SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTUARI: REALISTIC SCI-FI, Part 1

Hello all!

I taking a detour from Dungeons & Dragons for now, as I’m doing more research into fictional settings. I am pleasantly surprised by what I’ve seen so far—it is much more influential than I’ve realized. So it goes when understanding life. Anywho, the other reason for the detour is that the holidays have knocked me into a food coma, but some isolated part of my brain keeps writing articles and stories, even when I’m trying to sleep. Damnedest thing! I don’t lie or brag that my brain keeps chugging along with creativity, even though I don’t want it to. That means that too much writing can build up and begin pushing out the other articles that I want to write. Write it or lose it.

Where was I? Right, the detour. For those not in the know, Sid Meier is a video game designer primarily focused on strategy games. He’s about as big a name as Gygax in the video game industry, but his personality hasn’t seeped into public consciousness. Meier does not look like a wizardy weirdo for starters, nor did he publicize his personality as Gygax did. Born in Canada (uhg) but Swiss-American by birth (1954) he and Bill Stealey went on to found MicroProse Games 1982, and later Meier co-founded Firaxis Games with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996. The former is important, here, as MicroProse went on to make and/or publish two of the most influential games of the USA video game scene—Sid Meier’s Civilization (duh) (1991) and the sci-fi game classic X-COM: Enemy Unknown* (1994).

[*Called ‘X-COM: UFO Defense’ in the USA.]

In Civilization, or ‘Civ’ for brevity, the baseline mode of play is pseudo-historical, pseudo-simulation, as the players (human and AI) start with meager resources on a hex-based tile map, and are to build up their ‘civilization’ from nothing and work towards one of several victory conditions, such as (in the earliest games) world conquest, or researching, making, and launching a rocket to the Moon/Mars/Alpha Centauri. The first three games of Civ (1991, ’96, 2001) were pixel-art and based on grid-based tile maps, while the next three (2005, 2010, 2016) moved to a 3D engine and the maps became hex-based.

In all the games you take control of a (very condensed) real-life civilization from history; each ‘civ’ has a collection of strengths and unique bonuses. Most of the ‘advantage packages’ of each civ usually affect only a specific time period—is the civ strong in the early, middle, or late game? No, you don’t actually move through simulated ‘time’ like history, the game is turn-based, like chess and checkers, and as the pieces/civs move around and develop the game board, the advantages change. Complex interactions occur between the movement of military units, cities growing in size, new technologies (from writing to nuclear physics) are researched…but I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that the game is heavily biased towards a ‘build wide’ strategy.

What do I mean? The ‘build wide’ vs ‘build tall’ debate has been there since the beginning—thank Meier for that—and is similar to a ‘quantity vs quality’ approach. Do you build a bunch of crappy cities that don’t produce much, but there are a lot of them that produce stuff all at the same time, or do you focus on a small but dense collection of cities that have many ‘built up’ advancements? …Because Civ is a number-crunching game, and a ‘closed system’ with little random chance/outside chaos, it favors ‘build wide’ hands down. There are a few ways to mitigate this bias, such as deliberately making the overall map-board small, and thus reducing the space to crank out numerous cities. The other is to place arbitrary restrictions or penalties that penalize having many cities, such as ‘your empire is too big and people are throwing revolts!’.

…You know, now that I think of it, for it being a simulation game, Civ rarely ‘simulates’ famine as a game mechanic. The game does not even use it that much as a population control mechanic. Civilians in Civ cities rarely starve! They can starve, yes, but players (human or AI) have to deliberately sabotage their own food supply in order for this to happen*.

[*I suppose like real-life dictators, then?]

Each city in Civ produces resources, which are either used only in that city (like Food or Hammers) or are pooled into a collective fund (like Gold or Science-points). Food grows the city by giving it (slowly) more Civilians, who in turn are assigned jobs that gather in more resources. ‘Hammers’ are production points, that are used to build either new buildings in that city, or to build a military unit. A city can only produce with Hammers one thing at a time, so you normally can pump out military units while making a building and vice-versa! Gold is money, used to buy various improvements or to ‘fast-build’ a thing in the production queue*, at great Gold expense. Science-points slowly build up to obtain a new technology (‘get 700 points to unlock Pottery!’) which then unlocks new units and buildings and so on.

[*Cursed homophones, ‘queue’ is not the same as ‘que/cue’.]

Just as important as the package of advantages each civ has is its leader. They are ahistorical, in that they are, technically, a great and famous leader of that culture, but they’ve lead that culture since time immemorial in that game. For example, Mahatma Gandhi is a typical leader for the India-civ in most games, where he has led them since prehistory all the way up to the space age, for the glorious colonization of the stars. …Each civ-leader is an AI-script that directs their personality, which then directs how each non-human player builds up their civ. For example, Gandhi is usually the first civ-leader to build towards Nuclear Missiles. Yes, the very same Gandhi, a peace-loving AI, had a bug in his script, where his numerical values for ‘peacefulness’ (on that AI scale) were set so low that they turned over the dial to ‘kill ‘em all!’ territory.

…At least, that’s how the story goes. Gamers who were computer programmers found that no such bug existed even in the early games, but it did highlight how strange the game could get. It reflected how the various AI personalities acted within their parameters, yes, but they also acted on decisions that seemed the most beneficial at the moment. According to Brain Reynolds, what usually happened was that the Gandhi-India-civ focused most on a science victory, and so ran down the technology paths as quickly as possible, which included developing nuclear weapons in-game. By that point, it was ‘better to have them than not have them’, so reasoned the AI. And do note, that in the same game, Abraham Lincoln, civ-leader of America, had similar ‘peacefulness values’ as Gandhi, and also did the same thing of going down the science victory and establishing nuclear superiority! It was more jarring when civ-Gandhi did it, given the perceptions around him. Nor was it helped by the early Internet culture, when—when everything was its own mess and us humans had not adapted yet to Internet weirdness.

We won’t survive as a species if we don’t adapt to the Internet. And I don’t mean physical adaptations, I mean cultural adaptations. And I don’t even mean, more law enforcement on the Internet, I mean a genuine morality that permits or forbids different parts of the Internet from ever entering into the household or family. If gun safety, then Internet safety. If gun responsibility, then Internet responsibility. Common sense, that’s all it is, and hopefully we humans can develop this morality around this technology that we’ve had in the public for 30+ years. You’d think?!

Now, in the transition between Civilization 2 and 3, there was a side project, based around the science victory condition—what if there was a rocket sent to Alpha Centauri in outer space? In real-life, Alpha Centauri is the closest solar system to our own that also has (as far as we can tell) a planet similar to Earth in terms of ‘it should have the requirements needed to have life on it’, but we really won’t know till we get there.

In Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri? Oh yes, there’s life there, a strange pink fungus planet that has brain-eating worms that are a yard long and have psychic powers that they use to paralyze you, to burrow into your brain and lay eggs like a parasitic wasp!...And the planet itself is alive, and talks to you in your dreams! And, the atmosphere has too-high a concentration of nitrogen in the air which makes it unbreathable to humans if they aren’t wearing a scuba-tank.

I’ll mention a few other things before we dive in. Alpha Centauri, or ‘S.M.A.C.’ did have an expansion game, Alien Crossfire. I will not go into it too much, for I haven’t played it myself, but I also have a low opinion of what I have seen (I know, I know, that’s a dangerous combination for bias). SMAC and Crossfire both came out in 1999. In 2014, a ‘spiritual successor’ to SMAC came out, and was titled Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth (or, SMCBE or C:BE for short). It was a side game, too, and was inbetween Civ-5 (2010) and Civ-6 (2016). I like C:BE for what it is, as when it came out it was unfavorably received due to being in SMAC’s shadow. I grouched at it, too, but I came to respect it as a game—but loathe the spirit behind its writing. I’ll be referencing all three when appropriate.

SMAC’s story begins with an assassination and mutiny on the great big spaceship that carries the human colonies to planet Chiron (the fungus planet). The captain is killed under mysterious circumstances, and the contingents of humans factionalize into 7 distinct ideologies. The 7 faction leaders agree to disagree (at gunpoint) and take their followers and colonists to then settle ‘the Planet’, to develop their people as they see fit.

Each of the 7 is its own, unabashed, bold-faced, offensively kind of crazy. Each is a distinct flavor of 1990s space-crazy, which plays out in how they function in-game and in the writing. Similar to how, when I was describing the 1982 Conan film, my words cannot do justice in describing how GOOD the writing is in this game! And the voice-acting, the game had phenomenal voice-acting. The writing, says Wikipedia ™ has been compared to the likes of Kubrick (many movies), Frank Herbert (Dune), Arther C. Clark (2001: Space Odyssey), and Issac Asimov (I, Robot; Foundation).

Thes story, after the mutiny, is developed every time you (the player) research a new technology, where one of the 7 faction leaders narrates the effects of the new tech on the world and on the other factions. It’s beautiful. As the story progresses, you learn that the Planet is alive, and has a kind of global mind rooted in the vast amounts of fungus that cover the world. The Planet is curious yet cautious of these new humans who have impacted on its surface.

As for the technologies themselves, they can be called ‘near-future’. Whoever did the planning for the story took what was known at the time in the late 1990s and projected it onwards. The earliest techs in the game are simple things like rediscovering the Internet! The later ones allow for the creation of space elevators—which are just that. Giant elevators that go up to space and are connected with space stations in orbit—but in order to get to the space elevators, you have to first research different, semi-realistic branches of computing, engineering, and discovering the equivalent of carbon nano-tubes in order to make the cables. …But then there are also silly technologies, like inventing a weather control machine, straight out of comic books. The semi-realistic and the fantastic rubbing shoulders is part of the charm.

The visual aesthetic, though not as strong as in other games, is nonetheless recognizable. I don’t know what to call it, so I’ll make up a phrase—‘cyber-grunge’. It was an aesthetics style common-enough in the 1990s computer games. My examples of ‘cyber-grunge’ are SMAC, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999, by Westwood Studios), and the 1995 film Judge Dredd, starring Sylvester Stallone*. Like in the original Star Wars Trilogy (1977, ’80, ’83), the technology of cyber-grunge is robust-looking and well-used, lived-in even. Everything is bulky, boxy, but unlike Star Wars, cyber-grunge has blinking lights in nonsensical places and pipes jutting out of strange places. Whole rooms can be nothing but a desk in the center and the walls are made entirely out of pipes. Just pipes. And maybe some tele-screens. Cyber-grunge is not quite ‘cyber-punk’—the latter has cybernetics/robot parts be so common as to be normal, while in cyber-grunge cybernetics aren’t too common, and are even seen as freakish**. Even then, humans seem to wear blinking lights and doo-dads as a kind of jewelry.

[*On further reflection, I think the 1997 oddball adventure-platformer, Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee also fits the bill. Oh, how can I be so foolish! The 1998 classic and world-maker, Starcraft!]

[**Put another way, in cyber-punk or hi-tech settings, the cybernetics either look like flesh, or if they are clearly fake, they at least look like a sleek real arm made of metal. With cyber-grunge, the cybernetics look bolted on, or like a cancer that has replaced part of the body.]

Put another way, the tech in cyber-grunge is ugly. It is ugly because it looks tacky—a big boxy thing with sequins tacked on, or it is ugly in a realistic way, the same way that a tractor’s engine looks ugly. Robust, to do its hard job, but still ugly. Sometimes, it looks ugly, and ridiculous. As an example in game, one can research heavy laser weapons, but they are so large that they need to be mounted on platforms in order to be carried and used by a human. In-game, the model for such a military unit is the laser cannon, mounted on a minecart, with tank tracks for locomotion. The human operator stands on the platform, exposed to the air, behind the laser gun, as it crawls forwards on janky tank tracks. The Mobile Weapons Platform (MWP) of the future!

There’s a reason for this aesthetic. It was a time of transition in the entertainment industry. For those too young, and for those who don’t have a mind for history—tech from the 80s and 90s was just ugly, too. ‘Sci-fi is sleek and chrome’ did not become a real-life aesthetic, for cars and phones and buildings, until the freakin’ cell phones became popular! The whole aesthetic had an ugly puberty, too, because the change to the 2000s was when Computer-Generated Imagery was being improved upon* to the point where it could be made wholly from scratch and not need assistance from clay models to look nice. Was it The Matrix (1999) that kickstarted the trend, in the public view, of ‘sci-fi can be sleek, glossy, and cool’—not clunky like the previous decades?

[*Not withstanding the technical, skill-based marvels of Jurassic Park (1993) and Starship Troopers (1997), who used life-sized animatronics for the T-Rex and space bugs, respectively, but also used CGI based on those animatronics.]

Ahem, sorry. Cyber-grunge is the way it looks because of the change from pixel-art to true, 3-D models. Because of the limitations of pixels, at the time, colors were not the best looking. In pixel-art, line work, shape, and textures were paramount (though the last one was tricky); you had to struggle to make a bunch of square dots look like a real object, and then animate it moving! It would not surprise me if pixel-art and traditional hand-animation (old cartoons) have overlapping techniques. The computer tech of the time was a limitation, as much as working with only clay or only wood is a limitation, and by God striking artwork was made from all three!

What of the factions and their leaders, then? What is the nitty-gritty of each ideology? We’ll get to that in another paragraph or two. First, let’s understand the victory conditions of SMAC.

1) World Conquest

2) Making so much money that your faction establishes a monopoly on the planetary energy market.

3) Research a supercomputer that can download human brains—not to download them into the supercomputer, but to download human minds into the super-mind of the Planet.

4) Be elected the Chairman of the New Space United Nations and be voted as ‘Supreme Planetary Governor’.

Second, you have to understand the mechanical strengths and weaknesses of the 7 factions. Similar to how, in Dungeons & Dragons, a character, depending on their species, can have bonuses to some attribute and a clear penalty to another, so too do the 7 factions*. These strengths and weaknesses are tied into, and are supposed to reinforce, the ideology of the faction.

[*It’s an interesting mark of game design. In any given game, you want to balance out a collection of strengths with a weakness or trade off, for the overall sake of making the games ‘fair’ to each player, even if they all play by different rules. The trick of the penalty is that it cannot be crippling, but it also can’t be a slap on the wrist. The penalty has to be, ‘just right.’]

Now, SMAC comes from an era of gaming, an era of game design, where all factions, despite their weaknesses, can achieve any of the victories. The ideal—the ideal—is that you, a human player, can become skilled and clever enough to win any victory condition, no matter the odds. I’ve listened to the older nerds who came from that era, and many look upon it as like a golden age. The potential for creativity! Skill triumphing all! The honest older nerds who lived from that era instead say ‘yeah you could achieve crazy things and inventive victories, but in practice you had to get to brass tacks pretty quick.’*

[*It is similar to the Computer Role-Playing Games of the time, where they were so well-written that ‘all of a player’s choices were valid.’ You could be a psychopath or trickster and still ‘win’ the game, damn the consequences to the story. The same honest older nerds point out that sure, you could go AWOL from the plot and still win, but the most enjoyment came from working with the main plotline, as written by the developers, rather than trying to throw the plot out the window.]

Victory conditions, strengths, and weaknesses—let’s get to the factions!

Next post.

More to follow!