JOHN GILLOOLY spends some time getting to grips with a preview build of Firaxis’ new opus.
It has come to that strange time of the year where, after a drought, the ood of games has begun. Odds are that by the time you read this Beyond Earth will be out, but unfortunately review code timing and embargo dates mean that we missed out on including a review by mere days. We have, however, been able to spend a pretty serious chunk of our time playing a preview build of the game, limited to 250 turns. While this means it lacks the all important endgame, it was enough to give us a pretty good understanding of how the game has turned out, freshing out the information conveyed during various chats with Firaxis throughout the game’s development.
Before diving into the meat of the game, it is worth recapping just what Beyond Earth is and isn’t. It is technically the next standalone Civilization game, bearing that moniker and built around the same engine that powers Civ V. The same design team has built the game, but they have quite deliberately taken the opportunity to ex their creative muscles, something that isn’t always possible within the historical con nes of the Civ franchise.
All of this means that at rst blush the game looks like Civ V, but it doesn’t take long at all for the massive changes made to the way in which the game works to raise their heads. In fact, this begins with the setup of a new game itself.
Gone are the Civilizations with their special units and leader bonuses. Instead you customise your colonists with a series of decisions. Firstly, there is their sponsor, which equates to rough geopolitical regions of earth, each bringing with them speci c bonuses. Then you chose your colonist type, your spacecraft, and your cargo, each of which brings further bonuses to boost you down your chosen path.
If, for example, you have a militaristic bent you can use this setup to land with a soldier unit and boosts in both damage and military production, as well as having Alien nests automatically appear on your map, handy when heading out on a bug hunt. Or you can have a worker, extra colony health and know where all the coastlines are. The system is quite exible and helps you start your new life on an Alien world.
TEEMING WITH LIFE
We mean Alien in every sense. For when you land it doesn’t take long at all for you to first encounter the native inhabitants of the world. This is probably the first moment where the un-Civ like nature of the game rears its head. Every instinct screams ‘Barbarians!’, but these Aliens are a far cry from the rampaging hordes in games gone by. A lot of the time they keep their distance, only attacking when you get close to their nests (or when you develop an Alien killing reputation).
Others, like the Siege Worms, path across the map, effectively ignoring the existence of your colony and accompanying carefully improved tiles. Suf ce to say that your improvements come off second best to a giant earth churning worm. What makes it worse is that, when angered, they are tough buggers indeed, needing multiple upgraded units working in concert to bring them down.
Dealing with these Aliens is key to getting your rst toehold on your new planet. Go on the offensive and you’ll need to prepare for a long, drawn out war. Thankfully there are various solutions to the problem to be found in the new tech web, a daunting, sprawling rethink of the traditional tech tree. For example, instead of throwing military units at them, you can develop ultrasonic barriers that keep the Aliens two tiles away from your city at all times.
Choosing how you deal with this hostile environment is the lynchpin of Beyond Earth, delivered through the virtues system. Ultimately you need to choose between three broad approaches to the world - Supremacy, Purity and Harmony.
The names are fairly self explanatory - Supremacy is the military path, taming the planet through munitions. Purity involves trying to recreate earth, through terraforming and genetic manipulation of the environment and its inhabitants. Harmony on the other hand involves adapting to the new world and living side by side with the Aliens. Not only does each of these approaches unlock unique units, techs and upgrades, but they set the path to ultimate victory over rival colonists.
SPACE QUEST
Besides the tech web, there are two other major systems that progress the game, one completely new to the franchise and one modified to a near unrecognisable state. The former is the quest system, which acts as both an overarching storytelling mechanism and a way of further randomising the experience. Quests take a variety of forms, from straightforward achievement style deals through to more narrative affairs that have you siding with one outpost or another. While not in your face, the quests are ever present, and following them is also a great way to come to grips with the way the game works.
More prominent is the Virtues system, a total reworking of the Policies system seen in Civ. Covering Supremacy, Purity and Harmony, you work your way down the tree over time unlocking bonuses much like policies. However this time around there are also bonuses to be had from spreading your points horizontally as well as vertically, which is a nice way of encouraging varied approaches, rather than pushing you to ll in all the blanks like Policies did in Civ 5.
There are many other things at play in the game. There is a satellite layer that lets you build and launch relatively shortlived buffs to areas of the map, for example. There is also a complex trading system, which requires you to send convoys over land or sea for mutually bene cial buffs to two colonies, be they rival groups or small independent ones more akin to city states.
There are many, many more aspects to the game, more than we can outline over these few pages. The good news is that our time spent previewing the game has done nothing to dampen our enthusiasm, though we weren’t really prepared for how differently the game plays out. Suf ce to say our first attempts didn’t go well at all, but after a few goes through the early stages everything started making sense. Beyond Earth is an ambitious step for the Civ team, and while the proof will come when we have the full game in our hands, we are incredibly impressed by what we have seen so far.