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

Faster Research and Building
One of the keys to success in Alpha Centauri is out-producing and out-researching the competition. Alpha Centauri has so many potential discoveries and advanced military units that often, the victor is the one who gets to the higher levels first. To accomplish this, you need high surplus rates.

When you order a city to build a particular unit, say a scout rover, the time this takes to produce is directly related to how many minerals you show in surplus. The more powerful a unit, the more minerals it requires for completion. If your city is showing a low surplus in minerals, you can expect to wait around for quite a few turns until the unit is finally constructed. It is for this reason that you should resist building mineral-hoarding units or base enhancements until your city is showing a high surplus rate.

Pumping up the Surplus
There are three ways to increase your surplus of minerals, nutrients, and energy:
* Terraform the surrounding landscape
* Build base enhancements
* Reallocate your work force.

Let's take a look at each in detail.

Terraforming
Terraforming is the act of building new facilities on landscape tiles or affecting the land itself by raising or lowering its elevation. To terraform, you must first build a former, a special unit that has no offensive capability but can build a wide range of improvements to increase your resources. The advanced use of terraforming is covered in detail in Chapter 6.

TIP
The more formers you have, the quicker the region around your city will benefit from terraforming improvements. If you want a particular terrain tile terraformed rapidly, gang two formers up on it, and they will complete the task in double time!

When you finally have a former in action, you can manipulate it in one of two ways: manually or automatically. If you're a new player to Alpha Centauri, you should consider toggling your former to autopilot by selecting it and pressing shift-A. From this point onward, the former will travel around your city and create roads, mines, forests, sensors, and so on. All these improvements will increase the amount of resources generated by a particular terrain tile. A mine, for example, will enhance the number of minerals produced in that tile. Farms will increase nutrient output.

WARNING
When the former is set to autopilot, it usually creates roads first before moving onto farms and mines. If you are desperate for nutrients, energy, or minerals, you should manually give the former orders.

Next: Base Enhancements