Alpha Centauri "prequel"? What would you like to see?

[Transcendent]

I'm a big fan of Alpha Centauri and I am thinking about making a simpler card game based on a few ideas from Alpha Centauri (although thematically very different and not affiliated with it in any way). What feature did you like most about Alpha Centauri and what would you like to see in a "prequel"?

 

[Darsnan]

I think the different ideologies and how they evolved and came to be as represented in AC. So for example the Gaians and how they came to be in response to global warming and the other ecological harm that is being perpetrated on our planet, or the Morganites who saw only profit from the rape of same planet, or the Spartans who saw the thin vernier of civilization being peeled away to expose humanities more base instincts and so became survivalist/militaristic in response.

D

 

[Transcendent]

Right, one has to ask the question of why those factions and their leaders did not STAY on Earth. If I remember correctly, Alpha Centauri, even with all the technologies you discover, never gains a breathable atmosphere during the game and everyone lives and breaths under domes...

I guess one could make a story for University (scientific progress, let's explore Alpha Centauri) or Believers. For the Morganities, the question is if life in a spaceship / on Alpha Centauri is really better than on Earth (at least initially), as everyone could live in their bunkers... In my brainstorming, I had the US split into three factions, with a pre-cursor of the believers getting their hands on NASA (well, the southern states) wanting to build a colony ship, while a precursor of the Morganites controlling the north. And then some factions who deal with the problems their way (a precursor of the Gaians focusing on green energy, another two factions representing Europe vs Russia/China (maybe peacekeepers vs hive), a united Korea focusing on transhumanism/cyborg technology (precursor to Cybernetic Consciousness), and Japan focusing on robotics (no equivalent in Alpha Centauri, maybe a blend of Gaians and Drones)).
Spartans, Data Angels, Pirates, and Cult of Planet are the hardest to imagine, they more align with Alpha Centauri's approach of there being no factions on the colony ship but only charismatic leaders who later created those factions on the ship, not on Earth.
I worked on a few quotes for the robotics one (well, using text-to-speech AI) to test how it would sound:

 

[Bibor]

I don't think you quite got the story of U.N.S. Unity right. The mothership malfunctioned and people woke up early from their hibernation. Factions and their leaders arose after that. Nothing to do with Earth, but rather how they want to proceed into the future, based on their pre-existing affinities.

 

[Transcendent]

I don't think you quite got the story of U.N.S. Unity right. The mothership malfunctioned and people woke up early from their hibernation. Factions and their leaders arose after that. Nothing to do with Earth, but rather how they want to proceed into the future, based on their pre-existing affinities.

Well, a prequel would fill a gap between Civilization and Alpha Centauri. Of course, the "official" story is that of "Civilization", i.e., one nation put everything into production, polluted the Earth, built a spaceship, and filled it with its citizens.

I guess a prequel would have to involve another catastrophe to cause an ideological split.

 

[Darsnan]

I guess a prequel would have to involve another catastrophe to cause an ideological split.

You could always go with MIT's Limits to Growth model which is predicting a catastrophic drop in population in the not too distant future - that'd surely motivate even the most hedonistic Morganite to emigrate off-planet:

 

[Bibor]

Offtopic: it's really frustrating that we live in a world where we are at a technological level that we can "go full-renewable" whenever we want, but for "costs" and "profits".

 

[Darsnan]

Offtopic: it's really frustrating that we live in a world where we are at a technological level that we can "go full-renewable" whenever we want, but for "costs" and "profits".

Dammed Morganites!

 

[Transcendent]

You could always go with MIT's Limits to Growth model which is predicting a catastrophic drop in population in the not too distant future - that'd surely motivate even the most hedonistic Morganite to emigrate off-planet:
View attachment 685138

Actually, it's worse as the population is already collapsing demographically, at least in the industrialized countries. So, you have fewer people in the workforce but more people consuming... We're in for a rough ride the next few decades.
My idea was to represent these issues by an allegorical asteroid hitting Earth, and you can project any combination of projected doomsday scenarios into that asteroid.

 

[Darsnan]

My idea was to represent these issues by an allegorical asteroid hitting Earth, and you can project any combination of projected doomsday scenarios into that asteroid.

Below was what I'd come up with for a premise in Spatzimaus's Alpha Centauri mod. I think it can be modified to reflect an asteroid impact and the according results.

As the survivors of the great drought which destroyed the Mayan civilization experienced, the thin vernier of civilization is all too easily peeled away when a society is stressed beyond its means to cope: in the latter half of the 21st century the world came face to face with the spectre of global famine as the Malthusian Equation became a reality. The Intelligentsia of societies coined the phrase of "Chronic Deprivation" to describe the billions of gaunt corpses which still persisted in living and eking out a subsistence on the fringes of societies, while those closer to the cataclysm called it "The Great Sadness". Finally, when the governments of Earth failed to respond to the crisis and provide relief, whole civilizations rose in revolt, toppling their governments in orgies of chaos not seen since the French and Russian revolutions. With no central forms of government remaining, the four horsemen of the apocolypse rode across the world, and humanity sank into chaos and barbarism. Now, in the ashes of civilization, you have initiated Project Phoenix: the re-building of civilization.

 

[MysticWind]

I don't think you quite got the story of U.N.S. Unity right. The mothership malfunctioned and people woke up early from their hibernation. Factions and their leaders arose after that. Nothing to do with Earth, but rather how they want to proceed into the future, based on their pre-existing affinities.

Yeah, based on the leader profiles on the Firaxis website and the "Journey to Centauri" novella, the various leaders had life experiences and personal predilections that led to them declaring full-on ideological factions on Planet, but these weren't movements on Earth (except the Spartans, kind of).

That said, there's no reason you can't populate your prequel setting with precursor movements or groups that could have led to the purely ideological, post-national factions in Alpha Centauri. The novella sort of does that already- in episode 9, it says the "Spartan Coalition" is a survivalist movement that existed in New Los Angeles, where Santiago ended up in, and was the basis of the conspiracy that led to the Spartan mutiny during Planetfall. I was never a big fan of the idea because it singles out their faction as a major catalyst for why the mission fell apart, but it's only mentioned in the novella but not in most of the other material, so I can ignore it easily enough.

Now that I think about it, Morgan Industries even more explicitly predates the mission, as it was a major corporation on Earth, and according to the profiles, became a major contractor to build the ship after the "Russian economic system crashed again in 2058." Though if we follow the novella, the CEO himself was the only actual Morgan employee to make it into space, and the faction he founds is a brand new company with the same name, his employees being members of the mission he seduced into joining him.

I also think that potentially the Gaians might have existed in one form or another on Earth: because of all of the environmental devastation going on, it only seems natural that there would be eco-activist to eco-terrorist groups, the Gaia hypothesis is a real scientific theory, and there's always neopagan nature-worshipping groups. While it's probably a little much to single out Deirdre as being the member of such a movement before the mission (not to mention giving them the Gaian name so early on), it would make sense if she was a little influenced by them, and why she would gather so many followers besides her personal charisma and vision.

You can also feel free to ignore all of this supplementary material- it's separate from the game and not universally known, and often there's contradictions. (For example, the in-game datalinks rather infamously says Miriam is from the Christian States of America, a reference that's absent from the website profiles, but is brought back in the GURPS SMAC sourcebook.) I'm the type to really dive into this stuff and obsessively try to explain who the "Crimson Succession" from Yang's profile is about, or figure out what happened to the off-screen countries (kudos for mentioning Japan, btw, it's completely MIA from SMAC), but that's definitely not an approach that you have to follow when creating your prequel.

Right, one has to ask the question of why those factions and their leaders did not STAY on Earth.

It might just be those factions were more invested in trying to fix things on Earth, rather than fleeing to space. Maybe they wanted control of the planet. And also, in line with your ideas below, they were tied up to national, cultural, even religious identities that could not be as easily exported into space. The Unity mission was a multinational one done under the U.N. - it's not like Civilization: Beyond Earth, where every mission is tied to a specific Earth government and/or Earth geographical location. So if you're doing a prequel set on Earth, it's fine to maintain that connection between ideology and different tribal identities.

If I remember correctly, Alpha Centauri, even with all the technologies you discover, never gains a breathable atmosphere during the game and everyone lives and breaths under domes...

That's a really good point!

I guess one could make a story for University (scientific progress, let's explore Alpha Centauri) or Believers. For the Morganities, the question is if life in a spaceship / on Alpha Centauri is really better than on Earth (at least initially), as everyone could live in their bunkers... In my brainstorming, I had the US split into three factions, with a pre-cursor of the believers getting their hands on NASA (well, the southern states) wanting to build a colony ship, while a precursor of the Morganites controlling the north.

It is pretty funny that if you imagine the Believer precursors (whether the Christian States of America, the "Evangelical Fire", or whatever) controlling the South, they basically get launch capability because of the NASA spaceports in Texas + Florida.

As for the University, it could be any new roup of research purists, rationalists, and technocrats interested in the search for truth™, though I also want to mention that in Aki Zeta-5's profile it mentions before the mission she was a member of the "Zakharov Research Institute" back on Earth...

Who's the third faction in the U.S.?

another two factions representing Europe vs Russia/China (maybe peacekeepers vs hive),

Bear in mind that even if you disregard the supplementary info, ultimately Sheng-Ji Yang is sort of an extreme character with radical ideas for society. So while future China might be authoritarian, it probably shouldn't be as dystopian as the Human Hive is. (That's a lot of people and territory to shove underground and turn into mindless drones.) Though perhaps a future Chinese government taking authoritarian measures and applying state-of-the-art surveillance everywhere could be the sort of thing that shapes Yang's experiences, and vision for humanity.

a united Korea focusing on transhumanism/cyborg technology (precursor to Cybernetic Consciousness), and Japan focusing on robotics (no equivalent in Alpha Centauri, maybe a blend of Gaians and Drones)).

Cool ideas! Keep in mind you don't necessarily have to have each of your factions map out to SMAC ones 1:1. You can always have new characters and organizations. Maybe even characters who become equivalent to faction leaders on Earth, in charge of factions that could have been on Planet but didn't.

Spartans, Data Angels, Pirates, and Cult of Planet are the hardest to imagine, they more align with Alpha Centauri's approach of there being no factions on the colony ship but only charismatic leaders who later created those factions on the ship, not on Earth.

Spartans could just be militia malcontents in this future world- you can make them paramilitary rebels, insurgents, revolutionaries even- with any ideology you feel is true to Santiago's. Pirates, similarly, ctould be those who live on the territorial margins of the countries breaking down, former naval personnel preying on the citizens they once served. Data Angels could be cyberpunk hackers types trying to build an oasis in the metaverse, away from the conflicts and catastrophes of Earth's final days. Cult of Planet is really something tied specifically to Chiron's lore, but you can always have environmental extremists who go full-on death cult.

But also- feel free to explore more ideas of what could arise! Even if they don't end up as factions in SMAC.

I worked on a few quotes for the robotics one (well, using text-to-speech AI) to test how it would sound:

Very well done, looking forward to more content like this that brings your ideas into multimedia life.

Well, a prequel would fill a gap between Civilization and Alpha Centauri. Of course, the "official" story is that of "Civilization", i.e., one nation put everything into production, polluted the Earth, built a spaceship, and filled it with its citizens.

I guess a prequel would have to involve another catastrophe to cause an ideological split.

I like this comparison of Civilization and Alpha Centauri. Partly because Civ is more like idealized, archetypal versions of real-world nations rather than the hyper-detailed striving-for-realism versions you see in grand strategy mapgames. Since SMAC is similarly about Big Ideas and core values of humanity (so also archetypes), it makes sense for the countries to be somewhat different from the historical ones. As much as I like obsessive hyper-detailed attempts to suss out the backstory of SMAC, it probably makes more sense to portray countries more loosely. Sort of like how Beyond Earth does it, except better.

 

[Transcendent]

Thanks for the detailed comments

I think the main point is that while I wrote "prequel", my goal is NOT to try to bend the Alpha Centauri story to fit my idea (or vice versa). Actually, I do not plan to mention any of the Civilization/Alpha Centauri concepts, aside from the fact that one faction can build a spaceship. I arrived at the idea that this would not be a UN mission but something much more aligned with a religious faction while thinking about how fanatic you have to be to go on such a mission as we still don't know whether there are habitable planets anywhere nearby. As you confirmed, the south of the US would fit ideally for this.

That being said, Alpha Centauri did a great job in its variety of factions, so that's something I like to copy
I have played Beyond Earth again and noticed that the differences between the factions are hardly noticeable. Sure, there are some bonuses, but the leaders were indistinguishable, especially because of the missing voices.

So, I think the "magic recipe" is:
1) Align loosely with existing countries&nations to allow players to place the factions "on the map".
2) Do not just describe the factions, but give them personalities through their leaders.
3) Introduce some sort of catastrophe that allows for ideologically distinct factions and leaders to arise (as opposed to just clean-cut politically correct politicians).

Alpha Centauri is very strong in 2) and 3), Beyond Earth only has some emphasis on 1).

Story-wise, there is some conflict between 1) and 3). In that regard, Alpha Centauri feels somewhat contrived and is more like the start of a pen-and-paper game. "Let's create a party of very different characters and see how they interact". I agree that the additional parts of the story (like the concrete story on the ship and the involvement of Santiago) reduce the impact of the overall story. In that regard, the basic statement of Alpha Centauri is "Well, something happened on the flight to Alpha Centauri, now you have to deal with it" as opposed to a more interesting angle "Can we work together, despite different ideologies, to reach a common goal?" While in the game itself, you have an array of options to cooperate with other factions (a big step forward compared to Civilization), it feels like something is missing. I am not sure what it is 100%, but what comes to my mind is the political system in Stellaris where you don't have 100% fanatic followers but also different factions within your faction. That's something I want to rebuild (at least in a very basic form) in my card game Meaning, while you might be, for example, "The Lord's Believers", your (and the other players') decisions might lead to people embracing transhumanist technologies after all as they have shown to be beneficial and the previously prophecized doom&gloom have not materialized.

Coming back to the leaders/nation-state issue, the storyline makes it harder to imagine an "Alpha Centauri" in a different setting as it becomes less believable for extreme ideologists to reach a leadership position when it comes to nation-states. On a nation-state level, a country's geography and demography are usually the most significant factors in how the nation acts. For example, an island nation might be more reserved, while the leader of a nation with no natural borders (ocean, mountain ranges) might be more aggressive. On the other hand, even Alpha Centauri has leaders with an 'official' background. Pravin Lal is the typical UN politician, Zakharov is a representative of the Soviet Union (well, officially, Russia, but I think his personality strongly reflects the Soviet Union of the 1960s), and Deirdre Skye could be imagined as a leader of a nation hard hit by ecological disasters. And as you pointed out, Morgan Industries could have been a powerful non-government cyberpunk-ish corporation on Earth.
So, I think Alpha Centauri's actual recipe for success is a mix of factions that represent existing nation-states and special individuals who became leaders after the catastrophe.

In my scenario (an asteroid hitting the US), there would still be leaders of other factions closely representing their nation-states (Russia, China, Korea, Europe, South America, ...) while the factions emerging in the United States could be individuals that are strongly motivated by special individuals. Even today, we see such individuals rise to the top. E.g., thinking of Javier Milei (Argentina) or Trump.

For the third faction in the US, I thought about a conservative/libertarian faction that was most affected by the impact and felt lost in the new order. They are a reactionary faction who believe that the impact was deliberate (as in "could have been prevented") and a conspiracy by forces inside the US or from the outside. They are very skeptical of new technologies that are developed as an answer to the impact (to fix the climate or to adapt to the new world with transhumanist ideas). There is no equivalent in Alpha Centauri, although one could imagine them as a merge of the Drones, Santiago, and Data Angels. Well, and The Lord's Believers.