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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9372127" data-attributes="member: 18">You are far too kind to Civilization: After Earth here!It wasn't an attempt to recapture the magic of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri except perhaps from the perspective of whoever initially commissioned it to be made at Firaxis. The actual pair of people in charge of it behaved in truly astonishing ways, mind-blowing ways. Let me list just a couple of them:1) Early on, they happily admitted that neither of them had ever played Alpha Centauri, and further, said they no intention of playing Alpha Centauri, seemingly on the basis that this might spoil their magnificent "vision" of After Earth. This by itself is essentially the equivalent of some director who has never made a movie before, just some music videos, making a new Mad Max movie and saying "Yeah I heard there were some other ones by some Miller dude, but like, who cares about that old man and his dumb old people movies, I get it - post-apocalypse with cars, that's all I need to know!".Later on, this story changed slightly to only one of them having not played Alpha Centauri, but frankly, I believe the first version of the story. Nothing at all about AE suggests any knowledge of, let alone comprehension of SMAC. It's not even a cargo cult version of SMAC - it doesn't even rise to the level of cargo cult! There are some SMAC references, but they're all very low-end, and I suspect designers who worked on the game added them rather than the two lead devs.2) The two leads were extremely pleased with themselves and gave a lot of rambling interviews and self-indulgent press info (which to be fair, was fairly characteristic of games journalism at the time). In one of them*, they listed off all their science-fiction influences.It was... worse than you could possibly imagine. It wasn't even gonzo trash. That would have been better. Instead, the first part was basically a list of ultra-mainstream sci-fi novels from about 1960 to 1981 - not even clever, thoughtful stuff like Haldeman's Forever War - just the absolutely most mainstream stuff for that era. I was astonished by this list. Basically nothing which influenced SMAC except Dune was on the list, because SMAC was heavily influenced by a lot of then-quite-recent sci-fi (as well as a lot of deeper cut older stuff). Oh and randomly the one later book series they talked about being influenced by was the Hyperion Cantos, and this was well after Simmons had become a very intentionally public** psychotic anti-Muslim and ultra-racist bigot, so that was a bold choice to claim!So that was bad, and then they listed their TV/movie sci-fi influences, and it was both a paltry amount of stuff, but what was really striking was - almost none of it was space SF - it was things like Terminator, which yeah, like great movie, but you're making a game about colonizing an alien world and you're not mentioning, say, Solaris? It was like having a guy who doesn't watch sci-fi name sci-fi movies.And you're probably thinking, but Ruin you're critiquing the authors so meanly, you're not even critiquing the game, and it's like, I'd be here all day if I critiqued that game, and I have cooking to do!But if you have lead designers with zero real inspiration, very limited love for sci-fi, like less than the average SF enthusiast, and absolutely no respect whatsoever for or understanding of SMAC, they game they are going to (rightly) be contrasted with, you're building on sand. And the ultra-bland, sad, "game" we got, which felt more like the sort of total conversion that Civ IV would have just had in an expansion pack really was not good on any level, and it was up against a straight masterpiece - a game that not only played well, was aesthetically stunning, but also genuinely was good science fiction. This bland rubbish was none of that. I'd say it was like the Sylvester Stallone remake of Get Carter, but at least that movie showed the writers had maybe seen Get Carter!Unforgiveable and thus unforgiven. Call to Power was mediocre as hell but it wasn't as insultingly bad as this. I suspect Revolutions is better too but never played it so can't say.Apart from that, great list and very correct ordering, frankly. Much as it pains me to admit it, Civ V did eventually become the best Civ, and Civ IV was, in the end, better than Civ II, albeit by a lesser margin than one might have hoped.Agree completely re: Civ VI - I wanted to love it, particularly because of the Civs they chose, but it just feels too board-game-y in a bad way. Civ was never really a simulation (Civ II and SMAC were probably closest to even wanting to be that), but this was too far in the completely disconnected from even a sense of history direction.* = Actually more than one, but I'm thinking of a specific one - I think they repeated a subset of the same points in others.** = He published an open letter about how Muslims were going to kill us all. Still waiting on that.</blockquote>

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