Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

[MadMaxHellfire]

after less than 24 hours i'm already fed up with this.
one of the pros of civ5 was how units were much more durable. in be it's common for units to die in a single hit because scaling and balance are absolutely off.
every city, EVERY. CITY. can be taken with 1 laser satellite and 1 grunt because satellites have 1 tile longer range and only artilley units, which are extremely fragile, can fire at satellites.
aircrafts are useless.
managing a small bunch of trade routes in civ5 was something new and powerful which had to be carefully thought out sometimes. in be there are so many of them it's retarded, and they must be set up or you'll lose, but if you have 10+ cities (in late games) and 30+ trade routes it feels as entertaining as closing your fingers in the car's door. wtf, all you had to do firaxis was to add a button "renew route" or a tick "keep this route forever".
it's obvious the game has never been actually played, it's just a high budget mod which steals a couple ideas from fucking fall from heaven 2, a decade old mod, and can't even keep up with that crap named "faerun".
stations? even duller than city states. how can this even be possible? that's beyond earth.

 

[Heresiarch]

Just finished my first Transcendence Victory after 6 hours. Yeah, the game is a big fail even when compared to vanilla Civ 5.

The Transcendence Victory feels completely empty. It's just a few sentences saying "yo we are one now" and then off to the main menu you go. Compared to SMAC in which the Transcendence Plot there was a long storyline spanning from the beginning till the end, BE's Transcendence plot feels more like the designers have never played SMAC and just put this victory condition inside because "the managers told us to do so".

The game feels very soulless compared to Civ4/5 with all xpacks installed. Back in Civ4/5/SMAC there was seldom a boring moment - You could really see technology advancing, new toys appearing, new playfields (religion, corporation, tourism, etc.) coming up, etc. Wonders back then were fun and often critical to rush toward as they all feel unique, not to mention all the pretty cinematics/custscenes when a wonder is built.

BE feels dull at this moment. No religion/tourism/etc means there is very little variety you need to focus on. You just need to build combat units to protect yourself, and the AI is passive. Orbital layer doesn't feel very fun as the impact it brings is far from religion etc. And the game's wonders suck. There are several high-end wonders that provide like +6 culture or something. Utterly useless. Normal buildings are dull as hell as well, all are just +3 energy, +1 food, etc etc yawn.

The technology web looks interesting but it also diminish the feeling of having progress, because you can beeline to practically everything from the mid-game on. Not to mention it feels extraordinary weird to have nanorobotics researched but no biology or network.

UI problems, trade route problems, diplomacy etc are all well discussed by other guys.

Not really worth the 50 euros at this moment (I bought it for 25 though thanks to Russian steam codes), it feels like an indie 4x SMAC wannabe CIV 5 mod. Probably fixed after 1 or 2 expansion sets just like Civ 5.

 

[Destroid]

So is it better than Pandora?

 

[Jaedar]

Played this for a bit, stopping maybe 10-20 turns away from purity victory (walking all those settlers in is just a chore).

What I most noticed as different from Civ5 is that there's even less real decisions to be made regarding your strategy, and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more banal micromanagement. Every fucking turn you get bombarded with trade routes having expired and cities needing new things to build. Except there's nothing fun to pick. You don't really specialize your cities, you just sorta build everything. All the yields are so small it doesn't feel like anything you do matters. And the ai is just as inept at war as it always was.

I see pretty much no reason why anyone should play this instead of SMAC, or even CiV5 bnv for that matter. I thought the tech web would be cool, but there's so few techs that actually feel like they do something.

 

[Xu Fugui]

So is it better than Pandora?

Not really, no.

 

[Space Satan]

Respected game critics. Vocal minority. Critical approval. Award winning studio. Huge success. Trolls from 4chan.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

So is it better than Pandora?

barely.

 

[Jaedar]

Huh, Civ5 has 7.7 user score, 90 critic score.

So I guess beyond earth is statistically perceived to be worse.

 

[Thane Solus]

so what we learned today kids ( or since Metacritic launched) ? Metacritic real scores are on the right, the left is just a graphical bug, caused by a disease called "gaming journalism".

 

[AngryEddy]

How do I kill a Siege Worm easily in the early game?

 

[Xu Fugui]

How do I kill a Siege Worm easily in the early game?

Patience and any ranged unit will do, they don't really give a damn about getting their asses smoked by artillery or distant troops (as in one tile away). If your city can fire at it make it do so too. They might get annoyed or just randomly choose to move to the tile your unit is in and in that case your guys are toast so if it is in close range to your city keep them inside the ultrasonic fence.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Game fixed forever http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=331446196

 

[Zeriel]

Huh, Civ5 has 7.7 user score, 90 critic score.

So I guess beyond earth is statistically perceived to be worse.

Beyond Earth has to go up against SMAC.

Anyway, my impression so far: some of the art is pretty, but everything feels like a huge wasted opportunity, from the narrative (barely existent, especially compared to SMAC) to the wonders (they might as well not exist, they barely do anything), to the game depth (there is none).

The most interesting aspect is the victory conditions/unit differentiation via affinities, but it doesn't hold a candle to actually customizing units ala SMAC. Tech tree also feels very shallow, like they got halfway through developing the game and then just released it.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Been playing some hours on my second game. Larger map, terran, AI a bit harder ("Hard" difficulty, two notches into cheaty bonuses). Russia landed right next to me and got pissy in a hurry, declared war twice. Massively outnumbered me with units, but since it's civ 5 AI I had no casualties and was knocking on his capital when he sued for peace and gave me giant sacks of gold. Time passed, he declared war again, same result. Those have been the only two wars, pushing turn 300 at this point, nearing the point where I can build the robot-rape portal and invade Earth. Most other leaders have like 4 affinity ranks and I'm over 10. Russia still has rocket buggies for god's sake, I could probably go knock over his entire empire with one or two basic robot soldiers of the final tier. Rest of the world is far enough away nobody gives a shit about me.

Went somewhat tell for BE, only 3 (Now 4) cities. Wasn't too terrible but the massive city spam does work better, strictly speaking.

Went France and leaned pretty heavily on culture for shits and giggles. Think I got 2 (Or 3?) free techs out of it, but eh.

Overall, still feeling meh. It's a shame because when you start it off it feels pretty good, but then a combination of mounting busywork slowing the game down and the AI being bad really hurts it. I'd almost be inclined to say the AI is worse in BE than current double-expanded Civ 5. A bit before BE launched I played a game of Civ 5 to get in the mood and man, it's pretty much better than BE. Been seeing a lot of complaints about how BE has cut features like no religion, but honestly if they wanted to make spess colonization wargame they should've cut even more. Warlock's a good example of an elegant wargame with light 4X design. City building and empire management is incredibly simple but there are still distinct choices you want to make, like focusing a city on food/mana/research/gold/unit production/etc since it's just there to support and provide a framework for rubbing little dudes together.

Not too upset since it was free though. Just like when I dumped a pile of hours into FE:LH when Ulminati gave me his copy. It's not a very good strategy game, possibly even a bad one, but I enjoy me some TBS. It is a good pain.

 

[DrowningHarvey]

It feels uninspired and is uninspiring. When the politically correct cast fled the earth, they apparently left everyone with character behind. There is nothing to distinguish the leaders; they are soulless cardboard cutouts with very limited and mostly identical dialogue. Where are my spacenuns and astrofacists? Why are these people in positions of leadership? Why am I stranded in planet of social justice?

The aliens are re-skinned barbarians, except killing them is bad and should you make the mistake of vaporizing a space cockroach, every other colony will cease their daily affairs to tell you it is wrong and you should feel bad. Then they proceed to beg more space goo from you like nothing happened. Why is killing aliens bad? Why is making this planet my bitch bad? Are you going to call intergalactic PETA on me? There is no environmental impact on player’s actions. I couldn’t leave a lasting impression to the planet if I tried, you whiny ecofacists, because terraforming is limited to creating batches of spacejungle.

Wars and diplomacy are a joke. AI cannot protect its colonies and has hard time reacting to any player actions, no matter how obvious. Tech web and affinities tend to cause massive disparity between units and player has option of steamrolling every other civilization to oblivion with handful of affinity boosted units, should he want to engage in the boredom that is Civ5 combat. Diplomacy is limited to resource begging and declarations of war followed by awkward peace offers few turns later.

It feels and plays like a poorly balanced mod. There is no sense of alien environment, no hard choices and no character.

EDIT: And those tech flavor texts. Cringeworthy mix of whedonesque smartassery and 2deep4u tumblr philosophy, all read by the Indian chick. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

 

[Jick Magger]

I miss Leonard Nimoy.

 

[AngryEddy]

Another thing that bugged me about the game is that it forces you to basically turtle to win. I tried playing a production-heavy, Brazilian, purist faction and It just was dogshit compared to my UAC super-turtle, ultra-wealthy, supremacy faction.

The free super turrets that bases get and their huge health is such bad game design.

 

[Space Satan]

We should thank shit that is CivV for that. It was there when Firaxis gone full retard and made cities superdefensible on their own. Never before in civ series cities could remain without defences. It was a given that every new city should be protected and provided you with +def and bonuses.

 

[Jaedar]

Cities in Beyond earth are actually pretty shitty compared to CiV.

You can easily bring them down in a turn if you have decent ranged units(say a missile rover and 2 rangers). Or build an orbital laser to do it even faster. This was simply not the case in civ5, where even with a large army you'd need a lot of turns to siege.

Of course, the design is still bad, just less so.

 

[AngryEddy]

I have another complaint, the prosperity web is also terrible until tier 3. It needs a HUGE buff to even contemplate putting points in to it, when Industry and Knowledge are so amazing and the war tree is just meh. It is not acceptable to have to grind through shit to get to the good stuff.

 

[Minttunator]

Tried the demo and, as with the new XCOM, I have to give props to the Firaxis guys for releasing a demo in this day and age but - again, as with their XCOM game - it just resulted in me not wanting to buy it. I guess that's part of the reason why most game companies no longer release demos.

I'm one of those weird people that like Civ V but I've played a lot of it so I'm not really looking for any more and this game feels very much like vanilla Civ V with a different skin. Barbarians are now aliens, gold is now energy, etc. - but the actual gameplay is too similar to be interesting. In fact, when compared to Civ V with the GK+BNW expansions, this game just feels like a step back.

 

[Ulminati]

 

[Nael]

Why am I stranded in planet of social justice?

Because: THE FUTURE!

(Play a 4x strat with character and get Endless Legend. Really stupid AI but that is about the only major flaw with the game.)

 

[Norfleet]

The game does have a very bland character, with all of the leaders essentially devoid of any character. They don't even apparently have their own voice actors, it seems as if one leader is responsible for quoting every other leader's lines, because it's the same chick voicing everything. They may as well not have had any, it would be less jarring than the "Who is this?" when I realized this was the same chick voicing some dude's lines, and then I found out who it was. Apparently they don't have voice actors. They don't even have a cast of devs to do the voices. They have ONE person, apparently the rest no speaka da Engaleesh or something.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

All those brown tribbles mercilessly pounding that noble white man. Even worse, there are no male tribbles. The feminist ideal. I never knew original Star Trek was overrun by these social justice warriors. They're not even talking about video games which is clearly what I'm actually upset about, god damn fucking brown tribbles I AM GOING TO TWEET ABOUT THIS MARK MY WORDS.

The game does have a very bland character, with all of the leaders essentially devoid of any character. They don't even apparently have their own voice actors, it seems as if one leader is responsible for quoting every other leader's lines, because it's the same chick voicing everything. They may as well not have had any, it would be less jarring than the "Who is this?" when I realized this was the same chick voicing some dude's lines, and then I found out who it was. Apparently they don't have voice actors. They don't even have a cast of devs to do the voices. They have ONE person, apparently the rest no speaka da Engaleesh or something.

What? The talking heads have different voice actors. They have all of 3 or 4 spoken lines each. It's just all the leader quotes from wonders/techs is the indian narrator chick or whatever because Firaxis thought "Well civ 4* and 5 had a single narrator for techs and wonders so I guess BE should too". Not that it would really help given how stupid the tech quotes are, but still.

Also finished that second game I was playing. Putting the game down now. Feeling it may be Civ 3-tier for worst civ ever, ignoring the Call to Power games since I never played those. Vanilla 5 was possibly worse but after both expansions it's currently ok. Kinda doubt expansions will help BE since how it's built at the moment if they do the normal expansion thing of adding a new gameplay system or two it'll just make things worse.