Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

It was just this perfect storm of a game from a bygone era in game design. It iterated on Civilization 2 in a way that wouldn’t be replicated until Civilization 4, what with the social engineering screen. It had a bunch of user customization options for units that, yes, the AI didn’t know how to do, but I’m of the opinion it’s better to focus on the user experience than to try to make a game that is “fair” for AI players.

The factions perfectly encapsulated the political divisions of the era, with each faction having its own ideas about what went wrong back on Earth, and therefore what the path forward was necessary to avoid those problems on Chiron. Each faction would have an opinion of the other factions based on a number of different things, including their social engineering choices (form of government, economic model, publicly promoted values, future society model), with each faction having a gameplay restriction that prevented them from adopting the model favored by their philosophical opposite.

And then there was the tech tree. If there is a more beautiful way to build high quality speculative fiction right into the gameplay, I’ve never seen it. It wasn’t just “red lasers to blue lasers” as so many Sci-Fi 4x games do. Every entry in the tree was proper science fiction, with a description and a quote, with some of the quotes being from actual historical figures (“God does not play dice.” - Albert Einstein) and some being from fictional characters invented for the game (“Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded.” - Chairman Sheng-ji Yang).

This was a special era in art generally, that gave us such masterpieces as Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was an era where media models were changing and the artists were running out ahead of their coproate masters, operating at a nexus of increasing resources and increasing oversight.