Forums » The Lounge » Read Thread

Alpha Centauri is such a great fucking game, we should have a thread just to gush about it.

Wouldn't be out of place in a writing forum either with all the lore in the tech quotes. Though the voice acting was a bit part of that too.

"Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign: televids, touchbooks, holos, psi-tours-- the works. People need heroes. They don't need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers."

                                               --Morgan Stellartots Keynote Speech, "Mythology for Profit"

What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.

Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"

From mizal:

Endmaster I was fixing to make mine italics too why did you have to post??  

Yes, yes, we've all heard the philosophers babble about "oneness" being "beautiful" and "holy". But let me tell you that this kind of oneness certainly isn't pretty and if you're not careful it will scare the bejeezus out of you.
        --Anonymous Lab Technician, MorganLink 3DVision Live Interview

Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.

     --CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Ethics of Greed"

My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?

• Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"

Love all the quotes. Every one. I could do this all day.

• Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?
  • Sister Miriam Godwinson, "But for the Grace of God"

I'm guessing from the quotes you mostly picked you liked to play as Morgan Industries?

I usually picked The University or the Spartan Federation. (Or the Cyborg Collective with the expansion)

Never picked the Hive much mainly because they made for a better ongoing faction to fight against to keep things interesting. The Believers were okay enemies until later on, then they severely fell behind in tech and were essentially religious rednecks fighting you with shotguns while you had fusion cannons.

Probably the most annoying foe were the Peacekeepers though.

I liked the University, but Gaia's Stepdaughters were the easiest to win with.

I usually managed to be friendly with Deirdre and sometimes had an alliance with her, but the more fanatical Cult of the Planet I was usually at war with a lot.

Thanks Seth!

But yeah I used Morgan a lot, he's basically easy mode.

The hilarious thing about Miriam is that everyone hates her as this fundamentalist religious nut. She has all the usual stereotypical whining about 'things man was not meant to meddle with', then obviously gets left in the dust (as an AI faction...the trick when playing as her was to steal techs) and usually gets taken out early on...and then as the game goes on and the truly fucked up technologies start showing up, you start getting all those quotes from her where it turns out that holy shit, Miriam was right.

We Must Dissent

And as for plot bits gleaned from reading between the lines goes, it took me the longest time and a bunch of discussion on another forum to realize what was going on with Deidre's 'Secret War' against the Spartans. (There was no war ever declared, she was using mind worms under her control and letting it get blamed on Planet until she was ready to roll in and take their base.)

As the writhing, teeming mass of mindworms swarmed over the outer perimeter, we saw the defenders recoil in horror. "Stay calm! Use your flame guns!" shouted the commander, but to no avail. It is well known that the Mind Worm Boil uses psychic terror to paralyze its prey, and then carefully implants ravenous larvae into the brains of its still-conscious victims. Even with the best weapons, only the most disciplined troops can resist this horrific attack.

— Lady Deirdre Skye, "Our Secret War" 

Also this used to scare the crap out of me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lva8L-J8x04

Oh and here's another fun one:

Some civilian workers got in among the research patients today and became so hysterical I felt compelled to have them nerve stapled. The consequence, of course, will be another public relations nightmare, but I ws severely shaken by the extent of their revulsion towards a project so vital to our survival. — CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Personal Diaries

So Civilization: Beyond Earth is supposed to be Alpha Centauri's successor, but from what I've mostly heard and read is that it sucks even more than Civilization 5, anyone here play both for comparison?

Spiritual successor. It's not the same setting and from everything I've read it's extremely bland.

Maybe it'll be worth playing after a few expansion.

It's basically just a reskin of Civ 5.