I love me some Civ5 (and Civ 4). I played the shit out of those games and still do. I recently started playing 5 again and goddamn I love the hell out of that entire game, it is now my most played game on steam and I have put in the most hours into it out of all my friends on steam (kinda depressing, but kinda cool too). Anyways I decided to go ahead and purchase Beyond Earth because the past few year firaxis has made some of my favorite games and they deserve my money at full price.

Anyways I meant to try Alpha Centari months back when the game was originally announced and I really haven't kept up on the new/videos/press releases of the game because, it was something I was looking at eventually getting but probably not anytime soon. But I'm not really sure what to expect with the gameplay and how the game plays out (or at least how it played out in AC).

So kinda what should I expect from the game? Is it going to be extremely similar to Civ 4, 5? Is it more about exploration? Minigling with new races? Claiming unknown lands against other human "civilizations"? So on. Please give me an idea of what I'm going to get into at around midnight a month-ish from now.

So I'm kinda expecting Civ 5 with more exotic tilesets, where all of the planets will be themed like Star Wars, so there is a mostly desert planet, mostly ice planet, etc. You're still colonizing a single planet per game, right? It's not like Endless Space where each individual planet isn't that important, and it's more about having solar systems that are really useful?

There are a bunch of lets players on youtube with videos up.

It's completely, 100% just a scifi themed Civ 5.

You can probably expect a tech tree of some sort and some hexagons.

@nightriff: No it's seems to be quite different from Civ 4,5, and from Alpha Centauri (that was one of my favourite games of all times, but I already understood this game is not a remake of it). Much of the focus seems on the three different paths (purity, supremacy, harmony), the way these interact with the "tech web" (no longer linear tech advancement), and the aliens wich have a much more prominent role in the game than classic barbarians in civ. From this point of view the harmony affinity (kind of adapting/merging to the new planet) seems to have interesting possibilities (even though i'll go for supremacy the first time, yay cyborgs!). Also satellites appear to have a large role. I don't have proper understanding of the various factions (like franco-iberian, slavic, brasilia), but they are not like the factions in AC as far as i can tell.

The most different feature i see, and the one i don't understand much at this time, is the quest system. It seems like it will create kind of a narrative inside the game, and the winning condition of building the affinity "wonder" appears tied to it (like merging with planet conciousness for the harmony path), but i didn't see enough myself to properly understand

They released a lot of promotional dev video logs in the last months, you should check some of them to understand more of it :)

It's basically Civ 5.

Exploration, expansion, combat, ressources all essentially work the same way they do in Civ 5 so you'll feel right at home.

The majors differences are in the tech web and aliens replacing barbarians.

The aliens seem to be a lot more varied in types and behavior and strategic opportunity compared to civ 5's barbarians.

The tech web is a lot more open and non linear than the traditional tech tree of civ 5. The tech tree has more or less only two path through it, either prioritize the top half of the tree for culture/science or the bottom half for military. For the tech web you start in the middle and can unlock new techs in a much more random order. This creates more diversity between the factions and potential play style.

Also you don't get to play as alien races. All factions are humans who left Earth. The aliens found in the game are essentially wildlife. Doesn't mean some of them can't fuck you up though.

From what I can fathom, it's fundamentally a lot like Civ V, but with a more flexible tech tree and aliens or something.

It's certainly not Alpha Centauri.