SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTAURI: REALISTIC SCI-FI, PART 7, FINALE

Hello all!

I hope you’re all doing well this week before Christmas. Truth be told, never planned on rambling about sci-fi when one should be betting on the debate between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ. But hey, this a nerd-stuff and nerd-bashing blog. If space-Santa, sure. Oh, another thing I’ve now realized is that there has been some bizarre grammatical quirks and editing problems in my previous posts. That was because I thought I could be clever and use the quirky tools of MS Word ™ and translate them over, copy-paste. Not the case, because the tools do no exist in my blog-making space. Ugh.

Anyway, Merry Christmas everybody! I hope you love your families, and survive the dark winter to make one of your own.

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri! So damn much went into making this game. Lightning in a bottle? Certainly, as is the case with many unique things, and with those unique things that create/are the progenitor of whole genres, lines, lineages. And, people keep trying to recapture that magic—I wonder why?

An expansion pack, titled Alien Crossfire, was released a year after SMAC. It introduced 7 more factions and a few more technologies. Two of the factions are aliens! I don’t care for it much. I never played it. Yeah, I know, ‘don’t knock it till you try it’—but I did look over it. A few bugs that weren’t good, and none of the new factions are appealing. That’s not true—they aren’t appealing because they are not as grounded-in-reality as the core 7. The new 7 are two alien factions, sea pirates, a doomsday cult, a cyborg farm/friendly Borg, anarchist drone rebels and Internet hackers who are so LEET that they are cringe. (Early days of the Internet.)

All the new 7 factions are contingent on the core 7, or are so out there as to be more in ‘science fantasy’ than ‘science fiction’. The drone rebels are just escaped slaves from Morgan, Yang, and Zakharov’s factions; the cyborgs are a supercomputer possessing a cute young woman; the doomsday cult is explicitly anti-human fungus worshippers. Like with—well, I think all the complex, faction-based sci-fi mediums, adding more factions results in them becoming weirder or stranger in order to better differentiate from, say, the core 7 factions. They are the weirdness dancing around a more solid, orderly core (not that the core may be a ‘good’ order). I should know—one particular setting that I’ve known for 2 decades has about 20+ and fluctuating.

Why though? Hoo-boy…not to sound like a post-modern identity-weirdo, but in gaming entertainment it is usually the case to build factions around game mechanics (like with SMAC’s core 7), though, the reverse is also possible, where you first build a fictional meta-story and then build the game mechanics around all the explicit and implied traits of the factions. Whatever the case, all must be distinguishable, and easily distinguishable. They all have to look different, and think different, and play the game different. Why? Marketing, primarily. Well, okay, just take the following case with older wargaming—do you want to field armies of Romans or Carthaginians? How about French lines under Napoleon vs English lines under Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington? The Wehrmacht vs the Red Army at Stalingrad? They all have their great historical appeal, of re-enacting great battles, and maybe even play out ‘what-if?’ military scenarios that change history. If real history was not appealing to a particular group of nerds, they would not have made wargames out of it.

Faction identity (ughI’mnotaPo-MoIswear) plays a key part in guiding players to the right game (puns intended). Sure, it is a game—by nature it is ‘us vs them’, but how do we determine the Us and the Them? See, in all these tabletop RPG MMORPGs fantasy-fighting-game chock full of weirdness, where do you start? Especially the case where (like most nerd games) there are complex rules interactions, where you have to have a Master’s PHD in Grammar and Lawyer-Speak to determine all the different actions. Is it the ‘story’ that draws in a player? The playstyle? The artistic aesthetics*? Give a newcomer a starting point, a home from which they can explore the whole setting to their heart’s desire, at their own pace.

[*I am not joking when I say there are parts of the ‘gamer’ sub-cultures, who are composed of people who just want to socialize. They’ll buy into and play the game, because that’s part of the social game, but they aren’t or won’t be good at playing the board game; they instead enjoy the company of the people and the artistic appeal of tiny sculpted warriors. …Sculpted in multiple senses.]

The spiritual successor*, Sid Meier’s Civilization Beyond Earth (2014), did not do well on any of the above fronts—mechanics, stories, or aesthetics, says the consensus of my fellow nerds (though I disagree on the third point). Where the 1999 expansion Alien Crossfire failed (says I) was that the new 7 factions didn’t fit the overall tone of the original 7, and whose inclusion added a layer of zaniness to a game that seemed directed at a ‘grounded’ feel. SMC:BE failed because it did not tell a very good story in the first place. Though I did not play the game myself, I had more than enough friends who did, and who were all experts at the previous game in the series, Civilization V (2010). SMC: BE was mechanically not good and even a downgrade in the refinement of the base Civ games. Ouch.

[*When a game is inspired by the overall themes of a previous entry, but takes those themes in a different direction or application.]

It's story then? Well, okay, the overall plot of SMAC (1999) was one of oncoming dread—that yes, humanity divided into mutually exclusive factions, and that each faction was, on the regular, discovering one wonder-technology after another. It was the sense that every faction would do their damnedest to survive and gut alive the other factions in the process. Let alone the new horrors invented on Planet Chiron, such as mind-invading/destroying psychic powers, nerve stapling*, the rediscovery of nuclear weapons, the creation of self-aware A.I. and even limited manipulation over teleportation—and humanity was racing down these paths of horrors heedless of any wisdom. All delivered with quality narration, for all 7 faction leaders, 2 other narrators (male and female), and the Planet. (Yes, the Planet does talk to you in a distinctive speaking pattern.)

[*Yes, where the person is hooked up to a machine that ‘staples’ their nerves, almost lobotomizing them, to make them more obedient.]

The story of SMC: BE is that, yes, Earth is dying, time to send all these new colony ships to a new alien world and figure out what to do from there. Instead of one mega-ship splitting apart like in SMAC, you instead pick a ‘sponsor nation’ that then sends its own colony to the new planet. There’s aliens, it is a hostile death world, other humans exist and cause problems, and so on.

So I’m proof positive that the writing team of SMC: BE grew up entirely on Progressive narratives. You’ll know what I’m talking about. While the SMAC writing team tried to portray the strengths and hypocrisies of the core 7 in a hard spotlight…well. In SMC: BE, there are no wrong choices. Every choice is praised. There are no bad choices. As long as the choice is ‘forward’, that makes a clear upgrade or discovery—no thing is bad. It’s like it is coddling the player as they guide their faction in SMC: BE. There is no sense of caution—no, there is no sense of tradeoffs or harsh costs. There is only good, and good is more.

For example, in SMAC, cloning-vat technology can be researched, but the narration heavily implies that the technology can all-to-easily be used for evil purposes. In SMC: BE? Cloning? What a wonder! Imagine all the cool things we can do with mass-producing life on a whim! Just, just, no …it’s naivety. It is gross, ‘nothing-can-go-wrong’ naivety, as a sincere writing style, that has no moment of self-reflection. There is only good and good is more!

As another example, in SMAC the core factions all have a serious drawback or tradeoff that cannot be overcome. In SMC: BE, it is different. Faction identity is not built around a concrete, exclusive ideology. Rather, in SMC: BE you ‘build’ your faction from the ground up, in bits and pieces. In SMC: BE, it is about ‘layering’ one small bonus on top of another. Factions, are like LEGO ™ bricks*. Except, here, it’s done badly. It is done badly because the bonuses are so small, and because there are no clear penalties or tradeoffs. Each faction ultimately becomes a generic blob of mostly the same bonuses. There is no in-game pressure to diversify strategies or develop clearly different playstyles with a strong advantage and strong tradeoff to compensate. There is only good and good is more.

[*Now, as a game mechanic style, this is perfectly valid. In other games of this style, you start with little to no resources and deliberately build toward having specific advantages. Most of these games are called ‘deck-builders’, because it is like building up a small deck of cards, and each card has a special power. Your deck of special cards can be as fine-tuned as you wish, and in most cases, it needs to be.]

Even the narration is demeaning. Gamers can tell when the game developers are ‘hand-holding’ the players, and boy howdy do the experienced gamers hate it. Research a new technology? ‘Oh boy, you get to make a choice, A or B, in what kind of small bonus you now want to add to your collection. Don’t worry, there is no bad choice. Both A and B are the right choice in their own ways.’ EVERY. SINGLE. TECH. RESEARCHED. THIS. HAPPENS. And the sad part is that it is the same narrator for everything. Now, one narrator narrating everything is normal in Civilization games, but SMC: BE is supposed to be the successor to SMAC! Where are the deep, moving performances, voice actors? Where are they, SMC: BE?!

Oi vey. Okay, I do have three nice things to say about SMC: BE. They are the Technology Web, the aesthetic direction, and the Affinities. Did SMC: BE do them well? I don’t think so, but the ideas themselves are good and worthy of note.

The Tech Web is the technology system, but rather than it being a linear ‘tree’, it is a…web. As in, with other games you know that ‘if I research D then I also can then begin researching E’ and so on. Here, the various technologies are spread across different nodes which do not cross over with each other. See, in other Civ-style games, unlocking, say, ‘Biology’ would then give you access to later technologies down the line even if they wouldn’t make sense (‘You’ve unlocked Biology, you can now research Super Colliders’). Instead, the Tech-Web has different nodes—say, the one only about Biology and the one only about Robotics and so on. Unlocking some parts of the Robotics node unlocks more of the Robotics but does nothing in helping with unlocking the Biology node. Good idea. I’d like to see it more.

Aesthetics, the developers go a good job with what they have. Connected to aesthetics is the Affinities, but I’ll get to that momentarily. Now, the game is sci-fi, and slightly cartoony; it was just the style then, it was not because of graphical limitations. The aliens look like crab-bugs and/or bug-crabs, but that’s normal. Everything has a bright but defined silhouette so that you don’t have to squint at your computer to find something, you can tell a thing by its shape. As the game progresses, though, the aesthetics change. Depending on your choices, your units and cities become one of three categories—organic, chrome, and bulky. As you develop your society, you have to choose one of three: Genetic engineering, Cyborgs, or MEN.

See, as your faction grows, you have to choose your ‘Affinity’ as you progress. Yes, I complained about all factions being the same, but this is where they do become effectively different. See, to win the game, you have to unlock a victory condition, but they are all behind an Affinity—Harmony, Purity, and Supremacy. These three all represent the possible destinies of humanity on the new planet. If (blue) Harmony, then you choose the destiny of adapting humans to the planet, taking the best of the alien genes and weaving them into your own. If (yellow) Supremacy, you instead try and make the human better, so that a cyborg-person can survive any environment, overcome any challenge. If (red) Purity, you keep humans the same, but go harder into making kick-ass technologies that can challenge the alien-bug-humans and the cyborgs.

And that I think it the one saving grace of SMC: BE. What destiny does the human race choose when it reaches outer space? For SMAC, the factions made up their mind before they landed on the planet, and each in their own way tries to definitively prove the superiority of their ideology over the others. For all my gripes, I think SMC: BE does it right by having each of its factions grow organically, playing off each other as they jostle for life on the new alien world. They and their struggle differentiates the factions into something wholly new. It’s a lot like old Earth, when you think about it, where the different cultures grew up next to each other (for good and bad) and slowly built up into what they thought was the best way to live.

Unfortunately for SMAC, all of its ideologies are…calcified. Ungrowing. Stagnant. You will get only its ideology and just more copies of it. With SMC: BE? Hate to say it, but yeah, because you can copy from your neighbors, because you can overlap some things and reject others, and because you can mix-and-match—I think it a better system. (Better system on paper, but not executed that well.)

Hooboy! That’s really it for SMAC and friends. At its core, SMAC and SMC: BE are about humans going to space and figuring out for themselves ‘what is the best way to live?’ What is the destiny of mankind? That’s been a topic for a while now. Generations, if not a few hundred years, if not since the beginning. Frankly, that’s the underlying question of a lot of recent sci-fi—what is the destiny of mankind? I’ve looked over the given answers and…I’m not happy with a lot of them. I’ve got a lot of beef with everyone, and because I’m a cosmologist at heart, I start from the top and work my through. Is it strange to say that I got into writing because, out of spite, I’m writing against the answers I don’t like?

I hope you all have a merry Christmas Eve, and to all a good cheer. Next post will be something new and different, I promise.

More to follow!