Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Part 1

A Concise History of the Colonisation Age

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Introduction

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden. He drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. -The Conclave Bible

It is not easy to compile a history of that pivotal time when man first set foot on Planet. The bare facts are well known, however.

Earth of 2060 was ravaged by overpopulation.

Ravaged by war.

Ravaged by social breakdown.

Ravaged by tyranny.

It was in this context that was conceived the great plan - a colony ship sent to the nearest habitable planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. The UNS Unity, propelled by mighty Orion class nuclear pulse engines and carrying millions chosen from the best and brightest of humanity, was to be the last, best hope of mankind.

Nothing went right. The project was delayed and delayed, handed from one corporation to another. Corners were cut on the most vital of components, and political stooges installed as the nations involved bickered amongst themselves. It was by some miracle that the ship had finally reached its destination before disaster struck.

A micrometeor impact severely weakened the superstructure of the huge ship just before its arrival. The key officers of the ship were wakened from cryogenics, and due to their failure to cooperate, managed to escalate the problem into a full scale breach of the ship's reactors. At the same time, an unknown assassin murdered Captain Garland, the only man who was holding together the crew.

Those that survived clustered into seven factions, linked by common ideology. Each gathering what supplies they could salvage or found useful, and each taking control of a colony pod, they set off to find their destinies beneath alien skies.

Alpha Centauri intro video / Backup

But the specifics of what happened next has long been thought lost. Until now.

It is with great pleasure that we announce the publication of a serialised version of actual logs from that time, which we hope will give an unique insight into this period.

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Hi and welcome to my first SA thread, first SA post, and first SA LP. God I am stupid. Hopefully, I'll manage to make this thread vaguely enjoyable both to those who have and have not played the game in the few days before this gets abandoned.

For those still unaware, Alpha Centauri is sort of the sequel to the Civilisation series of games. Check the wikipedia article for tons of information. I'll probably be playing on Librarian difficulty, with pretty much the default game options, on the huge canonical map of Planet. If anyone has any suggestions otherwise, then tell me. I'm planning on playing the original game, but I might be persuaded to play the Underdogs versions of the expansion. In either case, I'll be staying with the original factions, because they have more personality and are better balanced. And yeah, I realise there's a LP of Alien Crossfire, but I think it's been pretty much abandoned by now.

I'm capturing using Irfanview. (I tried Fraps, but it doesn't seem to work). If anyone has any suggestions about changing the format of things, then do reply in the thread.

Otherwise, we need to choose a faction to play as:

Peacekeeping Forces (Pravin Lal):