Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

[Wasted]

Have played for a few hours, it's ok as a civ 5 sci-fi mod, it is no AC2.

[Yoru]

I played a couple hours last night thanks to timezones and pretending to be in Australia. (Thanks, Australia!) My morning-coffee thoughts follow.

From a hundred-foot view, it looks and feels a lot like modern Civ. You are still building cities, building units and structures inside cities, improving tiles, and going to war. You're still researching techs, you still have the same five basic resources as Civ5 (food, production, money, culture, science). You can still win by murdering the shit out of everyone around you, and you still still be irritated by Space Montezuma (Brazilia) randomly wardeccing.

Some elements are adapted from Civ5, such as "Virtues" - they're best described as the lovechild of Civ5 Brave New World's Ideology system and base Civ5's Social Policy system, but broader and deeper. Some elements are tweaks to add depth, such as "Quest Decisions", which allow you to customize your civ with a choice between two bonuses each time you build a new type of building, or the new Covert Ops system, which is Civ5-style but adds new missions and ways to use your spies.

Most of the stuff is akin to a cousin-once-removed of its analogous Civ5 system. Research is now arranged in concentric circles instead of lines. Affinities takes bits of BNW Ideologies, Unit leveling, the old Tech tree/unit upgrading system, and tack on some graphical flair.

The differences are in the details, of what buildings, units and tile improvements actually do. I found it a lot more difficult on my first go-around, because it's not quite obvious which buildings should be built in service of which goals, and which tile improvements I should be building.

The big difference is in playstyle. In Civ5, you basically picked something to shoot for at the outset and then executed that strategy over the long term. You picked your Civ5 civ with a victory and path in mind. In CivBE, it feels like you're forced to be flexible. The "civs" don't railroad you towards given types of victory or play; instead, your game is shaped by the tech, affinity and quest decisions you make.

In CivBE, you have to adapt your strategy to the evolving situation on the map. You may go in thinking you'll go for the Harmony victory, then get stuck somewhere which has none of the resources required for it. You may go in thinking you'd prefer to lean heavily on trade and found only a few cities, then find yourself alone, and on a continent devoid of strategic resources. Adapt.

TLDR: It's not a radical departure, it's not SMAC; it's space-flavored Civ5 BNW turned 90 degrees sideways and with a much greater degree of flexible thinking involved.

My main complaint so far is that it seems more... flavorless than the earlier Civs. Without the context of history to inform how I'm thinking of things, the buildings and techs just feel like generic sci-fi mush with some stats tacked on. The flavor text is appallingly written, leaning heavily on the idea of tossing out a familiar idea or quote, then sticking one or two words in there that go "lol space". In SMAC, at least, there was a (skippable) bit of flavor text explaining what sci-fi gubbins I'd discovered was supposed to be; here, it's just "+1 energy to geothermal" or whatever.

The UI is also pretty bad, particularly the city UI.

Buy/Don't Buy: Buy for giant Civ5 nerds. Everyone else, don't buy, wait for a -50% steam sale and some balance/UI patches.

[Yoru]

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention. The introduction of the rifts/craters means the maps have more "texture". There's more obstacles to movement, which tend to create natural corridors of development and chokepoints, far more than the generally wide-open spaces of Civ5. Again, something that forces you to consider your tactics and adapt.

[Draegan]

I'm torn. I haven't gotten really into the last few Civs. I mean, I bought them all on release, played them for 100 hours straight but then dropped them. I got the first Civ1 for christmas from my dad. I was 11.

I think I'm going to skip this one and wait for a sale. Too much else on my plate right now.

[Sky]

My main complaint so far is that it seems more... flavorless than the earlier Civs.

And that's saying something, as Civ has always been flavorless compared to FFH2 and SMAC.

It's a decent civ game. They never light anyone's fire on release, but you'll always get your money's worth if you're a TBS fan.

I do like the quest/decision system - it's something they put in the engine while working with Kael during Beyond the Sword, btw.

[Yegolev]

If you watch that video without sound, it looks like they are shipping the Jews to - at best - Space Israel.

[Ingmar]

They're Indians?

Anyway, after 150 turns or so, I like it. The way you deal with aliens is a good bit different than barbarians; seems like only siege worms will fuck with you without you fucking with them first. I like the expedition thing. The breadth/depth thing with the ideologies is pretty cool, and I like the tech branch/leaf thing better than a lot of other tech tree systems I've seen.

Problems: I agree that the UI feels pretty clunky; there's a lot of little touches missing, like things highlighting when you hover on them etc. And I don't know if it is because I'm color blind but I have a really hard time spotting miasma and differentiating some of the resources, so I have to play with resource icons turned on and check the tooltip on any square where I'm going to have a guy stop for a turn (maybe this is just Sid Meier space tradition because AC was awful for this sort of thing too before they added the color blind setting). Also the leaders thus far seem to have basically zero personality.

[calapine]

Problems: I agree that the UI feels pretty clunky; there's a lot of little touches missing, like things highlighting when you hover on them etc. And I don't know if it is because I'm color blind but I have a really hard time spotting miasma and differentiating some of the resources, so I have to play with resource icons turned on and check the tooltip on any square where I'm going to have a guy stop for a turn

Also the leaders thus far seem to have basically zero personality.

It's not just you. Partially it's probably just a matter of getting used to, but the map wasn't very good at telling at the first glance what's going on. Like you I did the tooltip-thing to see what I am actually looking at.

Btw, there are 3 different surface types: Lush, arid & 'something else', which are just visual variants and do not affect game-play. Maybe one of those is more friendly to the colour blind eye.

[Sky]

Yeah, I turned off the tooltip delay. Still, though...didn't want to go to bed last night (thanks for the midnight unlock, the taxpayers are getting less than 100% today, hah).

[lamaros]

Yeah, having slept on it I think most of the points are covered here.

Actual gameplay is different to Civ 5, though still similar in many ways.

But the UI is bad, the writing and story element are laughable, the colour palate is very poorly chosen, and it just isn't that polished. The game is ok but has no character. I doubt it will have much popular appeal and much expansion support either.

I'd rather see a new expansion for Civ or Civ 6 than them keep working on this. However it is not a bad game, and for those who love Civ and are burnt out on Civ 5 (which whatever Sky says is the best Civ ever after the expansions) it is worth a shot.

[Trippy]

Apparently this game has a very complicated back story involving dirty bombs and nuclear war that's not reflected at all in the game (at least as far as the ~200 turns I've played so far):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/24/the-wacky-geopolitics-of-civilization-beyond-earth/

[lamaros]

Just to confirm: trade routes, specifically internal ones, are broken good.

[MrHat]

Actual gameplay is different to Civ 5, though still similar in many ways.

But the UI is bad, the writing and story element are laughable, the colour palate is very poorly chosen, and it just isn't that polished. The game is ok but has no character. I doubt it will have much popular appeal and much expansion support either.

Agree here.  I'm having fun with it but I'm a Civ Slut.

That said, the UI is so horribly unpolished.  The color palate is shit.  The maps and icons are...worse than before somehow.  

The game has NO heart at all either.  Doesn't feel like someone really cared when they made it.  Devs really missed the boat in mining ten thousand fantastic sci fi books/movies for quotes to go with their upgrades.

I have been playing all day though.

[Spiff]

I somehow expected the fauna & flora to differ from planet to planet, but the universe seems to be filled with the same green/grey murky shit on every planet that isn't earth. Lot of missed opportunities here, the tech web and alignment system are enough to make me play this over CiV V for a while though.

Harmony seems to be the easier route so far, if I go a bit aggressive most aliens out there start one-shotting my explorers and my marines aren't doing much better.
Been in a few wars with the human AI as well and they still seem dumb as dirt.

[Ragnoros]

After sinking most of last night and this afternoon into the game I would say that the comments here are generally spot on.

[Rendakor]

Thanks for all the impressions and comments; going to hold off. I still haven't gotten around to playing Civ 5 despite owning it and it's expansions for more than year.

[lamaros]

Thanks for all the impressions and comments; going to hold off. I still haven't gotten around to playing Civ 5 despite owning it and it's expansions for more than year.

Do. It is great.

[Yoru]

So, I pulled an all-nighter last night for my second game and this time I took the lead early and won handily, playing Space Australia, focusing on Purity ideology (Space Australia is full, go home spaceboat people), and winning with a Contact victory.

I basically stand by my comments above. This is basically some very nice mechanics evolved atop the substrate of Civ5, and they actually do change the way you have to approach the game. The biggest weaknesses, as repeatedly noted, are the terrible UI and the sterile, joyless feeling to the sci-fi fluff.

(I did find one neat bit; check out the description of the Cynosure. It's only found in the Civilopedia. Most of the wonders have awful flavor text, this one's pretty good.)

A couple other observations:

- Trade routes are completely broken. With the right choices, you can get 3+ trade routes per city, and each internal route will pump up your cities' growth and production rates. Tack on some nice city-state ("station") trade routes, such as +science or +culture and you will absolutely rocket through the game.

- Rushing down one of the four virtue trees to get one of the big +health or unhealth-reducing virtues is important for not getting slapped with unhealth penalties. That said, a few turns of those penalties won't hurt too much.

- Aristocrats seem broken, in the bad sense of the word. I think their +health bonus might not get applied. Also, money is retardedly easy to get with trade routes, so they're kind of shit even if their +health does work.

- Artists seem broken, in the good sense of the word. I think their +health bonus stacks per population instead of being flat. Also, culture is so amazingly powerful thanks to virtues that they're awesome no matter what.

- The game seems to favor a steady expansion rate and higher numbers of cities than Civ5. There are fewer +% buildings and more buildings that offer a flat +X to any given stat/resource, so having more cities is a much bigger advantage than in Civ5. The main limiting factor seems to be how well you can worm settlers through the aliens and improve the land.

- The Contact victory seems broken, both in a buggy and a "too-easy" way. I only fulfilled one of the three requirements for the first stage (researching a very early tech) and was able to move swiftly on to the rest. Supposedly, I either needed to do a ton of exploration to find a relic or to get an end-game tech and build and expensive unit in addition to researching the first-stage early tech, but I never completed either of those requirements and the game moved me on up towards victory anyway. By the time I was at the very last stage of the Contact victory (building and dumping money into a huge artifact), I was just barely entering the outer two tech rings and maybe 2/3 of the planet had been settled. The other victory types seemed much, much further off.

- Some of the question decisions are a little too easy. Aliens not attacking trade routes and +1 trade route are both so hilariously overpowered as to make the choice obvious.

[Typhon]

I somehow expected the fauna & flora to differ from planet to planet, but the universe seems to be filled with the same green/grey murky shit on every planet that isn't earth. Lot of missed opportunities here, [snip]

For some reason I assumed the same thing (maybe due to the description of different planets).  Would have preferred this to what we got as it could have taken the "adapt to the circumstances at hand" that Yoru is talking about to the next level - e.g. if the planet has aliens that are largely unworkable, you need to no choose Harmony.

[schild]

The more I read in this thread, the more it sounds like an incomplete mod. How depressing :(

[Reg]

I'm a little sad to have my decision to wait for it to go on sale on Steam validated like this.

[Spiff]

Actually I think CIV IV had some mods that were as extensive if not more so than this is compared to CIV V.
The rework of the tech-tree to a much more non-linear tech-web is the most (only?) fundamental change here.
Virtues, although slightly less linear than in CIV V, feel like a step back in some ways since there's less of them and the removal of luxuries means you're almost forced to shoot for the happiness health virtues asap.
Nixing luxuries didn't exactly make resource management more exciting either.

It's hard for me to be disappointed with a new CIV game, CIV V was probably still the game I played most when this launched, which is part of the problem perhaps; I can't help but constantly and minutely comparing them and honestly if CIV BE launched at the same time as CIV V (with at least the first expansion), I don't think I'd be playing BE atm.

[Mandella]

The more I read in this thread, the more it sounds like an incomplete mod. How depressing :(

That's how I feel too. And it's funny how that goes. This isn't a potentially fun to watch train wreck like Star Citizen, this is just a disappointingly unrealized release that falls far short of (reasonable) expectations.

I was looking forward to playing this, now I'm not. Maybe I'll drag out my old copy of the original Alpha Centauri and replay it. It's been so long since I've messed with it that it will probably feel like a new game..

[calapine]

The more I read in this thread, the more it sounds like an incomplete mod. How depressing :(

That's how I feel too. And it's funny how that goes. This isn't a potentially fun to watch train wreak like Star Citizen, this is just a disappointingly unrealized release that falls far short of (reasonable) expectations.

I was looking forward to playing this, now I'm not. Maybe I'll drag out my old copy of the original Alpha Centauri and replay it. It's been so long since I've messed with it that it will probably feel like a new game..

It's not so bad. I played last night in multiplayer with 6 people and that was quite fun. For anyone not a Civ addicted it's probably best to wait until the game + 1st expansion are on sale.

[Merusk]

The more I read in this thread, the more it sounds like an incomplete mod. How depressing :(

That's how I feel too. And it's funny how that goes. This isn't a potentially fun to watch train wreak like Star Citizen, this is just a disappointingly unrealized release that falls far short of (reasonable) expectations.

I was looking forward to playing this, now I'm not. Maybe I'll drag out my old copy of the original Alpha Centauri and replay it. It's been so long since I've messed with it that it will probably feel like a new game..

It's not so bad. I played last night in multiplayer with 6 people and that was quite fun. For anyone not a Civ addicted it's probably best to wait until the game + 1st expansion are on sale.

The great thing about 4x games is just how long they stay viable when they're great.  I still break out Master of Magic once or twice a year and play a game.  It's only really started to feel clunky in the last 2 or 3 years and that's all UI not gameplay. 

Goddamn them for never making a true successor.

[lamaros]

I don't think this game is redeemable. They won't be able to G&K it. The issues are too fundemtal.

Maybe they can borrow some ideas from it for Civ 6 though. Even then the ideas are mostly crap or trivial. What Civ really needs is a massive focus on decent AI development.

[Teleku]

Played through it a bit, and I agree with the general consensus so far.  Its not bad, just sort of bland and unimaginative considering the possibilities they opened up with this setting.  I do think that it could potentially be turned around by a G&K style expansion, however.  I'm getting some fun out of it though, so not a waste.

I guess the glass half full outlook on this is that, since they claim to have given it heavy modding capabilities, somebody will do an FFH2 style conversion and create an Alpha Centari remake.   

[Sky]

I've been having fun bringing a Stalinist regime to an alien world.

Don't worry, lamaros, every time I talk about games needing better AI I'm told it's not a big deal and everything is fine in the world of gaming AI. Meanwhile something like Mordor comes along and shows what one fucking cool trick can do. We should be dealing with complex interplay of multiple AIs making decisions based on thousands of data points. But I guess 'Things aren't going well here, please give us x of resource y' is fucking top notch 21st century AI.

Dear devs, stop trying to film citizen kane and make some AI that doesn't shit the bed. Thanks.

[Teleku]

Meh, ever since Civ 3 I've pretty much played nothing but Pangea maps, which gets ride of 70% of the AI's stupidity.  The AI in Civ 5 actually seems to do a pretty good job overall.  Pangea and a higher difficulty rating makes for fun/challenging games.

[lamaros]

The AI is still awful in CiV. Yes it is a very complex game and playing well even for humans is quite hard, but the AI is absolutely a key weak point and should be a massive focus. I imagine things like the tech web will only make it harder for it.

I'd love the AI difficulty to be based on how clever the AI plays, not how many game advantages it has. Sadly we are no where near that.

[March]

Ok... for all the other idiots trying to build a work barge to harvest sea tiles... rejoice, sea barges are not a unit like the old work boat... they are an improvement built by your worker.  I'm not going to disclose how many games and how many turns I played before connecting those dots.

[calapine]

Some minor quality of life tips:

1) To skip the '2K - Firaxis Games - AMD Gaming evolved' videos at the start go to: '%Steamlibrary%\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth' and rename/delete the file 'CivBE_Logos.bk2'.


2) To skip the ERSB 'Online content not rated' popup at the start go to: '%SteamLibrary%\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth\assets\UI\FrontEnd', find the file 'FrontEnd.lua' and open it with a text editor.

Find the following three lines:

Code:

if( not UI:HasShownLegal() ) then
UIManager:QueuePopup( Controls.LegalScreen, PopupPriority.LegalScreen );
end

and comment them out by adding '--' in front of them. Result:

Code:

-- if( not UI:HasShownLegal() ) then
-- UIManager:QueuePopup( Controls.LegalScreen, PopupPriority.LegalScreen );
-- end

3) The game has Depth of Field effect: parts of the map that are not in the center are slightly blurred. If one find that annoying (as I did), it is easy to fix. Go to '%user%\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth'. Edit the file 'GraphicsSettings.ini' with a text editor. Change the line 'Enable DoF = 1" to "Enable DoF = 0"

[MrHat]

Adding code to start up files?

Yup, sounds like a Civ game.

Also, I've played way too much of this already this week.

[Sky]

Yeah this game did kind of move in and take over my gaming time.

[Thrawn]

My wife managed to talk me out of buying Beyond Earth, but now I've re installed Civ V and am finding myself playing a ton of that instead.