colinp

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

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FEATURES

Seed the Adventure: Establish your cultural identity by choosing one of eight different expedition sponsors, each with its own leader and unique gameplay benefits. Assemble your spacecraft, cargo & colonists through a series of choices that directly seed the starting conditions when arriving at the new planet.

Colonize an Alien World: Explore the dangers and benefits of a new planet filled with dangerous terrain, mystical resources, and hostile life forms unlike those of Earth. Build outposts, unearth ancient alien relics, tame new forms of life, develop flourishing cities and establish trade routes to create prosperity for your people.

Technology Web: To reflect progress forward into an uncertain future, technology advancement occurs through a series of nonlinear choices that affect the development of mankind. The technology web is organized around three broad themes, each with a distinct victory condition.

Quest System: Quests are injected with fiction about the planet, and help to guide you through a series of side-missions that will aid in resource collection, unit upgrades, and advancement through the game.

Orbital Layer: Build and deploy advanced military, economic and scientific units that provide strategic offensive, defensive and support capabilities from orbit.

Unit Customization: Unlock different upgrades through the tech web and customize your units to reflect your play style.

Multiplayer: Up to 8 players can compete for dominance of a new alien world.

Mod support: Robust mod support allows you to customize and extend your game experience.

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Sounds pretty sweet! I first watched the trailer in bed without sound on and hmmm I kinda liked it better that way without the voice over, but that's still a great trailer.

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Looks good. I just hope it's not a reskin of CiV with some SMAC narrative thrown in. Don't get me wrong, I really like both CiV and SMAC, but I've played both of them already. So here's hoping for some interesting new game mechanics and a different narrative.

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There's an interview at PC Gamer that goes into more depth about the game:

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/12/civilization-beyond-earth-interview-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-factions-aliens-technology-and-more/

 

I can't say it has reassured me that the game will be a resounding success, there are definitely a couple of points they make that are these flags for me that make me a little nervous about some of the design decisions, but some decisions could also be really cool if they pan out. I guess I'm just really curious about this game without having a positive or negative opinion.

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Reactions:

  • Custom-built factions - Neutral; I like having more control and even an RPG-like point-buy system to build a faction, but it means balance-through-breadth rather than balance-through-design and less faction-specific fiction.
  • Quest-based narrative - Bad; unless they make dozens and dozens of quests with multiple outcomes, this will get tiresome so quick. I can buy playing the same factions and discovering the same techs every game, but not finding the same worm skull and getting the same bonus for it.
  • Factional affinities - Neutral; hopefully having discrete types based on different gameplay styles will inspire them to build in different theming for each, but only three and such obvious archetypes?
  • Separate orbital and ground maps - Good; I don't even need to comment on this. Dual interconnected maps!
  • Unique planet biomes - Good; this allays some of my replayability fears, although again it undercuts the ability to tell a good story. Also, "no new ideas about alien planets"? See below for my comment on fictional influences.
  • Victory quests rather than conditions - Neutral; it really sounds like six of one and half-dozen of another, but they seem really excited about the idea of the game creating an emergent victory state out of your ingame choices rather than a finish line being crossed.
  • Confrontation-based diplomacy with no world congress - Bad; uh, really? They say that coalitions between factions will emerge via the affinities, but seriously? I can't see this being a positive step.
  • Focus on espionage - Bad; has there ever been a 4X game where spies and sabotage were fun things for a player to inflict on others and have inflicted on them? No. I don't know why they say this'll be the feature that gives depth to the diplomacy.
  • Affinity-based units that level up - Neutral; I don't really have a reason for feeling neutral about this. It just seems like they're tying too much to the affinities, which don't sound like terribly compelling strategic choices on their own.
  • Game art will reflect player choices in tech and affinities - Good; okay, this is the best thing they've said about affinities so far. I like that a Harmony-based Brazilia will look and feel different than a Supremacy-based Brazilia, as opposed to the entirely numerical effects of Civilization V's ideologies.
  • Fictional influences - Bad; they cite obvious and boring novels and movies, most of them fifty or sixty years old. I would die of a heart attack if one of them said Peter Watts, Steven Baxter, or even Iain M. Banks, but it's apparent they chose these because they're the ones they already know well, not because they're suited to the particular game they say they want to make. Reynolds' list of fictional influences for Alpha Centauri was surprisingly broad and deep, the product of hard research. This one doesn't hold a candle to it.

I'm not going to average out all the goods and bads, but I think I probably end up pretty close to neutral, too. Like sclpls, I see a lot of features that look very interesting and a lot that look like terrible ideas. We'll see how the game plays out; the last page of the interview is full of the typical fluff about how these guys are making a "different" 4X, but the proof is always in the pudding.

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This is probably going to be one of those games where I can read a ton about it, but until I actually play it for a while and see all the systems in action I won't have any idea if I like it or not. I want to like it, but right now I'm probably another neutral vote.

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I'm not necessarily as down on the quest system as Gormongous (with the caveat that it could still be terrible of course!) Fantasy Flight's Eldritch Horror game has you solving mysteries that are dependent on whatever Ancient Horror you are fighting. Each Ancient Horror has four mysteries, and to win the game you have to solve three of those mysteries. Not surprisingly, it doesn't take many play throughs before you start seeing the same mysteries pop up. But that's okay, because what the mysteries actually accomplish is making sure your strategic priorities vary from game to game.

 

Of course if it's more like the sort of requests that nation states make in Civ 5 then I will hate it.

 

Also agree with Gormongous' complaint about the game's influences. Perhaps they will at least mine some less considered ideas from these sources, but it's not too encouraging that they just decided to check out the works cited in SMAC.

 

Also, yeah, that it sounds like they're just sticking to Civ 5's diplomacy system is really disappointing. That they're doubling down on espionage is also worrisome.

 

On the other hand, ditching unit customization for organically evolving unit composition is a really compelling idea.

 

But TheLastBaron is right basically. We can look at any individual mechanic and say whether we like it or not. But the reality is with a deep strategy game it comes down to how all the mechanics and systems interact in totality, and that's impossible to evaluate on paper.

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Once they finally fixed it, Fallen Enchantress by Stardock had a quest system that worked fairly well. It was basically a step up from the "goodie hut" thing that so many 4X games are stuck with these days, with a few longer more involved questlines here and there (including one that causes you to win the game.) It does get a little old seeing the same quests again and again, but additional downloadable quest packs helped that out some.

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I'm not necessarily as down on the quest system as Gormongous (with the caveat that it could still be terrible of course!) Fantasy Flight's Eldritch Horror game has you solving mysteries that are dependent on whatever Ancient Horror you are fighting. Each Ancient Horror has four mysteries, and to win the game you have to solve three of those mysteries. Not surprisingly, it doesn't take many play throughs before you start seeing the same mysteries pop up. But that's okay, because what the mysteries actually accomplish is making sure your strategic priorities vary from game to game.

 

Of course if it's more like the sort of requests that nation states make in Civ 5 then I will hate it.

 

I feel like I'm caught sounding like I'm the most pessimistically neutral about the game. I know that quest systems can and do work in 4X games, I'm just worried by the (implied) statement from Firaxis saying, "Oh, you make your own faction, so we're implementing a quest system to carry the game's narrative." It feels like replacing something that has worked with something that has never worked for Firaxis, in order to reap the questionable benefit of fully customizable factions, which are something only a small portion of 4X gamers really even care about. Not to say it can't work or that customizable factions won't be worth it, just that there are more ways it could go wrong than right. Okay, maybe I am the most pessimistically neutral.

 

Above all, I hope that they build the quests intelligently to push your playstyle in unexpected directions. I can easily imagine the worm skull example they gave just asking you to choose A, B, or C for military, economic, or technological benefits, respectively. That sounds incredibly boring and would be nowhere as repeatable as a quest that always looks the same at the outset but leads in dramatically different directions towards A, B, and C each time. Basically, if they're going to have deterministic quests, I hope they're not just a lever for more player agency in the narrative. Players tend to tell pretty boring stories in 4X games without some sort of external force pushing them towards something else.

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  • Fictional influences - Bad; they cite obvious and boring novels and movies, most of them fifty or sixty years old. I would die of a heart attack if one of them said Peter Watts, Steven Baxter, or even Iain M. Banks, but it's apparent they chose these because they're the ones they already know well, not because they're suited to the particular game they say they want to make. Reynolds' list of fictional influences for Alpha Centauri was surprisingly broad and deep, the product of hard research. This one doesn't hold a candle to it.

 

Don't they say in that interview that they read everything Reynolds read for Alpha Centauri?

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Don't they say in that interview that they read everything Reynolds read for Alpha Centauri?

 

Yeah, but it's been almost twenty years since Reynolds wrote the bibliography. There's tons upon tons of new and inventive sci-fi around now, plus the reevaluation of many old classics. For them to basically come up with the exact same bibliography in 2014 as Reynolds did in 1996 for a different but related game, minus all of the hard science texts and a few of the less recognizable novels, makes me feel like it's an exercise in PR, not a sincere attempt to find inspiration for their game.

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To be fair to the designers though, they clearly are aiming for a different tone from Alpha Centauri (Rob Zacny covers this: http://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-goes-beyond-earth-not-back-alpha-centauri ) so it might not be so important that they have different fictional influences if they successfully convey a different idea about the future.

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To be fair to the designers though, they clearly are aiming for a different tone from Alpha Centauri (Rob Zacny covers this: http://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-goes-beyond-earth-not-back-alpha-centauri ) so it might not be so important that they have different fictional influences if they successfully convey a different idea about the future.

 

Oh, of course. I don't mean to say otherwise. It just doesn't change the fact that it's an underwhelming bibliography of safe and obvious sci-fi. I mean, I don't want to repeat myself, but when one of the leads comes out and says, "There's no new ideas about alien planets out there," it shows me someone who hasn't read (or even heard about) Blindsight or Excession. In fact, all of the authors they talk about were active almost entirely between the 1960s and the 1990s. Even Greg Bear and Dan Simmons, the two authors in their bibliography still writing today, haven't recaptured the success they enjoyed in the late 80s and early 90s. They're missing two whole decades of sci-fi among their influences and that leaves me with some disquiet, that's all.

 

Maybe they're intentionally making a Golden Age or New Wave sci-fi game, which would be great, but if they're just trying to make a sci-fi game full of new and interesting ideas, they're not reading the right stuff.

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Personally, I like the tone of 80's sci-fi, and it would be interesting to have a modern game themed around it, much like Fallout shows us a 1960's version of the future. In the end, I've always found those "list of influences" type articles near worthless anyway.

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Having got over my initial excitement at this announcement, there's a lot in what they've been saving that looks and sounds good and some not so good. I love the idea of orbital and land base maps and systems, I don't mind the 'quest' system as a replacement to goodie huts. As has been mentioned above that sort of works in Fallen Enchantress. If they could make modding that and creating your own quests easy and straightforward I could that becoming a real asset too.

Still it does still sound very much like Civ in Space. Not necessarily a bad thing at all but here's hoping we hear more about some different mechanics as more details emerge.

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Maybe I'm excessively cynical, but when they say they are keeping modding in mind, to me that reads like that's something they have decided to ignore. Most developers I'm aware of say that if you're going to let your game be modded that's really something you have to keep in mind from the beginning of the project.

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I don't know, you can't play a modded multiplayer game of CiV, for example. 

 

You can see the panel discussion here:

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Another interview with Rock Paper Shotgun: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/20/civilization-beyond-earth-impressions-interview/

 

A bit of an odd one, really. They talk about a lot of interesting philosophical inspirations, but pull way back on the "spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri" angle. Instead, Miller says, "It’s a Civ in space, that’s about it." How disappointing, there are mods that do "Civ in space" perfectly fine. I want something more from a developer like Firaxis.

 

Also, their list of fictional influences continues to underwhelm. They talk about "less expected stuff like Aliens and Predator, and Firefly," whatever that means. Still watching this with quiet optimism myself, I know it's hard to tell with me.

 

 

EDIT: A few of the RPS commenters hit the whole "fictional influences" thing on the head for me.

 

I’m honestly concerned that neither of them seem to be big fans of SMAC, nor of even vaguely modern SF (Vinge, Banks, etc.), and that they think Earth nation-states (how 20th century!) fighting it out on an alien planet is “more optimistic” than SMAC.

 

It sounds almost like retro-SF and not in a good, intentional way.

I cringed at the “Asimov and Heinlein, and Frank Herbert, and Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury” part. Like really, you named one guy who is still alive and he’s become one of the most awful pulp-pushers of the since the others WERE alive. I would be way more excited if they had said Banks, Mieville, Vinge, Sterling, etc.

What jumped out at me (not in a good way) was the generic quality of SF influences cited. A bunch of pre-1970 writers, plus a bunch of TV-movie pap. (I don’t think that Asimov, Herbert, etc., are bad — they are legends. But a list of only famous legends is the list of someone who doesn’t really follow SF.)

 

By contrast, the SMAC creators obviously knew and cared about SF as literature of ideas, and they had kept up with it since the Golden Age, citing writers like Vernor Vinge and Kim Stanley Robinson. The Mars Trilogy in particular is an obvious influence on SMAC, one that informs a lot of its unique flavor. The faction leaders are inspired by the First Hundred, and the huge range of terraforming and climate possibilities reflect the focus of those books.

 

The SMAC users’ manual had a “suggested reading” section which included a bunch of SF and non-fiction reading. I did a little post comparing that with what these guys say about SF.

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I came away much more optimistic after reading that because it sounds like they are taking mod support more seriously than I thought!

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Speaking of new sci-fi, and also to go completely off-topic: what are the good modern sci-fi writers that I should be reading? The newest sci-fi book that I've read is the Star Wars book where Chewbacca died (and I read that in middle school.)

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I haven't read anything by him yet (but plan to), but Iain Banks is the name I keep hearing from lots of different people for more recent science fiction.

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Speaking of new sci-fi, and also to go completely off-topic: what are the good modern sci-fi writers that I should be reading? The newest sci-fi book that I've read is the Star Wars book where Chewbacca died (and I read that in middle school.)

 

It really depends what you're looking for. I like New Space Opera a lot, so my favorites are Iain M. Banks and Vernor Vinge. If you're into military sci-fi, you've got John Scalzi and David Weber. You can't really pass up the greats of the eighties, nineties, and naughties like William Gibson, David Brin, Ursula K. LeGuin, or Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I recently read Peter Watts' Blindsight and found it overly cute myself, but still wildly inventive and interesting. I've got Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice on request from the library, so I have high hopes for that.

 

I haven't read anything by him yet (but plan to), but Iain Banks is the name I keep hearing from lots of different people for more recent science fiction.

 

I really adore Banks, his Culture novels in particular. Most of my sci-fi reading the past few years have been an attempt to find a replacement for him who's still alive. I haven't been affected by the death of an author like that in a long time...

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I just hope they do more with making the endgame interesting. I often stop playing my Civ 5 games because the endgame is so dull. This is partially my fault as the only compelling win condition IMO is conquest and there is always a point where you are far more powerful than all other Civs and it becomes a grind to win.

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I haven't read anything by him yet (but plan to), but Iain Banks is the name I keep hearing from lots of different people for more recent science fiction.

His death last year was a real loss to the genre. His culture novels really do stand out as a gold standard of 'space opera' Sci-Fi in recent years. So many good books to choose from but don't ignore his earlier non-culture books as well - Feersum Enjinn and Against a Dark Background are both excellent novels in their own right.

Neal Asher's books might also be worth checking out - although a lot of his early book echo a lot of banks' work (AI led human society) he quickly sheds that with some really imaginative stuff. Worth a look.

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50 minutes of "gameplay", go over the customization options you pick before the game starts. sponsor (big bonus), colonists (supplement bonus), ship (starting bonus), cargo (other starting bonus) and what kind of planet you are going to. They also look at the map customization options. 

 

After 32 minutes they finally get to the actual game. You get to pick your starting your location from a small radius (can be modified with a start bonus). Neat stuff to see, but I want to know about mid and endgame.

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