Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

[vonAchdorf]

At least the new water shader looks better than in Witcher 3

 

[IDtenT]

Same for Gods and Kings. So maybe...

I disagree. Nothing could salvage CiV from trying to be a wargame.

 

[MilesBeyond]

Yeah I'm not optimistic. Civ V struggled from trying to blend 4X and wargaming and ended up with the worst of both worlds, but it also suffered from lacking most of the features earlier Civs had. The second, at least, was fixed through expansions (and the first was actually mitigated through both tinkering with the system to minimize Carpets of Doom, and through putting heavy penalties on warmongering, meaning it's now totally feasible to play an entire game of Civ V without even touching the combat. Point in the game's favour? You decide).


Civ V also had, IMHO, the worst AI in a strategy game that can be (kinda, sorta) tolerated. BE was even worse. BE actually has the worst AI of any strategy game I've ever played, and I've played nearly every TBS game ever made (except the Hall of Shame games like MoO 3, LotR 3, Disciples 3... Man what is it with the third instalment being terrible? Though I guess HoMM 3 was the best of its franchise. Same with AoW 3 *dons flame suit*). Like I can't even wrap my head around how bad BE's AI is. When the best thing you can say about a game is "At least it's still better than Master of Orion 3," then...


So unless Firaxis somehow completely reverses its track record and actually manages to make an expansion pack that improves the AI, I don't think I'll be interested.


Ah well. Even though BE will probably never be as good as Civ 3, and will almost definitely never be as good as SMAC, at least this expansion can't be any worse than the expansions for those games. I mean, okay, I know there are people who like Alien Crossfire, and I respect that. But Play the World has got to be the single worst expansion pack ever made.

 

[omega21]

“Nudging The Game Further Into True Sci-Fi”
haha what

 

[Azira]

 

[Hellraiser]

This shit is beyond saving.

 

[rezaf]

Maybe if they let a comittee of seven codexer patriots tell them what to do...

At this point though?

 

[Hellraiser]

This shit is beyond saving.

Maybe if they let a comittee of seven codexer patriots tell them what to do...

And at least 2 years extra on rewriting the framework.

And artists not tainted by Avatar.

Honestly, when the team making the game does research on Alpha Centauri by reading about it on wikipedia, instead of playing the game and reading the manual, you know the project is fucked.

Ecology? Lol nope, we only haz alienz (which are space fantasy bullshit)

Social engineering? Here have this talent tree (the tree would nto have been bad for secondary traits, but when it is all you get instead of picking democracy/police state/fundies it plain sucks).

Unit design? Here, have this meaningless choice between two kinds of AWESUM.

Tech pacing? Oh it goes from fucking slow then suddenly it becomes so fast it is meaningless (also SMACs way of calculating tech costs is way superior and allowed for more nonlinearity than the tech web)

City management? Click quest, just build shit. Global unhappiness health, lol.

Espionage? Nearly utterly useless apart from tech theft.

Unit diversity? Civ V has better diversity and more tactical options(sic!).

The only things I wish SMAC had that this game has are culture, convoys (if they were tuned to be less of micromanagement hassle), hexes and starting loadout (good idea, poor execution).

SMAC mechanics:

Beyond Earth mechanics:

Honestly, this is a game that is dumbed down compared to VANILLA CIV V.

The new AWESUM generation of game-designers ruined it.

 

[Khorne]

I did sink a fair amount of time into civ 5 and civ:be, it's definitely nowhere near civ 4 feature-wise, but it could be way worse.
At least it's not made in unity engine, and the ui is actually configurable. Technically, it has more in common with PC games than PoE.
That said, I'm not sure what to expect from expansion and I wouldn't judge it until I see it.
As far as "True Sci-Fi" goes, I don't think they've nailed it just yet, but that doesn't mean they won't nail it in the future DLC.
Some things I've noticed: Purity is just a Space Marine chapter, Supremacy is Skynet, Harmony is Zerg, and aliens are just green barbarians with dune worms.
There are overlords, ultralisks, terminators and imperial tanks, even the models look suspiciously similar.
They blend these ideas together and call it popular science fiction, but in truth, it's just a bunch of old ideas, almost like they're afraid of doing something new.
To be honest, I just wanted colonization in space or maybe AC reboot, something like that.
However, this game tries to be too many things at the same time, none of which are executed properly.
I suppose they were thinking more along the lines of turn based starcraft, instead of spore colonization, and that is a shame, imo.

 

[Galdred]

I suppose they were thinking more along the lines of turn based starcraft, instead of spore colonization, and that is a shame, imo.

You say that because you never played turn based starcraft

I would really like to have such a great board game ported to PC actually...

 

[cvv]

Man, boardgame Starcraft is awesome.

And yeah, why aren't more board games computerized? Best Civ game ever? PC version of Through the Ages bitches.

 

[Khorne]

You say that because you never played turn based starcraft

I would really like to have such a great board game ported to PC actually...

Not really, I just mentioned it because starcraft also tries to be too many things at the same time.
It's arguably just a WH40K variation, and the depth is artificial. It's true I have not played this board, though I grew up on Risk if that counts.
I've mentioned spore, not because it's a good game, but because of its creativity. It lets you create without being bound to rails, but execution sucks.
In civ:be, everything is on rails, and much like starcraft, it lets you create until a certain point, but execution sucks.
If it would let you create morphs of different alien races and talents from within the base game, it would suck much less.
Not to mention the extremely boring and predictable neutrals that serve only as a filler. With random generated evolution system, they would suck much less.

 

[Destroid]

I didn't like the Starcraft boardgame much at all. Seemed too long, too much trumping from late game free shit, though I haven't played a ton of games to really get the balance down. I did like the hidden order stacking mechanics though.

 

[Ulminati]

Eclipse > Twilight Imperium 3rd Ed > Star Craft as far as 4x in spaaaace board games go.

And you could probably cram a couple of lesser known games in between Eclipse and TI and several dozen between TI and SC.

 

[Galdred]

Wait, no. Eclipse balance leads to all players rushing to plasma missiles, and I despise the lack of hidden information in the game. It encourages camping a bit too much IMO, even though the scoring system would suggest otherwise. But maybe if I had played with set team, and allied victory, I would have liked the game more.
Twilight Imperium, I found a bit bloated.
But my main problem with both games is that they make kingmaking too important (Chaos in the Old World manages to avoid this for instance), which does not work well with many groups (I mean, you really need your players not to hold grudge, or make meta game arrangements from one session to another one for it to work).
Starcraft is a game about combat, and I think it does this better than the other one (but I almost always played it as a team game) : chosing your techs is much more involved than in Eclipse, as is chosing your combat cards, and setting your units up for combat.

 

[Average Manatee]

Is Beyond Earth worth playing for "so bad its good" reasons or is it just bad? Is there anything novel or at all interesting in it compared to Civ5?

Not removed from inventory of course.

 

[Jaedar]

Is Beyond Earth worth playing for "so bad its good" reasons or is it just bad? Is there anything novel or at all interesting in it compared to Civ5?

Not removed from inventory of course.

There is no reason to play CivBE instead of CiV with expansions.

Of course, you should actually be playing SMAC.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Is Beyond Earth worth playing for "so bad its good" reasons or is it just bad? Is there anything novel or at all interesting in it compared to Civ5?

Not removed from inventory of course.

it's so bad it gives you seizures.

 

[Space Satan]

I fixed it

 

[Ulminati]

Is Beyond Earth worth playing for "so bad its good" reasons or is it just bad? Is there anything novel or at all interesting in it compared to Civ5?

Not removed from inventory of course.

No. Just play SMAC or Civ4 + planetfall/dune wars/fall from heaven 2

 

[KoolNoodles]

Yeah, if you want that sci-fi angle, play dune wars. Pretty good stuff.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

and forget planetfall, it's beyond earth's level of horrible.

 

[Torrasque01]

I know I saw here somewhere a link to a french or german forum with a better SMAC mod for civ4. Does anyone remember?

Edit: It's Conflict on Chiron:
http://www.civforum.de/showthread.p...mp-Updates&s=fa7483146e64da55070de7af570680d2

 

[MilesBeyond]

Is Beyond Earth worth playing for "so bad its good" reasons or is it just bad? Is there anything novel or at all interesting in it compared to Civ5?

Not removed from inventory of course.

No. Just play SMAC or Civ4 + planetfall/dune wars/fall from heaven 2

I really, really wish I could enjoy FFH2. The problem, though, is that the AI spams so many useless soldiers that it never actually brings into battle that getting towards the endgame, AI turns are excruciatingly long. I get to a point where I'm spending more time not playing than I am playing, and that's when I say "Screw this" and go play a different game.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

that's common in almost every 4x.