Civilization - Beyond Earth (Alpha Centauri Sequel)

That sounds decent. I'm a bit hopeful. I don't see wonders being less effective as a negative. I think wonders were silly.

Picked it up for $35 got a group of friends who all play Civ together so I'll get my money's worth

After having watched a few hours of gameplay I feel like I have already played this game to death; if you are bored of Civ V and were hoping for something refreshing to mix it up then look elsewhere. It felt like I was watching a Civ V game with blander AI's, large insects, drab looking terrain tiles and near identical gameplay/diplomacy. There is nothing really new to see; everything different is a minor tweak of standard systems aside from satellites which work like the magical buffs you cast on cities from the fantasy themed Civ clones like Warlock. Granted there is only so much Firaxis can do and still have it be a Civ game but I would have at least expected a space layer of some sort in a "Beyond Earth" setting and perhaps alien life more interesting than Dune worms and purposeless insects that bounce around randomly and accomplish little more than take up space. When I think of settling on an alien world I would expect the new environment to be the biggest and most persistent challenge but all too quickly the roaches are squished/tamed, cities are plopped out left and right and the Civs are at each others throats like always. Meh.

Having a subterranean and space layer would actually be pretty fucking awesome. You could even have a few civs that don't settle planetside. They stay in orbit and/or travel around the galaxy (FTL) and occasionally visit. All of Earth wouldn't have the exact same strategy regarding what to do after leaving Earth.

I'm not too thrilled at this point. AC was a completely new game with many different mechanics, here in BE they copied Civ 5 in so many aspects. Health works pretty much exactly like happiness from what I've seen so far, energy replaced money, colonists halt city growth and so on...

Number of cities increasing unhappiness was already a questionable mechanic that made little sense, but founding city B now decreases health everywhere? Ugh.

Wow, even chopping down a forest gives +20 production in a city. Makes perfect sense, we have no knowledge of the properties of the trees, let's build shit out of it!

Where are people seeing the $35 price? I'm seeing as $49.99 on GMG


Nevermind... it helps if I login first.

Quineloe_sl said:

I'm not too thrilled at this point. AC was a completely new game with many different mechanics, here in BE they copied Civ 5 in so many aspects. Health works pretty much exactly like happiness from what I've seen so far, energy replaced money, colonists halt city growth and so on...

Number of cities increasing unhappiness was already a questionable mechanic that made little sense, but founding city B now decreases health everywhere? Ugh.

Wow, even chopping down a forest gives +20 production in a city. Makes perfect sense, we have no knowledge of the properties of the trees, let's build shit out of it!

Click to expand...

and yet I hit 300+ turns at 3AM and went "fuck"...one more turn.

Hatorade_sl said:

and yet I hit 300+ turns at 3AM and went "fuck"...one more turn.

Click to expand...

Sure, it has all the addictive Civ elements.

I just definitely feel that I'm simply playing a reskinned Civ V. Pretty much everything feels the same. I was hoping for something that would make this seem way more sci-fi, but I can't help but see everything as the same. Maybe it will feel unique later.

AC wasn'tcompletelynew. It was still an iteration on civ. Maybe half of AC was new. AC was great but it was still basically civ 2.5. MoM was like civ 1.5 I think!

Anyone have that endless legends? How does it stack up against Civ5?

Where is the option to change key bindings? Really hate using arrow keys to move around.

I was hoping it would have MP mods. Doesn't, so won't bother picking it up. There's almost no chance they'll add it since they said it was 'in the works' for Civ V at one point and it's clearly not going to happen there ever either.

Selix_sl said:

Where is the option to change key bindings? Really hate using arrow keys to move around.

Click to expand...

Yeah, not being able to toggle grid with G and Resources with CTRL R makes me furious

Tech web is great, that's probably my favorite new addition so far. It adds a lot of variety in how you go about doing things. Orbital layer is cool too, and espionage is done well. Pretty happy with it so far, my only gripes are the noted lack of personality in faction leaders, and UI seems a bit less intuitive to navigate than civ5. It's no SMAC2, but it's a pretty solid game and hopefully an expansion or two makes it great.

The worst part so far is the AI. Nothing changed since civ5 so expect a lot of "we want open borders to pass through your land, so we'll offer it to you if you give us 7 luxury items and 40 gold a turn."

I can see where some reviews were coming from with the lack of life in the game. In classic civ, you are reliving all of history, which is awesome. In Alpha Centauri, they did an absolutely awesome job of designing characters and a tech tree that set the atmosphere. 15 years later I can still hear 'I don't know but I've been told, Deidre's got a network node...' in my head, and there's so manymore.

The alien nest thing is pretty good in BE and I felt like I was under an alien onslaught - but the setting, characters and techs really didn't do much for me. I know it's completely unrealistic to expect anything as good as Alpha Centauri, but still a bit disappointing. From a pure gameplay perspective, I'm having fun though and I prefer a lot of the mechanics to Civ5.

Why does the AI half way through the game start attacking outposts? And how do I prevent it without declaring war and just stomping their armies away from the outposts?