by Tim Trian
August 10, 1998

Factional Strife - Balancing a Masterpiece
Often, when I have to tell people what I do for a living, I get a similar response: "So you sit around and play games all day, right?" As the producer on Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the best days of my job are when I can actually sit at my desk for eight hours straight and just play the game, occasionally tabbing over to MS Word to note some mistake the AI had just made. The completely addictive quality of Alpha Centauri just makes these days all the sweeter. At 6:30pm I look up glassy-eyed and think, "Where did the day go?" We've been doing a lot of that lately at Firaxis, as we work to balance each of the seven factions you can play in the game.

Each faction in Alpha Centauri is founded on an ideology, with strengths and weaknesses related to its beliefs. We have several goals in balancing those attributes: Each faction should have certain strategies suggested by its culture. However, the faction should not be "locked in" to those strategies - if the game situation warrants it, a faction should be able to deviate from its optimal path. Also, the faction strengths should give the player interesting things to do without unbalancing the game. Finally, and most important, the faction must be fun to play, ensuring the player has a new and different series of interesting and challenging decisions to make each time he or she plays.