05-10-2009, 07:30 AM
Quote:Alpha Centauri is a near-perfect game, with a gigantic, glaring flaw that you could drive a truck through: the AI. If all you're looking for is a single-player strategy game that will keep you challenged for years to come, you can safely give SMAC a pass, it's just not going to cut it. Once you know the ropes, you can trounce the computer on any settings you like.
SMAC was just a game that was too advanced for the AI-writing capability of the time and for several years thereafter. Civ3 was a great example of this; they couldn't write a decent AI, so they massively slashed down the options available to the player and hard capped various mechanics at both ends to force the AI into competitiveness.
That said, it doesn't mean it isn't going to keep you challenged. I approached it sort of like Diablo: yeah, the base game is not really all that hard, but you can come up with a lot of challenges to make it interesting.
Seconding recommendations on Diplomacy and PS:T, although Diplomacy is hard to get into. You need to play with six other people to get the real experience, and play-by-e-mail games are slow and typically die a few turns in when half the players lose interest (of course, face-to-face games rarely end either considering how long it takes). I know there's a computer game, but I really don't see Diplomacy as a game a computer can play well at all.