Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth | Rising Tide Expansion Out Now

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Super Dragon 64
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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Super Dragon 64 » Thu Jan 15, 2015 8:38 pm

Steam has this on sale for £17.99 this weekend and you can play it for free from now until 9pm on Sunday evening.

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Jingle Ord The Way » Thu Jan 15, 2015 10:49 pm

Might seem like a "noob" question but how do I download this? The only option Steam gives me is to
a - Play the game (doesn't download anything to let me play for free)
b - Buy the game for £17.99
c - Buy some Civ: Beyond Earth bundle for £24.99 game and DLC

:?

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Roonmastor » Thu Jan 15, 2015 10:57 pm

It is already in your library under S.

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Super Dragon 64 » Fri Jan 16, 2015 12:43 am

Open the Steam client and it should be in your library, as Roonmastor said. If it's not there, restart the client.

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Jingle Ord The Way » Sun Jan 18, 2015 4:51 pm

Yep! Thanks for that. I gave it a go yesterday and played through one game (13 hours). I actually got pretty bored with it. The futuristic setting wasn't for me because I can't relate to what implications a "xeno gene splicing" tech can bring to my civilisation, plus all the other leaders were kind of dull. Uninstalled. I'll stick to Civ V and Endless Legend for my 4X strategy fix.

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Alvin Flummux » Sun Jan 18, 2015 5:37 pm

It sounds like Beyond Earth is just too far removed from the base game to retain the kind of interest it receives.

Maybe it would be better if you could still manage your Earth-side state while you're doing your spacey thing, and manage other colony worlds at the same time too?

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Jordan UK » Sun Jan 18, 2015 9:41 pm

[iup=3657445]Alvin Flummux[/iup] wrote:It sounds like Beyond Earth is just too far removed from the base game to retain the kind of interest it receives.

Maybe it would be better if you could still manage your Earth-side state while you're doing your spacey thing, and manage other colony worlds at the same time too?


I've often thought this would be a cool thing to do, too. Would be ace if the leaders you have tangled with for thousands of years follow you to another planet.

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Ironhide » Sun Jan 18, 2015 10:00 pm

[iup=3657445]Alvin Flummux[/iup] wrote:It sounds like Beyond Earth is just too far removed from the base game to retain the kind of interest it receives.

Maybe it would be better if you could still manage your Earth-side state while you're doing your spacey thing, and manage other colony worlds at the same time too?


Galactic Civilizations II (soon III) is probably your best choice then.

It's a bit overwhelming at first though and the story campaign is unbelievably hard.

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Free Weekend
by Alvin Flummux » Mon Jan 19, 2015 3:08 am

[iup=3657563]Jordan UK[/iup] wrote:
[iup=3657445]Alvin Flummux[/iup] wrote:It sounds like Beyond Earth is just too far removed from the base game to retain the kind of interest it receives.

Maybe it would be better if you could still manage your Earth-side state while you're doing your spacey thing, and manage other colony worlds at the same time too?


I've often thought this would be a cool thing to do, too. Would be ace if the leaders you have tangled with for thousands of years follow you to another planet.


That's something that really bothers me. Why do we have just the one leader? Why not several randomly generated leaders per civ, with successive ones with the same names having suffixes appended, and diplomatic screen backgrounds indicative of the era? It wouldn't be that hard, surely?

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now
by Lagamorph » Tue Mar 24, 2015 1:18 pm

Is there a way to turn off the 'minor civilisations' in this? Even a mod to do so? I'm constantly forced to approve one venture or the other, and no matter which I approve they always take a spot right where I was planning on setting up my own colony.

Also, for a Civ V re-skin they seem to have stripped out a lot of the customisation options when creating a game.

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now
by OrangeRKN » Tue Mar 24, 2015 1:43 pm

Just destroy them once they've set up base, they don't have much in the way of defence

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now
by Lagamorph » Mon Mar 30, 2015 8:27 pm

Found a mod to disable the non-quest ones and another one to give you an option of 'Neither' when the game forces you to approve one venture or another.

The pacing in this feels really wrong though compared to Civ V. In Civ V I'd always go for Marathon or Epic otherwise I'd feel like everything was happening too fast. In this, even on the quickest setting it feels like it takes forever to get anything done.

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now
by That » Tue Mar 31, 2015 3:22 am

Beyond Earth is an odd game - I thought it was very impressive and imaginative when I first played it, but it seems to seriously lack the replayability of Brave New World.

I feel the problem lies, fundamentally, in the victories - the progenitor, alien, cyborg, and human victories are all the same! You traverse certain marked blobs of the tech web, gain access to a magic resource, start building super powerful land units, then use them to defend a victory building until a countdown expires. The only choice there is which affinity best matches your starting area. The domination victory is still distinct from the other four, but the AI plays so defensively you are unlikely to encounter other states going for it, and you're likely to be most of the way to one of the other victories by the time it's viable for you to try out - at least in single-player. Furthermore, because of this uniformity in outcome, it feels like it doesn't really matter what techs you go for - there's no impetus to go off the beaten track and grab a different, interesting-looking tech. You just stick to the ones that advance your affinity. That makes the tech web feel very bland, which is a shame, because by rights it should be a more exciting system than the tech tree.

I feel like the game suffers from some serious UI issues, too, but that's secondary to some of the mechanics being a bit off. The leaders and civilizations are also bland, and even the story - which should be pretty interesting - is presented in a dull way. It's weird, because those are all things that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri got really right, by all accounts.

I'm sure if I forced myself to play it lots I would uncover hidden depth and quality - it is a Civilization game, after all! - but in Brave New World you see how great the game is straight away and you certainly don't have to give the game the benefit of the doubt or force anything on yourself.

Saying all that, I don't regret my purchase - what I did play of it was fun, it's just not quite up to the same standard as Brave New World.

I should try Starships, but I hear it's a bad port of a very lightweight tablet game. So really I'm just waiting for Sid Meier's Civilization 6 now. :(

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now
by That » Tue Mar 31, 2015 3:43 am

A few things I'll say in Beyond Earth's favour: it got spying and espionage absolutely right, and how satellites work is spot-on. I would love to see both of those features work their way into Civ 6. Quests were a nice touch too, adding little touches of individuality every time you researched or built something new.

If they can take the best of Beyond Earth and Brave New World, and perhaps mix in the fine balance that made Beyond the Sword so competitive, then Civilization 6 could be essentially perfect. With their new focus on sci-fi, I'm hoping that the next main-series Civ might mix things up a bit and have the victories kick in around the year 2400 once you've had the chance to play with some cyberpunk future-tech. I have high hopes!

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PostRe: [PC] Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now
by Ironhide » Tue Mar 31, 2015 4:20 pm

Trying to get my dad to try Civ V (he's hopelessly addicted to Civ IV) but he refuses to install Steam on his laptop as he seems to think its malware.

Parents and technology :fp:

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PostRe: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now | Rising Tide Expansion Due in Autumn
by Super Dragon 64 » Mon May 18, 2015 6:20 pm

An expansion pack, called Rising Tide, has been announced for release in Autumn. It will be priced at £19.99 and RPS has an interview about it below. I played another campaign of the base game a few weeks ago and, as I found when I first got it, there are some interesting new features, like the quest system, but it's very monotonous in its appearance. The interface is heavily grey which makes trying to learn it a chore compared to the vibrant colours of Civ V that let you easily distinguish different gameplay elements. I won't be in much of a rush to buy the expansion pack but I'll look into it, if it gets a better reception than the base game did.
RPS: What’s this doing in a nutshell, then?

Will: Rising Tide is what we like to call a Firaxis-style expansion, which means in addition to putting a lot of content into the game and balancing and polishing we also put new systems into the game which fundamentally change how it plays. If you’ve had Beyond Earth for a while and are interested in the expansion, this is going to be a brand new experience for you, from a gameplay perspective as well as a content perspective.

There are several features that we are very excited about. First, as the name suggests, is the addition of water-based gameplay, the ability to land cities on the water, and the new units and the aliens and the resources that come along with that. We’ve also completely replaced the diplomacy system from the original game with something new, which I think probably changes the game the most. I think that’s the most fundamental difference under the hood.

We’ve added four new factions, including the Al Falah, the Arabic leader. And we’ve also introduced the concept of hybrid affinities.

RPS: How much of a foregone conclusion was an expansion pack for Beyond Earth? A lot of reviews – including ours, I think – predicted that expansions would make it so much better, but how reasonable an assumption was that?

Will: We have a long-term product plan at Firaxis. I can’t comment on exactly what that looks like, but when we set out to make Beyond Earth the idea was to make a franchise. You’re seeing us committed to that franchise, committed to that idea with this expansion, And with the patches to the base game that we released afterwards. I think it is sort of a foregone conclusion for us. This kind of echoes what happened with Civ V. We released it, it had some problems, then we patched it, we released two expansions that really brought that game up to what people know and love today. We’re in the process of doing that with Beyond Earth. I think we released a very strong initial product, and we patched it based on user feedback. This expansion is a combination of David and my vision for the game, and the addition of what people wanted from the community. We built this game for our players, and we’re always watching how people are playing and trying to react to that, and drive the franchise in a new and differentiated direction from Civ.

Nothing is ever certain in this business, but when we set out to make Beyond Earth we certainly hoped that it will have a long life. One of the biggest, most rewarding pieces of feedback that we got from our community was that there was a hunger for this game, for the idea that this game represents. We’re delivering on that.

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RPS: Is there a conscious attempt to be less conservative now?

David: Absolutely. Beyond Earth went as far as we thought that we could go. We actually talked about this at GDC, on this exact subject. We did a lot of things that we’re really proud of and we think that the game is very successful one, but when it came out we were both pleased and surprised to see fans react by saying ‘I wish you’d gone further, I wish there was more differentiation, more wildness.’ We were like ‘oh, we’d love to.’ So in the expansion we’ve definitely taken a few stands that are way different from anything that a Civ game has attempted before, beyond what we felt we wanted to do with the base game. We’re really excited by how much it changes how the game plays. Water gameplay alone – there’s never been a Civ game where the whole surface of the map is playable, there’s nowhere to escape. The idea of totally rebalancing the game around cities that are on water as well as on land is more than just ‘oh, you have blue terrain now.’ It’s an entirely different strategic landscape. Every game, every decision you make is new, even the old ones. There’s a lot in this game that really pushes the envelope of what BE can be and Civ can be.

RPS: Is the water building something you can do from the off, or do you have to actively pursue it in the Tech web?

David: You have a modest tech requirement, similar to Pioneering in Beyond Earth, which you had to research before you could build a Colonist. It’s very achievable really quickly if you go for it. And two of the new factions – unfortunately neither of them we’re revealing yet – will have special advantages to playing on the water. There’s a real effort to make water gameplay part of your game from the very beginning. Even if you intended to play an entirely land-based Civ, you’re still going to have understand how the water works, how to play against aquatic competitors, use the new power that water gameplay provides… It’s a big deal.

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RPS: Is it all on the surface of the water?

Will: It is one surface. We wanted to keep the gameplay on the map, we didn’t want to make another layer that you had to drop into to see what was going on. The information is there. Our artists have done a really amazing job with the presentation of this and I cannot wait for you to get screenshots to see just how good this looks. We’ve rewritten our water rendering and our water shader to let you see through the surface, we’ve revamped how our terrain generation works and how our map generation works, to generate the terrain underneath. We have a full range of new aquatic resources for both shallow and deep water, and new expedition sites, and new things to find out there, along with a host of new aliens to contend with. So it’s an entirely new space for you to play, and as David alluded to, it’s not just blue terrain. There are some mechanical differences between terrestrial cities and water cities, terrestrial combat and water combat, and how growth works. We’ve really differentiated them without, I think, increasing the complexity too much.

RPS: If you’re an experienced BE player starting your first Rising Tide campaign, what’s the first thing you’ll hit that’ll feel significantly different?

David: Really the second you land you’ll be able to see the new water. You can see the surface and the sea floor, all the new creatures and new resources. Even if you play on a map that’s predominantly land it’ll look different. A couple of the factions will start with major advantages on the water, so if you pick one of those your game is utterly different from the get-go. But it’s impossible to ignore – everything from the units you can to build to the technologies that you first encounter and what they unlock, how you get Affinity, how you’re interacting with the other leaders. The new Diplomacy system… From the very beginning the changes are in front of you.

Will: We’ve also introduced two new biomes. We can’t really say what those are yet, but even the environment that you play in can be potentially be different. From turn 1 it’s going to be a pretty different game.

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RPS: How has the Diplomacy system changed, then?

David: We can’t tell you too many details, but I can speak to it from a philosophical level. One of the takeaways from the base game is that the diplomacy system from Civ V, which we just brought over wholesale, didn’t really work, because it relied on these characters from history. Players understood intuitively how Montezuma might behave or how Ghandi might behave. You could make strategic decisions based on prior knowledge of those characters. Because we have invented characters we wanted to provide more transparency in terms of how they behave and why they do the things they do. We wanted to make a game out of that. We also wanted the player to do more meaningful things through diplomacy. In Civ V and in Beyond Earth the outputs of diplomacy are trade and you can declare war or peace. There’s actually very little that you do in diplomacy; they’re important things, but there’s not a lot of high frequency interaction that you have. You didn’t have a lot of opportunity to interact with the leaders that we put in, their personalities didn’t really get an opportunity to shine. We wanted to build a game around this idea of diplomacy, that would allow our characters to take centre stage and give the player the chance to introspect into their personalities and to give them more things to do, more benefits to be gained.

So just as an example, if I’m playing a military game but I need help researching new technologies, I can solve that problem now through the diplomacy system. I can make an agreement with another leader and in exchange for other things can now have mututal benefits, but it’s a strategic choice because they get something from me too. So I have to be very careful about who’s getting what.

We’ve also built in some new vectors about how leaders communicate with you. The system as a whole is broader, I would say. There’s a lot more meat to it, there’s a game to it, there’s a progression to it, and it’s more transparent.

RPS: It kind of felt in Beyond Earth like you had the option to steamroller everyone or you had to perpetually have something prepared in case someone suddenly lashed out at you; now will you have more sense of why that might happen, and how much does that enable a more nuanced and reactive approach?

Will: Yes, that’s exactly right. The reason the AI behaves the way it does is very complicated. I think one of the problems with Beyond Earth is that the perception of motivations for the leaders was not apparent. They would do things that didn’t make any sense in the context of what was happening on the map. This system is there to give you a window into what they’re thinking, and to make a game out of that. One of the inspirations for that, and this may give you a little bit of a telegraph into what this looks like, is a boardgame called Tales of the Arabian Nights.Your personality as a player is this collection of cards that you get from the experiences that you have in the game. It’s not exactly like that, but we loved this idea of the player having a personality that evolves, and that personality be the driving thing behind the interaction you have with them, and to put that in front in the player and let them strategise around it.

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RPS: Do you mean that the player’s behaviour will change over the course of the game because they feel they’ve built up relationships with the other factions?

Will: I’d say that that’s true. I’d also say that you can use the diplomacy layer to make up for deficits. So if I need something I can get it through research, I can get it through exploration, and now I can get it through diplomacy. We’ve taken a lot of these benefits and spread them all out across the game, making the diplomacy important to other parts of the game, rather than just the war and peace thing. And adding this idea of progression, so the leaders that start off the game have a personality that changes over the course of the game to something different at the end, based on what’s happening, based on your interactions with them, based on the map, based on a lot of factors. You can see that as a player, and you can plan around it.

RPS: Traditionally, or at least as armchair critics like me have it, Civ expansions target weaknesses in the mid game or the late game. It sounds like this one is meant to be more game-wide?

David: That’s definitely true. Our game has got a different pace to it, a different arc than a traditional Civ. It tends to ramp higher and faster. In the base game we spent a lot of our effort making it play and feel different from Civ in very key ways – things like the Tech Web and the Affinity system. What we’re doing in the expansion is simultaneously deepening those systems and adding more content and more variety, more opportunity for player personalisation and for them to control the way the game goes. But also things like the diplomacy and the water system are relevant no matter how big or how small your game is, or how early or how later. There are things that are going to change every decision that you make, in big and little ways. There are also things that scale with the player’s interests. You can invest in the diplomacy to whatever extent that you feel you need to. It’ll be rewarding whether it’s a 1v1 game or a 1v10. Likewise, the water gameplay, even if you play on a map that’s one little ocean or one that’s entirely water, it’s still a big deal, one that changes the strategic landscape. I think it’s accurate to say the changes that we’re after in this game are consistent throughout all the phases of it, they’re meant to turn up the stakes on every part.

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RPS: Has your approach to science fiction changed? Despite having human-alien hybrids, it was kind of buttoned down in the base game. How much is the wildness restrained by a theoretical science mindset?

David:
I think we do both, actually. I think there are a lot of new additions which are very much plausible science, real world-inspired things. There are a lot of ideas in the dipomacy which are based on real, modern politics, there’s a lot of aspects of the new factions that are drawn from the same real-world sources that the existing ones are. The new units, like we’ve introduced the submarine, which is a unit that everyone already understands, but the Hybrid Affinity unique units are much wilder, they’re more bizarre than the Purity ones were. The naval alien catalogue has been expanded, so that feels even more alien, more of a strange environment, than it used to be. And then little things like the new biomes and adjustments to the victory conditions… In many, many small ways we are nudging the game further into true sci-fi. We’re letting it progress there. There’s a number of pieces of new content or new features which are much more strange, much more space than BE had.

RPS: Internally, how much sense is there that you have to redeem Beyond Earth?

Will:
Every product is iterative with us. I think our audience, and rightfully so, has a pretty short memory. When Civ V came out it was pretty rough and it took two expansions to get that game to the place that people have in their heads. The game that people have in their heads is the result of lots of patches, lots of iteration and two expansions. Beyond Earth is no different. When you make a complex strategy game or you iterate on a franchise like Civ you have to watch how people play, you have to see what people do with the game, and you have to respond. We’ve done that with the patches that we’ve released and the Rising Tide expansion is an indication of our committment to this as a franchise. We’re growing this idea and improving and expanding upon it. We’re not a studio that releases one-and-done products. We’re always watching and always improving.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

Rising Tide is due for release this fall/Autumn and will cost £19.99.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/05/18/civilisation-beyond-earth-expansion-release-date/

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PostRe: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now | Rising Tide Expansion Due in Autumn
by Irene Demova » Mon May 18, 2015 6:24 pm

There's no way I'd buy an expansion for it without them almost completely remaking the game, there's several 4x games that came out around the time of BE/after it's launch which gooseberry fool all over it

Hell there's now even gal civ for space

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PostRe: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now | Rising Tide Expansion Due in Autumn
by That » Mon May 18, 2015 6:41 pm

I love Civ but BE just didn't click with me. I'll probably watch some extended gameplay vids or streams of Rising Tide before deciding if it's for me. If it significantly polishes the game then there's certainly hope.

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PostRe: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now | Rising Tide Expansion Due in Autumn
by Tragic Magic » Mon May 18, 2015 6:52 pm

I think it sounds good. I completely agree with people's comments about the game but I did play it for about 40 hours and thoroughly enjoyed it. The expansion sounds like it's adding some really good features though so my hope is that after a couple of expansions it'll be as deep as Civ V now is.

The main problem with BE is that every game feels the same. And it looks like they are trying to address that. Although I can't help that think the new factions are just going to be carbon copies of Napoleon/Alexander/etc that predictably wage war every time you play.

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PostRe: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Out Now | Rising Tide Expansion Due in Autumn
by OrangeRKN » Mon May 18, 2015 11:13 pm

I'll definitely be buying this. I haven't played anywhere near as much Beyond Earth as Civ 5, but I still really like it. And just look back at how much better the expansions made that game - they completely changed it. Hoping for the same here!

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