Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

Anyone else looking forward to this? It's supposed to basically be a modernized version of Alpha Centauri. Set after the collapse of civilization on Earth, it's about the colonization of other worlds by the survivors. It will be coming out this Friday. I've never played a Sid Meier game that wasn't fantastic, so this will be a day one purchase for me.

It's a PC exclusive of course because filthy, uneducated console peasants lack the intellect of the glorious PC gaming master race that is needed to play a game like this.

 

The AI has gotten better. On normal difficulty it tends to keep pace reasonably well with the player with no civilizations being too far ahead, at least in Civ V. Also, it doesn't just sit around waiting to get conquered. It wages pretty well organized military campaigns using massed units, often sending a huge number of units right at your capital.

On the highest difficulties it still cheats horribly. Except now it's every AI that is cheating, and you will be the one with spearman against M1 Abrams tanks and stealth bombers being sent at you by multiple opponents. In their defense though, they make it well known when you pick those higher difficulties that you will be up against cheating AI. It's right in the description.

 

Reviews on this are pretty medicore. IGN 7.9, Gamespot 7. Kind of glad I didn't buy it now. I think I'm going to hold off until it gets some patches and expansions and gets really cheap.

Civ games always score 9s and 10s across the board, so this must be seriously flawed to be getting 7s.

 

Yeah it's always hard to get the AI right in these games. If it's too dumb, it doesn't present a challenge. If it's obviously cheating, things feel unfair and rigged. Civ V after a lot of patching seemed to have the AI just about right.

Often with the civ games the expansions fix glaring issues. The vanilla version of Civ 3 was a mess. I never played it with the expansions, but I heard it actually got quite good later.

 

I haven't formed a complete opinion on this yet. The similarities to civ v are only skin deep. It's very different in a lot of ways. It has more of a military focus. Also tech progresses in a web rather than a tree, with various sub techs you can research, and the technologies you research take you towards different affinities and end games. But you don't have to completely commit to an affinity. You can mix and match. The alien landscape is pretty weird. There's a lot of deadly gas that damages your units. The aliens aren't necessarily hostile, and if you go with the hippie tree hugger affinity you can befriend them. Mostly it seems you'll be fighting with other groups of colonists. It seems good but a bit barebones at this point, like some stuff was deliberately left out to leave room for expansions. It seems like the affinities can make the game play out in very different ways, so you would need to play at least three times to get a good idea of what the game has to offer. I've put dozens of hours into every other Civ game so it's probably worth $37 for me. If you aren't really into civ or strategy games I'm not sure if this would appeal to you.

My initial impression is that some of the critics were too harsh and this seems more like an 8/10 that could become a 9/10 with expansions. It doesn't have the glaring technical problems that civ v had at launch, or the glaring gameplay balance issues of civ 3, so it's starting off better than some other civ games out of the gate.

 

I just played for 5 hours straight. I'm really enjoying it. I would say your opinion of it will depend on what you look for in a Civ game. If you like the older more military focused Civ games like Civ 2, you'll probably really like it. If you prefer the newer games with all of that hippie cultural victory crap, you'll probably be disappointed. I prefer the older games that had more of a military focus, so I'm really digging it.

As far as the affinites, it seems like harmony is really good at the beginning of the game when you're trying to adapt to the harsh world, but supremacy has the best end game stuff. I started out focusing on harmony and then shifted to supremacy. I can't really speak for purity as I haven't tried any of those advancements.

 

Pretty much. I'm currently researching a giant Supremacy death walker to wipe out the indigenous life and the rival colonists.

 

Crap I lost track of time and played until 5AM last night. One more turn and all of that jazz.

What is cool is that eventually if you put enough points in an affinity, all of your cities and units change their look, special affinity specific unit abilites begin to unlock, and your rivals become very angry at you. All of the tree huggers were angry that I had picked supremacy and had lost touch with nature or something. The Chinese even declared war on me over it. But their units were no match for me, and I had wiped out their army and forced them into a peace treaty in only a few turns. They were pretty smart about their attack though. They picked two relatively undefended cities to attack while my army was deployed elsewhere. I was afraid I was going to lose the cities before my army could reach them. But my units showed up right before one of the cities was going to fall and pushed them back.