In the bottom left of the city view there is a little check box “Show”. This will make your buildings visible. Just click on a specialist circle to assign one.
I caved. I am weak.
Observations so far :
- it’s purdy.
- the UI is horrible, or at least will take a long while getting used to. It’s very heavy on obscure icons and “mediaglyphics” (in the words of Neal Stephenson)
- Trade routes are ridiculously OP. Worse, the AI doesn’t seem to use them much. It’s kind of a micro hell however, as each city can start with 2 routes with an early building and presumably goes up from there with tech.
- Speaking of which, the AI is kind of a joke. On the one hand, it’s halfway competent at waging war this time around. On the other hand, it’s really anemic about expanding - shades of Civ V at launch there, where AIs would settle one city and then kind of… stagnate from there. Granted, I was pursuing a “screw happyness, REX REX REX” strategy with only one other civ on my continent, but still.
- There’s a heavy focus on tiles and tile improvements, and there are relatively early techs that make even tundra and deserts halfway decent - so we’re back to ICS with a vengeance, folks. Also you’ll never have enough workers : not only do cities and cultural frontiers grow very fast, there are progressively better terrain improvements unlocked through tech to replace older ones (though you can also focus on techs that improve the starting ones instead).
- Which brings us to : Happyness, now dubbed Health. In Civ V dipping into negative happy was crushing. In BE it’s kind of negligible : being positive means your new cities will become cities faster (there’s a delay between settling a settler and the city coming online), while being negative only incurs a 10% growth and science penalty, which is more than made up for by taking over more land. That being said, I haven’t dipped really far down the unsanitary, maybe when you get into double digits it gets worse. There are millions of ways to generate health, too. Again : ICS is the name of the game.
- Naval combat is bugged : all naval units are ranged, but somehow use their melee defense in combat. So all naval combat is one hit kills.
- Barbarians/Aliens are a strange mix of overwhelming and harmless. They spawn really fast and are super dangerous at first (before you get a real military going), but unless you get near their spawn camps or otherwise piss them off with systematic attacks they’ll mostly will leave you be and there are buildings and techs to shoo 'em away peacefully. Although they’ll happily chomp on lone civilian units far from cities. Beware though : some alien types are motherfuckers. Siege worms can eat all the dicks.
- The tech tree is made of open-ended concentric circles rather than parallel lines you’ll be bound to go through, which both opens up tons of options and is a bit overwhelming - especially since due to the UI being what is is it’s hard to figure out what each tech does, if it opens wonders or units or buildings or what etc… Tech is also really slow - don’t count on having unlocked every last tech by endgame, focus is everything. Again this will take getting used to, but I like it on principle.
- The culture trees are more narrow, but also deeper. Instead of 8+ very specialized trees with 5 picks each (and a bonus for picking all 5) there are 4 more general/hybrid trees 15 deep, with bonuses at the 5, 10 and 15 picks marks. Ideologies are mostly unlocked through tech choices (although some quests and events also give you some points there).
- No more unit upgrades, kind of. Instead of unlocking new, more powerful versions of the same unit then spending a million gold to upgrade everybody, rinse repeat, now as you pick up points in one of the three ideologies all of your existing units are improved automatically (and they have a kind of skill tree of their own, e.g. the first Warrior upgrade is either +5 HP healed/turn or +15% attack to go with the automatic +12 strength). Their looks evolve correspondingly.
- On top of that each ideology also has its own unique unit types reflecting their combat philosophies : the symbiosis faction has fast units that are immune to alien miasma (pretty much the same thing as fungus in AC, except now it also actively harms units stuck in it), the terraforming faction has tough, defensive but slow units and the last one is focused on flanking and making continuous walls of weaker units that get large bonuses when they fight together.
- Diplo is shit. Like, what they say is literally a copy/paste, only the leaders are all bland to boot and very backstab happy.
- Speaking of which, the various civs are less specific than Civ V - instead of picking a civ with one unique trait, unit and building ; now you pick a civ with one small fixed perk, then refine it by deciding what your population is made of (artists for more culture per city, scientists for more science etc…), then a global bonus (see more resources from the get go, faster border growth…), and finally a starting bonus (one free worker, 100 free cash, bigger starting borders, that kind of thing). So you can tailor your civ to your playing style
- Victory types have been shuffled around. It’s still about teching and building specific stuff, but now they’re also tied with ideologies with the exception of Conquest (same as before) and Contact (kind of luck-based, either you find the right alien ruins early on or you don’t).
- The advertized biomes are kind of underwhelming. Maybe you can unlock more or they’ll ship more through DLC, but right now it’s arid (brown/yellow), earthlike (green) and fungal (blue shrooms everywhere). Same aliens on all three, no effects on tiles or ressources that I could see (though they might have an influence on the mapgen script ?)
I’m deep into my third game. My second game was short. Very short.
I landed on the Northern tip of a continent. Two AIs landed just to the South. My explorer was digging up some ruins that was roughly equidistant to all three of us. The two other AIs objected to my presence. They declared war together and soon I had several marine units coming over the horizon. This was turn 37. Ow. The AI is better able to keep up on vostok difficulty (one above default).
Game three is going much better. I have found something which I found troubling. If you ally with the natives (by having an untouched alien nest in your borders for about 100 turns) the natives don’t seem to turn against no matter what you do to them after that. I reached a point where the xenomorphs (“Is this another bug hunt, Sir?”) were blocking some ideal resources and so they had to go. I’ve destroyed two alien nests and a dozen or so xenos but they’re still allied to me. Maybe I haven’t done enough bad stuff yet to break the alliance but you would think that would be enough.
I did feel like a movie villain.
I think the AIs reluctance to colonize is due to them overfearing the diplo penalty to colonizing close to another civ. I’ve noticed that given room to expand they will expand but you can see the “neutral zone” effect quite clearly over time. In game one, (8 players on standard map) all the AIs but one expanded to ~4-5 cities. In game three, it is quite clear to me that the AI player is expanding away from me. I can see though that other AIs which are more boxed in aren’t expanding at all. This will hopefully be patched and maybe even could be fixed in a mod if the parameters are exposed.
I discovered that the aliens (natives) will stay allied with you until you destroy a nest you don’t control. I personally think that they should lose allied status much more quickly, but at least it will happen.
I’ve been playing now on vostok difficulty, small map (which is the regular sized map) with angry aliens turned on. This last option has made a tremendous difference. Siege worms come out much earlier. And they’re very angry.
The aliens are no longer just a matter of story. I find myself actively hunting them down and destroying them (or getting on their good side). The AI seems to do much better on vostok. I might even bump it up one more notch.
I’ve been playing a fair bit. I agree that the game lacks charm. It’s a combination of lacking the charm SMAC and having Civ V’s lack of charm, if that makes sense.
The interplay of technologies and virtues and affinities is fun.
I had put off building trade units until I saw Kobal2’s post. Holy mackerel, they are powerful. At least internal trade routes are; especially for helping new settlements get on their feet.
Yeah, for realsies. A trade route from your capital is like +4-5 food, +7 hammers to a small city, while ALSO giving the capital some food and hammers back. And if you play the Polynesians, you’ve got 4 of those available. Just that would be kind of crazy, and it certainly pops new cities from 1 to 6-7 pop in like 10 turns while letting them build the Old World Relic, trade station and the first few health buildings super fast.
Then you add 2 trade routes per (3 with autofactory), from small city to small city (generally worth 1 food and a couple hammers or so to each) or stations. There’s a Virtue that makes each of these worth 6 gold per level of the station, and they gain levels pretty fast when you trade with them - so you’re very quickly swimming in gold from those.
Trade routes are really, really insane :). Basically they’ve taken the spot of AC’s supply crawler as the “unassuming, key to roflpwn, fill up on those at all times” unit.
Oh, they also don’t have a max length, because it’s the 23rd century :). Their only balancing factor is that aliens tend to chomp on them… but then again, you can build one (1) magnetic fence somewhere, wait for it to pop its quest, reverse the polarity and bam : alien-proof trade routes.
There are a… lot of issues with this game. If anyone is still on the fence, I’d recommend waiting until some discounts, some patches, or both, unless you really loved Civ V. Some things have somehow been downgraded since Civ V, though - the UI and the endgame especially - while it retained the major issues with AI in general and combat in particular. The 82 on metacritic is probably where it should be, inasmuch as an 82 with the dumbass way video game review scales work is equal to a one and a half or two star movie.
If you do buy it and play, though, listen to everyone talking about trade routes.
I’ve stopped playing it and will wait for some patches. The game is playable, but the graphics are making me mad. It is just way too dark and hard to see.
Yeah, I’ve got some issues with the graphics as well. Namely : it’s really hard to tell where there is and isn’t any miasma (which is kind of a big deal), and in city view the “worked tile” icon obscures that tile’s yield which, OMG, who thought that could possibly be a good idea ?!
There’s also a very simple mod for the tech tree out there that recolours the various icons based on what they bring to the party : red for units, orange for buildings, violet for wonders and so on. It’s silly how much it improves figuring things out.
Bottomline : I think BE at launch is a better game than Civ V was at launch ; but at this time Civ V is still a much better, richer game overall. If BE gets a couple of expansions and years of iterative patching, it’s likely to knock it out of the park though.
I’m kind of glad my computer is currently out of comission, because this would have been a Day-1 purchase for me, and that’s despite my knowing full well that there would be issues at launch.
I think I’ll check back in on BE after the first major expansion hits, and reassess at that time.
I’ve yet to play the expansion; if you expect me to download a 4 gig patch and not even tell me what it is, you’ve got another thing coming. So I can’t comment on Meld. Terror management was in the original, it was just hidden- and at any rate, stoppable, if you could shoot down the diplomatic ship. Firmly established cover and skill trees were brought into the reboot from the knockoffs, the ‘UFO: After’ series and the like; and while I don’t know of any specific examples, removing action points and inventory both made the game markedly worse. While that last bit may be subject to taste, no one’s made a game that erases vital operating system files when you install it, either (well, okay, the new Pool of Radiance, but besides that). It’s more a general, widespread tendency of oversimplification in the name of ease of access for a broader audience. While this is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, it is disheartening to see long-running, in-depth series that you could sink your intellectual teeth into undergoing radical shifts that run counter to longstanding traditions- if you open the Lou Malnati’s box and find a pie from Little Caesar’s inside, you’re going to have some hard questions, after all, which brings me back around to Beyond Earth.
A friend gifted me a copy, and though only a few hours in, I have to say I’m surprised by how much I’m liking it. The manual’s a piece of junk, ignoring important information on the assumption you’ve already played Civ 5, the UI is a mess, diplomacy is even stupider than it was in the last game, and they somehow screwed up the civilopedia, which had better cross-linked information in its first incarnation in 1991. But the hordes of (sometimes) ravenous aliens and (inexplicably not-pathfinder-avoided) miasma, do slow development down enough to change the pacing and feel. The flexibility in choosing your starting situation, coupled with the ‘which bonus do you want for building x options’ , means that they’ve taken the more generic leaders and units to heart, and decided to see what could be wrung out of them, rather than trying to compensate for their limitations.
The unknown nature of what faction resources you’ll have crippling the idea of going in with ‘this game, I’ll do X and Y and totally avoid z’ without destroying it is interesting; I’m not sure how I feel about forcing strategic adaptation being done by resource limits, especially since it seems a little crowbared in to compensate for the AI’s abysmal failings in that department, but at the very least it’s an interesting experiment- I just hope it doesn’t turn out as awful as the 1-unit-per-tile one did.
The quest system, brought over from the subcategory of random events from Civ 4 and expanded, adds another new interesting aspect; but in my few games I’ve already seen several repeated, if there aren’t more than I’ve been lead to believe, this could end up working to the game’s detriment.
All in all, there’s a lot to be praised here, as well as a lot to be condemned. Fortunately, most of the real problems are UI- and balance-based, and (with luck) patches’ll take care of them. I see much potential here; a good deal more than I thought there’d be.
However, the intro splash screens are unskippable, and the game isn’t backloading while they’re running, which there is absolutely no excuse for.
Oh yeah, that made me irrationally angry. I shouldn’t have to scroll in to see what’s being worked.
Nope, no cover in AfterX, or skill trees - instead there’s kludgy real time. Admittedly, there were already skill trees in Silent Storm, which I’d shamefully forgotten. Still, they’re not super common in the squad tactics genre, and few add new powers that drastically change how you play with that character - generally they’re more of the “do you want better shooting with this or with that ?” type deals.
There was also that Apple shooter game that deliberately destroyed random files when you got shot, but deleted itself when you won 
But to counter your argument (which is a common criticism of the new Xcom, especially from players of the old) : consider Chess. It’s a really simple game, with really simple rules. No action points, no inventory management, no cover, and the pieces don’t even have stats ! :). And yet, it’s an extremely *complex *game.
I feel the same is true of these simplifications (no APs, no inventory, no ammo, smaller squads etc…) : they remove crufty, clunky or annoying micro aspects of the game the better to let the player focus on positioning and tactics ; and in the end the depth and complexity is still there because that’s on the macro level.
As you say, to each their own. But I don’t think their goal was to, or at least solely to, appeal to a broader dumber audience - Xcom is still pretty damn niche. I feel like their design decisions make sense even from a purely grognard-y standpoint. More stats and variables to juggle is not an end in and of itself.
That’s kind of always been the case (well, always as of Civ III anyway 
) though, hasn’t it ? Playing Caesar, no iron anywhere, heaps of swearing :p. Same goes for going into a game planning on doing Wide Religious and finding oneself with a coastal start on an watery map, or expecting to go tall and being stuck in the Plains & Hills.
Okay, I’m annoyed at the UI. Very annoyed. I’m playing a game where I’m around 80% or more through researching all of the technologies, and just now I realize that there’s flavor text buried in the Civilopedia. It’s not linked on the pop-up when you research a technology. It’s not linked when you build a wonder. It’s not linked from anywhere, near as I can tell. But it is there, in the Civilopedia, if you care to look for it. This whole time I’ve been just playing; “Yeah, sure, ‘resilin’, whatever.”, “Yeah, sure, ‘collaborative thought’, whatever.”, “Yeah, sure, ‘Bytegeist’, whatever”. I must have inferred, based on the piss-poor linking in the Civilopedia’s tutorial topics, that the whole thing was ridiculously laconic. At this point, I’m going to wait until my next playthrough to read the flavor text.
Also, there needs to be a better interface for assigning trade routes. I don’t care about “sort by sponsor” or “sort by distance”; I care about “sort by best trade route”.
I’m playing my latest game on Gemini difficulty on a Standard map with rampaging aliens. This seems to be generating a fun experience. I had a slightly lucky start so I’m currently in the lead, but each AI has between 2-6 cities by mid game (the poor fellow with two cities was completely boxed in so it is understandable).
I’m starting to realize just how valuable racing up the affinity tree is. I have 9 CNDRs (playing Supremacy) and they just utterly smashed an AI army that had lower affinity. It does mean I’m a little behind in terms of overall tech since I’ve had to go deep into the web to get my affinity techs instead of around the web to generalize but again my army is simply second to none (I have 5 Supremacy + 1 Purity affinity, and the highest an AI has is 3 Purity + 1 Supremacy).
I was originally thinking of going for a contact victory, but my army is so powerful right now I might go for a domination victory. There’s no single AI that an stand up to my CNDRs.
**Max **: Yeah, all that brilliant stuff that SMAC doled out and hinted at with little quotes throughout the game is 100% hidden, tucked away in the Civilopedia in this game. There’s some good writing and themes in there too - and a lot of bad writing trying to be snarky.
Still, it’s indeed worth hitting the Civilopedia whenever you research new stuff.
I can’t figure out how to search the Civ’o’pedia. Anyone?
It also seems strange that when you find titanium (or whatever) in the Civ’o’pedia, it doesn’t seem to show what units or buildings need titanium. So I have yet to learn whether I should care about titanium early or late in the game.
Floatstone is used for Purity units and buildings. Firaxite for Supremacy units and buildings. Xenomass for Harmony units and buildings. Oil and titanium seem primarily used for orbitals. I’m not sure what geothermals are for yet.
Oil and Geothermal are also used by (some) buildings, mostly production & economy buildings.
Though I’m not 100% on whether you consume an Oil ressource to build a Petrochemical Plant (like Coal was used for factories in Civ V), or whether you simply have to have an oil well within the city’s territory (kind of like Mints in Civ V needed gold & silver sources within the city’s “fat hex” but did not eat the lux itself)
ETA : IMO the main benefit of titanium is that it’s a *ridiculous *production hex :). Which is why the Civ pick that reveals it without having the tech is huge.