Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Prima's Official Strategy Guide

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $7.47

Customer Reviews:

This isn't strategy [Posted on 2000-07-10]
It would be charitable to say that the book had more than twenty pages of useful information. Most of the materiol is taking the information within the games own rather good help files and rewriting them, and the tips they give are excrutiatingly obvious.

Just don't bother.

Not good [Posted on 2000-10-10]
This SG's maps are hard too read, and the stratageys are dumb. it is not good at all, although it does have cool discriptions of the techs. bottom line; unless you are a billionair, dont buy this

Not Necessary: And Now Packaged Free With Game [Posted on 2001-04-01]
Go to ZDNet: GameSpot: Game Guides for a free, downloadable and far superior guide to SMAC. We're (the reviewers) mostly in agreement here that this guide doesn't do enough "right" (like faction strategies, unit design, etc.) and does too much "wrong" (like trivial descriptions of already available game info with little or no explanations of how a player might best make use of the info). I would have appreciated a book half as thick but with opinions on the how and why for designing well-equipped armed forces, choosing government types, allocating research, and so on.

Alternative manual - not strategy guide [Posted on 2001-08-14]
The official strategy guide to SMAC was a disappointment. In retrospect, I realize I should have heeded the warnings in the other reviews. The beginning is good, with nice tips on general gameplay and the various victory types, but then it reverts to nothing more than a rewrite of the game manual and online help.

The Alpha Centauri strategy guide pales in comparison with the corresponding book for Civilization II, which is required reading for any Civ2 fan.

Liked the Software, Liked the Book [Posted on 2003-12-26]
The book is a good reference when playing the game. The information in the strategy guide contains more information than the game's on-line help. The strategy guide has a cross reference to easily find information in the guide and in the software manual. For me, the quick reference makes the game play more enjoyable.

I particularly liked Appendix C, which gives insight on how to modify the game play. Alpha Centauri has seven players. The computer players have certain personalities. Quite frankly, there is one personality I do not like to play with. By changing a file, I was able to change offending personality.

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