While the writing in Alpha Centauri is some of the best in video games, the actual game itself is less fun than Civilization. The hostile terrain and alien life you spend most of the game dealing with just isn't as interesting as the enemy AI.
The best example is horror games like Amnesia. They are essentially "walking simulators" with almost no game mechanics beyond movement. Yet the atmosphere is so good that the players don't notice.
Personally I think too much attention in the game industry has been placed on flow and artificial-sweeteners such as RPC leveling reward systems at the cost of neglecting atmosphere and as a sense real presence.
But it was sort of overambitious, and a lot of the features were ridiculously opaque. I think it's a sci-fi gem, but it definitely takes a bit of patience.
If you don't have patience or time, most of the pithy quotes are here:
Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units, random battles sometimes meant an ancient trireme could destroy a battleship, which is fun to imagine...
How do I know we're talking about Civilization?
> Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units
I think it's unlikely Civ II added stats in response to feedback from Civ III.
I was thinking of Partisans which spawn when a city is captured, https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Partisans_(Civ2); I think of militia when I think of Partisans.
However, the weakest unit in Civ 2 is definitely the Warrior: https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Warriors_(Civ2)
In the same way that Civ II cannot have made changes in response to Civ III, it also can't have made changes in response to itself.
Warriors should never be able to defeat a battleship in Civ2 because of the new combat system. The AI cheats (of course); I have had armor go down to knights on deity level
One takeaway is to be careful about how strength numbers translate into odds. If your strength is 100 and mine is 1, does that mean I have a 1% chance to out-and-out beat you? Your armored tank shouldn't have an even 1% chance of being completely annihilated by my club-wielding warrior (that's somehow still around by then).
The later Civ games have taken odds out of the equation, and I think it's for the better. Instead, the amount of damage each unit takes per combat depends on the difference in their strength deterministically. From my own perspective, this is overall more fun than 'randomly' having really strong units lose against weak units occasionally.
But, I'm pretty sure i got to the end game at least once and when I think about it, I remember still having fun and I still spent a lot of time on it. It's actually one i've thought about going back to play as an adult, just because I feel like I'd have a better time of it now.