I have loved this game many years, and I was ecstatic to see a remaster able to run on modern machines. I literally kept an old laptop alive for like 10 years after it was a viable day-to-day machine because it could still run this game.

Great to see this on Steam now! Hopefully this leads ( somehow) to a better chance EA will give Firaxis and 2K a deal to make AC2! There was nothing nearly as good as this for so many years ( this came out in 1999! and sucked up many many hours of my time). It is purely a work of art that still shows the heart put into the design . From the discovery and secret projects ( like wonders) video excerpts to the music and personality of characters, it's pure fantastic classic! The rule book was actual paper made and a work of art in itself. I especially liked the scientific information of the triple star system in the back of the manual and how they took some liberties on how a habitable planet in that system might have evolved. They guessed right on there being a habitable planet in the system as Proxima Centauri b was discovered in 2016. C'mon EA give back to the people that bought all your products over the years and let Firaxis give us what we have wanted for 25 years now...Alpha Centauri 2!! Stop killing good games for game gods sake!

90% of this game is just a mod of Civilization 2:
-Meaning, everything works the same way but it's now renamed into some obscure fake futuristic terms.
-Meaning, you now have to re-learn what's what for no good reason.
-Meaning, you might already know how to play the game but have to waste time figuring it out because now food has to be called "nutrients" and luxuries are "psych" for some reason.
-Meaning, that research topics/buildings are not immediately understood as they deal with sci-fi technologies.
-Meaning, there's no immediate feeling of connection, relatability or intuitiveness to anything.
-Meaning, the game tries hard to constantly force in the background stories of all the factions into the game (with inconsistent narrative tone containing dumb bits of humor that ruin any sense of it being taken seriously).
-Meaning, tech discoveries, buildings, diplomacy messages come with long, meandering, often nonsensical, fake quotes by fake future historical figures.

Anyways here's the 10% that's new:
-Not being able to select how many opponents you'll play against (unlike in every other Civ game). Even on a tiny map, it's always 7 factions. Meaning, you'll constantly be badgered by lengthy diplomatic messages and incessant notifications of what secret project (wonders) they're building or switching to building.
- Inconsistent videos after building Wonders, some are comics, some are 3D, some are real movies.
-Being able to customize your units (though it's never really necessary but the game keeps annoyingly asking if you want to do it every time something new is researched).
-Applying occasional researched bonuses to your civilization on a Social Engineering screen.
-The planet being a character that eventually speaks to you and is always awkwardly refered to as just "Planet" (not the planet) whenever it's mentioned.
-Occasionally finding alien artifacts which you have to move to one of your cities for research.
-Some dumb terrain mechanic where you have to figure out potential food/gold/resource yields by the amount of green/brown colour on it and how high the elevation looks. Meaning that sometimes building a farm/mine on it will do nothing. Some improvements aren't even explained. "Drill to Aquifer", what does it do? Who knows, it's not in the help/database.

Nevertheless, at least it looks better than that hideous and lame attempt at a remake, Beyond Earth.