![]() ![]() Both purity and supremacy require that you make contact with old Earth using an FTL communication satellite and build a warp gate to reach back home, but that’s where the similarities end. The harmony victory involves communing with a mysterious life form that dwells within the planet, eventually melding with its hive mind to transcend humanity’s limitations. ![]() There’s nothing stopping you from pursuing two affinities at once, but doing so will mean it takes you longer to reach the late game.Įach affinity has its own unique victory condition that can be reached through researching certain branches of the tech tree. As you gain levels in each category you’ll unlock passive bonuses, first affecting how aliens react to you, then changing how your units interact with the world (supremacy specialists will get free roadways, for instance, while harmonious players will be healed instead of hurt by clouds of toxic alien miasma). One of the big overarching themes of Beyond Earth is the question of how mankind will adapt to a new planet – will use technology to bend it to our whims, cohabitate with the alien life, or reject progress entirely to preserve mankind’s ideals? Depending on your answer, your Civilization will develop an affinity for Supremacy, Harmony, or Purity. In addition to giving you new buildings and units to play with, certain technologies will also advance your affinity level. Each branch also has one or two ultra-specialized “leaf” technologies that can confer serious advantages (though investing in them tends to be more costly). From the word go you have six branches to explore, with further more specialized branches shooting off from them. Gone is the linear tech tree from previous Civ games, replaced with a sprawling web of options. You’ll start to notice some substantial changes, however, when it comes to science. Energy lets you buy improvements and units right away if you have enough, while culture lets you establish “virtues” (similar to Civ V’s social policies, though they’re all available from the start) that further affect your resource output and unit behavior. From that point the early game will feel pretty familiar to long-time fans – you must develop tiles on a hex grid to yield resources like food, which makes your population grow, and production, which lets you build things over time. Instead of moving a settler to your desired starting point, you’ll pick a spot within a small radius for your ship to land in, and your city will be founded there. You can customize your spaceship to gain sort of advanced knowledge of the planet’s surface or an advantage in city placement or starting energy (the game’s currency.) Finally you can choose the cargo your colonists brought with them, which will let you start with unit, building, or technology already available. You can further define your faction by choosing the resource specialties of your colonists, which affects the output of each city you build. Instead of choosing from dozens of potential nationalities, Beyond Earth gives you a pick of eight civilizations (ranging from an American megacorporation to a cabal of Australians and Polynesians), each with a substantial factional bonus that distinguishes them from the others. ![]() ![]() Mankind’s new home is well and truly a new frontier – one with several topography types to pick from – and even before you land you’ll have several vital choices to make. If you’re not familiar with Civilization, you should give Civ V a try while it’s still free and see why this series is the reigning king of the 4X strategy genre. But fans of Civilization V shouldn’t get too comfortable either – the sci-fi elements go far deeper than just being cosmetic additions, and will have a dramatic impact on the way you approach the game. This game has been hyped as a spiritual successor to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and while elements of that beloved game are certainly present, the influence of the Civ series feels a lot more prominent. What this boils down to, basically, is more of the Civ you love, but with satellites overhead and giant alien krakens lurking in the ocean depths. As the name suggests, Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is about what comes after that: more squabbling for cultural dominance, but on the surface of an alien world. Your choices, really, are to become the dominant force on a boned planet, or to escape to the stars in a cool rocket and colonize a new one. Swaths of earth are stripped bare by industry, cities have been devastated by war, and whole continents have been razed in nuclear hellfire because someone had the gall to build the Eiffel Tower before Gandhi. If you’re like most people, the world is pretty messed up at the end of your Civilization campaigns. ![]()
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