This game needs a remaster

[HuffingJenkem]

And by remaster, I mean allow more factions simultaneously rather than having Sid Meier enshittify the mechanics to appeal to console gamers.

[Hade]

Need to be brought to 64 bit. All the limits in this game are just annoying.

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

There's Beyond Earth. So, just using the next Civ engine with a new game should be better than touch this game that works fine as it is.

[Tylernol]

Greatest 4x game of all time. It needs a remaster.

[Hade]

Played that abortion, Beyond Earth, it was also a 32 bit game. The AI never built more then 3 or 4 cities, no matter how you tweaked it. Often then not the game would crash before being completed from too much of everything.

This game would be great remastered and brought to 64 bit. Every game like this tried to be like this one and failed.

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

Yeah, you never really played it then. AI likes to expand and wage war pretty much like in Alpha Centauri.
And the purpose of Sid Meier is not to copy/paste games, it's pretty obvious with the Civilization series. Like Colonization II was tied to CivIV engine. Cultural expansion was weird, but the rest was fine, like for Beyond Earth.

[Hade]

I played BE for over 1k hrs, modded the hell out of it. Upped the spawn rate of aliens to wear the game was initially lagging. Though never used workshop mods. Still not very challenging at highest level. My 20+ cities vs ai 3-5, who's gonna win?

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

Well, you must do something wrong with your modding.

[Iristrismegistus]

The first problem is EA. Its quite evident that EA does not care about its smaller franchises, which unfortunately includes Alpha Centauri. I've been waiting AGES for The Sims 1, the first Sims game, to be rereleased on Steam and GOG. Its not happened.
The second problem is unironically with Firaxis. The staff who worked on Alpha Centauri are no longer at FIraxis. Yes, that includes Brian Reynolds, who was the creative minds and pretty much the driving force behind SMAC. Sid Meier may be the man behind the Civilization franchise, but Alpha Centauri was very much Reynolds brainchild. Yes, Beyond Earth was nothing like SMAC. But thats ignoring the fact that SMAC itself was lightning in a bottle.

I'm all for a remaster for SMAC, but I believe it will be very difficult. Even just a faithful remaster, rescaling the game but keeping everything as is would be difficult. We were lucky that C&C Remastered turned out the way it did because C&C had both a dedicated community and Petroglyph (aka Westwood reborn) who provided the most faithful remaster possible. We can only hope the same can happen for SMAC.

[grodysattva]

At big companies like EA the thought is "If we sell it and someone does better with it than we did, we'll look bad, so we'll hold onto it forever." It sucks, but it's how big business works.