GameSpot's Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Game Guide

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part 1

Chapter 1: Exploration
Chapter 2: Infrastructure
    Humble Beginnings
    The City Screen
    The Governor
    Workers and Talents
Chapter 3: Research and Development
Chapter 4: Military Fundamentals

Chapter 2: Infrastructure
Throughout human history, powerful and important leaders have always pointed toward their cities as examples of their abilities. Whether it was Rome, Greece, or Alexandria, great cities were held up as a symbol of advancement and culture. With Alpha Centauri, this heritage continues. A city is your lifeline to research, resources, and military might. Without powerful and evolving cities under your thumb, your future will be bleak and short-lived. This chapter will ease you into the concepts behind a successful city, such as how to promote growth, build infrastructure, allocate workers, and suppress the occasional riot.

Humble Beginnings
Now that your colony pod has safely touched down on the surface of Planet, a shiny new city recycles itself into existence. It is from this humble beginning that your empire will grow and expand, leading to the founding of even more cities under your control.

Population
The first thing you should make note of is the number displayed over your city, viewable from the main game screen. At the outset of the game, this number will be 1. This number represents how large the city is, translating into 1,000 citizens. If the number were 2, you'd have 2,000 citizens dwelling within the city, and so on. Every new city will start at 1 and progress up as the growth rate takes hold, and your citizens procreate.

The population number also indicates how many workers you currently have available to collect resources within reach of the city. A population 1 city will have one worker that can be placed on any tile within the radius of the city. A level 3 city would have three workers to be allocated each on his own tile.

	The tile upon which your city rests automatically generates resources without a worker assigned to it, so consider the city tile a freebie.

When your city reaches a population of 7, you cannot progress past this number until you build a hab complex. Once that has been constructed, your population will flourish until it reaches 15, when you must build a hab dome to continue growing.

Growth
The growth of your city depends on the availability of nutrients. Without solid access to nutrients, the growth of your city will be severely stunted. Having an ever-expanding population is extremely important. The more workers you have, the more resources you can have them collect; and the more resources you're collecting, the faster you can research new technologies and develop new military units.

	The more nutrients you collect every turn, the faster your city will increase in population.

For every 1,000 citizens you have, you must generate a minimum of two nutrients to support them. If your city happens to be breaking even on nutrients, your city is stagnant and will not increase in size. The only way to prevent this is to ensure you're generating more nutrients than your city consumes.

WARNING
If you have more citizens than your intake of nutrients allows for, your population will begin to die off until a balance is reached between population and nutrient intake. This can lead to rioting by your citizens!

Next: The City Screen