SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTUARI: REALISTIC SCI-FI, Part 2

Hello all

When we last left off from our story, I went to lengths about the history and aesthetics of this computer game.

Let me first explain the state of Chiron, the Planet, the game board. It is composed of a giant grid of even squares that wraps around like a globe 70% water and 30% solid land, so land is a relatively uncommon feature unless you’re on one of the several continents—that means no barriers to unfriendly neighbors if you aren’t on an island, isthmus, or peninsula. In addition, the grotesquely pink Alien Fungus covers 60% to 80% of any given landmass, and acts as a barrier to movement, and it hinders food production and resources collection. It also acts as a nest for the mind worms (brain eaters), who will periodically spawn and attack nearby settlements*.

[*In the Civ parlance, the mind worms act like independent barbarian factions that are antagonistic to everybody, and at their most dangerous can destroy whole settlements.]

In SMAC, each city has a set radius of tiles, centered on the city itself, and the Civilians are then assigned to work on nearby tiles to gather resources. The resources are simple, as SMAC works on an earlier game engine. They are Food, Minerals, and Energy, to reflect the odd situation of humanity on the Planet. Food of course makes more people; Minerals are your ‘hammers/Production’, and so more Minerals means a given city can produce a building or unit faster; Energy is money, as the old money from Earth is useless. You heard it right, the standard unit of currency in SMAC are AA batteries, because the batteries are limited in number and are useful—they keep the life-support power one. (In-game, Energy-money is still used to purchase and ‘fast-buy’ units.)

Another important, interesting challenge of SMAC is that its ‘technology tree’ is semi-random. In most video games, and the main Civilization games, the technology tree is linear—you build up enough ‘science points’ and unlock a new tech. The whole tree, the line of technology, can be planned out from start to finish*. Not so with SMAC! Rather, you randomly get a new technology every time you accumulate enough ‘science points’; the best you can do is assign higher priorities to a given tech category, such as Military or Discovery, and hope you’ll have a better chance of getting what you want. Because of this, technology in SMAC is schizophrenic, and a powerful bargaining chip in potential diplomacy. It also forces each faction to specialize what they want to focus on, as if they don’t they’ll get a hodge-podge of technologies that they may not be able to apply well. (And need I remind you that one of the basic techs is ‘Rediscover the Internet’?)

[*It can lead to amusing results, like not researching paper or Morse code, because your grand strategy across time may not need those to win.]

The odd technology gamble is a wonderful game system. Informed by the story of the game, it is humanity not only making new tech for their tenuous situation, but also refinding what they took from Earth. It is not a steady progress. It has many hiccups, and sharing knowledge with friends or foes can result in great upheavals. It’s much closer to real-life, where many of the early discoveries were accidents, and a given technology may do nothing if it is not applied, or if it was discovered in a time period where it was not immediately useful. It’s a reminder that progress is not a given.

Now, let’s get to the players, the 7 factions, their leaders, ideologies, playstyles, and how all of them are going to Hell in a handbasket; each in their own special way!

I’ll divide up the 7 into two broad groups. The first group relies on, and is rewarded by, aggression towards other players. In playing the game, if these three are your neighbors, prepare for war, for they are not rewarded by peace. (In no order), they are the Human Hive, the Spartan Federation, and the Lord’s Believers.

The second broad group I class as the builders. They don’t need to be proactive marauders—though they will be opportunistic thieves and land-grabbers. Instead, they have the tools they need to build up a strong economic base. (In no order), they are Gaia’s Stepdaughters, Morgan Industries, the Peacekeeping Forces, and the University of Planet. Be warned! These four aren’t too much into militarism, but they each have their own dystopia planned if they were to get their way.

Each faction has a definitive collection of strengths, and one clear weakness. It may, over time, with effort and higher-end techs, be able to overcome those weaknesses, but that weakness will always hold it back. It prevents that faction from having an extra degree of oomph that lets it truly shine in that area. As for its strengths, of course, that is where their competitive edge lies.

Each faction is an ideology. I’ll explain it, and give what examples I know from across history. Don’t take those examples as one-for-one equivalency, though, but think of it as mostly-similar patterns playing across history. I don’t believe in fate or determinism, but history sure does rhyme a lot! Furthermore, each ideology, I think, has the perfect circumstances to present itself. The factions are each a monoculture, as far as I can tell, with little pollution or cultural contamination from other sources. Because of the story, each city is self-sealed away from the deadly atmosphere; humans live in wholly artificial environments. Plus, each faction leader is ultimately an idealist through and through, unconcerned with taking and holding power—because by the quirks of the game, they already have absolute, uncontested, and permanent power over their factions in the first place. Thus, they can show their ideology in bold face, without compromise.

Let’s start. …You have been warned.

Chairman Shen-ji Yang and the Human Hive: Yang is a filthy Communist Hegelian Collectivist and a mad social engineer Incorruptible, Enlightened Despot who guides every aspect of his peoples’ daily lives. Well, it may be that the mad social engineer doesn’t underscore the real Yang. He may very well be quite sane, but merely uses the full power of his rational sanity to work towards insane goals. Humans are weird like that. Yang himself is cool, calm, and collected, to a fault—he sounds like a wise grandpa when he speaks.

Yang is a materialist—there is no spirit, only matter—and a collectivist. The group is more important than an individual. I know! Sounds wholly alien to most of our ears, but collectivism is the norm in human history. The human individual has to be made special in order for the—hmm? What do I mean by Hegelian? For those who don’t know, Georg W. F. Hegel (Earth-planet years 1770-1831, of Earth-planet regions south-west Germany and Prussia) was a philosopher who believed in human self-perfection. He had peculiar views on everything*, and one of these was that the nation-state can make perfect humans. Hegel had a very strong influence on Friend Marx, Wise Lenin, Counselor Stalin, and Chairman Mao.

Hegel believed, that there were ‘ideals’, and that these ideals informed people on how to act. People in turn make the state, whose institutions then in turn reinforce and refine the ideals, who then make better informed people, who then make a better nation-state based on those ideals, and so on, in a positive feedback circle that goes on and on—until all three reach their heights of perfection. It is why the end-goal of these institutions is to eventually fade away, because a perfect people does not need government or guiding ideals anymore.

[*Note that he did not make up the ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ method, that was by Immanuel Kant—curse him from childhood!—but instead his modification of the method is ‘abstract-negation-concrete’. The former is somewhat peaceable, but the latter method is in practice the method of smashing two opposite ideas/beliefs together and then seeing what’s left over from the mess. Then start over with other ideas.]

Yang is taking this process of human self-perfection down to the genetic level. His most recognizable quote from the game is ‘We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on,’ and in particular shows an interest in refining the genetic codes of humans. Life is not sacred, it is a tool to be used and perfected. It’s just a series of chemical reactions, after all. It is why pain and agony are just information inputs. It is also why, so it is implied, he helped create the Genejack—a vat-grown slave laborer that has an underdeveloped cerebral cortex (thinky-thinky brain) and enough muscles to deadlift 900lbs. Cleverly, he dodges accusations of tyranny by saying that one cannot tyrannize a thing which feels no pain, fear, or thought. (He forgets that Sauron did the same thing in making the orcs.)

…So, yes, if you’ve noticed, Yang does not at all explicitly promise a happy utopia—that is the Gaians’ promise—because his happy utopia is a surviving mass of humanity. So long as humanity, as a collective, survives, grows, and is industrious—they will all be happy in the same way that Earth-animals are quietly happy.

Despite my references to the Union of Counselors and Socialists Republics, Yang is much closer to C. S. Lewis’s ‘men-without-chests’ in his The Abolition of Man (1943), where factions of world-controllers—who have the appetites of the stomachs and their rational brains but no hearts—who by psychology, social engineering, and genetic manipulation turn all of humanity into…well, whatever form of slave-race that the world controllers like, based on personal preference. These men-without-chests refuse to acknowledge morality or anything sacred. In Lewis’s words, these world-controllers ignore the Tao (from China), which Lewis refers as ‘the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew”—that the Tao is the proper ‘way’ or ‘path’ of human conduct living in reality. The main symbol of Taoism is the yin-yang. Shen-ji Yang explicitly wants to overcome the yin-yang, as said in his quotes, to escape from its dualism. Like all such men, Yang wants to be God, lording over in absolute power the human race as God does.

Human Hive Playstyle: The Human Hive is cancer, pure and simple. Thanks to Yang’s social engineering, the cities of the Hive get bonuses to population and industry, but penalties to economy (a big one!) The Hive’s cities grow fast, and can make buildings/units fast, but are perpetually short on cash. Thus, the Hive’s Civ-playstyle is to crank out a bunch of cities, and have them all produce stuff/make money at the same time. Military-wise, it gives them an army power that scales strangely.

In SMAC, each city can support a number of military units for free, but if you exceed this free allowance, then the city loses Minerals to pay for their upkeep. In SMAC, if your city isn’t building anything, then it converts those unused Minerals into energy-money—and converting extra minerals to money is how the Hive makes its money normally. Meaning, if it builds up a huge military, it has to succeed or go bust. It must take more cities to make up for the military deficit. The Hive—much like other expansionist powers—must keep expanding or it will collapse in on itself. Counterattacking on the Hive’s cities is harder than normal, because each of the cities gets a defense building for free (thanks to Yang’s planning). However, the defense building is still a building, and thus can be sabotaged before attacking.

Colonel Corazon Santiago and the Spartan Federation: Actually they’re far more like the early Roman Republic than they realize. They are as paranoid as the real-life Spartans, too. Though, Corazon herself is a lioness, and speaks with a thick, rich, Brazilian purr…Hmm? What? I wasn’t distracted by her*!

[*Though when I played the game when I was young, I did play the Spartans the most…But not because Corazon is sexy. She’s a cougar with grey streaks in her black mane. I chose the Spartans first because my 12-year-old brain said ‘Wow! With all this military power, no one can bully me!’ and then proceeded to play the Spartans as peaceful builders. I kept losing the game in the long run. Never finished a whole game of SMAC.]

Above all, the Spartans are a regression into futuristic neo-tribalism paramilitary survivalists. I have to clarify something, as I can hear the alarm bells ring in certain brains. They are not 2nd Amendment gun activists. The Spartan Feds are anti-idealists. They are not followers of the Fasces, nor are they National Socialists—though like those political groups, the Spartan Feds don’t have any real ideals to aspire to. The Spartan Feds instead see life in harsh practicalities—life is lethal. Nature preys on humans and humans prey on humans; only the strong survive, and to be strong, you need force and violence.

They also, now, live on a death world where everything is trying to kill them, so their ideology has also gotten a bit to their heads. Like the hill tribes across Earth-planet—the early Romans, Greeks, early Scotsmen—they are fiercely independent and dirt-poor. They are a living paradox that makes their own problems, for the Spartan Feds insist on having a superior martial culture, but then they get afraid and attack their neighbors to prevent their neighbors from attacking them—thus starting a war that threatens their survival anyway. Like the Spartans of ancient Greece, they emphasized military culture so much that they crippled their economic culture. Only slaves and those unworthy of fighting do the manual labor.

Note that this attitude can come to any fighting culture. The ancient Greeks and Scots had no excuse save that they both lived in resource-poor areas* and survived by stealing from others—the same with the Apache tribe of North America, who also lived in harsh climates and stole from other tribes. Meanwhile, you have early Rome, the Aztecs, and the Comanche tribe of North America. These three share a similar pattern—all three were bullied by other cultures. For Rome it was the Etruscans and their neighboring hill tribes; for the Aztecs they were kicked out of their homes by other tribes and wandered from place to place; for the Comanche, they were abused greatly by the Apache and exiled from their land. Then, the Romans, Aztecs, and Comanches got mean. They were bully victims, and refused to be bullied ever again. So, Rome and the Aztecs conquered empires, while the Comanche nearly drove the Apache to extinction in a series of generational wars (and then the Spanish and the white-man came…)

[*You know, like an alien death world.]

For the Spartan Feds, the only true security is total domination. Like Rome and the Aztecs, they see the world as a kind of chaos, and order must be imposed upon it for there to be peace. Thus, for order to be imposed on the outside, order must be imposed on the inside of the tribe command structure, from youngest to oldest. Santiago is notable for advocating for Children’s Creches—communal, state-funded daycares that concentrate children in one place while the parents fulfill their duties elsewhere. Her approaches to life and diplomacy are the same way she approaches logic and tactics. Her understanding of logistics, the lifeblood of military supremacy, translates into highly practical social policy. She only respects strength, and is polite, courteous, to anyone of professional military skill—even as she knows that only one warrior is walking out alive. Like Yang, her power is uncontested, though her command structure differs from his. Yang kills both the incompetent and those who let corrupt power go to their heads—you must meet Yang’s standards of Enlightened Despotism or else. Santiago, however, understands her society-wide officer’s club, where she has learned to listen to the grumbling complaints. She adjusts, or punishes, accordingly. And, as a warrior, you are trained to die for the cause, without a thought for why…thinking is a distraction, after all. If, perhaps, her heart of hearts could be seen, it would be that her love of tribe is paramount over all other concerns—paramount over love of stranger. I think it is the same in most hearts.

Spartan Federation Playstyle: The Spartan Feds are gradual imperialists* and weapons innovators. They have bonuses to military and police but a penalty to industry. In effect, they have little civil unrest—their citizens don’t riot and rarely protest—and their military units are more elite than equivalent units from other faction. But they produce buildings and units slower than other factions, in a game that favors cranking out cities that make more cities and/or units**. To keep up, they have to take bites out of other factions’ territories, and use their clear military muscle to bully other diplomatically. Unless, of course, your faction can fight them to a standstill—then they play along. Their hair-trigger attitude of ‘our-independence-is-paramount’ means they can rapidly interpret any aggression as an act of war.

[*Similar to Rome and the Aztecs—they conquered over generations.]

[**Their other faction bonus is that they add more upgrades to their military units for cheaper, compared to other factions.]

Ultimately, though, their military has a crippling weakness, in that they can’t use mass conscription*—their numbers are too low and casualties are irreplaceable, and ironically their economy is too weak for sustained wartime. The ever-vigilant super-warriors cannot fight long battles—and life is the long battle they are supposedly preparing for.

[*Conscription is a complex bag of pros and cons; one of them is that it can outscale smaller, elite warrior societies, but typically conscripts only win wars by good leadership, and distracting the enemy long enough for the actual soldiers to kill the enemy’s professional soldiers. Conscription also means that if you lose hard, your population is not growing back.]

Sister Miriam Godwinson and the Lord’s Believers:

Okay. There is no way I can be cute or polite about this one. The Lord’s Believers are Evangelical Protestant Christians who act like Islamic Space-Jihadists.

Thematically speaking, the Lord’ Believers have elements from all three branches of the Abrahamic faiths. Like the Biblical Hebrews, they (the Believers) are now conquering the (new) Promised Land of the Planet…for goodness sake, people they name their cities like ‘New Jerusalem’ and ‘Far Jericho’! As Christians, they have an apocalyptic form of Revelation and proselytizing, and as Muslims they use skullduggery and inexpensive militia who will fight for the cause on faith. (Though in-game they are merely described as Evangelical Christians.)

If I am being harsh on Miriam and the Believers, it is because the Believer’s are a harsh pastiche of the Abrahamic faiths. Though don’t get me wrong, when playing the game Miriam is always a red-headed stepchild of Acheron a problem child due to her playstyle. They are a hard faction to talk about because the whole faction is a stereotype of stereotypes, and the only way to pick it apart is to be knowledgable about three distinct religions who do share similarities on the surface but have drastic differences at the deeper core. I’ve also seen this Abrahamic pastiche in fantasy literature*, believe it or not, and it seems the common consensus of nerds is that if smushed together into one, the Abrahamics are stubborn, stubbornly exclusive, tough, fanatical-unto-martyrdom, and above all, scrappy fighters, who become stronger the more you beat them up. It’s somewhat flattering all things considered.

[*Such as in the fantasy miniatures wargame, Warmachine by Privateer Press.]

When you smush their three different interpretations of God into one deity, of course He’s a thundering all-powerful ass-kicker and law-giver, who punishes the wicked and unbelievers—and all other nuances are lost. It’s also a flattering compliment, in a back-handed kind of way.

So, are the Lord’s Believers a theocracy? A rule by priests and God? Not quite. In spite of the fears of liberals, atheists, progressives, and anyone else with a cause to fear Christianity, making a theocracy is hard. The first and greatest problem for Jews, Protestants*, and Muslims, is—and I’m being flippant for a point—is that all three of them are a bunch of loud people arguing over how to interpret the same damn book. You cannot have a priesthood without built-in formality, and to do that you need one definitive explanation of the sacred texts.

[*Catholics and the Orthodox don’t have this problem. Curiously, though, they have parallels in that the Vatican is the domain of the Catholic Pope, while Mount Athos is a similar spiritual capital for the Orthodox. Both are ‘technically’ theocracies in that they are exempt from secular political control—but the only people who live in them are priests and monks!]

As such, you don’t have official priests in those cultures, but rather teachers—the rabbis, pastors, and imams, respectively. The issue of theocracy is further muddled because—and modern Westerners don’t understand this well—for many cultures the spiritual order and secular-political order overlapped. A healthy king or emperor was a sign of favor from the heavens. Good behavior was seen as intrinsically tied to the life of the nation—bad behavior or un-godliness would result in a thunderbolt to your head and the destruction of your people overall.

In practice, the ‘secular’ aristocrats/warrior-nobility were almost always in bed with the priesthood (figuratively and literally). Among the Inca, the Egyptians, and the Sumerians, the Emperor, Pharoh, and King (respectively) were, literally, gods upon the Earth, and ought to act like such. That is, the Sapa Inca (emperor) is a mountain who does not flinch; the Pharoh is as orderly and life-giving as the Nile River; the King of Sumer brings rain by having sex with, and fertilizing, a priestess (in public) so that the crops grow.

If not literal gods, then among other peoples the king or emperor is divinized into godhood-on-Earth. Rome was famous with her god-emperors (who became such when they ascended the throne and moreso after they died); in ancient, pre-Islamic Persia, the Shah of Shahs* was not a god, but he was gifted with an aura of divine splendor as a sign of his legitimacy, and homage must be given to the Shah’s kingly person and to the heaven-sent aura. Even the King of Siam (modern Thailand) is not a god, per se, but whoever is King, has divine protection—woe to anyone who strikes at him! There will be a thunderbolt, or worse for you!

[*Yes, Frank Miller’s 300 the movie and comic got so damn much wrong—Xerxes would have been abandoned by his people if he claimed to be a literal god as he did in 300.]

HOWEVER.

Miriam and the Lord’s Believers do show an important point—that no matter if a culture is pagan or Abrahamic, humans have always tried to make Earth into Heaven. (This always backfires, by the way.)

The Orthodox and Catholics tried it first, and failed badly. The Orthodox did so by believing that the Byzantine Emperor had the powers of the secular and the sacred invested into his person, that he is God’s personal representative on Earth, and that he possesses an authority that was supreme over the priests and the Patriarchs—so it shouldn’t have surprised them when he went off his rocker, and (depending on the Emperor) either threatened the priests at worst or constantly argued with/ignored them at the least. With the Catholics, they spent the whole 1000 years of the Medieval era trying to figure out if the Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops could hold sacred and political power. It turns out, that whenever a holy man tried to use political power against a political entity (King or noble), that political entity stomped the hell out of them, so then the holy man had to retreat to sacred power to stop the political entity from slapping them around.

Even the Muslim Caliphates understood that, while the caliph is the inheritor of the Prophet, the caliph/sultan’s power only goes so far, in that he is to defend the faith and conquer infidels, but he has no supreme ‘holy’ powers, as that is the domain of Allah alone. It is also understood that the caliph/sultan needs to be on good terms with the imams, and vice-versa, lest division between them pit their people against one another (as don’t forget that imams are trained preachers, too).

‘But what about them imposing moralistic laws on us?’ I can hear some people say through the Internet. First, get out of my brain. The second is—why should that surprise you? There is the Christian cultures, and the Muslims cultures, and the Secular cultures, and more. Every culture has a kind of morality that it imposes on the people who live in the culture, it’s that the Secular cultures think they’ve outgrown morality! There’s a secular morality, but it is best left unspoken. Otherwise, people will debate it to death. And, do not the Secular culture try to impose their morality on other cultures, because the Secular way is superior to (say) the religious way?

So, what are Miriam and the Believers like? Well, at root, like Protestants, Jews, and Muslims on Planet Earth, they do believe that the are here on Planet Chiron to make it into God’s Kingdom, and that they are to debate people into accepting their mission. Otherwise, they will fight. The good thing going for Miriam is that this society of contentious debaters is forced to live together and compromise—otherwise, like historical ‘peoples of the book’, they will immediately factionalize, break up, and leave for parts unknown. There are sects among the Jews, many sects of Protestantism, and the Muslims have deeper divisions than Sunni-Shia, they also have differing ‘schools of jurisprudence’ that interpret the Koran differently. Being forced to live in the same, sealed-off city means the Believers have to be nice to each other.

As for Miriam herself—the one good thing going for her is that Miriam is pro-human. What? She’s a religious fanatic, and she’s pro-human? Yes! Yes, actually, despite what the propaganda might say. It helps that she can preach without raising her voice and looks like a distantly-related, red-haired aunt.

In the majority of her quotes—the ones that play when a new technology is researched—Miriam has a constant pro-human, pro-God stance, who also warns against the dangers of technology. Most of her quotes are about ‘this new tech is going to kill us and here’s why!’ Her best one is when the technology ‘Self-Aware Colonies’* is researched.

[*Self-Aware Colonies is a very-late game, penultimate technology. As a reminder, in-game-story says that all the cities are sealed off from the deadly atmosphere. Self-Aware Colonies is putting a Super A.I. in each city. You are doing worse than making Skynet, you are trapping your citizens in a physical Matrix—not digital! The Self-Aware Colony tends to the citizens’ needs, yes, but it is always watching for ‘trouble’ and makes the ‘trouble’ disappear, without a body. The people inside the Sentient City can’t leave. It is like the spaceship from Wall-E (2008), but from hell and mixed in with a bit of 1984 for good measure. And Miriam is the only one screaming at the top of her lungs ‘this is a god-awful idea!’]

Ultimately, Miriam and the Believers are misguided righteousness. They do want to do good, and do want to save people. This is a trait of the Abrahamic faiths, starting with the Hebrews onto Christians onto Muslims. And, like humans, they’re great big fools who blunder though their well-meaning intentions. The biggest folly is that the Lord’s Believers think they can pull their mission through—when really it’s the all-loving God who saves the day in the end. Though, I don’t want to mislead you. Don’t think I believe in a wishy-washy God; I believe in a God who has every right to slap us if we’re being ungrateful, petulant children. It is His right to chastise us—and somehow, Him slapping us upside the head brings us good!

Lord’s Believers Playstyle: In terms of playstyle, the Believers have two broad options.

In game mechanics, they have bonuses to probe and military support but severe penalties to research and environmentalism. The bonus to ‘probe’ means they produce excellent spy teams and are better protected against enemy spy teams. The bonus to military* means that they can have more military units without spending as much money for upkeep. The penalties to research mean they’re always behind on technology, and the penalty to environmentalism means that the Planet itself hates them.

[*Another bonus is that their military has a bonus when attacking but are not good at defending.]

This means that, military-wise, the Believers crank out cheap, large, low-tech armies that hammer other factions in the ‘early game’, when the factions have small, weak cities. Later on, as the game progresses, the Believers have to rely more and more on their spy teams, to make up for their lack of technological advantage, and to constantly steal technology from other factions in order to keep up competition. [I learned this on my own Miriam playthrough.]

Thus, militant Believers rely mostly on conquest and land grabs to maintain superiority, while the more ‘defensive’ Believers keep sending spy teams to constantly sabotage their neighbors! Miriam is always a problem child if she’s controlled by the computer A.I. The science victory is so impractical as to be not an option, but the Economic victory (have more money than everyone) and the Governor victory remain options. (The latter being by Miriam having more population than everyone else and thus gets the most votes at the Space U.N.)

…And I'm already at 4000+ words, time to break up the post.

More to follow!