Before you land on a new planet and start shaping humanitys 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 wont arrive until much later. In the beginning, you are completely alone amid the wilderness. "Whats neat about it is the feeling you get from coming into this new place," said lead producer Dennis Shirk. "Its not the same as in other Civilization games where you already know youre on Earth, the only threat is the occasional barbarian, and youre 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, its 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.
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.
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!
But does it have Space Gandhi?
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.
Robot War Elephants are such a great defensive unit
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.
BTW, Pyramids in the water. This surely is a Civ game.
So will I be playing my civ from stone age to outer space? Or the expansion will start from outer space?
PC only?! Son of a bitch.
It starts with you landing on a new planet.
Oooh I like those. Go supremacy victorythe 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 Earths 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
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 Earths 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
Trailer was cool. Although I only put 50 hours into Civ V and stopped. The games take so long!
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 Earths 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
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 Earths 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
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.