posted 03-06-99 06:54 AM ET        

What surprised me first of all was how many people couldnt even get their
games to install or to work in the first place! At least, I can play the
standard game although, and this is something which brought back memories
of 'Master of Orion 2', even the 'nursery slopes' standard Citizen game
seems pretty hard going! But it put my problems into some sort of
perspective.

Conceptually, the game is marvellous. I keep imagining the
scenario even when away from it like some great Sci-fi novel I am reading,
I am living. But do you out theres share some of the gripes I have? Such as,
they should have gone in for 'production points' or some such concept. As
it stands, I find it difficult to know whether it is a good budgetary
practice to order any given production item (combat unit or facility or
what have you) from any given base. I find the energy/mineral status of any
given base difficult to work out. What do you do when you suddenly get that
pop-up which says that your citizens are starving and have fled the
factories or you are out of minerals and cant build anything? There doesnt
seem anything much you can do, as far as I can see. You are in a vicious
circle. You cant build anything to feed your citizens or your factories
because you cant build anything... duh, to feed your citizens or your
factories. What I have to do is let the Governor on automatic work it out
but he has to scrap stuff willy nilly, sometimes valuable combat units or
facilities, and let people starve which isnt a satisfactory resolution for
'Brother Christopher Mark of the Peacekeepers' the Enlightened One. But I
have as yet worked out no other form of command to handle the situation
more economically. This really got me with
'Master of Orion 2' - in real life, things dont have to be scrapped but
mothballed until you can afford to reactivate them. Also, while we are
talking about production, in real life production can be parallel not
serial. That is, a city can make a creche AND a bomber. Only, if it makes
both together perhaps it has to make them more slowly or expensively. Why
couldnt that have been factored in?

Secondly, some of the pop-up graphics are great - I am in love with Lady
Gaia and Col Santiago - treacherous ladies though they may be. But I agreed
with another bulletin that the icons for units, cities etc. are really
quite crude. With all the terrific work which went into the research on the
game, couldnt they have put a little effort into the look of the thing as
the units plays. For instance, there is this space strategy game called
'Pax Imperia', less sophisticated than Alpha Centauri, but as one reviewer
said trully, 'the look of the game just draws you in.' It is the concept
of AC which draws me in DESPITE the looks.

Thirdly, do any of you find some of your units buggy? I automate a plane and it
crashes out of fuel. Or it keeps stopping and and I have to nurse it back
to base. Perhaps the pilot shouldnt have been let out of flying school? I dont know. But I thought
automating a unit should enable it to take care of itself freeing me to
worry more properly about strategic matters.Also, in my first game, I built a
colony pod in a city in the heart of Peackeeper territory only to find it
suddenly turn up in the heart of Sister Miriam's! (I hadnt built the
Planetary Transit system by the way). For once, Sister Miriam had a right
to be 'seething'! I had to destroy it to avoid a war! I also notice that I
get a 'production finished' voice but I cant read the specific message to
which it refers in the message box because I cant scroll it while a turn is
being played out. 'Turn complete' is another bugbear. Turn complete,
alright, so I want to order a depleted unit back to base, maybe more than
one, redirect a colony pod somewhere else, stuff like that. I redirect my
first unit and then the game launches immediately into another whole turn!

Now, to the Scenario Editor (SE). I spent the whole first weekend of owning
the game struggling with that to no avail. I have so far eluded this
'terran.exe' thing, about which people are complaining, thanks be to the God of computing. No, the fatal
'knocking on my window' is 'unable to allocate draw buffer'. Like, alright,
what do I do now? A little more helpfully, it says that it has encountered
a programme error and I should contact the vendor. I tried every possible
combination. First I had done a bit of landscaping (that certainly pandered
to my God complex) - I was marking out the best territory for my beloved
Peacekeepers, of course - and then added the units. It fell over. Then I
sadly put aside the landscaping option and just added the units, with some
extra scouts and rovers and choppers of the Peacekeepers - well, they have
a job ahead of them with those crazies out there to police - and that fell
over. And then I didnt do any landscaping or add any other units but just
put down some colony pods - more for the Peacekeepers of course. That didnt
work either. Well, not quite. I did get one game going, sort of. All the
other factions I had laid out - and it takes quite a while, doesnt it, to set up
all the parameters, as well as the units - started busily colonising, turn
after turn, but my peacekeepers didnt make a move! I couldnt get them to
budge! Like they had all gone into hibernation! Or been killed within
their pods by some mysterious space sickness or bio-weapon or malfunction or sabotage! I gave up on
the SE then but happily I can now report that I am in a standard,
non-scenario game where the Peacekeepers are doing okay so I am somewhat
mollified. As I said before, at least I can play the game, which is more
than can be said for some of the poor souls out there.

By the way, I downloaded the alternative colour pallete but cant get that
to work! I can unzip it but there seems nothing to execute. And it took
more than an hour to download! I am not colour-blind but find it difficult
to work out the nature of any given square on the current palette. I just
automate my terraformers and let them get on with it. They can understand
the map far better than my poor eyes can interpret it!

I see they are now doing beta testing. In short, they did nowhere near
enough testing on this game before releasing it! I cant believe, I just
CANT believe, they did proper testing on the Scenario Editor option. Why
give us the damn thing, just to tantalise us, when it turns out to be so
buggy. It definitely needs a patch. Oh, patches, brilliant! If you are
European or English like me - you are second class citizens. You have to
wait for your patch to be developed. The Americans come first. I never
heard of that before. A game with a somewhat different programme for
different countries! Still, having said that, I did derive a certain
guilty pleasure from finding out that for some Americans the patch doesnt
install or work!

That 'Civilisation: Call to Power', from Sid Meier's old company' is coming out a month after AC wouldnt have anything to do with all this bugginess, would it? The impression I am getting is that Firaxis decided to rush this game out 'coute qui coute', as the French say.