Civilization: Beyond Earth announced

From what I remember from preview gameplay, you can still stack a military and civilian unit on the same tile.

Just finished playing a little bit of the demo.
From what little I've played so far, I really dislike it. There are just too many freaking aliens.
This was my experience: After landing I sent my scout to explore. I found one of those resource derrick things right next to an alien hive, my scout was killed before I got a chance to open it though.
No problem I thought, just build a soldier, take the fight to them and get the resources!

So I did just that, sent out my soldier and all of a sudden aliens were ******* EVERYWHERE.
The game just became too tedious, early exploration was an ordeal and I got bored really quick.

I dunno about you, but I had a blast in the demo.

My goal was to try and spring for harmony even in the 100 turn limit, so I focused on not pissing off the aliens by approaching their nests, or killing them.

At the start, it was hard to explore, alien nests blocked the centre of the continent, so that was a no go, and nest encounters ate 2 explorers, so I shot for the alien fences, snagging the +1 range upgrade from the quest pop up in order to keep my new neighbourinos from shredding my worker.

Then I went for a tech that would give me level 1 of harmony, and bing bang boozle the first level of harmony allows the aliens to chill the **** out, and they do it rather fast too.

Now my boys could approach their nests (Not to kill them, as that's a big ol no no) without aggression, allowing me to pick up the remaining loot boxes and begin a few excavations.

Soon (If I had the game) the legions of aliens would serve me.

However I did kinda need to piss them off for a few turns to develop a xeno mass near my capitol, as it was covered by nest (That r/civ told me when covered by my influence would stop spawning, it did yay!) that was within my alien fences.

Overall I had 2 citys on the go, with mega fences to keep the aliens from getting into my fridge, and they were like, totes chill across the whole planet, and with the tech to remove miasma with my workers, I could carve out my own little kingdom without resorting to satellite bombardment to scrub up the alien love funk.

Compared to my extermination attempt (That worked fairly well in the long term, not the short) it was much more successful.


Would frigging love to have this mechanic in civ 6 so I can choose to not commit genocide in every damn game. Like geeze I get it, im England, we are kinda *** holes throughout history, but give me a break randomly spawning true Scots men!

I love the refinement of the mechanics, as well as a few new ones.

Might have to wait for a sale, as moneys tight, bills are paid (Kinda, but I live at home) so the rest of my money is in savings for a classic British rainy day.

I think I might just like 4X games overall, which is why the idea of this just being like, a mod for civ5 never bothered me.

I already own like 7 different copys of civ in some manner, but this looks too legit to quit!

So... Every day?

I'm waiting for a sale too. I liked the ideas behind Civ V but its contrivances drove me up the wall (and through the ceiling). However that covert ops system seems like it'll solve the "you can't destroy this city using that because REASONS" problem I have with Civ V.

Also level 1 Purity stops aliens from murdering explorers, which is handy.

First thing I'm gonna do is land on an ice planet and go full supremacy, invading Earth with a legion of Cybermen.

Go to earth, wait for the purity people to start the promised land victory, and pop through their own teleporters, PA style! (I wish).

Yea that's kind of the point of the whole alien planet angle. If you're intent on fighting the aliens, chose military virtues and i think Supremacy, as it gives you a much easier time killing them. (i think one virtue gives +30% damage against aliens).

I've bought the game. It's fun. But there are two main problems.

*sterile. Unlike Civ5 (which i only played with all DLC, bought it in a steam sale) the game is much more narrow in variety. It works, but it's not exactly as broad as Civ5.

*There seems to be little consequence to the whole Affinity thing, because even though i'm a lvl 16 Harmony player, no other civ has started to hate me (the worst i've got is "guarded".). I can still research all tech apparently, i can harvest all resources (particularly Firaxite is attractive as it gives me a big science boost), i use all sorts of techs that feel distinctly non-harmony (e.g. artificial intelligence), and it feels too much like a coat of paint in stead of a fundamental decision.

Minor points:

Orbital feels pretty inconsequential, and gimmicky.

Victories seem limited.

One more thing: your enemies seem to be players of the same, not other virtue. I'm currently playing a game with AI's and one AI is ahead of me in harmony. He grabs my wonders ~3 turns before i finish them by building them first, and our victory conditions contest too. Unlike the other players, who are much slower in their victory game and have plenty of non-overlapping wonders.


Major improvement:

I think the biggest positive thing are the quests. I like the quests. It gives a nice bit of connection and insight into the game and your faction, and ties things together more and gives more incentive to do stuff. It's also not in-your-face.

Fair enough, but there should be a slight limit.
I played Civ V with Raging Barbarians, compared to this game raging barbs was tame.

That said I've done a little more experimenting around with it and I'm slowly getting used to it. The hundred turn limit simply isn't enough to form a full opinion though but I'm probably going to end up buying it. I'll admit that the massive amount of aliens does bring a certain flavour of urgency to the game, which is pretty cool.

One thing I can definitely say though is that I too really like the quest system, especially the quest choices. One of my consistent annoyances with the civilization series is that you never really got much of a view from the citizen side of things, this remedies that pretty well, though with a measly 100 turns to work with it's hard to see how deep this goes. I'm hoping to see some more difficult choices than "purely beneficial choice A vs. purely beneficial choice B".

Something like
Negotiate peace with (faction leader name here) and all cities will have +25% energy production for 25 turns
OR
Keep the war with (faction leader name here) and all combat units will gain +25% combat strength for 25 turns

Played through the 100 turns twice, I like it so far.

Then this happened:



Friggin' nest right outside my borders! GET AWAY DANGIT!

If you get a nest in your borders, it will stop the aliens from spawning. And if you leave it for like 50 turns, the aliens will become friendly (blue icon colour).


By the way, if anyone's waiting for mac/linux version, you can still preorder (and get the mappack) on Aspyr's site. It will grant a steam key on the day the versions come out. Though I do wonder if we'll see any discount during autumn sales.

Harmony is for hippies.

It doesn't need harmony though… it's just handy to have so you can eradicate later them when you have OP units.

You should also try this on an island map: You can mass teleport alien forces to other islands with ultrasonic fence. It's really funny to see your neighbor having his entire island full of aliens that came out of the blue. You do need a fairly large island (with a couple nests) and fill it completely with cities though. But I saw someone destroy a city using that technique, it was hilarious.

Screw the aliens. THIS IS MY PLANET NOW.

Someone in my class has been having issues - is anyone else getting hangs and crashes when playing multiplayer with more than 3 human players?

Then i'm a damn scary hippie i think.

Won a game. I had to cheat via a save, unfortunately. As i mentioned earlier, it feels like you compete with equal affinity players, not opposite affinity players. So my best buddy harmony player had a Mind Flower (endgame device) a few turns before me. It activated 2 turns before mine. So went back in time, sent a military force 5 turns before the endgame and blew it up. He conquered a city i recently conquered, got back to being friends and i transcended.

YOU. WILL. BE. UP-GRADED. THE. CYBERMEN. ARE. THE. SU-PREME. RACE.

The AI is really good at teching to the right stuff to get the non-Domination victories, I've found.

Just set all games to Domination until you're really familiar with the tech web. The AI, conversely, is really, really baffled at the idea of killing other players. It gets most of the way there eventually, but I'm at turn 795 and nobody's even declared war on me yet (technically Neo-France won through a "time victory" at turn 500 - I didn't turn that on game why do you do this to me game).

Neo-France is hanging on with one city left (I think they're Purity), and the world is split between me (ARC, Harmony), the Pan-Asian Cooperative (Supremacy) and Polynesia (Supremacy). I had a Harmony buddy hanging around before Asia and Polynesia punted her face in.

Exact opposite for me. I was going for a harmony victory and found that the other harmony player was beating me to quite a few wonders and beat me to the victory.

I actually like this AI better. It feels like diplomacy is a bit more natural, with more peace-minded AI's rather than some of Civ5's "i go to war anyway".

So far, my verdict is: It's not a bad game. It's also not a superb game. it's...OK.

Beware of cybernetic Australians.

"non-Domination" victories. So yah, my experience is the same as yours

And yeah, I like them not being as homicidal as in previous Civ games (all the way back to Civ 1, really).