Now, don't get me wrong. It's an absolutely amazing
game. It took away weeks of my
life. But:
I am convinced now that the AI in Alpha Centauri cheats on Librarian level (the fourth difficulty level out of six).
In one game, basically the fate of the rest of the game hinged on whether I took a certain base. I was playing as Deirdre and trying to take a Peacekeeper base. I had built up a lot of mind worms, missile squads, etcetera, in a bunker two squares away from the base. On the turn before I was going to attack, an astounding number of missile rovers came pouring out of the base and individually killed every single one of the units I had in the bunker. I hadn't even seen any indication by then that the Peacekeepers had enough technology to build missile rovers. So, because I had concentrated so much on that attack, I was left fairly defenseless. Lal took my nearest base and then I gave in and started paying tribute in exchange for a truce.
In another game, I was again playing as Deirdre (trying to compensate for the previous failure), and busy kicking the Hive's ass and becoming the most powerful faction. I was looking forward to a war with the Spartans, who had become the second most powerful faction, later on, with all the nifty technologies you get late in the game. But the Spartans made some sort of bad social engineering choice, every one of its bases had drone riots, and it got itself into such a mess that the game consistently crashed on the Spartans' next turn. I suppose that's a good strategy from the AI's point of view - if you can't win, crash.