Alpha Centauri is a ~14 year old game by Firaxis that some people (including me) consider the best Firaxis game ever made. News about Civ: Beyond Earth has got me thinking about it and then playing it again.
That said, I wanted to talk about a few aspects of it that I feel are broken. This isn't nostalgia dissipating because I only started playing the game when it was already 6 years old or so and I've pretty much always found parts of it a little broken.
1) Forests give you an ecology bonus, 1 food, 1 energy, and 2 minerals, even when they're planted on a desert tile. They also grow on their own, and they scale into late game with building upgrades. I feel that forests are just unreasonably good. They probably shouldn't give you 2 minerals. I think 1/1/1 would be fair given they work like that almost anywhere and grow on their own.
Since we're terraforming maybe it DOES make sense that most of your tiles would become earth plants.... is this intentional maybe? I still think they're too much of a no-brainer either way. Unless you're role playing a Captain Planet bad guy, why would you not mostly build forests?
2) Supply crawlers. These should really be capped at convoying ONE unit of any resource, max, to your city. Otherwise you can just build more workers by making them, basically. That or some other debuff.
3) The Hunter Seeker Algorithm. I mostly play University, and when you get this baby, your faction loses its major disadvantage completely. Yeah I know you can block them from it, but there is no other faction + secret project combo this good.
Any other SMAC fans who feel the same way about these things?
Still my favorite civ game but these aspects of it bug me.
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