Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack

(Note: if you're on Windows 11, you can use the Baggs patch to fix the game crashing if EA hasn't fixed it yet. https://github.com/nathan-baggs/Adamite ) I know Steam says I have next to no hours. It's not counting the hundreds of hours I had on the original copy I bought when I was in high school. The hundreds, if not thousands more hours I played in college once I finally got my hands on Alien Crossfire. I have bought this game four times now. I own a DRM free digital copy and I still spent $5 on a Steam copy just to support it. (One of these days I'll do another campaign! But I also have so many other games that need to be played and so much less time than I did back in the day.) Anyway, this is a fantastic game to this day. It does, of course, show its age. That 2024 release date is a lie; this released in 1999. The writing and world building have aged like fine wine; it's not told in a linear fashion, but the game does have a story you can tease out, and the original seven factions have fantastic writing and flavor. (The expansion factions are mechanically strong, but not quite as interesting for the most part.) While the graphics are a bit rough to the modern eye, they're still functional and entirely readable. It does make heavy use of keyboard shortcuts and menus; it's less intuitive than modern games usually are. I honestly don't know how the learning curve is to the modern gamer; when I first played this I came from Civ II, which is this game's direct predecessor, and a lot of the controls and mechanics carried over; I never had to learn it from scratch. If you like 4X games or well-told science fiction stories and can adapt to the somewhat archaic UI, this is well worth your $5.

Sad that it doesn't work :(

LOVE THIS GAME... STILL HAS IT

This game still holds up so well. If you are a fan of sci-fi and civ-like game play. I highly encourage you to try it. Don't let the 2024 steam release date fool you, this is over 20 years old.

One of the greatest games of all time, a true gem.

It's an oldy but a goodie. The one, the only, Alpha Centauri! I've been playing it for 20 years.

endless hours of fun!

planet more like plant

This was my favorite game when it came out. It finally showed up on Steam. I prefer to play the Alien Crossfire version. BUT... on Windows 11, IT WILL CRASH as soon as the first autosave happens! This is a program bug in the game itself, not Steam's fault. There is a patch that fixes it: Adamite.exe is a program written by Nathan Baggs. Find it on www.nexusmods.com. This patch fixes the program error in SMAX that causes it to crash in Windows 11 (not previous windows versions or Linux). Running Adamite.exe will cause Windows to freak out. No worries! Just override Windows refusal to run the program. There will also be something about hash. Ignore this and continue. Adamite will create a small window. On your computer, go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Find terranx.exe (NOT terran.exe) Drag terranx.exe into the window the program created and run the program. It should be very fast. Go back to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and rename terranx.exe (I used terranxBUGGYORIGINAL.exe) Find terranx_nb.exe, and rename it terranx.exe. Done. Game will run without crashing.

The game brings back memories. Games just don't have the same depth anymore.