Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/YMMV

• Alternate Character Interpretation: There's a positive or negative interpretation possible for every faction in the game, even if you account for the limits of their ideologies. Yes, including the Hive and the Believers.
  • Commissioner Pravin Lal is the perfect embodiment of ethical integrity until one little quote in regards to genetics.

"I loved my chosen. How then to face the day when she left me? So I took from her body a single cell, perhaps to love her again." -- Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Time of Bereavement"

• • • Then again, according to the short-story she was shot in the back by Santiago's men on the Unity.
    • And according to the novels, it doesn't work: the clone doesn't want anything to do with him.
• Game Breaker:
  • The Manifold Caretakers and the Manifold Usurpers are considered overpowered in multiplayer.
  • Cloudbase Academy. In multiplayer, of course, the usual response to someone else developing it is to nuke the base from orbit.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A planet only a bit bigger than Earth has been discovered in the Alpha Centauri system... that's as close to its sun as Mercury is to ours. Dammit.
  • Well, it orbits Alpha Centauri B. Chiron (fictionally) orbits Alpha Centauri A. There's still hope!
• Magnificent Bastard: Sheng-Ji Yang. He cheated on his psych evaluation (using knowledge he obtained via having a PHD in psychology) to get on board the Unity as its executive officer and quite possibly (never confirmed) assassinated Captain Garland. Did I mention that his willpower is so great that he is nearly immune to the effects of pain?
• Memetic Mutation: Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.
• Player Punch: When you first create a Mind Worm boil, you'll be treated to an interlude where your faction leader dispatches a trusted aide to become the boil's controller. If that first boil gets destroyed in combat, another interlude will appear where your faction leader is looking upon the scorched remains of said aide, and is quite distraught by the sight.
  • If you subsequently capture the city that produced the unit that killed your aide, you get a third interlude, and the city is renamed in their honor automatically.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy: Miriam. War in 4X games built on the civilization model, like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, is a costly and time-consuming endeavor, and without proper preparations it can quickly become long-winded war of attrition with no end in sight. Miriam is aggressive and therefore extremely annoying, should you end up with a common border or insufficiently large body of water between you. Playing as Miriam is even worse, because the AIs are suddenly as aggressive towards her as she usually is towards everyone else. All six of them. Alternatively, she may immediately offer a treaty and pact depending on whether you're running fundamentalist or not, even if you're running democratic she may still pact you...
  • Many are unhappy with the new factions in the expansion, believing them much more powerful than their counterparts in the original game. The aliens get hit particularly hard with this, since their primary disadvantage (their inability to properly form alliances and launch diplomatic programs) isn't a factor in multiplayer games.
• The Woobie: Pravin Lal, whose sole goal is to preserve the original Unity mandate of creating a peaceful settlement for mankind on another planet and must now watch as that dream falls apart through factional infighting... and it's Up to Eleven in the Novelization. He can become a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, however, depending on how the game unfolds.