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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

SMAC is solidly in my top 10 games of all time, moreso than some of Sid's more recent 4X games. SMAC has a lot of elements that I think are still unique from the Civilization series: elevation, weather, terraforming, cities on water tiles, useful satellites, more types of combat, and even the ability to create your own unit types. It ties a story to "barbarians" (alien mind worms) and technology advancement. It ties the difficulty of the aliens to how much pollution you generate and what civic choices you make: is your government pro-aliens or anti-aliens?

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Same here. SMAC is my favourite Sid Meier game by far. I prefer it to all of the Civ games. I’m doing a philosophy minor in university right now and I proudly admit that all of my interest in philosophy began with this game.

SMAC is a story of the possible, an homage to “what if?” Many armchair philosophers have dreamt their utopias. SMAC lets you build one. And then it puts you up against other utopians with their own visions and gives you a front row seat to all of the consequences: the atrocities, the nuclear weapons, the environmental degradation.

People have been thinking about these issues for millennia, at least as far back as Plato’s Republic. SMAC lets you experiment and play dictator for a day, without hurting any real people. It gives you the first taste, and if you’re a certain kind of person, you just might end up hooked for life.

Wow, yeah all of those elements are utterly absent from Civ 5 and 6.

The latest DLC added some environmental effects to the game, but nothing on the scale that SMAC had.

Also the social engineering and faction traits replacing govts from previous civ games. All these traits give you various bonuses or punishments for different attributes like morale, green, economic, and population growth. It’s also cool how it dictates how you relate to everything else in the game: from the planet to other factions ideologies.

I can play a “green Morgan” for example that mixed capitalism and environmentalism. Or throw in police stare to make it a kind of Fascist capitalist state...

It all makes me feel like I truly am playing a character like in an RPG. Which involves me in the story in a way other strategy games don’t.

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