Spit and polish?

[child of Thor]

Partly cause Vel mention's it alot, i thought i'd give Alpha Centuri a go.
A few things struck me about it that might be nice to try to attempt for CTP2. I suppose these are just considerations to polish the overall feel of CTP2, but just from my 8 hour bash at Smac, i was very impressed with the atmosphere the game managed to convey.

1. Some kind of throne room thingy - in smac it's represented by a kind of 'history monument' that give a picture and description of important events in your civs timeline(your first succsesful war for example).
This feature may be more relevent than just a decorative throne room,and really adds a sense of achievment, even after you have been through them all. It makes you give a damn about how well you are doing(more so than say a box with numbers in it). I think that's important.

2. The diplomacy in Smac really feels like its personal. I don't know exactly how clever it is, but it conveys a sense of personality very well - you really feel like you are talking to living,breathing opponants. I know the setup is different in that in Smac you have very distinct leaders, in CTP2 it's more openbook, but we do have leader personality traits. How easy(difficult?) would it be to tie personality to type of language used in diplomacy?
eg.

evil warmonger - 'Mighty leader of the Lemurs, let us combine our scientific knowledge to further our research into weapons so we can wage war on the weak nations and bring them under our heal.'

scientific pacifist - 'Great Leader of the Lemurs, let us combine knowledge to further our aims of a lasting peace amongst all peoples.'

This kind of thing,possible or not and if so where would the replacement text messages go?

One thing that is obvious about Smac is the attention to detail, and the huge amount of customisable options. In comparison to CTP2 it obvious(and from the unused commands in CTP2) which was rushed out without this extra spit and polish.
This is a shame.So much has been done by goodwill alone with CTP2, that has improved the game measurably, that the little finishing touches seem all the more desirable(to me at least!).
So any ideas on the throne/history room and a more personal diplo exchange? There may be more things like this that could do with attention,but these came to my attention first.

[Locutus]

1. Nope, not possible. It was in CtP1, but in CtP2 the official story is that it just distracted from gameplay and was therefore removed. Might be that they just didn't have time to come up with something new though. Remnants of the CtP1 throne room are still there, but not enough to activate it again

2. I guess that what you suggest *might* be possible (then again, maybe not), but if it is, it would be a monumental task to implement. So probably not gonna happen anytime soon...

SMAC's a nice game but during prolonged play, the graphics start to hurt my eyes and gameplay-wise it's almost identical to Civ2. The game is definately a step up from Civ2 and the storyline is fantastic - contributes to the great overall atmosphere - but CtP2's gameplay concepts are better and I prefer a more familiar environment in my Civ games (i.e. real history rather than SF fantasy).

[child of Thor]

1. Oh well.......
2. I guess when Pedrunn and the others have run out of things to do.....

And yeah i know what you mean about the graphics, i think there is a download/patch for it though, which i haven't tried yet.
I did find it got quite a pain as you got big - lots of terraformers to move around(Civ problem). But the atmosphere it can create is very nice.
It seems sometimes a bit lacking in CTP2, but if it was rushed out by Activision then i guess we know alot of things that the progammers would have liked to do would have been left out, along with all the nice 'finishing touches' and graphical/musical extra's(although it doesn't do bad on the wonder front).
Still this is my Fav tbs of all time, i always come back to it!