just finished a round of Alpha Centauri. seems as good an excuse as any to create a thread about it>It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people!- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
I've played this game on and off since it came out decades ago and it is still just as enjoyable as ever
did you doomstack deathspheres?
>>2170746needlejets and locusts
playing Gaia and sending out wave after wave of Mind Worms to crush Sister Miriam
playing Believers and sending out wave after wave of Belivers to crush the worm slut
>>2171014>>2171021ladies! don't fight! there's plenty of space in the feeding bay
reading the wiki when suddenly
>>2171021Someone compared Miriam to Putin and this concept lives rent-free in my mind>supposed religious heavyweight, last bastion of Christianity, but in practice just uses it to fool rubes foreign and domestic for blind support>supposed military heavyweight, but the doctrine ends up boiling down to sending meatwave after meatwave>basically an inferior version of some Chinese guy
>>2171200Miriam's AI is different than Miriam in lore. And that's not to defend her ideology in particular, but rather all of the leaders are quite intelligent and respectable while the game mechanics treat the Believers in very unfair ways. Like how nobody gives a fuck about Fundamentalist ethics except her, so she will inevitably go to war with everyone simply because "other player fundamentalist = false".
>>2171212To add: how I'd fix this in some sort of SMAC2 is to separate religion from social engineering entirely and let each faction develop their own faith, and Miriam would naturally get the most bonuses associated with this.It's her whole deal, but it leaves her faction orphaned due to zero representation.
>>2171200>>2171212>>2171214Miriam was in the game as an expy of the SNL "church lady". This game came put when the "New Atheists"/"Brights" were picking up steam and thought of themselves very highly. Late 90s/Early 2000s, unironically wore Spaghetti Monster Shirts, bought The God Delusion/liked Dawkins, went onto campuses to insult preachers, etc. They expect that you think the Miriam obnoxious caricature is tasteful and "a real problem in the real world, and the obvious villain of this game". She spends the game being an irritant and impeding the noble, atheist "science" factions (which the Brights consider one and the same)
>>2171231No, I strongly disagree with that. Miriam's lore and quotes portray her as an intelligent person - maybe even the most intelligent person because she alone criticizes some of the more dystopian secret projects and technologies - the actual problem is the game mechanics treat her as the Civ archetype equivalent of Montezuma.
>>2171231nerds who played the game at the time (and redditors to this day) definitely read all this into her, but I agree with the other anon that she wasn't written as such and was actually pretty well fleshed out by Brian Reynolds.
is there any Deirdre Skye x Mindworms smut? asking for a friend
