Surprisingly Touched by Games?

[Queequeg]

Just finished a game of Alpha Centauri as the University.  I had a huge continent I shared with the Spartans, while Foreman Domai (Space Marxists) was on a large central continent, the Gaians on reasonably sized island, and a long, thin island was populated by the Fundies, the Peacekeepers and the Morganites (Capitalists.)

I'm guessing most of you know the plot of Alpha, but the outline is that mid-late 21st century earth is rapidly approaching point of being uninhabitable, so they haul ass and colonize an earthlike planet called Alpha Centauri.  The dominant native life form is a kind of fungus that, over millions of years, develops massively powerful intelligence and then engineers a mass extinction event.  In the game, the arrival of humans kicks things off for "Planet", and near the end of the game, with a lot of massively powerful terraforming and industrial tools being put to use, the planet starts throwing everything it has at you. 

The continent I was on resembled a reverse-South America, with the Spartans on a kind of tropical Argentina and Chile, and myself centered on the wide, northern plains and mountain ranges of the northern region.  I had a shitton of resources, an extremely defensible position-the northern and southern parts of the continent were separated by a large oceanic inlet-a pre-planetfall borehole cluster (massive aid in industry building), and just generally speaking did pretty well.  After some disastrous defeats in the first University-Spartan war, my tech and industrial advantage started really coming through, and I managed to take a southern peninsula that was on my (right) side of the continent but physically far closer to the Spartan's main bases.  I was in what was basically an eternal alliance with the Greens and Peacekeepers because of my Democratic-Green politics and economics, but pretty freely sold tech to all factions, and sometimes ended up giving a helping technological hand to factions that threatened to go completely under. 

Anyway, after my last victory against the Spartans I really start taking off.  There's a point in the mid-early late game where the University can just go fucking nuts-you start getting all of these lab bonuses, and certain wonders that add 100%+ research at a base are just nuts.  My main area of settlement and the recently conquered Spartan territory was naturally divided by a large desert, so I built a ton of condensers and aquifers to transform it in to a new agricultural area in a kind of Aral Sea like experiment.  Also started building a ton of boreholes.  My score went up insanely, the "great desert" became a huge agricultural area, and by the beginning of the true lategame I basically have no competitors.     I started to really enjoy entire process of terraforming-by the end of the game I managed to basically turn every square in my large area in to introduced, Earth-based forest or farms, mines and solar collectors. 

However, this is when things really started getting weird.  Global warming started hitting like a bitch.  A lot of my peripheral cities on the relatively recently settled east coast were underwater pretty quickly, and the Spartans seemed to not have the same ability to cope as I did-they lost entire cities, while mine just became water-based.    I think a large part of this was my terraforming and massive expansion of industrial base (including thermal boreholes), but I was also selling a lot of tech to Foreman Domai who had no compunctions about environmental damage. After about 15 years of this I've effectively lost a few core cities to massive mindworm invasions that I wasn't prepared for, and a lot of the great coastal cities were now either water cities or, for other factions, gone.  This was basically Earth II-this wasn't going to last another 30 years, and my industrial and population base were both under serious pressure as my farms, forests and mines were underwater.  I was surprisingly upset by this-I'd spent several paintstacking hours terraforming my continent, and within like 20 turns a lot of it was either underwater or replaced by fungus. New rivers popped up.  I didn't even know that happened in Alpha Centauri. 

Then transcendence hit.  In the game, one of the ways to win (an equivalent of building the rocket to Alpha Centauri in Civilization) is to make transition to posthuman society by uploading sum total of human knowledge to the now totally sapient Planet, with most of the human population of the planet electing to take part in this new planet-human synthesis.  I was really, really relieved-the rest of my faction was safe, and I'd made up for whatever hubris led me to wreck so much ecological devastation. 

Anyone else have any similar weird little moments when playing a game?

[Josquius]

Weird, I've never had an AC game work out so well. They always go fairly easily for me. I remember one game playing the expansion I win in a handful of terms due to landing next door to the other alien faction and killing them quickly.

Civ games too usually don't quite get to such a fun end game. Sometimes however they do quite nicely. I recall one game where I was in the middle of  a sort of America's, two loosely connected continents. India  to the north, France  to the south. I discovered France first and much of my early game  was spent taking as much of  their rightful lands as possible. I somehow failed to notice the land bridge to the north until fairly late, it seemed many of my nAtural resources were up there though....

India grabbed a lot and the border settled on a long strip of very narrow land with primitive wars rarely going anywhere. Contrary to my usual wonder whoring and dominating I was doing fairly bad, which had its fun sides despite the annoyance of missing out.
Come the industrial  age. though and I was first to several key military technologies. A pretty hefty world war kicked off with me vs India and then my small, weak other continent ally getting attacked by someone.

[Ed Anger]

When I snapped my joystick playing a porn game on my C64.

[Syt]

I had a rather awesome game of Distant Worlds once (with the second expansion). I was playing as peaceful diplomatic humans. I had a decent sized empire of 20 or so colonies, and a good, strong military.

I was also allied with a few alien races ... which turned out to be a bit of a problem. Those races had hostile neighbors, and they kept dragging me into lengthy wars. One conflict would wind down, then another would start. My military kicked mighty ass, and I eventually became a bit overconfident.

At any rate, my real enemies were not without but within. Tired of being at war all the time, my peace loving citizens broke out in revolt. Planet after planet joined the revolt. In the end, about 2/3 of my empire had seceded, including my home world and the most developed colonies. I was left with a handful of backwards settlements sprinkled throughout space, while the rebels had formed their own independent state.

I wanted to try and a) survive and b) re-unite my empire, but the save game got bugged and crashed on me.



Civ4 once surprised me as well. I was playing peacefully as is my wont, right next door to Carthage and Hannibal. I kept him sweet with tributes and gifts throughout the game, so I could play the culture game. He was busy conquering other lands. During the end game he ran out of stuff to declare war on. So in very few turns he abolished our friendship that had lasted all game, and then dropped a massive nuclear first strike on me that completely devastated seven of my ten or so cities, then moved in for the kill. My cities and military in shambles, I could only watch in fascination.

[CountDeMoney]

I was surpisingly touched by Red Orchestra once, when I used a satchel charge to wipe out three Germans on the Stalingrad map, Palestinian-style.

[The Brain]

When I shot a Swedish rapper in the back in CS. I guess he hipped when he should have hopped.