Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
That said, I never really considered adding this as another phase of a Civ game. But you're right, that would be awesome.
Oh man, really? I was thinking "What, that's it?" the moment I left Earth in Civ II. xD "I WANT SPAAAAAACE"
By the time I finished Civilization II, I had already played Master of Orion. And, while both are great games, the distinctions always kept me from going for the "ooh, now space" bit.

Master of Orion is the game that is actually what a space 4x game should be like. It acknowledges and accepts the differences between working on a planet and working in space. It expands your scope to a staggering degree. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, while awesome, loses a lot when compared to managing your empire across the galaxy.

The problem is that, while I would love to make that transition from planet to space... It would not be a smooth one. The play environments are fundamentally different. Most of space is just that - space. It's empty, with no place to build roads or terraform. This alone necessitates a drastic change to implementation of functionality.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri just feels like it comes up short. Granted, it's every bit as fun as a Civilization game (and probably one of the best, if not the best, in that series). But for a space game, it's missing the space. Heck, Civilization II had the Fantastic Worlds expansion, which added in tons of science fiction and fantasy mods and maps for the game. While playing Alpha Centauri, I couldn't help but wonder "why are we still bound to a single planet"? We're a spacefaring race that never leaves our new homeworld. Which is kind of depressing, and nowhere near as awesome.

And now I have my first ever desire to play Spore, because I heard it made this transition fairly successfully, despite several other problems I've heard around the game's release.