HISTORY Following on from the success of Civilization and Civilization 2, gamers the world over were expecting a third incarnation, which would use at least some of the whizzo hardware that was becoming available. However, Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds departed Microprose to set up their own outfit, Firaxis and all that came of the rumours and dreams was "Civilization, Call to Power" , "Civilization: Test of Time" and a slew of scenarios for Civ2. SMAC was in production for a fair old while and, amongst the strategy community at least, was one of the most eagerly awaited games of the decade. THE GAME If you know Civilization, you will know how to play SMAC. It's as simple as that. In most respects, it's the game Civ3 would have been, except that it is set in space and way into the future, which is where one's niggling doubts come in. More on that later. In essence then, you start the game with the ship that you launched at the end of Civ2 arriving in the Alpha Centauri star system, only to find that you've brought with you all of mankind's age old problems. A major malfunction en route has left the ship disabled and without formal leadership, so the seven strongest personalities onboard have set themselves up as the heads of disparate factions, intent on pursuing their own agendas in separate colonies on Planet's surface. (I sincerely hope our first real extra-terrestrial colonists don't come up with a name as trite as that for their new home!) These factions equate to the races in the Civ' games, but this time round their individual characteristics really do affect the way you play, both as and against. The way this is done is by "hard wiring" advantages and disadvantages into the faction profiles. For instance, playing as University, you have a much better research rate than any of the other factions, but your open attitude to technology means that you are the most vulnerable to espionage, or "probe" as it is called in this game. Playing as the Spartans, a militaristic, survivalist cult, you don't have to pay extra resources for first-of-type units and they get a morale upgrade right out of the box. On the downside, your technology rate is terrible. Cities and Diplomacy. The principle is identical to that of Civ'. Build and develop cities, produce more colony pods to found yet more settlements and then defend them, both against the other factions and the native lifeforms. These little beasties are particularly voracious, using Psionic powers to attack your units and cities. They are a lot more of a problem than the old Barbarians and towards the end of the game can even upset the balance of power if you aren't ready for them. Interaction between you and the other leaders has also been enhanced over that in the Civ' games, with many more options open each time you speak and, in general, more realistic attitudes. For instance, if you have an alliance with the U.N faction, which promotes democracy and co-operation, then you aren't going to get on with the totalitarian Hive. Adopt the corporate policies of the Morganites and you will fall foul of the Gaians' tree hugging leader. It is possible however, because I've done it, to play an entire game with only minor skirmishes with your rivals. By sharing technology, lending energy (the game's currency) when requested and staying out of other people's territory, you can play an almost entirely peaceful game. That way, however, you won't get to muck around with all the wonderful military units available. The AI isn't perfect though and you will still get odd events, such as a close ally declaring vendetta for the most trivial of reasons. Having said that, one of the major advances over Civ' is that each faction treats every other one in the same way as they treat you. If one outfit commits an atrocity (e.g. using nerve gas, razing a city or dropping a planet buster), then it will suffer the consequences. You can also co-ordinate battles with your allies, even to the extent of handing over units to each other, though the AI still needs a deal of tweaking to make it really effective. Building stuff is done in the same way as Civ', but with the most welcome addition of a queueing system. This is a godsend, though you need to keep long queues under review to make sure you aren't overcome by events. It is quite common to find that some older cities are beavering away at something quite nice but useless, while a war is raging close by. There are plenty of alert options, but just as in Civ', it is well worthwhile having a scan through all your cities every now and again. To take some of the micro-management burden off players, city Governors have been introduced. There are four priority settings (the same as for science); build, grow, conquer and discover. It is possible to rewrite the defaults so that Governors produce stuff closer to your liking, but aside from selecting Grow in newly captured cities, I have seldom used it. Units. The unit workshop is one of the game's added bonuses, though it has to be said that it could have been a little better implemented . The idea is that each unit, military or otherwise, is constructed from a number of components, all of which can be upgraded on discovering the appropriate technologies. Therefore each unit has a chassis, whether infantry, speeder, hovertank, air (fixed and rotary wing), or one of several naval versions, including foil, cruiser and battleship. Added to this is shielding, from none to such esoteric materials as photon wall and synthmetal. Weapons start at basic handguns, but progress through lasers, missiles and various futuristic variations such as the Graviton gun. Most chassis can also carry things like colony pods or supply modules (analogous to caravans in Civ'), so you can build such weird and wonderful units as Needlejet colony ships, should you have the desire. Finally, each unit has the capability (depending upon technology researched) to be equipped with up to two special abilities. These might be blink displacers, (which act as cloaking devices), ECM, anti-air or anti-Psi, nerve gas or drop pods. To design your unit then, you simply call up the Workshop panel and get going, adding bits and pieces as you see fit, but all the while keeping a close eye on the cost. To keep things sensible, any unit with a zero in its ADM number will be very economical. Tool up a shard hovertank with the latest armour and a blink displacer, however and the cost will go through the roof, and that doesn't include the extra charge for producing a prototype. Therefore if you intend to build a lot of units quickly, they will either have to have fire power, or armour but not both. This isn't as bad as it sounds, because the combat has been changed rather substantially from that found in Civ'. Defending stacks are no longer destroyed when one unit loses a battle. Instead, the AI chooses the best defender ( you can override this by designating a unit as prime defence) and should it lose, only it is destroyed, while all other units take damage depending on the usual factors. This makes the use of mixed forces a real option and allows for much more interesting battles. Production, technology and government. Same as Civ', pretty much. Energy has replaced trade, minerals are your new shields and food is food. Energy is broken down into science, credits and psych' (luxuries). You can prioritise your research in one or more of four areas; pure knowledge, growth, military and economy. The default option for the game is blind research, where you can't select what you will learn next, but have to take what the AI gives you, modified by your priorities. This can lead to frustrations, for instance where you can't build habitation domes because you haven't reached the appropriate level in the Build tech' tree, so all your cities stall at size 14 or so. However, it isn't entirely unrealistic and introduces a welcome random element into things, adding to replay value. If the game has a weakness, it is in the technologies and their applications. Being set some way into the future, you don't have to research things like the wheel and bronze working. Instead you have such options as polymorphic software and sentient algorithms. See the problem? Having no frame of reference for all these sci-fi gizmos, it is possible to get more than a little lost and, combined with the blind option, research just becomes a lottery. I therefore prefer to deselect the random setting and go for directed research, where each time you get four options. It helps you learn the new technologies more quickly as well as giving you a bit more control. It is in government that the game really scores. There are three strands; economy, philosophy and future concepts. For instance, you can choose a wealth oriented, police state, or a knowledge based democracy. As you get the later technologies, you are presented with such futuristic options as Eudemia. All these modify your numbers in each of the ten areas of city life, such as unit morale, science rate, resistance to espionage and efficiency. It is in these factors that the Faction hard wiring is done and they will seriously affect the pace of research and the amount of cash you are bringing in each month. With some 64 combinations possible by the end of the game, you can just about create exactly the society you want for any given situation, though at a cost and with major trade-offs. Victory. There are four paths to victory. Conquest, of course, or you could be elected supreme planetary leader by unanimous vote of the other (surviving) leaders. The trickiest method is to corner the energy market and I haven't even thought of attempting it yet. The big win comes to the faction that is the first to build the Secret Project (Wonders in Civ'), Ascent to Transcendence, which opens the door to the next step in Man's evolution. Unfortunately, once the precursor project has been completed, all factions can enter the race, which shifts the game's balance more than a little. SUMMARY. Everyone says it, this is the game Civ3 would have been. Still might be, for that matter, as Sid and Brian are working on it right at this very moment. The animated, customisable units; 3D, terraformable terrain; improved diplomacy; sophisticated social engineering and flexible multiplayer options are all you could wish for. The graphics are nice, though the terrain is a little boring, with just greens, browns and pinks on land. There's quite a bit of multimedia, with wee videos accompanying each Secret Project and the capture of a faction leader, as well as audio with each technological discovery. In the unpatched version, this was poorly implemented, but by Version 4, it was sorted out and now works very nicely. On the subject of patches, a word of praise for the developers, as well as a bit of a bollocking. On first release, the game was bugged to hell. The screams of frustration in the fora on the Firaxis site were a thing to behold, but to their credit, Firaxis were working on it from day one and about a month after the game was released, a big patch came out. This sorted out the snags for some systems, but three more patches were required before things ran the way they were supposed to. To some extent this was down to the European insistence on copy protection (the UK version of the first patch was several weeks behind the US one), but the US version had its problems too. Whatever, patched to version 4 the game is as smooth as silk and just as stable. Some say that it's too easy and certainly at the middle setting, I have little difficulty winning, though that could be down to the experience gained from a huge number of games of Civilization 1 and 2. A lot depends on which faction you choose however, as the key to success is still science and two of them have a major advantage, so if you are playing one of the others, you will have to find a way to catch up. It's a good game, but if you aren't into Civilization and its offshoots, forget it. It can take days to finish a game and if you sort out the opposition early, the last couple of centuries can be a bit of a grind. I imagine that a lot of the concepts and execution seen in the game will find their way into Civ3 (see the Apolyton site for news) when it comes out (~2001?), which should make for a stunning game.
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