Alpha Centauri is in my humble opinion the best game ever. It has everythign i could ever want. A good tech tree, Multiplayer, Endless replay, no shiny graphics. Just good honest game play, if Ares were ported to windows platform and was allowed to use Battle.net then that woudl be teh best game ever. Although swoop comes in a close secound. Anyone else play Alpha Centauri , if not you should.

I played the demo a veeeeery long time ago. Seemed like a good game, but I never really got into it.

Currently, we're waiting for Ares to run on post-10.3 (which will most likely never happen). Good luck getting it ported to Windows!

I was an Alpha Centauri master, back before I lost the CD and could no longer install it. I tell you, planet buster carrying submarines were the key to victory.

Alien Crossfire took it to an even higher level, even if the pirates were unbeatable, though ironically enough I always ended up terraforming the planet so that it was all land covered in fungus.

But yeah, the game was indeed fantastic. A lot of fun.

Edit: I did just remember, however, that there was a pretty severe bug that, if you took the time to utilize it, allowed you to prevent your opponents from actually building anything (unless they had the money to rush it). Ahhh, good times.

I have it, though I have not played it in a loooong time. I'm not much of one for turn-based strategy.

One early bug was that you could click on an enemy city and while there, choose different squares for it to harvest, starving it of resources. Is that what you are referring to? It was patched, a little way down the line.

Anyway, Alpha Centauri and SMAX were great. Very happy times in the late 90's... and in fact I have to confess I still fire it up and play nowadays. It's one of the reasons I still have a Mac that can run Classic applications. Sure, the AI wasn't the brightest, but it was still a brilliant game concept. As was Civilisation.

AC is simply the best TBS I've ever played. My favorite strategy is to grab a tech monopoly with the University and then use the bonuses from grabbing all the secret projects to swarm locusts.

I need to see if anyone has a copy of LinCentauri on Ebay... cause it did get ported, though Loki has been dead for years.

VA and others--you do know there's a carbonized (beta) version of SMAC? It works fine for me with OS X (I believe earlier versions had bugs), although it might only work in non-full screen, it's been a while since I played:

http://www.brad-oliver.com:8081/~boliver/SMAC_Carbon_b3.sit

I remember playing a demo of Alien Crossfire awhile back and it was pretty fun, though I never bought it.

I played it way back in the day, it was quite enjoyable. But compared to Civ 2 or Civ:CTP, I never really played it as much. I dunno why, it just never struck me as replayable as the others, and after one game of building your own designs, it got tedious. I probably should have picked up Alien Crossfire, but never did. Oh well, I moved on to Civ3 when that came out, and I'm currently on Civ4. Honestly, Alpha Centauri seems rather outdated to me at this point. Civ4 is extremely good fun, has the simplicity I knew and loved from Civ2, and the soundtrack is amazing too. What's best is you can sit down and have an hour game, or a game lasting a few days, or a game lasting a week, you get to decide what kind of time you have.

Yes! Alpha Centauri is definitely the best TBS game I have ever played. Frankly, I played it a ton more than any Civ game, and it was soooo replayable. I probably still have all my custom factions. I've had games lasting months and 've even beaten the game within 6 hours on Transcend.

I wish I had been able to find Alien Crossfire. By the time I knew it existed, it was out of stores and selling for $50 on Ebay.

First post here - and all because I'm searching for SMAC for Apple; have SMAX for both PC and classic Mac, as well as SMAC for PC. Would love to have SMAC for OSX [Tiger], but guess will have to settle to just running this great game on the PC, and/or acquiring latest Civ for OSX. Have corrupted my mom, younger brother, and both boys [13 and 8 years old] into 'wasting' hours playing...

PS: macmaxbh - can you explain more about this carbonized version? What does a person need to have/do for this? BTW, nice quote...

Actually, I lied. I remember now that I did order Alien Crossfire. Only, when I got it I discovered it was for Mac (I run PC). Sucked for me; I had it but couldn't play it. Oh well, the original was good enough.

Ha-ha. Feel the pain.


I mean that in the nicest way possible

I hate you guys. I really do.


You made me spent WAY too much of my break glued to Alpha Centauri.

My strategy is to build cheap, low-power units and then use the upgrade feature. Gets a lot of powerful units into service fast.

I swear I posted a response to this but it DISAPPEARED! Or perhaps I never hit "submit".

You need a Mac copy of Alpha Centauri; then you download the archive, put the carbon app in the same folder as the classic app (or replace it, I forget which) and then launch it. There may be a freezing bug due to full-screen, I don't remember.