This Old Neon Forum

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Saturday... or Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

I'm sure I've posted about it here before, but Alpha Centauri is a fantastic iteration on Civ; it introduces unit customization, a more comprehensive civics system, and factions that you can mostly sympathize with (I think the developers admitted they went a little hard on the Believers). Unlike Civ, you have a science fiction story that unfolds gradually as you expand and gain technology - and technologies, buildings and wonders likewise have short narratives built into them. While the story is static, you can entirely turn off the mild interruptions - which are generally text-only pages that pop up every so often - but I never do, because it's short and well-written.

One thing I love about it is that each tech / building / wonder is narrated from the perspective of one of the faction leaders - so you sometimes get the reverence of learning for learning's sake of Zakharov, or the canny business mindset of Morgan, or the eye for use in warfare from Santiago - they're wildly different perspectives coming at you piece by piece, and really flesh out the way this world is changing with the rapid development of technology combined with the changes happening to The Planet.

Mechanically the factions combine well with the civic system, giving you bonuses and penalties that you can try and synergize with the different political or economic systems to cover weaknesses or emphasize strengths. It takes the base Civ 2 experience and really pushes it to the next level, and I don't think a better Civ-style game came out until 5. Let's not talk about Beyond Earth.

The expansion, Alien Crossfire, does add some interesting new dimensions but ultimately I find the original version holds up better.

While I do like Hard Corps, I can't vote for it against SMAC.