We called Mohawk’s strategy game Old World “almost the perfect blend of Civilization and Crusader Kings III” back in 2021. As such, the opinions of people who worked on Old World are of interest to me. Here’s one: designer and programmer Daniels Umanovskis would very much like to make a sequel to the undersung Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, because it is “the best game ever”.
“It had top-level Civilization-like gameplay with an incredibly good atmosphere and game world,” Umanovskis told Norwegian site Spillhistorie in a recent interview, also featuring Mohawk studio boss and former Civilization 4 designer Soren Johnson. “The characters were interesting and memorable even if they didn’t really even have much dialogue.
“I love 4X games and am an avid sci-fi reader, for me the dream game is of course a very good sequel to SMAC,” Umanovskis went on. “Mechanically, such games have developed quite a bit since 1999 and I would really like to create a game that is based on the same ideas but renews the mechanics with what we have learned since then, and has the same high quality of the story. SMAC didn’t just have a story that you could say is ‘good for a game’, it was really good sci-fi that could just as easily have been in a different form.”
I’ve still yet to play Alpha Centauri myself, but Sin’s Rally Point article about the game from 2023 makes it sound fascinating. “Where so many others are about the arbitrary icons of nationalism, or stock elves/insectoids/robots, it’s a game about ideology and personality,” she wrote. “Where a sequel to Civilization’s ‘send a colony ship into space’ ending could have asked ‘what if lasers and aliens’, Alpha Centauri instead asked: Where is humanity going?”
The Spillhistorie interview covers a range of 4xcellent topics, and is worth reading in full. There’s an aside from Johnson about the concept of a ‘modern-day’ 4X that makes a nice chaser for Umanovskis’s enthusiasm for Alpha Centauri, while also showing how much 4X games depend on the colonial premise of masses of unspoilt, ‘virgin territory’, waiting to be painted your colour.
“I think modern, or even medieval, history is harder to map onto a 4X because they don’t have the same plausible ’empty map’ starting point that the ancient history era has,” Johnson said. “There is a reason that ‘modern’ 4X games often look to a sci-fi setting to solve this problem.”
I should play Old World – one of our regulars mentioned the quality of its diplomacy system in the comments on another piece. I should play Alpha Centauri, too. I’ve got it downloaded n’ all. But argh, no time, no time.
