![]() There's just no time between the alien corralling game or the terraforming one to care much about what the colonist A.I.'s up to. On the other hand, unless you're aggressively expansionist, your interactions with other factions tend to be either feckless banter or same-ol' horse trading (diplomacy's as dull as ever, a menu of conversational levers that give little sense of the gears they're moving). During this phase, you're still poring over the map like it's an interesting place to be. Every two or three hexes there's a mess in need of cleanup or a threat that demands tackling. ![]() Canyons and mountains frame logjams of alien nests defended by hyper-vigilant squads of alien wolf beetles, raptor bugs, manticores and drones. Miasma-saturated hexes sap unit health and take a lot of work to either clear up or figure out how to exploit. It's here the game feels the least like Civilization V, more so because you're having to jockey your explorers and workers and soldiers around in a topographical straightjacket. Attack them, and you're batting a karmic hornet's nest that over time can bring the planet's collective xenomorphs (mostly bug-like, with the odd Dune worm or space-kraken tossed in) crashing down on you like an extraterrestrial hammer. Ignore them and they'll swarm and block your growth and inevitably attack. Instead of fending off anemic barbarian tribes, you're sharing turf with minor armies of natives. It's the early game, where they're just distant dots on the map, that is as close as Beyond Earth gets to riveting. in these games never plays the same game you do.ĭepending how you play, of course, the other factions matter less than the aliens. They quickly catch up to you, a contrivance that actually feels like one: Why have the other factions start so much later if they're just going to cheat their way to parity? It does nothing for the game's fiction, and instead draws attention to the fact that the A.I. Then it's off to establish your colony city, which begets more cities, which beget vehicles and explorers and workers and military-industrial bric-a-brac and an in-game encyclopedia's worth of reverential sci-fi lingo.Īfter a few dozen turns of solo play, other factions start to land. It's marginally more granular, but in the end more like rolling your own mix of *Civilization V'*s leader traits and perks. Instead of selecting a leader, you pick a colony sponsor, colonists, spaceship, and cargo, all of which fix your initial bonuses. Other key variables just swap names: gold is now "energy," happiness is now "health," and culture is. Most of *Civilization V'*s initial shortcomings (like its abysmal A.I.) were finessed in its expansions, and Beyond Earth picks up a few of their better improvements, including trade routes and espionage. Developer Firaxis tilled interstellar ground once before with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in 1996, a riff on Civilization II that picked up where that game ended: Reach for the stars, colonize a hostile planet, integrate (or exploit) the indigenous lifeforms and fool with metaphysical gobbledygook like "sentient econometrics," "transcendent thought" and "the singularity" distilled down to abilities and modifiers that helped sculpt your passive-aggressive tromp toward victory.īeyond Earth plays the same cards, but flaunts *Civilization V'*s DNA, which means bigger cities, slower build queues (to mitigate sprawl, since units can't stack) and maneuvering across hexes instead of orthogonal grids.
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