I used to always either play Morgan or the pirate guys from the expansion pack, and Chairman Yang was always my strongest opponent.

We must dissent.

Please don’t go. The drones need you. They look up to you.

I always preferred the Gaians myself.

Ooh, wb flurie, didn’t realise you were still reading…

Apart from old-timers like me, though, how many people are really familiar with a game that’s what, about 13 years old?

This brings back memories:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier’s_Alpha_Centauri

“Apart from old-timers like me, though, how many people are really familiar with a game that’s what, about 13 years old? “

Me. Though not specifically *this* game, mind you, just generally old games. <_<

Afraid I never got into this one, I’m more of a Civilization I old-timer. Although generic space colonisation seems like a perfectly good theme, if you’re happy with off-theme suggestions from players who don’t know any better.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I still play it fairly regularly.  It’s still one of the highest-acclaimed games of all time.

Play it? I still have an active PbEM chain of Alpha Centauri going. Admittedly that’s partly because a PbEM game of SMAC takes a good year to complete.

This game was AWESOME.

I played a demo one time. Does that help?

I may just start playing this again. Wow.

I agree with Kevan (though I’ve never played Civilization I; I started with II).

Awesome. I always preferred Colonization and Alpha Centauri to the Civ games myself. Video games were so much better in those days, when pixels were noses and phalangites could defeat modern battleships in one-on-one combat.

The one thing that stops me from voting for this is that it’s a great theme but gives me no indication of what kind of mechanic you’d be going for. What would the gameplay look like in a space colonisation dynasty?

I’ve decided to withdraw my manifesto and support Ienpw III for now.  What I would have gone for was allowing players to pick a faction and their social engineering choices, and then let the overall mechanic for military/diplomatic/economic warfare develop, eventually having the victory conditions be the same as in SMAC: military dominance, economic dominance, diplomatic dominance, or transcendence.  But I realized we’d basically be creating “Alpha Centauri, the text based version” and constraining ideas to fit within the framework of the existing video game, rather than creating a new and wonderful original game.  So let’s go with a “blank nomic”, in my opinion.