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

Workers and Talents
The backbone of any city is the workforce that keeps it sustained. In Alpha Centauri, your workers are a loyal lot, but they can only be pushed so far. As a city grows in population and overcrowding becomes an issue, you must always be on the lookout for the dreaded drone riot.

The best way to handle your burgeoning population is to monitor every city, every turn. Eventually, your city will benefit from talents, a derivative of the worker but with a unique ability to either calm people down, enhance research, or stimulate the economy. However, using talents isn't as easy as it sounds.

The biggest concern with talents is that turning a worker into a talent diverts him away from your workforce; that is, you have one less person out gathering resources. The trick here is to find the right balance between assigning talents and maintaining a surplus in the three key categories of nutrients, minerals, and energy. If you pull a worker off the terrain, you can bet your generation of resources will suffer. Therefore, only assign talents when you can afford to do so without jeopardizing the growth or profitability of your city.

	"The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Drone Riots
Drone riots occur when the amount of drones within a given city equals or outnumbers the amount of talents available. When a drone riot happens, your citizens will continue to generate nutrients, but will cease all production, and nothing in the way of energy surplus will be produced.

Drone riots can be prevented or ended by the following methods:
* Build psych-related facilities, such as a recreation commons.
* If you have a high police rating under social engineering, placing military units in a rioting city can calm down the populace. (Social Engineering is explained in detail in Chapter 5.)
* Convert some of your workers to talents, such as a doctor.
* If you don't have enough talents to restore the balance, pump up your energy allocation to psych to create more talents (explained in Chapter 5).

Drone riots should be avoided at all cost, especially in times of war. The last thing you need while knee-deep in a military campaign is to divert your attention to a drone riot. Chances are, it could've been avoided in the first place!

Recap
* Each increase in population equals 1,000 people and one new worker.
* Population growth occurs by having a nutrient surplus.
* Every city should strive to have a surplus in nutrients, minerals, and energy.
* The more minerals you produce, the faster you'll construct new units and base enhancements.
* The more energy you produce, the quicker you'll research new secret projects and discoveries.
* Use formers to terraform the landscape around your base to improve the amount of resources you bring in.
* Build recycling tanks at every base to improve resource gathering.
* Fine-tune which terrain tiles your workers are operating on.
* Use the governor to micromanage the details of your cities until you are comfortable with the concepts behind the game.
* Use talents to keep your city in a good mood.

Next - Chapter 3: Research and Development