It’s coming out on Friday. Is anyone picking it up?
I’m thinking about it, but I may wait until I see some playthroughs. PC Turn Based Strategy games always seem to be a bit rough on release, and often tend to need a few major expansions before they’re really great.
Yeah, that seems prudent. It’s pretty much the story with Civ 5, where it didn’t really seem to come together until Brave New World. Not to mention that 2K’s games seem to go half-off extremely quickly.
Yeah, I can’t really fault your logic. I’ll probably pick it up on release, though. I enjoyed vanilla Civ 5.
I been a Civ fan from the very get-go. Loved Alpha Centauri too. After the first I have gotten every game on Day #1.
Since then various games have burned me with pre-orders so I’ve made myself a promise to wait-and-see with all games (except, maybe, Witcher 3). As a result I’ll wait till release and see how it goes.
Personally I am not convinced it is much more than Civ-5 with cosmetic changes. Some place or other suggested it wasn’t but still…will wait and see.
All that and there are a lot of games coming out in the next month or so so I need to be a bit judicious.
I’ll be buying it … eventually. Even if it is great (and I really liked Civ5 so I’m hopeful) money’s a bit tight.
I love the Civilization series as well as Alpha Centauri. I’m quite excited by Beyond Earth. That being said, I’m going to wait for the inevitable complete edition and Steam sale. The teething problems should be worked out by then.
Alpha Centauri is one of my all-time favorite games, so I’ll be checking out Beyond Earth very soon.
I’m concerned that it will be too much like Civ V, which, to me, was the second-weakest installment of the franchise. I actually liked Civ V well enough when it was first released, but then they had to patch it over and over to gear it more and more toward multiplayer games and favoring strategies I don’t like. I like building large cities with minimal radius overlap, but so many changes catered to people who found many small cities. I also liked how in the early versions, you’d get a big production boost in the industrial era. Factories gave +50% production, as did a rail/sea connection to the capital; they changed it to something like +15% and +3 hammers for a factory and nothing for rail connection. Suddenly the industrial revolution didn’t feel very revolutionary.
I’m leery. From what I’ve seen, it looks just Civ 5 with a face lift. In all fairness, Alpha Centauri, the game on which nostalgia for is what Firaxis is basing a lot of the appeal for this, looked like Civ 2 with a face lift, and ended up being the other contender for best game in the series, so there’s reason to hope.
On the other hand, Civ 5 was in many respects a step down for the franchise- certainly many steps away; whether those were good or bad is up to individual judgement- whereas Civ 2 just expanded on what the original brought. I’m especially iffy on how Firaxis seems to think that that ‘conquest’, ‘race up the tech tree’, ‘race up the tech tree and build’, ‘race up the tech tree and build’ and ‘race up the tech tree and possibly build’ constitute five different victory conditions. So there’s reason to doubt.
The obvious comparison is Alpha Centauri. But what made Alpha Centauri so special wasn’t just the crazy detail that let you build nukes that not only destroyed a city, but obliterated the land surrounding it, or the insane terraforming options that let you submerge an enemy base and destroy it by lowering the land it was on, or the combination of the two, that let you build mountain ranges to reduce enemy farming capacity by placing the land in the newly-created rain shadow (new from Firaxis- Civilization: Passive Aggressive edition!), but the writing. It was a civilization game that had actual characters, and established technological background that was based on actual theoretical lines of research leading into a vision of the future that was both Utopian and deeply horrifying. The sound clip for the Temple of Chiron (the way they continually refer to the planet simply as ‘planet’ was one of the few things that annoyed me, even at the time) actually sounds like a person who’s so consumed with incoherent rage that his grasp on a non-native language is failing him. Out of context, it seems like laughably bad voice acting. In context, it seems like how a real person would actually react- if it’s bad voice acting, it’s because it’s too realistic- it doesn’t seem like acting. Not only was the game mechanically rock-solid, it had soul Firaxis has, by and large, gotten a pass on the common ‘make it like everyone else does’ attitude that plagues the modern video game industry, in no small part I’m sure because Sid Meier’s name alone sells games, but after Civ 5 and the inexplicably hyphenless X-Com reboot, I suspect that may be fading. And given the wider trend towards generic cookie-cutter experiences with mute heroes who never exhibit the slightest bit of characterization in the name of making them ‘relateable’, I doubt 2K’s going to want Firaxis to spend too much time, effort and money on writing. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I wish they had just got the license to make Alpha Centauri 2. I don’t think anyone else is seriously thinking about making it so I imagine they could have gotten the rights for a reasonable price. I will keep an eye out for this game though and maybe buy it after a few years.
Actually, it’s probably best that they didn’t. Alpha Centauri was probably a once-in-a-lifetime game; the result of many of the developers studying deeper levels of philosophy at the time. So far as I know, the publication rights are still held by EA, Brian Reynolds (the lead designer), has gone on from Firaxis, and is now working on designing Facebook games, because God enjoys making us miserable. Ultimately, all making the game a formal sequel would do is raise unreasonable expectations and creatively limit the developers. Tragic as it may seem, you can’t make lightning strike twice.
I ended up preordering it. I’ve spent a good 1500 hours in Civ V. The odds are I’m going to like BE.
Pretty much, plus the feature list of BE does go beyond a simple facelift :
I mean, yes, when all is said and done this all sounds like “could have been a megamod”, but then again, yeah, the same was true of AC 
Diplomatic & econ wins in AC also involved racing up the tech tree and building crap, didn’t they ? 
For that matter, so does Conquest - you want to crush them all under your fusion-powered hover murdertanks full of biogas, not futilely poke at them with nekkid impact rovers. Which is fine - in 4Xs the question is never really whether or not you will tech and build, but about your tech & build focus and how it interacts with your neighbours’ own focus.
What do you mean ? Xcom was full of fresh ideas (that many have copied since). 2 actions per dude instead of action points, directional cover, skill trees borrowed from RPGs, no inventory, terror management, Meld…
Agreed on AC’s soul being hard to reproduce however. I was fond of the little novel-like segments you got upon certain triggers, which slowly and subtly made you realize that this big red thing you’re infinite-city-sprawling on ? It wants to talk to you about that. OR ELSE. Sure, they lost their potency by game 500, but the first few times ? Oh yeah. **Big **gameboner.
As well, I always loved the concept that pollution and over-the-top industrialization not only meant rising sea levels and eco damage, it also meant mind worms popping up everywhere in a frantic attempt by Planet (what ? I liked that :o) to make you diediediediedie ; whereas Civ barbarians had always been more of an artificial, gamey thing.
When all is said and done, the drones need me. They look up to me.
I caved and bought it. So far it’s very buggy (read: entirely).
Oops; false alarm. Just had to do the ol’ “verify integrity of game cache” to get everything running smoothly.
I watched a few videos of it. I think I’m going to hold off. It looks decent enough, but it lacks a lot of charm, IMO. (I’m shallow like that)
I agree that it seems to lack charm. I’m a huge SMAC fan and the best part of it was the charm in the characters, the story, etc. This game seems to forget all of that, unfortunately.
I’ve been playing it since the midnight release. I really like it. It is quite obviously built heavily off of Civ 5, but I find there’s enough stylistic and mechanical changes to make it a fresh take on the Civ 5 experience.
Some points (then I must get back to playing):
The only real significant down so far is that diplomacy is super neutered and the AI leaders don’t seem to have much personality. I’m don’t consider this a big deal personally, but it might be irksome to others.
Overall, I love 4X, I loved Civ 5 and this is a welcome additional to my gaming library. I disagree with some reviewers that seem to be reviewing BE vs Civ 5 + ALL of the xpacs. I considering this to be a base game, just like Civ 5. I’m sure there will be xpacs, and generally Firaxis xpacs are quite good and I’m sure will increase the quality of the game even more.
In addition, if anybody has any specific questions, ask away and I’ll try to answer them.
I’m usually a year or more behind on Civs, and just started Civ5 within the last year, so I can wait until they iron stuff out, but will definitely get it in 2016 or so.
I have one stupid question: how do I sign specialists in a city?