Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/Gameplay

This chapter is a guide to all Civ and Civ-related games. Therefore every guide will include this chapter.

The goal of the game
The precise goals of the game vary from game to game. For instance, in Civilization, there are two ways to win: launch a spaceship to Alpha Centauri, or destroy all the other nations. Every Civ game has equivalents to these two goals. Most of them have more. For instance, the Transcendence victory in Alpha Centauri corresponds roughly to the spaceship victory in Civilization.

As in chess, the game is divided into several phases and the ultimate goal of the game should not distract you from playing each phase correctly. Checking the king without purpose is useless in chess, as is making empty threats for no reason other than to make threats in Civ. In both games, an empty threat may or may not be effective, but for it to be truly effective it must have sound reasoning behind it, and if it does not work it must not punish the player who made the threat.

Cities
All Civilization games have cities. Alpha Centauri refers to them as "bases", but they serve exactly the same function. The primary function of a city is production. The secondary function of a city is acquiring and holding territory. By acquiring territory, you reduce your enemy's possibilities for production. Therefore, an unproductive city can still be very useful, but a productive city will almost always be more useful. The ideal city serves both functions.

Good city sites
The details of what constitutes a good city site depends on the game. For instance, in Alpha Centauri, high elevation is desirable. However, most other Civilization games have no concept of elevation. What they do share in common is that different terrain will produce different resources and have different defensive capabilities. Therefore, what makes a certain site desirable is always the same: an abundance of resources and an ability for the city to defend itself.

Resources and production
Cities always produce three resources. These are usually named food, shields, and trade. In SMAC, these are called nutrients, minerals, and energy, respectively. In Civilization III, "trade" was renamed "commerce". In Civilization II: Test of Time, the names depend on the current game being played. Regardless of their names, they always serve the same functions. For consistency, we will refer to them as food, shields, and trade.

Your cities are populated by citizens. They will work the surrounding terrain and produce goods. Each citizen may work one tile; the city tile is always worked automatically. For instance, a city with 6 citizens can work up to seven tiles: the center tile plus one tile per citizen. Citizens can also be specialists and not work tiles; this will be discussed later.

These are the three kinds of goods that your cities will produce:
 * Food - No civilization can survive without food. Surplus food will accumulate until the food box is full. When it is, another citizen will be added to the city and the food box will either empty or drop to about half-full. Each citizen requires two food per turn to survive. A citizen will never take more or less than this. If the city is not producing enough food to meet demand, this food will be taken from the food box. If the food box is empty and a citizen still must eat, a citizen starves and the population count will be reduced by one. In some Civ games, Settlers units need support in the form of food from their home city in addition to the shields they need for support. In these cases, if the food box empties and more food is needed, the most distant such unit will be disbanded. If more food is still needed after that, then a citizen will die. The population count will never be reduced by more than one per turn due to starvation.


 * Shields - A city must procure raw materials (shields), which can then be used to build things. Your city will always be working on one of three kinds of projects:
 * Unit - Build a miltary, Settler, caravan, or Worker unit.
 * Improvement - An improvement to benefit the city, or a Wonder to benefit your entire civilization or even the entire world.
 * Capitalization - Shields are converted to trade, usually with a heavy penalty (e.g., one trade takes four shields).


 * Shields are added to the shield box (except in Capitalization). When the shield box is full, production is complete and the unit or improvement is immediately available. In most Civ games, but not Civilization III, cities that control units must expend shields in support of these units (however, in some circumstances a unit is "free"). If more shields are needed by units than are being collected in the city, then in Civ I a unit is disbanded, but in other versions the needed shields are removed from the shield box. If the box empties but more shields are still needed, one unit will randomly be disbanded.


 * Trade - Every civilization has some form of currency or barter system. You tax this trade, and the tax goes into at least one of three things:
 * Tax - The taxed goods become money in your pocket. You can use it to rush-build or use it as part of a trade with another civilization, or even give it as a gift.
 * Science - The taxed goods go toward improving scientific research.
 * Luxury - The taxed goods go toward entertaining the populace, keeping them happy or at least not unhappy.

Citizen happiness
For your cities to be productive, their citizens must be kept content. If the number of unhappy people exceeds the number of happy people in a city, the city will fall into civil disorder. Content citizens and specialists do not enter the equation. When a city is in civil disorder, no goods are produced other than food. (In some games, rush-building during disorder is impossible, as well.) Some Civ games have nuclear power plants or other improvements that are dangerous to have in a city under civil disorder. Also, some Civ games have forms of government that cannot handle prolonged civil disorder (usually Democracy).

Research
Each turn of the game, you have a chance to accumulate research toward a "tech" (technology). Techs will grant you new capabilities, or at least the chance to acquire them later, and can be used as a trading item. The only circumstances you will not accumulate research are if you have no cities, your research rate is at 0%, or you have cities and a research rate but are not generating sufficient trade in any cities to put taxes into research. The technologies always follow a hierarchy, called the "tech tree". Most Civ games have one huge tech tree, but Civilization III has four tech trees, one for each Age. All the games have etxremely different tech trees, but they all share similarities. For instance, many players could not tell you the exact effects of "Electricity" for every single Civ game without looking it up (but good players will certainly know them for their favorite games). This is because the name of the tech may have little to do with its effects.

Expansion phase
The first phase of any Civ game is the expansion phase. Each civilization tries to stake its claim to as much territory as it can, possibly even knocking out a rival with a "rush". The details of this will differ from game to game and from player to player. For instance, in Civilization I and II, many players will place cities as far apart as necessary to avoid overlap, four squares being roughly optimal, while the same player may place cities extremely close together in Civilization III (sometimes even two squares apart, or one square apart in extreme situations). All games share a need to produce colonizing units as fast as practicable in the expansion phase (Settlers in most versions, Colony Pods in Alpha Centauri).

Diplomacy and the meta-game
The term "meta-game" when applied to Civ diplomacy was possibly first proposed by Velociryx, one of the acknowledged masters of Civilization-style games. It is difficult to define this concept precisely, but it refers to idea that diplomacy is a game in itself, with its own rules and strategies, particulary in the way that three civs can interact with one another.