You can build and launch satellites in Beyond Earth, and these will impart benefits to specific tiles. The other big newness is the orbital layer. Whereas attempting to clear out the new world’s alien lifeforms (instead of attempting to harmonize with them), can lead to them becoming even more aggressive, eventually luring more powerful aliens toward your cities. Over-aggressively terraform your new world and your Harmony attributes will be for naught, as aggro aliens force you into conflict. Still, other times, aliens would attack me at random, either provoked by the presence of one of my military units or by the aggressive actions of my civ neighbors. I was able to send Explorer units carefully into heavily alien-infested territories without earning so much as a scratch. Whereas barbarians will more or less attack whatever is in range at random, the aliens will frequently not attack unless provoked. On the surface, these seem to be more bug-like versions of the barbarians, but they play and react quite differently from their hairier, Earth-bound cousins. Instead of Civilization’s barbarians, Beyond Earth has a variety of alien lifeforms, some more aggressive than others. This is most noticeable when dealing with the planet’s indigenous creatures. Although it does have narrative elements, and certain signature aspects of Alpha Centauri have crept in, Beyond Earth is very much its own game.
#1440P 329 CIVILIZATION BEYOND EARTH UPDATE#
That said, if I had come to Beyond Earth looking for a direct sequel or a modern update to the 1999 game, I would have been wildly disappointed.
I was taken in by the living world aspect and the deep narrative with elements pulled from science fiction of the day. I played Alpha Centauri extensively during a long Late Winter in San Francisco. Firaxis has since regained many IPs from now-defunct Microprose, but due to the vagaries of the game business, Alpha Centauri resides with its publisher, EA. One of the first games developed by Firaxis following its founders’ departure from Microprose, Alpha Centauri had the benefit of the expertise of Civilization Creator Sid Meier, but without the Civilization IP. It’s impossible to play Beyond Earth without comparing it to the 'other' Civ-in-space game, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Other civs will respond to you (or not) based on your affinity, and actions you take in the world can impact your affinity score.īesides, who doesn’t like launching stuff into space? Whereas the Harmony affinity will grant you access to alien-based units and the ability to tolerate the new world’s harsh alien environment. Specializing in Supremacy will unlock robot soldiers, for example. Finally, Supremacy lets you make your civ’s humans into cyborgs with giant robot friends.Įach affinity allows for slightly different victories and affinity-only units, and can have a dramatic effect on your overall game. Purity focuses on genetic manipulation of the human genome to build better versions of your civ. The Harmony affinity is what it sounds like, allowing you to meld with the new planet’s lifeforms and create new alien units. Trade routes feature prominently in Beyond Earth, for one thing, as does a new strategic component much like Gods & Kings’s religions, called Affinities.Īffinities allow you to evolve your Beyond Earth civ beyond its human origins, focusing research on technologies that will play to how you want to interface with your new world and its inhabitants. Beyond Earth brings some of the better reinventions along with it. On the one hand, there are many worse 4X strategy games to emulate than Civ 5, and as that game’s expansions have proved, while it redesigned much of the original Civ formula, it left a lot of room on the table for reinventing itself. But the experience of cracking it open, watching my colony ship settle onto a completely dark map and then setting foot onto this alien world felt just like playing Civ 5-at first. Beyond Earth has a lot of new looks: new units, new victories, a completely new tech tree (actually, it’s a web), new leaders, new civilizations and a handful of things under the hood that are also completely new.
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