Weekend Recap, Vienna Teng concert, Alpha Centauri

This past week was pretty busy at work, to the point where I am being encouraged to take it easy this next week if possible, so that is going to be the plan of action.

I did not get a TON of stuff done this weekend but I did not exactly set out to do so in the first place, so that is not exactly a failure by any means.

Let's see what there is to mention...

I tuned in for Vienna Teng's concert on Saturday (yesterday).  As before, she always makes me think about how well she performs.  I thought to myself that I have never in my life performed anything with that amount of confidence.  Not among video games, tetris, speedcubing, music, marching band, social dance, glowsticking, taichi, programming, or anything else that I can think of.  That's not really out of the ordinary, I mean, most of us are not heavily involved in the performing arts, and I myself have been on record many times as preferring the practice of creation to performance, but it still really made me think about things.  Vienna has some very beautiful songs, and some that are really resonant, especially performed live, but her new work really "clicked" for me in a way that I'm not really sure any of her other works really had.

I think the closest I could compare it to is watching movies or reading stories.  There are some movies that you watch and you feel that they are very heartfelt and beautiful, but at the same time they don't really have the same impact on you because they're not really coming from the same space as you.  Like a story about parenting, for someone who doesn't ever intend on being a parent.  Or a story about the slow passage of time, for someone who has not yet escaped the fast-paced days of their youth.  Or a story about family conflict for someone who had no family at all.  That kind of thing.  I think a lot (not all?) of Vienna's other songs were and are sort of like that for me.  But this one wasn't, at that moment.  It was really good.

I accomplished....one and half things really, this weekend.  I worked on commission stuff a little bit, though I did not finish -- looks like this particular assignment is going to be one of the more slow-going ones.  Aside from that, I also drove around and did my Santa run, delivering to...7 different stops I believe, this time, waving hi from a distance while wearing mask and Santa hood.  It was kind of surreal seeing all these people exist in person, sort of a weird reminder.  In a way it was quite nice to actually interact with these people, albeit briefly, but in another way, it sort of made it feel more "real" that yeah, these are the people that I'm basically no longer seeing anymore at this time.

Well, I mean, in addition to all the other people from my past.  You know the ones.

EDIT: Gah, I forgot, I actually accomplished something else this weekend as well.  I put up the flash game archive on my website, as well as links to that on all of the affected games, so my flash games are all ready to be run past the end of 2020 (albeit locally -- sadly they will not be able to run in-browser anymore.  RIP flash).  Good to finally cross that off of my TODO list for now.  One thing at a time...

I finished a full game of Alpha Centauri.  I don't think I'll be playing another.  For those of you who don't know (and that's probably basically all of you?), Alpha Centauri is a Sid Meier game, heavily based on Civilization II, but this time set on the planet Chiron of the titular Alpha Centauri system -- in other words, using a sci-fi setting as opposed to Civ 2 which is on Earth and starts from the Ancient era.

I admittedly don't have much experience with other Civ games at all, and my main 4X game of choice is actually Master of Orion 2, so I don't have much to compare off of.  However I feel like Alpha Centauri offers some cool things....while also not really being super great as an overall experience.

I do feel like Alpha Centauri really evokes a strong sense of worldbuilding, of imagery, and of an interesting yet also bleak (?) outlook on humanity.  The planet of Chiron is infested with an alien psionic consciousness as well as "mind worms" which sprout from the xenofungus and psionically attack your troops.  The Planet itself, has a sort of "life" to it, and ends up sending more of these worm units to assault your bases in response to ecological damage such as aggressive terraforming.  The "research-based" route to victory actually has you research a way to merge human consciousness with that of the planet itself, leading to "Transcendence".  So that whole thing is pretty unique to Alpha Centauri.

The setting of having different factions split off, each with their own beliefs and strengths/weaknesses, is great too.  Of course this is standard for a civ game -- previously you'd have things like the Romans, or the Egyptians, or the Aztecs.  But this time you get factions that are based on areas of focus -- one is led by the chief science officer of the original ship, and another is led by the woman who was in charge of hydroponics.

But I think even more than that is the interesting way in which Alpha Centauri paints the technological advances and technologies/events that arise over the course of the game.  There's a video accompanying every "secret project" that you build, and not all of them are exactly happy-go-lucky celebrations.  The one for "The Self-Aware Colony" for example, repeats the words "We must dissent", with a quote, "Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind."  This is the upgrade that halves energy maintenance costs and puts an extra point of policing at every one of your bases to quell unruly citizens -- both good things -- but the video itself stands in stark contrast to this.

And many of the sci-fi advances -- nanotech, cloning vats, clinical immortality, mind control, cybernetics -- offer this same sort of duality.  They offer you exceedingly large gameplay benefits, while painting an ever-bleak picture of dystopia as being inevitable with human advancement.  The 7 factions of the original starship land on Alpha Centauri to "begin anew" after Earth was abandoned, but really they brought with them all of the baggage of mankind as a species.

There are seldom any "good guys" in Alpha Centauri and the vices of each faction are way more apparent and blatant here than in Civ, where you get something like "The Babylonians have science and religion as their strengths".  Instead in Alpha Centauri if you want to play as the economic faction, you play as "CEO Morgan" and command a corporate capitalism.  If you want to play as the industry-focused faction, that's "The Human Hive", a totalitarian faction that sees people as resources and morality as inefficiency.  If you want to play as the research-based faction, that's the one that values knowledge above ethics.  And so on and so forth.

That, along with all of the other sci-fi elements and cool technologies that you get to discover, are probably Alpha Centauri's strongest points.

The downsides....hm, where do I start.  Terraforming and using supply crawlers are two facets of the game which are vital to success yet also very complicated, with many options to choose from and no clear obvious direction about what to do.  There is an option to have your terraformers simply "auto-terraform" but I found that their choices are seldom optimal.  I think there is something to be said in understanding a complex system and trying to extract the most yield from it, but I think these two systems are just not intuitive enough and I feel like that probably alienates (pardon the pun) a lot of potential players.

Dealing with "Drones" is also one of the most annoying things in the game (more so since I was playing as University, which has more of those than normal).  Drones are Alpha Centauri's way of implementing a sort of "morale" system for bases.  If you get too many, you start to get rioting because the citizens of that base are unhappy, so you need to build recreation facilities, hospitals, etc to prevent this.  The penalty for bad morale in form of drones unfortunately is that ALL production at the base grinds to a halt, so you just wasted your turn.  As a gameplay mechanic I felt like this was just too punishing and annoying to have to deal with, I much preferred something like in MOO2 where morale confers percentage-based bonuses and/or penalties.  To make matters worse, drone problems grow worse as your empire grows larger, and not really according to an intuitive system -- sometimes you get an extra drone every 3 population, sometimes every 4 population units, and it depends on various factors such as your faction, the game difficulty, etc.

As with all 4X type games, the end-game ends up becoming pretty tedious as micromanaging a sprawling empire becomes quickly untenable.  Alpha Centauri was no different in this regard and managing the bases became pretty tiring even (especially?) after I had established clear dominance over all of the other factions and merely needed to wipe them all out by stomping across the rest of the planet.  It didn't help that half of the other factions were on a completely separate continent from me, meaning I had to build naval ships to ferry forces over there, or just wait until I had air units -- but even then, the lower-tier air units need to return to your bases for fuel.

The research "tree" (if you could even call it that) is pretty convoluted for Alpha Centauri, as it's almost random what techs become available to you at each point.

All of that to say that MOO2 is definitely going to remain my 4X game of choice.  MOO2 has cool technologies, much simpler base management, you don't have to worry about terrain or anything like that, and let's not forget the awesome ship-to-ship tactical battles which are WAY more fun than Alpha Centauri unit combat resolutions.  MOO2 still has plenty of strategy and complexity, but it takes a lot of the more painful complexity out, I feel like, in comparison.