Quote Originally Posted by Sermil View Post
Odd that you say that, since I found the design your own unit -- and the constant need to produce another version with the slightly better weapon or slightly better doohickey, in a pretty unfriendly interface with (IIRC) a limited # of slots -- to be a major housekeeping chore, and one of the reason I never played that much Alpha Centauri. The other big reason was the constantly-hammered-home story which was OK the first time, but didn't exactly get better with repetition. I like the Civ games where it's my story.
I'll concede that the cut scenes have not aged well, but you can turn those off in preferences. I don't think they're any more annoying than the animated world leaders from later Civs.

But the unit designer was actually one of the best strengths of the game, only it had some pretty stupid defaults. The trick was to turn off the 'default' unit designs the AI would stuff in your library, so only the designs you approve are in your menu. You still had to create your own prototypes, but once you had, keeping track of them was a lot easier, and the ability to spend energy credits to upgrade unilts either as a class, or individually, made management of the whole system fairly easy. I'm also fairly aggressive with disbanding units which haven't gotten morale upgrades to warrant further support, so my usual force usually consisted of whatever my current garrison guard unit was, a mobile rover type, formers, 1/1 police units for drone control, and a few interceptors for cap defense. Only when I went to war did I start cranking out huge numbers of artillery, rovers, probe teams, and garrisons.

If I were to be frank about Alpha Centauri, the only real design flaw I see is how grotesquely effective the supply rovers were in slingshotting your economy, making an early grab at Industrial Automation virtually mandatory, even for momentum factions.