Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - The Collection

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - The Collection

released on Oct 09, 2015

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Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - The Collection

released on Oct 09, 2015

This compilation contains: - Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth (base game) - Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide (expansion pack) - Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - Exoplanets (map pack)


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The Collection


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Space colonization must be difficult and dangerous. You're landing in an environment where any lifeform could be deadly. Parasites and diseases we could never have imagined, poisonous chemicals, radiation, unpredictable climatic catastrophes, an infinite amount of unimaginable threats. Beyond Earth knows this, and puts SOME effort into creating the immersion. But ultimately it fails to distinguish itself much from its mainline predecessor.

Now, to be clear, being a decent spin-off to one of the greatest turn-based strategies of all time is an achievement in itself. The core mechanics are still there and are still just as fun. However, the biggest problem with Beyond Earth is that almost everything that makes it different is what makes it worse.

The main way it conveys the difficulty and the danger of establishing a space colony is through slower progression and alien life. Essentially, early on this forces you to put more effort into development and avoid conflict as much as possible, whether with other civs or the aliens. And this is not difficult to do. Aliens might destroy your improvement once in a while or just annoyingly stand on the tiles you want to build on, but won't cause many problems otherwise. The AI is surprisingly non-aggressive towards you. And why would they be? The number of civs you can have on a map is much smaller now, so you can avoid stepping on anybody's toes for a long time. I spent my early game peacefully building and expanding.

But once the game kicks off, all of that immersion really goes out the window, and you end up feeling like you're playing a total conversion mod of Civ 5. Aliens turn from a threat to a nuisance real quick. And that's when you get to become heavily involved with the local diplomacy system, which is... If I had to describe it with one word: UNFINISHED.

At first it appears more complex because it involves a system of agreements, which give you bonuses depending on your relationship status (Neutral, Cooperating or Allied). However, you quickly realize that the number of these agreements is finite. Once you find the few you really want, you never need to bother with that system again. Unless one of the participants declares war on the other, the agreement stays active for the rest of the game. This really could've been an engaging diplomacy system if there was more depth to it.

The alliances and wars are downright broken. You should never ally with anyone in this game because the unpredictable AI will end up declaring war on someone, and you will be dragged into it. In Civ 5 there were Defensive Pacts, which would only drag you into a war if the other member of the pact gets attacked. If THEY declare war on someone, the pact would simply get nullified, leaving you completely unaffected by the AI's dumb decisions. But here you are very likely to end up in such scenarios where you're allied with 3 civs and the next turn you're at war with all 3 of them. It is ridiculous.

And these wars are much less likely to be bloodless. In Civ 5 after about 10 turns your enemy would start offering peace deals. Depending on the sizes of your armies, they'd either give you something, demand something from you or agree to a white peace. That makes sense because no civilization wants a prolonged war. But here, I have no idea what you have to do to have a bloodless war. Sometimes the AI will offer peace without blood, but I can't tell what the prerequisites for this are. In most situations however you can't make peace unless you have a higher war score. You earn the war score by destroying enemy units and capturing their cities. Which means in the majority of situations you HAVE TO attack the opponent even if you don't want to. It is especially frustrating when the war started because of your alliance, but then your ally makes peace with the enemy, while you're left fighting them, when you had no intentions of beginning this war in the first place. So, the best strategy is to just never ally with anyone ever. Just sit tight and develop.

Speaking of the development, I appreciate the attempt to make it non-linear, but it ends up being messy and confusing. In Civ 5 every new tile improvement and building was a better version of the previous one. Which meant that you learn about them in the early game and don't have to pay too much attention to them in the late game, when you'll be busy with diplomacy and war. But here some of the buildings you're supposed to unlock in the early game are only useful in the early game, but will remain available throughout the whole session, thus cluttering your production list. And a lot of the buildings and tile improvements you unlock just give you the same types of bonuses as the ones you already have, with the only difference being the build time. This leads to a lot of unnecessary micro-management in the late game, which Civ 5 already had too much of. Here it's just ridiculous.

The one thing I did enjoy about the progression here is the Affinity system. The civs in this game don't really have unique traits like in Civ 5, but they have unique development paths called Affinities. It's basically like a dynamic class system in something like Titan Quest or Grim Dawn, which allows you combine traits from different classes and developing your own unique build. Each of these affinities comes with its own aesthetic too, and it's cool to see how your leader and your cities transform with the passage of time.

That being said, this game is not as aesthetically pleasing in general as Civ 5. While Civ 5 had vivid and diverse colors, this game operates with a really toned-down palette, where the most prominent colors are toxic greens and pale blues, making the whole game feel cold and unwelcoming, which is just not the right approach for this type of game. In addition, most icons are now symbolic, making it harder to distinguish between buildings and units. It is also not helped by their confusing names. While in Civ 5 buildings and units would have self-explanatory names like "Aqueduct" or "Swordsman", here you get stuff like "Cytonursery" and "Sentinel", forcing you to point your mouse cursor at them just to see what the hell they are. And it's also not helped by the fact that your units change names with each upgrade.

In terms of audio, I think the game did a great job, but sadly this is one category where it had no chance at living up to Civ 5. The soundtrack here fits perfectly with the game's theme and aesthetic, but Civ 5 had one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, composed of iterations of classic melodies from a variety of cultures. I get goosebumps just remembering some of the songs from Civ 5, whereas Beyond Earth's soundtrack eventually becomes a background noise.

In conclusion, Civ: Beyond Earth is not a bad game, but it is doomed to live in the shadow of its predecessor. Because frankly, it doesn't really add anything substantial, but takes away a lot. After spending about 20 hours in this game, you'll start questioning yourself why you're playing this instead of Civ 5. Essentially, it doesn't offer a space colonization experience, not really. Its undercooked new systems create the impression that this game was never treated seriously by the devs and neither should be by you.

P. S. Forgot to mention the Aquatic Cities introduced in the Rising Tide DLC. Well, honestly, I'd rather they didn't. The Aquatic Cities feel like a gimmick. They're worse than normal cities in almost every way, and are more vulnerable because the sea has no geography like hills or mountains to protect it. The game already suffers from the two-dimensionality of the map, since you can build tile improvements on water, making the geography less relevant. The Aquatic Cities only make this situation worse.