In it, you (the leader of whatever faction you’ve chosen) and your assistants begin to plumb the depths of the planet’s connection to the mind worms, and to its new human inhabitants. It’s quite surprising actually: thanks either to a hidden trigger, or a certain technology being researched, a page full of text blots out your civilization, a page that takes the horizon of your new home as its background. It’s at this point in the game that the first narrative interlude appears. These mind worms roam the planet, growing in strength and attacking colonists. It turns out that this particular planet isn’t as uninhabited as the colonists had assumed.
It’s all pretty standard until the mind worms start showing up. It’s all classic Civilization: the different technologies and developments include description that are narrated by the different faction leaders, and the “Wonders of the World” structures all come with classic FMV and CG cutscenes. As always, the factions have different bonuses to certain units and techs, and it’s easier to start playing in a particular way, to focus on one kind of development, until the mid-game. The factions are familiar space strategy material: the militaristic faction, the traders, the environmentalists, the masters of tech, and so on.ĭifferent factions led to slightly different play experiences, but not in a way that’s noticeable at first. The original colony ship was split apart by disagreements over how to treat this new home, this untouched (by human hands) planet. At the game’s opening, your faction’s colony pod crashes on one of Alpha Centauri’s planets. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is quite different from other strategy games, and from the Civilization series, in story (play-wise, it’s mostly Civilization in space with some adjustments). It’s all about expanding, bettering, and guiding your civilization, trying to build that spaceship so you can blast off to Alpha Centauri. You’re leader, of some sort (you have the face of a famous person in Civ IV), but why you’re leading and how you’re leading are fairly unimportant as Civilizations’ “story” is concerned. That’s the kind of story the Civilization series has always had. It makes it easier to enjoy the game itself if you ignore these laughable cutscenes and strange frame stories. Blizzard still drops hours of deadly serious cinematic full of sadly unironic bombast in our laps with every RTS, HoMM only recently started including interesting stories in their games, and Red Alert insists on throwing weird FMV and cheesecake at us with every new release.īut for the most part, a story in a strategy game is something that everyone pretends doesn’t exist. Some observers have been known to cynically note that real-time strategy and turn-based strategy narratives are lacking - and have been for a while.
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