled now that Civ3 and 4 have higher limits as well.

4) Balance the factions a bit so that Prokir (sp?) isn't always the first to genetic engineering. Hell it's such a forgone conclusion it's in the damn manual!

5) Allow me to create gravship needlejet carriers. Always wanted one of them, but they never let me make that in the shop!

6) Allow for more options than the OZ effect (i.e. emerald forest everywhere). Some people liked the boreholes and the advanced stuff, but the ideal city had a hybrid farm/tree farm with trees everywhere. That was the city 90% of the people made.

And stop heaping so much hate onto the other games. Spread the love, hug the trees, kiss the worms!.... err wait a minute...

 

[Hellfire]

Odd, how did I double post? Sorry for that.

 

[Wilhelm Kaleva]

Just who is Prokir?

 

[Vael]

There will never be a SMAC2. Firaxis doesn't own the rights to SMAC, Electronic Arts does. Since Firaxis is part of Take 2 now, that means SMAC2 will never exist.

 

[Phlegmak]

AC is the best game of this type and Firaxis would be making a dire mistake not pursuing it further

No, they would be making a mistake to pursue it. Alpha Centauri isn't a very highly marketable game. It did poorly in sales, and nondiehard gamers complained (stupidly) that the tech tree is meaningless, and the colors look bad.

So Alpha Centauri is simply not the best game from a sales point of view.

It might be yours and my favorite turn based civ-style game, but people like us are the minority.

 

[Drakan]

nondiehard gamers complained (stupidly) that the tech tree is meaningless, and the colors look bad.

I consider myself a hardcore TBS gamer and I found and still find the colours of SMAC awful. I love the game but cannot possibly play it without a patch for the colours which some fan did (drabsmac IIRC).

The problem is that when this game came out, the RTS genre started to pick up. We must admit that only a minority of players are willing to play braintaxing games. The majority of the flow rather play along the lines of candy-eyed RTS games but which lack strategy or a challenging AI. So from a commercial standpoint I find it difficult to make a profit on such a complex game (you can always try out new crazy strategies and somehow they seem to work out !).

 

[Urederra]

Well. If I understand correctly what Dale, a Civ IV Beta-tester and scenario maker, says in this post, it seems that they are working on SMAC2.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3993826&postcount=44

Come on guys! Be reasonable. Firaxis is a company there to make money. T2 is a company there to make money. We're the consumers.

They know they can get us to buy 2 products: game + xp. So what? What do you think will fund SMAC2? Or CivCity? Or any other project they undertake? PROFIT!

So the bottom line is, if they can't make profit they can't make games. If we don't buy games, they don't make profit. The consumer circle.

So Firaxis releasing an xp with what you're saying is "intentially left out items" is perfect business sense. They know SMAC2 will sell big-time. But they need money to make it. Civ4 + xp = money for SMAC2.

Dale

 

[Good Ash]

Well. If I understand correctly what Dale, a Civ IV Beta-tester and scenario maker, says in this post, it seems that they are working on SMAC2.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3993826&postcount=44

Wow! I hope your right. Now what are the chances they won't f*** it up.

 

[Good Ash]

Then again they've choosen to remake a rail road game instead.
Hmmm... perhaps Dale is wrong.

 

[Anemone]

What's all this about colours? I never had a problem with vanilla AC/AX, in fact I prefer the graphics to half the games released today, gives it a chess board feel, imo too many strategy games are focusing on graphics which is a bit disappointing, you'd think developers would have more faith. (e.g. if Rome Total War had the generic Total War set up for the world map, would it have really made a difference?)

While I'd love a SMAC sequel I doubt anything can really top it, chances are they'd dumb it down to the level of CivIV and pretty much just have 'civ in space' which is nowhere near deserving of the original's greatness.

 

[Midwinter]

I would love to see a SMAC2 - SMAC was the first Civ game I played, but Civ4 (which I really looked forward to) was a huge letdown.

I think it's the mechanics of SMAC, rather than the setting (although I love that, too), that make it so great. IMO, Civ4's mechanics weren't so good in comparison (especially Civics and leader traits, which IMO paled when compared with SMAC's Social Engineering and Social Factors).

 

[CapTVK]

Though looking at Freeciv it could take devoted fans quite a while to "finish" such a project completely. Concidering that devoted fans rarely have the resources and time (the biggest factor) to produce a high quality product in a reasonable amount of time. As Amesjustin said he'd be happy to devote 5-10 hours a week, but that pales in comparison to the 40+ hours a week employees of Fraxis would put into a program.

Actually that´s one thing we do have: Time. There´s no ultimate deadline for Freeciv so you can work on it for a month, drop out for a while and continue where you left off. If your early work was succesful and was taken up by others you might be surprised.

 

[MarkUCLA]

I never liked Civ III or IV near as much as Alpha Centauri. I still have SMAC loaded on an older machine at home and will never remove it till the machine dies a horrible death. The music still marches on in my head. There was nothing more exciting than discovering a tech, then you got to watch a cool movie/video. Twas awesome.

I've given up on a SMAC II, its been too long and I'm sure it would be much different then what I would envision if it were done today. But the memories will linger on for the rest of my lifetime.....

 

[Maraxus]

Never played Civ4 but I definitly favor AC over Civ3.

The tech tree is much more interesing in AC. And through I've played it a lot, I'm still much more improvising at every point, what of the available technologies and it's next followers I could use in a situation, instead of really calculating the possibliities through. And still, there are so huge impacts on the way the faction develops. Look at Civ once and you see the one and only way through the tree (with minor variations).

And the combat system, what is the one thing, that I would put most improvements into for a theoretically Alpha Centauri 2, this is even much weaker in Civ.

Another great point is the world: Earth, how boring is this? A world that ages and nothing happens. Compare this to an awaikening planet. Spreading Xenofungus and Psychoworms!

And from what I read, Civ 4 made some bad tactical errors, too. I think it's not far from a correct quote, one developer said something like: "We want to force out players to build single centers for cultural, industrial and scintific affaris, only a few cities, as opposed to previous Civilisation titles, where the best tactic was to spread out into many small cities." I don't understand it? Why do they want to force players to play the game like they want. They could have looked at AC, where diffrent styles of the game compleatly free to choose stand next to each other.



Well, if someone asked me, however (obviously noone does, but imagine), I would not recoment an Alpha Centauri 2 in the first place. New concepts is what wins the market. Therefor I'd like a 4th setting after Civ, Col and AC. Something with fantasy elements. Imagine "Civilisation meats Arcanum" (an older RPG, you should know). You start with a tribal culture and develop a martial, magic or technologic empire, or a mixture thereof. Diffrent paths lead to diffrent future civilisations (Hey, don't stop at a present time, include lot's of Sci-Fi stuff in it).

I think the two points of AC over Civ are: More options, more flavor. And I want even more of that.

 

[Gazurtoid]

*arise from the dead!*

Brian Reynolds comments here on the possibility of a SMAC 2.

Ha ha! Alpha Centauri has I suspect been kind of trapped in "Triple IP Voodoo Purgatory". I think the IP itself probably still belongs to Electronic Arts; the right-to-develop probably still belongs to Firaxis where most of the artists still work plus the current "Civ team" and Civ4 engine; and substantially all of the original designers/programmers/writers who created the "world" now work at Big Huge. So it would be kind of like trying to put the Beatles back together (though at least no one's dead), and THEN you could deal with the question of whether there'd be a big enough market for it to make it worthwhile.

I suppose if the powers-that-be perceived enough of a market for it, then Firaxis (i.e. Take Two) and EA could unwind the IP rights and do some kind of follow-on with the Civ4 engine. My guess is don't hold your breath. It would be interesting to see though... if they go for it my advice to them is hire a designer/writer with a philosophy degree!

Brian

p.s. Thanks for reminding me about the Network Node song... I really should go dig up the WAV files from that and make myself some Windows theme sounds or something.