• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Civilization: Beyond Earth announced, Fall 2014, PC [Trailer, Details]

raphier

Banned
That trailer is amazing, very memorable. Kinda thought I was watching Interstellar for a second for that sense of exploration.
 

Nzyme32

Member
Am I right then? Is this the a bit of a continuation of a Civ V science victory, following in the footsteps of the old Alpha Centauri game?
 

syllogism

Member
Before you land on a new planet and start shaping humanity’s destiny, you must first equip your expedition. Referred to as "the seeding," this is an expanded version of your civilization selection in previous games. In Beyond Earth, not only do you choose which faction (read: civilization) to play, but also which spacecraft to take, what cargo to carry, who to bring, and the type of planet you want to inhabit. Each selection you make will greatly impact the start of your game: you could carry high-quality cargo that grants additional funds up-front, for instance, or hard-working, production-oriented colonists who build structures faster. The Civilization series has always been about defining a strategy early on, and then adapting that strategy to accommodate whatever curveballs the game throws your way. These choices should give you greater control over how you define your opening gambit.

After the seeding, you make planetfall and establish your first human colony. It is also the only human colony. The next human player won’t arrive until much later. In the beginning, you are completely alone amid the wilderness. "What’s neat about it is the feeling you get from coming into this new place," said lead producer Dennis Shirk. "It’s not the same as in other Civilization games where you already know you’re on Earth, the only threat is the occasional barbarian, and you’re going to run into other civilizations--and if one of those is Genghis Khan or Montezuma you know what your game is going to be like! With Beyond Earth, it’s basically you versus the environment in the beginning."

And by "environment," Shirk of course means alien lifeforms. Depending on the planet, these lifeforms may be indifferent to your arrival, or hostile. You must decide how to deal with them, and in doing so the development team hopes the experience will feel more isolated, more alien, than in previous games. You are setting forth into the unknown reaches of space, after all. It could be 20 turns or more before you see another player make planetfall and introduce themselves, and another 15 turns after that until the next. And if you think these newcomers are going to be easy pickings just because they were late to the party, think again. Those who arrive after you receive an extra boost to help them catch up to your civilization.

More at http://www.gamespot.com/articles/beyond-earth-takes-civilization-to-the-stars/1100-6418906/
 

Afrodium

Banned
Praying for an iPad version. My computer cannot handle late-game Civ V so I doubt it will fare well with this. They did it with X-Com, and I'll gladly pay full price for it in the App Store. Make it happen!
 
Fantastic trailer. Looking forward to taming alien lifeforms and making Pokemon a reality for my people. After all, they wanna be the very best, like no one ever was.

AOW3 had a massive budget (According to Brad Wardell, the budget for that game was more than all of Stardock's strategy games combined) I think the GOG was due to Notch not wanting to support a Steam-only game.

Huh, I didn't know that but it makes sense. The budget shows, and I think it was well-spent - it's a very well put-together game.
 

megalowho

Member
So into this, thank you Firaxis. Loving the grand Civilization meets space epic vibe of that trailer.

Still not clear how far from Civ they're planning on taking things, a large part of the reason Alpha Centauri appealed to me was its faction based narrative and philosophical hooks and it would be great to see some of that return. Felt like it set the games apart from Civ proper, aside from all the otherworldly units and mechanics. Excellent news either way, cannot wait to hear more about it.
 

Qassim

Member
Praying for an iPad version. My computer cannot handle late-game Civ V so I doubt it will fare well with this. They did it with X-Com, and I'll gladly pay full price for it in the App Store. Make it happen!

If they can't scale it down to low end PCs why would they be able to make it scale down to an iPad? :p

If they did (it'd be cool to give it a go, an on-the-go proper Civilization game would be epic) then I suspect it'd be not really the same game.

Xcom is significantly reduced in scope in comparison to Civ regarding processing of turns.
 

3phemeral

Member
Seed the Adventure: Players will establish a cultural identity, select a leader and sponsor an expedition by assembling the spacecraft, cargo and colonists through a series of choices that directly impact starting conditions when arriving on the new alien planet.

After watching the trailer, I was hoping for exactly this.
 

belushy

Banned
IGN's Article on Civ: Beyond Earth

Because of the non-linear choices you and your competitors will make based on your needs and overall strategy, and the intentional lack of technology trading, no faction will be able to unlock all the technologies in a single playthrough, and by the end of a game each faction should look and function very differently.

The other major change is in how you start, and how Beyond Earth intends to make itself highly replayable. Instead of simply picking a nation and starting with a settler and a couple of scouts or warriors, your starting conditions and bonuses will depend on your choice of which of the eight Earth organizations sponsored your expedition, what types of colonists you brought with you, the ship that transports you there, and the cargo you packed. McDonough stresses that those leaders don’t define your culture like they do in past Civ games, but provide a wide variety of starting points. Even the leader’s models which you see during diplomacy will change based on the Affinity choices you make along the way.
 
That trailer tho
chansub-global-emoticon-3a624954918104fe-19x27.png
 

kiunchbb

www.dictionary.com
So will I be playing my civ from stone age to outer space? Or the expansion will start from outer space?
 

Sub Zero

his body's cold as ice, but he's got a heart of gold
I hope it will implement some kind of save import system if you won Civ V by launching into space. Would be cool to be able to play as all the civs from v in the new campaign
 

Real Hero

Member
the five victories from the gamespot article:

Harmony: awaken a semi-sentient super organism within the planet and reach a new level of consciousness
Purity: terraform the alien planet into a mirror of Earth and relocate Earth’s populace to this new Eden
Supremacy: embrace cybernetic augmentation, then return to Earth and "free" the people from their bodies
Contact: discover evidence of intelligent life and construct a means to establish first contact
Domination: actually, domination is the same as in every other Civilization
 

Durante

Member
the five victories from the gamespot article:

Harmony: awaken a semi-sentient super organism within the planet and reach a new level of consciousness
Purity: terraform the alien planet into a mirror of Earth and relocate Earth’s populace to this new Eden
Supremacy: embrace cybernetic augmentation, then return to Earth and "free" the people from their bodies
Contact: discover evidence of intelligent life and construct a means to establish first contact
Domination: actually, domination is the same as in every other Civilization
Oooh I like those. Go supremacy victory :p
 

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
So would Miriam or Yang be the Montezuma of SMAC? We better get similar faction leaders in this one!
 
I'm definitely into this, but I would be moreso if it allowed you to start a campaign on late-game earth and let you make some decisions in the degraded environment that affect your space campaign. And then perhaps continue to manage earth through the inevitable catastrophe, for example ferrying colonists from old world to new or harvesting and disassembling old earth artifacts/technology/resources.
 
the five victories from the gamespot article:

Harmony: awaken a semi-sentient super organism within the planet and reach a new level of consciousness
Purity: terraform the alien planet into a mirror of Earth and relocate Earth’s populace to this new Eden
Supremacy: embrace cybernetic augmentation, then return to Earth and "free" the people from their bodies
Contact: discover evidence of intelligent life and construct a means to establish first contact
Domination: actually, domination is the same as in every other Civilization

Wow, this doesn't fit into the standard Civ victories at all. It'll be interesting to see how each one works.
 
the five victories from the gamespot article:

Harmony: awaken a semi-sentient super organism within the planet and reach a new level of consciousness
Purity: terraform the alien planet into a mirror of Earth and relocate Earth’s populace to this new Eden
Supremacy: embrace cybernetic augmentation, then return to Earth and "free" the people from their bodies
Contact: discover evidence of intelligent life and construct a means to establish first contact
Domination: actually, domination is the same as in every other Civilization

Oh man.
 

Nzyme32

Member
aaaaah no more William Morgan Sheppard as the narrator by the sounds of things

10414208_ori.jpg


You may remember his from Star Trek (both TNG and New Film), Dr Who, Mad Men, Dexter, Afro Samurai, Transformers, The Prestige... just to name a few :p
 

Samyy

Member
Fall 2014, when I'll be knee deep in recruiting for jobs after my bachelors and dying of midterms. Firaxis pls :(
 

jon bones

hot hot hanuman-on-man action
the five victories from the gamespot article:

Harmony: awaken a semi-sentient super organism within the planet and reach a new level of consciousness
Purity: terraform the alien planet into a mirror of Earth and relocate Earth’s populace to this new Eden
Supremacy: embrace cybernetic augmentation, then return to Earth and "free" the people from their bodies
Contact: discover evidence of intelligent life and construct a means to establish first contact
Domination: actually, domination is the same as in every other Civilization

oh man this is going to be great
 

syllogism

Member
PC Gamer: So there are three 'affinities' that you can take, which define your relationship to the planet. How will they operate, what do they affect?

David McDonough: They influence not just the way things look, but the way that they move, and the way that they build. The three identities are the combination of who humanity is when they land on the planet, and what they find, and how those two collide for the next two thousand years.. Harmony finds that the planet is a beautiful place. It's a gem, a jewel. Maybe the mistakes that they made on Earth, pillaging, polluting and so on, they don't want to repeat, so they find a way to make themselves belong on the planet. They say 'this is going to be our new home'. We're going to be fully of this world, and not ruin it, not spoil it, so they take a very positive, welcoming, inclusive approach to the planet. Their territory is large, they grow very easily, they have a lot of free movement over the terrain. They're very fluid, they're very nimble.

The Supremacy player says "well, technology is the salvation of humankind. The ability to build a colony ship is what got us off that world, we've got to keep going down that road, it's the only way we'll be safe and keep humankind going. So, robotics, advanced artificial intelligence, machinery, things that are immune to an alien world and the depths of space. They start to leave behind organic ties, including up to a point their own bodies, eventually.

Purity is I think the most interesting thing, because it's not exactly a rejection of the two. It's a very plausible philosophy of what humanity would do if faced with, as the quote goes, "the unimaginable strangeness" of space", which is that they'll hold on very tightly to what they know, and what they recognise, and where they came from. So the player tries to push away the alien, they try to make the planet more like Earth, they try to avoid conflict with the alien life forms by building massive defences, by being tough and very hard to kill, very secure in the territory they've made safe, then at the same time try to devote themselves to the preservation, or you might say the conservation of the idea of humanity, hence the name. If you just think about those philosophically, you can imagine how they start to become playstyles, how they become conflicts, how they become wars when you're the Purity player with your big strongholds and the harmony territories are around you from all sides. That sets up a lot of options for both players.

Will Miller: Mechanically, the Purity player is the one that's going to put guns on things. Giant platforms with lots of guns.

David McDonough: We're going to build a fortress, and we're going to make it fly.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/12/c...he-new-factions-aliens-technology-and-more/2/
 
Top Bottom