seven escape pods, each containing a faction, are scattered across Planet. In the Alien Crossfire expansion pack, players learn that alien experiments led to disastrous consequences at Tau Ceti, creating a hundred-million-year evolutionary cycle that ended with the eradication of most complex animal life in several neighboring inhabited star systems. After the disaster (referred to by Progenitors as "Tau Ceti Flowering"), the Progenitors split into two factions: Manifold Caretakers, opposed to further experimentation and dedicated to preventing another Flowering; and Manifold Usurpers, favoring further experimentation and intending to induce a controlled Flowering in Alpha Centauris Planet. In Alien Crossfire, these factions compete along with the human factions for control over the destiny of Planet. Characters and factions The game focuses on the leaders of seven factions, chosen by the player from the 14 possible leaders in Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire, and Planet (voiced by Alena Kanka). The characters are developed from the faction leaders' portraits, the spoken monologues accompanying scientific discoveries and the "photographs in the corner of a commlink – home towns, first steps, first loves, family, graduation, spacewalk." The leaders in Alpha Centauri comprise: Lady Deirdre Skye, a Scottish activist (voiced by Carolyn Dahl), of Gaia's Stepdaughters; Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, a Chinese Legalist official (voiced by Lu Yu), of the Human Hive; Academician Prokhor Zakharov, a Russian academic (voiced by Yuri Nesteroff) of the University of Planet; CEO Nwabudike Morgan, a Namibian businessman (voiced by Regi Davis), of Morgan Industries; Colonel Corazon Santiago, an American militiawoman (voiced by Wanda Niño) of the Spartan Federation; Sister Miriam Godwinson, an American minister and social psychologist (voiced by Gretchen Weigel), of the Lord's Believers; and Commissioner Pravin Lal, an Indian surgeon and diplomat (voiced by Hesh Gordon), of the Peacekeeping Forces. The player controls one of the leaders and competes against the others to colonize and conquer Planet. The Datalinks (voiced by Robert Levy and Katherine Ferguson) are minor characters who provide information to the player. Each faction excels at one or two important aspects of the game and follows a distinct philosophical belief, such as technological utopianism, Conclave Christianity, "free-market" capitalism, militarist survivalism, Chinese Legalism, U.N. Charter humanitarianism, or Environmentalist Gaia philosophy. The game takes place on Planet, with its "rolling red ochre plains" and "bands of lonely terraformed green". The seven additional faction leaders in Alien Crossfire are Prime Function Aki Zeta-Five, a Norwegian research assistant-turned-cyborg (voiced by