What do you like? Dislike? Hate? Love? Meh? Changes you like? Things you miss? What do YOU think?

My initial response is...it is Civ 5 but different, and despite playing a shit load of Civ 5 over the past month or so, and I'm really enjoying it. So far no itch to just go back to 5 but want to keep going to see what happens.

Probably what I appreciate most so far, you really are surviving. It could be that I'm just getting used to what I want to do with the tech and how I should approach everything but for my first 3 or 4 hours I was doing terrible. Like all Civs I always start my first game on the easiest difficulty as I don't know what to expect and don't want to fuck up too much, but the AI and aliens were kicking my ass for a good while. Once I got the hang of it and decided how the tech web actually works and how I should approach it (don't filter is what I learned, I thought it would guide me through how to gain science (what I filtered) quicker but it just told me what the science techs were, so I spent my first few techs trying to gain advanced shit instead of developing a base before going for that stuff, my mistake really).

Combat is....meh, they really made the cities formidable for where I am at to the point of my units getting fucked up quick and can't really take over anything, essentially I'm just on defense the whole time and can't really go on attack, at least that is the point of where I am at. I like the unit stuff as well, mass upgrades is pretty cool and don't have to worry about upgrading each one individually.

Covert Ops is pretty badass and I wish Civ 5 actually had a more similar system (despite the diplomat stuff, love that). You steal soooooo much energy it is crazy, I got 30000 energy from two spies that pretty much changed the game for me as I didn't have enough military to defend during a war.

I am playing marathon so I'm about ~550 turns in, don't know where exactly I am at, went for a purity run and I'm at +6 purity.

All in all I can't wait to play more BE.

Played about two full games and so far it's the breath of fresh air I needed for my Civ fatigue. The biggest change is by far the tech web. While the concept is much much better than what we're used to, the presentation feels like a complete mess. I understand how they've structured it, but finding the tech you want is a nightmare. It also feels like they've gone a bit overboard on the "hidden" dependancies. There's good depth there though, and I bet it gets more managable after several games, but for a first-timer it's too chaotic.

I'm also not quite sold on the quests. The affinity stuff is good, but the building quests feel very punishing for new players. Basically every building has 2 hidden attributes (and you pick one of them) and there's no way of knowing what they are before you build a few of the buildings. Some of the bonuses basically make the buildings, while others are pretty much useless. It ends up being a trial and error experience.

There also seem to be an issue of lack of variety outside the tech web. The factions aren't distinct enough to really feel like you're changing play style, and with only 4 virtue trees there isn't much choice there. Not to mention how the thing that really forces your hand is the resources near your first city.

Having that said, I've been enjoying it quite a lot. My first game I landed on a ton of "free" bio mass, and went full on harmony, which seems like the best resource by far. Got an alien bee from an excavation really early, which was amazing. I could just fly all around the place picking up resource nodes giving me a great start. Ended up screwing myself over with the tech web though, going too hard in one direction instead of slowly but surely spiraling out.

My second game was sorta strange. Landed on a good deal of firaxite, but ended up getting level 1 purity from an excavation early on. And from that point on it was as if the game had decided that I had to go down the purity path, even though it didn't fit my situation at all. Managed to turn it all around in the end though (after royally screwing myself by not realizing manufacturies give you bad health) and the game ended up with me frantically sending CNDRs into my emancipation gate while everyone else was attacking me from all sides.

Can't wait to jump back in again tomorrow, still got a lot to learn. Just hope the game has enough legs to keep me going.

My only question. Can you build a space station that orbits the planet?

I wanna make my own faction leader if I'm not playing some historical figure.

Just as a warning to anyone with... eh, just anyone at all, the game seems to be refusing to run in decent resolutions for people with high refresh rate monitors, people using tvs, and intermittently everyone else. It works ok if you run it in windowed, but it's not borderless windowed either.

@alexw00d: hmm, I'm running it at 1680x1050 on my TV just fine.

Yeah that kind of sucks.

I got hit with that resolution bug as well. Awesome.

Feel bad for people having the resolution bug. Ran on my work computer fine and on my nice laptop as well. Was also watching the GB stream while playing too. Sorry duders.

After spending about a full day with it, I'm enjoying it. I've noticed some minor issues that kind of bug me. There are definitely still a lot of things that need to be balanced, and the UI could use some work. Some quest choices are clearly better than the other option. Trade routes are way overpowered at the moment. The benefits they give you are just too much. So much so that you can basically ignore negative health penalties just to spam out more cities for more trade routes. The number of trade routes available per city needs to be toned down, or at least the value of each trade route. Or make negative health more of a factor I suppose.

The affinities being tied to a specific resource is a bit bitter sweet. It makes it an interesting concept in that you have to adapt your plan to your surroundings as with most every other element of civilization, but at the same time it makes it hard to just say I really want to go Harmony this time around without restarting the map a dozen times. Speaking of which, xenomass feels like the stronger resource by a little bit. I've enjoyed both my harmony and supremacy games though so not a big issue. The AI is also way too passive even on the higher difficulties. The difficulty just isn't really there.

I'm also having some issues with the UI. At a cursory glance its really hard to distinguish units from buildings from wonders in the tech web. I know I'm still in the process of learning the tree, but there should be a more clear visual indicator without having to hover over every single icon. Unlike a picture of a bowman or a picture of the Taj Mahal, the little white icons that represent everything in the tech web mean nothing to me. I know they probably wanted to make everything look as clean and techy as possible, but a little distinction between the category of this tiny white icon and that other tiny white icon would be nice.

All and all its a really fun take on Civilization, and its very refreshing after spending so much time with Civilization V. I'm just looking forward to when they smooth out the difficulty and balance more. Regardless, I'll probably be up late playing it again tonight!

This is one of my big hangups with this game. A lot of the UI stuff looks like Endless Space, and while that worked for that game I expected a little more visual flourish with Civ. I guess they were going for that really clean and minimalist futuristic design but we would have been better served with more colorful icons and the like.

I'm loving it so far though. I think the orbital layer adds a great strategic element to it. I'm still on my first game (Supremacy affinity) so I haven't had time to dig around with much, but I can imagine all the great stuff you could get up to with that extra layer. I hope at least one expansion is focused on that.

So it's not just Civ 5 with it's historical guts ripped out and replaced with a bunch of procedurally generated nonsense?

This post by Quill18 sums up really well how i feel about the game.

http://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/2k73h6/i_only_complain_about_games_i_like_so_here_are_my/

Some problems i have can be fixed (lack of a demographics and global politics screen needs fixing urgently). Bugs can be ironed out, mechanics can be balanced etc.

My main sticking point however is more difficult to overcome. I hate how it looks. I hate the color palette. The UI design seems unfinished and more like placeholder menus than anything else. I don't like how borders are all made of straight lines. It all looks so artificial compared to the more organic look of Civ 5. The leaders have no personality. The game just feels empty and lifeless. I'm not sure what they can do about this.

Man people sure are being debbie downers about this, though i probably haven't played enough yet to form an opinion. Im still hyped for it though; don't get me down. :(

It's mostly what one would expect from previews. I quite like the tech-web and the way that it changes up your approach to tech development depending on which affinity you pick. On the other hand, coming from CIV5 w/ both expansions to Civ: BE has ended up making it feel really...small? The lack of tourism, great scientists/engineers/artists/etc, significant political depth, and the reduction in the importance of city states are just a few things that serve to remind me of how flat vanilla Civ5 could be, and alas this reminds me a lot of that.

Of course, I know that criticising it because it doesn't match the breadth or scope of content touted by a game with 2 full expansions is a bit silly. To my eyes BE is clearly a good starting point for them to build a FUCKING FANTASTIC Civ game from (seriously, the flow of the tech-web itself is fucking brilliant), but I'm not sure that I have the patience to wait through that process again when the alternative already exists.

I guess the most telling thing I can say is that I'm sitting here on a work trip, and where I expected to be spending my free time diving deep into BE and learning its ins and outs, I instead finished a game, read the little blurb they popped up at the end, closed it, and started up Civ5 again; because that game feels full, and finished, and teeming with life. Maybe in a few years I'll come back to BE and find it in a state that compels me to dive into it the way I have Civ5, but for now, I think I'm good with the old shit.

P.S.

THAT UI. MAN. "Readability" is a pretty key tenant they seem to have eschewed in favor of minimalism / starkness (this applies all the way down to basics like the map, with its nigh on invisible miasma), and while I'm quite fond of stark minimalism as an aesthetic choice, I'm not sure it's a great move in a game that basically boils down to an information management simulator.

I like it but I went full production and it got real easy. I mean, that's normally how it goes cus science and money in most 4x games are determined by your city enhancements which you get faster with production, and you could beef up your soldiers but with high production you can just make a high volume of them and its just as good. So I did that and went down the production virtue path, which ended up giving me hellof energy, like way more than I knew what to do with. And I'd use that to buy health and sometimes science upgrades and let everything else get produced the regular way. And like someone else said, trade routes are super OP, any new city you make you can just move trade routes to them and they'll grow extremely quickly. Maybe too quickly. Though I like that the ramp isnt as slow as Civ 5; and it shouldn't be. Everyone's already pretty advanced.

Only hurdle was my first big fight, got health down to -45 but after -10 it basically makes no difference (I dont know if I like that or not, the big penalty for a lot of unhappiness could be annoying in Civ 5 but it exists so you cant just steamroll through cities). Ended up getting a contact victory. I mean, I like how quickly the turns happen and I feel like the foundation here lends itself to building up much better than Civ 5 did, where a lot of things that came later (like religion) felt weirdly implemented, like they were mods almost. It seems slicker, better put together, and it runs a lot better. I like the system of running you down a path that changes your civ cosmetically and every other way, I went with harmony and got some weird looking units by the end. I feel like it would be super easy through expansions and stuff to just add 2 or 3 more of these things. So like I said, good foundation to build on imo and after playing BE its real hard to go back to super long turns in Civ 5.

It would have been cool to actually build in something resembling an actual ending, I always thought it was weird how epic the intros to these things are and yet my contact victory is just some art and text. Considering the amount of time you put in, it'd be nice to get a bit more cake when you wrap it up.

People shitting on it without playing it, stop hating yourself for a second and give the game a shot its pretty alright. People bitching about DX11 required, its 2014 you cant use Windows XP forever. At some point this shit is on you for being a Luddite and not upgrading your shit more than once every decade. j/s

It's a reskin of Civ 5 and it's alright I guess. Probably should have been expansion pack price.

My entry into the Civ series was with Civ Rev on Xbox 360, and then made the jump to Civ V once I built my first PC, so I don't have quite the history with the franchise as some others do, but so far I'm loving this far more than Civ V. I haven't finished a game yet (I'm about 375 turns into my first game, had to walk away when I realized I had played the game for 7 hours straight while watching the Jason's stream last night), but it didn't take long to get acclimated to how the game works. I'm really loving the covert ops stuff, too. So far I'd say my only gripe is that it feels like its impossible to build up a gigantic military force and steam roll the world very early like you could on Civ V, but overall I think it's the definitive version of the series. Looking forward to seeing what weird stuff people will put into the game on Steam Workshop.

guys the game is still on a hexagonal grid, clone confirmed. smh

Seems like it will be good when they release expansions. People seem to forget how much backlash vanilla Civ5 got

I'm frustrated that they claimed Alpha Centauri as an influence and then allowed what little dialogue there is to be written by someone who's apparently only vaguely heard of the concepts of philosophy, science, religion and history.

'John Henry and his Nanoangstrom hammers.' Alright.

Wonders have also been heavily neutered. That might make sense from a design perspective, but with boots on the proverbial ground it feels like a total bummer.

Supremacy and Purity also feel way too close to each other in design and combat philosophy. It's especially strange given that you can field every set of mid-tier unique units the game provides, if you try hard enough.

This is Civ5 continued! I haven't really fallen on how I feel about that, but the game is a continuation of old ideas.

I'm a noob to Civ, been looking into getting into one of the games at some point. Maybe an older one? I just played the demo for Beyond Earth and wow did I get my ass kicked. I couldn't make much progress due to the insane amount of aliens everywhere.

@nickhead: Honestly I would recommend getting Civilization V with all of its expansions. It's a much more complete game than this. This game is more akin to how Civilization V was before the patches and expansions hit. Poorly balanced, in need of some reworks, and in need of some life and soul to be injected into it somehow. I love Civilization games and have mostly enjoyed this one, but as the fresh sci-fi feel is wearing thin I find myself just wanting to play Civ V. I would recommend avoiding this version for awhile. Give it time to fix itself.

Maybe its a factor in trying to be diplomatic, but the avatars are all just super boring and devoid of personality.Granted a lot of that is true for Civ 5 but I always wanted to keep Montezuma on my good side cus his avatar was such a nutty badass. And also considering how big a factor your affinity seems to be, as it changes how your units look and how your city looks, it would be pretty crazy and cool if it also changed your avatar. With Surpremicy people becoming superhumans, Harmony people looking about half alien, and purity people becoming bearded zealots. I just want them to push everything they have further and stop locking themselves into how things worked with Civ 5, cus this isnt Civ 5. Do something else.

I'll be really disappointed if the expansions just add like surrogates to whats in Civ 5 already. By the end of this I would hope the 2 games progress entirely different.

@bargainben: It does change your avatar and the other leaders as well when you reach the higher levels of an affinity. Supremecy starts to look more like an ultimate ruler and adds cybernetic pieces for example. A lot of it is very minor though. Color changes on their outfits and whatnot. Unfortunately I don't think there is a way to see yourself, so you won't ever see your own avatar change with your choices. Completely agree about them feeling boring and lifeless. You could pretty much mix and match any of the leaders in a game and I wouldn't know the difference. They all just spout the same lines and don't seem to skew toward one particular way of playing like some leaders did in Civ V.

As others have already said, it doesn't feel complete when compared to Civ V with 2 expansions. Perhaps that's not a fair comparison, but after playing two games of BE, I'm ready to play Civ V until BE gets a few more expansions.

Some of the new elements are neat, but need to be reworked. It was a bad idea to implement the optional functions of each building as quests. It's confusing, and makes it difficult to plan ahead. Overall, quests are just poorly implemented. Most of them are simply associated with doing what you would normally do in a Civ game. In the future, options for buildings should be separated from interactions with other players.

The tech web is also really confusing. They need to make it easier for decisions to be made at a glance, and make it clearer what research leads to what benefit. I get that it's impossible to make research as intuitive as it is in history-based Civ games, but there has got to be a way to improve it so that I can look at a tech and know that it's going to help me improve my civ's health, or power generation, or whatever. So far, I spend way too much time trying to navigate the web to figure out what branch grants me a certain benefit.

This game is phenomenal. The tech web and affinity system offer so much more interesting decisions than a normal 4x game's tech system.

There are three different planet tile sets (lush, dessert, and fungle) which require unique strategies to deal with each. Each tile set has its own unique musical soundtrack which adds to making each planet type feel different.

I love how different the units look at different high affinity levels. Civ military units have never looked this cool before.

Really liking it so far.

After playing two games to completion, it's... okay? Doubt it will supplant Age of Wonders III as my current time sucking TBS game of choice, but it at least has a solid core of mechanics, even if I think it's an expansion or two away from being really great. The tech web is sort of confusing, Diplomacy is as useless as ever, the sponsors don't have a ton of personality and I really like the design of the affinity units. That's about as much as I can say thus far.

Are you sure? I didnt ever notice it on the other players. Maybe I finished the game too early

Maybe this is just me, but I think this game feels a lot... slower than Civ 5 does. In Civ 5, I could easily make it to 150 turns without checking the turn count, but in this one, I invariably check the turn count at 70 - 80 turns because it feels like that much time has passed. There also hasn't been a great sense of progression for me yet. I research a bunch of technologies, but still always feel like I'm either behind or not researching the right things. Maybe this will change with time, but I don't know. Also, because soldiers upgrade far less frequently than they did in 5, I never feel like I'm moving forward in time. There's just this feeling I get around turn 100 that feels like I've hit a plateau and can't really grow any further no matter what I research.

In Civ 5, the tech tree had the benefit of familiar technologies. I knew that I should have canons by the 1700s because they used them in the revolutionary war (I'm not a history major, guys. Don't judge me!). In this game, who knows when I should have Xenobiology? That technology isn't real (yet) so I have no idea what it is or when it should happen. Same goes for the buildings/wonders.

I also find this game to have a more unfriendly UI than Civ 5. My biggest pet peeve is that they switched the sides things are displayed on. For example, when you enter the city screen, worker focus is on the left and production stuff is on the right. Why would they change that? The tech web is really overwhelming to me right now and is a lot less intuitive than a tree, but maybe that's because I'm a Computer Science major. I also find terrain to be really indistinct and tough to read at a glance, but hopefully that will change after I've spent more time with the game.

Overall, I think it's a decent game, but I think that it will really hit its stride after an expansion or two. To me, the game feels like a slightly emptier and lifeless version of Civ 5 set in space. There are some good ideas, like the affinity system and branching tech web, but I want this game to get better at presenting this information to me and have more personality. I'll probably keep playing it for a week or two, but then I think I'm gonna go back to Civ 5 until the expansion(s).

@bargainben: Its hard to notice honestly. The changes are small and there isn't much of a reason to spend that much time in dialogue with the sponsors to begin with. I didn't even know it happens until I was reading through a thread talking about it on civfanatics. Here is a link to a post that has all of the leader changes linked in it.

So just some random thoughts. I have played one and a half games now and really like it. I feel it found that perfect middle ground between familiar and new from civilization 5.

I guess 3 negatives. As people of mentioned the tech web is a nice change but also kind of a mess. And this seems unfair to compare, but next to civilization 5 it feels lacking in content. Lastly the worst is the writing and especially voice acting for when you learn a new technology. It's AWFUL. I loved that in civilization 5. Here it is cringe worthy just how dumb it comes of.

Love the affinity system. Setting and atmosphere are great. The unit upgrading is cool. Most importantly I want to play a lot more.

Is it more a successor to Civ 5 than Alpha Centauri?

Yeah they didnt go far enough. And the harmony ones are boring and not indicative at all of what harmony is in the game, which is hybriding with the natives. Kinda emblematic of the game as a whole, which again I like. But I won't be playing to the degree that I played Civ 5 cus it hasn't gone far enough with its new ideas. Which would be fine by itself, just dipping their toe in the water, if they hadn't previously made Alpha Centauri which did go pretty far to differentiate itself.

And maybe that's an unfair thing to do, cus they are still calling this a Civ game, but its impossible to not make the comparison and they had to be aware of that.

It's a strange fusion of Civ 5 and 'look how erudite and witty we are, we love sci-fi, and sci-fi things.' I still love playing it, but the fluff aspects of it are really subpar.

@nomin: Yes.

@nightriff: For me, the change in scenery is all I needed I think. I never really liked the Civ games for their historic settings (I own Civ5 and just reeeeally don't like rolling around on horses and all that). Now I'm starting with space marines, shooting aliens on a different planet and it just seems to make it all click for me. I just finished a play through of the demo to see how I'd take to it, and just the sci-fi change alone is enough to make me instantly like it. Currently downloading the full version.

I hope I get as much out of it as I did with Endless Space.

It feels like a reskin of civ5, but in my opinion that's not a bad thing at all. The historical travel through units, buildings and technology was cool... but we've had that in every iteration in the series, so it's fun to see just one continuous time frame with some pretty crazy looking units that are available down the tech line. It's nothing super different in gameplay either, but there are some much needed tweeks to features from civ5. The science fiction backdrop is pretty great. I love the alien, unit and building designs.

The tech tree though feels like a very bad concoction of every science fiction word thrown together to sound interesting. The diplomacy feature is very vague, on my first game I couldn't really tell why some nations were mad at me and some weren't, but I sort of started to understand it on my second game. Then again... I got everyone to hate me because I completely annihilated another nation so that was pretty easy to understand.

I'd really like to get this but I think I'll wait until I've played more Civ V first.

I enjoy my time with it so far, but to be honest it feels more like a reskinned overhaul of Civ V. Most of the things feel like they could have been modded into Civ V. There doesn't seem to be a lot of units though.

I really like the future space travel stuff, but I would have liked more future units at least late in the game.

I've played it a lot these days (it was perfect while the extra-life stream were going), got to every victory, used every "sponsor" and every kind of map.

Honestly, the overarching feeling i have about it is that there is not enough "meat"

I appreciated some changes, especially the new spying system (combined with the tech-web it's nice to be able to steal technologies since often you can find something to steal even if you're way more "advanced" than the other sponsor).

The affinity system leaves me very conflicted. In the early stages some bonuses are just to good to try different routes (1st level of purity, i'm looking at you, especially since the explorers are sooo frail), in the middle stages they don't make so much of a difference (gogo xenoswarm) and the final part of the game is dictated by the late buildings and victory you're pursuing. I often end up with at least level 7 in supremacy for the cybershop (with its quest it becomes just to good) and going for the, by far, easiest victory condition which is the harmony one. It's incredibly unbalanced compared to some others like the purity one, which is an hassle simply for the spacial requirement.Problem is that the affinity upgrades and building quest decisions feel like a substitute for having more variety of assets. Even the game configuration options give that same feeling: instead of different "civs" with their own buildings, units, and game-changing bonuses, you have the (only) 8 sponsors with very minor differences and then the "create your own adventure!" options. This is like an rpg who tells you "and now you can replay the story, but with an evil/good character!". Playing it, especially in the first games, i often had in the back of my head the thought "this is clearly created with expansions and mods already in mind".

Also to me it seems very restricted in a fiction sense. This is sci-fi, you can go crazy with tech, units, settings and wonders; but apparently in this post-earth future we don't even have helicopter technology :D

I know this is not an Alpha Centauri remake, but i can only sigh when i think of all the crazy depth and things in it. The insane technologies, wonders (with nice videos), sea cities, social structures, factions, etc.

Going back to AC and crossfire (which are just a few bucks on gog) and coming back to this game when it will have all the expansions seems like the better thing to do for me

ps: fuck the indipendent stations, the first or second one always appears where i want to build a new city and have to rethink all my strategy

pps: will someon explain to me the Daedalus Ladder wonder? It would have been shitty as a wonder at the beginning but it's also a late game one!!

I hate everything about it. Well, aside from the concept (Sci-fi Civ sounds lovely).

• Aesthetically, the game looks like garbage. It's bland, it lacks polish, it feels cheap.
• The UI needs a ton of work, and relies way too heavily on iconography.
• The tech web is a neat idea, but feels far too aimless and unintuitive.
• The non-combat route is shallow and unengaging; the lack of (meaningful) culture and religious input hurts this aspect the most.
• Stations feel like a half-baked idea.
• The lack of historical grounding hurts the game in so many ways. It makes everything less intuitive (predicting AI, having a reference point for nations, having a reference point for technology, etc.). It also impacts a lot of Civ's "historical fan fiction" charm; the idea of a modern military formed under the leadership of Genghis Khan...
• Sponsors are nowhere near as interesting (or plentiful) as their Civilization counterparts.

What do I like? Iunno, the espionage stuff is cool, the early game is slightly more interesting, and I think miasma is a cool mechanic. I'm not a hardcore fan of the genre, but this game was a pretty huge disappointment. Playing it makes me want to turn it off and play a better Civ game.

@cagliostro88: Killing the stations is very very easy. They don't attack on their turn, so you can basically take them down with a pair of any unit but basic marines.

I know but i'm talking about the first/second one that happen very early in the game, usually when i'm about to build my second/third city, and i don't have the military units to spare at that time. If i really want that spot i just wait for them to die/crumble by themselves; the setback it would inflict upon my "civ" by creating the necessary military power would be just too much :)

Due to a busy week I've only been able to play a few hours, but I've liked it quite a bit. The music is fantastic. I can see myself playing it a lot. The tech web is really cool.

The resolution thing is a real bummer though. It runs at full 2560x1440 but at 59hz and with no fullscreen windowed mode so if I alt tab out, chaos ensues. It was doubly bad before I got the Beyond Earth specific driver for my 970. Prior to that it was flashing black a lot and was giving me a headache. Afterward it wasn't nearly as bad. I played a few hours without issue outside of when I went to change something on a different monitor.

I'm just now in the later stages of my first game, but I'm not all that impressed by it in my time so far. I do like the change in scenery, the attempts to open things up with the tech web, and the early impact of the alien bugs. However, overall it just feels a bit bare-bones, poorly designed in spots, and lacking the same level of polish as Civ V. Maybe it's unfair to make that comparison - Civ V has improved since its launch with the expansions adding a lot of additional depth, but I recall being floored by things like the UI design early on with Civ V and nothing in BE is having a similar effect on me.

Don't get me wrong. Civ:BE is still a solid turn-based strategy game that I can see myself losing a lot of time playing, but seemingly everything in it just recalls for me things that Civ V does better.

I’ve played all of the Civ games and overall I find this one to be kind of disappointing. I have only finished a single game played on the biggest map at the slowest speed on Vostok difficulty.

The pros:

- Civ in Space is a cool idea J In fact the game has lots of cool ideas, different planet types, the affinities, the aliens etc.

- The units and their use have been streamlined (no need to return to pay base and pay money for upgrade, only a few types of units each with their own upgrade path.

- Choosing your faction, ship load out etc. This is really nice choice and lets you customise your civ.

The cons:

- The combat AI is still very poor. I had hoped that the combat AI issues from Civ V would be addressed but they are still extremely weak. The AI has no understanding of how combat works. This has always been an issue with Civ games but at least they could brute force you by overwhelming you with numbers. By going to a “one unit per tile” system in Civ V they really brought this weakness to the fore. Unit placement is crucial to create synergy between different unit types (melee to the fore, ranged behind, anti-mobile on the flanks etc.) but the AI just doesn’t understand any of this and often sends lone units at you to be annihilated. With good unit placement and healing/swapping out a small, player controlled force can wipe out any amount of AI troops unless they are seriously mismatched on their upgrade paths. Which leads to my next problem

- The unit upgrades and many of the choices don’t really matter. For the units, what does it matter what upgrade I pick when the Ai can’t fight coherently. For the city improvements they should have pushed the decisions further. Not just +3 this or +3 that, they should have gone +3 this & -2 that and +3 this & -2 the other. Force the player to make more difficult decisions that can have a negative impact on their civ as well as a positive. This is a great example of a good idea that just feels half baked. Unfortunately this game is full of these.

- Stations. I have no first hand experience of what these are like as none were set up near me and the two on my continent were destroyed before I ever had a chance to get near them. From what I have gleaned from the internet though, it sounds as if they are less developed versions of city states (which were a cool addition to Civ). Why they would water them down I just don’t understand. It seems strange and I fear that DLC will remedy the situation. Which is a bit gross really.

- Diplomacy is still a black box. Civ 4 did it much better by breaking down exactly what other factions liked/disliked about you and how they felt about each other. That last bit was really handy. Also, why can’t you check how things stand diplomatically while talking to another faction leader. This really bugged me in Civ V and I can’t believe that they did the exact same thing here. If a faction wants me to go to war with their enemy, I need to be able to pull up the information on them and see who they are, what they want etc etc. Also, because I cannot see a lot of the reasoning behind decisions, the AI often appears irrational, bordering on schizophrenic. Another piece of Civ V that drastically needed work and failed to receive much attention.

- The AI is too passive. That’s all there is to that.

- The factions are bland. In fact, the whole game is too bland. I understand that you get to customise your faction by choosing an affinity but they enemy lack any kind of personality. This was far better done in Alpha Centauri, where the other factions had concrete personalities that meant you could really grow to hate them. Why do they only have one voice actor for all of the research blurbs, even when the quote comes from one of the voiced faction leaders? This was a great chance to lend some identity to the characters. The same goes for the wonders – why no cut scene showing the cool thing you built? This would go a long way to helping immerse the player in this new world. In fact, no real effort is made to create any kind of atmosphere outside of the quest system.

- The writing is bad. I know this isn’t a new Alpha Centauri but I can’t help but draw comparisons. The writing in Alpha Centauri created atmosphere, an interesting world, the personality of your enemies and even some of the wonder of visiting a new planet. All of this was conveyed through a few text screens, some cheap cut scenes and few voice overs down by maybe 16 different voice actors. Beyond earth fails to compete with this in every respect.

Right, that’s enough, I’m just starting to whine. It’s just that I feel let down so much by this. I’ve been a fan of Civ games since I was 10 and have preordered them as a show of support (foolish I know but I like Firaxis) since I’ve had the money to. I don’t think I’ll do that any more.

The game is enjoyable and has some cool features but the fact that they failed to fix the glaring issues that Civ V had (poor, passive AI that doesn't understand the game combat and inscrutable diplomacy) is unacceptable.