Bah, you dont play the game, you game it
Hey, in Transcend, you actually need most of the tricks if you want to both win and set up an aesthetically pleasing empire, ie no ugly ICS, minimal number of bases to reduce micromanagment, putting all the SPs in the most efficient manner rather than where ever you can, or God forbid having to capture a terrible AI city to get it, etc.
I agree with your critcism of the AI. Gaians are the only faction with a halfways decent AI (building enough bases - so do Hive and Believers, but that collapses once they go to war, which happens way too quickly), but of course only for as long as theres no war... and the Morganite AI is so sucky that it boggles the mind, and UN and University AIs are only little better...
I firmly believe AC is the finest strategy game ever made...if only not for the craptastic AI. The enormous power of social engineering, terraforming, and supply crawlers allow a huge assortment of strategies, and the (original 7) factions are near perfectly balanced, but wildly different in play, nothing like the minimal differences in practice you see with Civ 4. Sadly, this only appears in multiplayer, and its just too hard to get a multi-game set up and properly played.
The AI, on the other hand, is both what the vast majority of players will face, and completely anemic, thus greatly limiting both the diversity of strategies used and faced.
Its problems are manifold, but can be boiled down to:
1) Inability to terraform: It just doesn't emphasize Centauri ecology enough or get formers out early enough. It also doesn't understand even basic terraforming much less advanced terraforming or crawler heavy strats, witness the prevalence of the useless mine/farm combo on perfectly good flatland. Incidently, this is actually something players can improve. It's recommended to mod alphax.txt so that all factions start with 1 former, allow formers to be built without Centauri ecology, and make the build road and plant forest abilities available from the beginning with the other early abilities except for mines unlocked at CentauriEc. Mines should be pushed back to that tech that lifts the mineral cap. You'll find that the AI responds to attack better with a functioning road net, builds faster and is less chocked by fungus with the spreading of early planted forests, and techs faster with more solar collectors instead of useless flatland mines.
2) Inability to use Social Engineering: AC Social engineering is not like the incremental or discrete benefits from Civics in other Civ games, but rather based on reaching specific thresholds while minimising the costs of doing so, ie +3 Police for double police, +2 Economy for +1 E per square, +6 growth for popboom, +4 Efficiency for Paradigm economy, +3 Probe for probe immunity, etc, and the AI never aims for these thresholds. One thing you see every game is Morgan switching to Free Market, when Morgan's biggest advantage is the ability to get to +2 Economy without FM, and doing so without doing anything to counter the massive Police penalty, proceeding to destroy their entire empire with endless drone riots.
3) Inability to use Supply Crawlers: This is a biggie, since Crawlers are important to every single strategy, and most actually revolve around them. In multiplayer, you'll never get a single SP without crawlers, and lack of crawler pickets means death as enemy scouts wander your empire at will.
4) Inability to plan: The AI only ever reacts. It never plans for military campaigns by forming alliances and isolating the enemy. It'll declare war with its own troops wildly out of place and its core territories uncovered. It'll invade the Gaians with a small number of highly teched units without trance or empath when a huge stack of mindworms is clearly visable, or build no probes when (not) preparing to attack the University. This also feeds into 2, since a lot of Social Engineering requires planning. You need a plan for ensuring peace and countering worms before going to FM, and a plan for using that cash once you switch out. It takes careful planning to set up drone control, food, and terraforming in advance of a popboom. And of course, lastly, the AI never has a plan for actually winning. It doesn't aim for any victory conditions, and only ever wins if it blunders into it.
Sadly, not one of these issues were corrected in later Civs. (3) was covered for by eliminating Crawlers/caravans, (1) and (2) were hidden by nerfing the power of each, and (4) is simply still there.
Where can one find this game?
Unless you can find the "Planetary Pack" which combines both the original and the expansion, the only way to get the expansion is pretty much to pirate it. Due to a low production run or something, you'll find Alien Crossfire selling on Ebay for over $200 sometimes, and you'll never find it in any legitimate online stores. I figure this is stupid enough that pirating is justified. I actually pirated the expansion when I lost my original AX disk during a move, though I think in that case, it was actually legal since I did buy it originally.
