Estimations

Alynzia · January 13, 2002, 05:49

Greetings,

I'm sorry to start a pointless thread, but damn it I have a reputation to maintain here.

Can I assume most of us have been playing SMAC and then SMAX since they came out?

How much of your life have you spent playing Alpha Centauri? I'm serious, in hours.

These things are near impossible to accurately estimate, but if SMAC came out March 1999, as I believe it did in England and you roughly played every week for two and a half hours since then, you would have clocked up around 340 hours playing time. That is going by it has been 34 months since release, four weeks in a month, blah, blah. I know no one has played every week since it came out but surely someone could have spent that long equivalently through going through phases of playing and then having a life.

Isn't it amazing to think some of us may have spend an equivalent of 15 straight days playing a computer game?

To be fair, I honestly thought it would be more...

Alynzia.

Mr. President · January 13, 2002, 06:50

I bet there are people for whom it is a lot more than fifteen days (possibly me). I've heard legends about people who play games until 4:00 AM, go to bed, get up at dawn, and start playing again. Like a Unicorn, such creatures have rarely been seen, and when they are seen it's usually by people who drink too much.

Seriously, though. I have owned Alpha Centauri since last February, when I got my new computer. This is January 13, 2002. So I've been visiting Planet for 348 days, if we count from February 1. I often play other games on the computer, or even play Nintendo or (shock! horror!) do something outside, so let's assume I only play Alpha Centauri for an average of one and a half hours per day.

348 days averaging 1.5 hours per day gives 522 hours or 21 and three-quarter days.

Well, the long (?) exhaustive search for the record is over. I've wasted three weeks of my life on Earth imagining myself dancing naked through the trees with Lady Deirdre. It's very depressing if you think about it.

Still, though, every hour you play the game is one hour closer to the date of the game's setting, and perhaps the chance for fantasy to become reality, because that same hour carried India and Pakistan that much closer to mutual annihilation and sped American troops ever closer to the inevitable climactic confrontation with the Jihad.

Vlad Antlerkov · January 13, 2002, 08:13

I've owned SMAC since May of 1999 (IIRC). Got SMAX for Christmas in 1999.

My estimate for total time spent on SMAC is probably somewhere in the 300-hour range. That's something like 12.5 days of playing.

On the other hand, I've been playing DOOM in its various incarnations since 1995, so I've probably accumulated something like 2500 hours with that game. That's one third of a year of playing Doom. The scary thing is, none of that was multiplayer (unless you count playing against AI bots)...

Then there's Civ II. I've had Civ II since November of '97 or thereabouts. I estimate I've ~~wasted~~ spent 1800 hours, or 75 days on Civ II.

MariOne · January 13, 2002, 08:36

If with playing you also mean dedicating time to study, test, think to strategies, plot chatrs and tables related to SMAC, well...

I got the Demo in the last days of 1998, and I count it too.
I remember I boutght full SMAC when it got out, on Feb 23rd 1999.
For sure there have been long periods when I was dedicating ~60 hours per week to it. As there must have been days after the first year which I was able to spend without thinkin to it. I guess.

I figure 1600 hours could be a raw wild average guess for me.
But probably more.
Hey, if I count the time dedicate to post on some forum about SMAC, that would be definitely more!

knowhow2 · January 13, 2002, 11:55

about a 1000 or so since I bought it november 2000

Adalbertus · January 13, 2002, 13:21

I bought SMAC in june 2001, played approximately 10 - 15 h per week in the average. so, I spent roughly 300 to 450 hours on this terrific game. More to come. I spent another 50 h on browsing this newsgroup.

Googlie · January 13, 2002, 21:53

Like MariOne I downloaded the demo the day it was released - and I remember the old OWO forums, the printing out of the instructions for HEX Editor (or something like, that) so we could hack in more than 200 years of playing time, then I boght SMAC the day it was released, and then SMAX

With playing, testing, writing, (although the muse has left me for a few months), CMNing and scenario building I prolly run to around 25 hours a week (an average of 3 1/2 a day - sounds about right)

So in the 40 months it's been playable, that would give me around 4000 hours.

(and playing golf every other day, at 4 hours a round, over that 40 month period would give me 2400 hours of golf - that sounds about right too)

G.

Tizzy · January 15, 2002, 12:28

I've been playing for about 9 months. Used to play almost every night for about 3 hours, but now it's about 6 hours a week in total

Alex · January 17, 2002, 12:55

Quote:

How much of your life have you spent playing Alpha Centauri? I'm serious, in hours.

Life? What life?

Seriously, I got SMAC as soon as I could. March 1999, I guess. It was not available on my city (a beautiful tropical paradise called Natal), thus I had to order it through mail. I think I was the first one to get SMAC in Natal (hmmm... I may have been the only one to get SMAC in Natal...)

Without complicating things, I estimate some 1500 hours with the game. Until now. And I still love to crush Miriam, after all this time. Such are the classics...