When you research gunpowder, you can invent the gun - they're real technologies with obvious real-world applications. ![]() When you research the wheel, you expect to be able to build a cart. Placed at the far side of the map with a small ocean between me and my cohabitants on the new planet, I built up a powerful military in secret and launched an amphibious invasion, sweeping across the planet with mechanized forces.īut this sci-fi setting also makes Beyond Earth more abstract than previous Civilizations. ![]() Dropped in the center of a continent between four wary opponents, I cultivated diplomatic ties with neighbors, built up reserves of petroleum, titanium, and hovering alien "floatstone," and made myself indispensable to those who would attack me. This freedom means each of my campaigns felt very different to play. It let me race towards a future where I could upload my consciousness to the cloud before I had a thorough understanding of how boats worked. In previous Civilizations it meant you won't invent the computer before you invent the printing press, or the jet engine before the wheel - but Beyond Earth has a tech web that radiates out from a central point. Most strategy games have a tech tree that players climb, branch after branch, reaching the best toys and technology at the end of the game. Not being tied to real history gives freedom to how you play Beyond Earth. I was me, boss of a newly unified France and Spain, discovering how I could fire tiny robots into the bloodstreams of my citizens to keep them alive longer, or how I could build giant bipedal battlesuits in the year 2700-something. I wasn't George Washington laying down railroads right on schedule in the 1800s, I wasn't Gandhi researching theories of nonviolence on cue a few decades later. The sci-fi setting also means that the stories Beyond Earth spits out can feel more personal. The armored car, and its unarmored passengers, were torn apart in one turn by a swarm of razor-clawed bug beasts. Landing on an apparently uninhabited island, I built one and sent it out into the wilds a few hexagonal spaces over. Essentially space-age clown cars, they're crawlers that move slowly across the map, before unpacking themselves into small cities, complete with a ready-made human population. Ignore them at your peril.Ĭolony units are how Civilization leaders build new settlements. Alien nests close to growing cities mean a steady stream of chitinous monsters appearing at your doorstep, keen to see your new colonies and maybe eat your legs. There's much more to do in Beyond Earth's first few turns than there was in the most recent major Civ game, Civilization 5. These cosmetic changes make mechanical differences to a series that's been about the same things - research, expand, prosper - since 1991. I wasn't beset by barbarian forces keen to knock down my timber gates I was at the mercy of a gigantic marauding death worm who smashed up my bio-centers and geothermal power plants for fun. My capital city wasn't built from the ground up out of mud and thatch, but plopped down as a big silver disc, unfurling after crash-landing from space. Where they have been grounded in fact and history, Beyond Earth has a taken on a sci-fi aesthetic. As in other "Civ" games, I chose a starting location for my capital city, I pushed out my borders by growing my food supply, my infrastructure, and my economy, and I built both new colonies, and a military force to protect those settlements as I expanded across the map.īut Beyond Earth has big differences to other Civ games. ![]() Despite its extraterrestrial setting, Civilization: Beyond Earth follows in footsteps laid down by historical antecedents in the Civilization series. It casts you as leader of one of eight future factions, born from an Earth that's rapidly running out of resources, and recently landed on a new planet. ![]() We step into the light, and we see four words that congratulate us on our new consciouness.Ĭivilization: Beyond Earth ends with something of a whimper, but this turn-based strategy game is more about the journey than the payoff. A new plane of understanding, a new plane of being, a new plane of existence itself. We've made it to a new planet and conquered it, we've tamed the wildlife - worms and krakens and monsters - and we've come to a new plane. We've fought our way out of caves and from shorelines, built cities, built rockets, finally slipped the surly bonds of Earth.
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