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What does everyone think?

I'm about 150 turns into a game, and so far it's pretty much Civ 5 with a less linear tech tree and some cool decision-making moments. I'm hoping for more as I progress.

Do you feel there are lots of viable overall strategies? In Civ 5 I always feel limited to making a tall empire that relies on either tradition (usually) or maybe tradition plus a little of the honor tree if barbarians are raging. Lack of city spam is cool, but all my games played out basically the same way.

Not sure yet. I'm trying to go for the "Contact Victory", but I'll have to see if there's any big differences in going for that versus going for the other ones besides Conquest.

Well, its as addictive as every good Civilisation-game.
Also, pretty bug-free as far as i can tell - the worst i had happen to me so far was one leader complaining about the same thing over and over again - that being the destruction of a neutral station, which i did not repeat.

As for different strategies - the three alignments/affinities do seem to be the main choice. Which one you pick or how you mix them makes different buildings and units available, and they seem to be equally valuable so far.
A game with more hostile aliens would probably benefit more from going for Harmony, a game with a very large map would make the better orbital deployment of Supremacy more valuable, Purities terraforming is more important if you are stuck with crappy terrain around you and so on. But they also lend themselves to different strategies even without map differences. Plus of course the fact that each has its own unique winning strategy in addition to the two common ones (Contact and Conquest).

Hmm, that sounds really cool!

Similar question, does it have the same restrictive "You built 4 cities, THAT IS ONE MORE CITY THAN YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE AT THIS POINT, PREPARE TO BE PUNISHED!!!" dynamic? Conversely, does it suffer from rewarding city spam too much?

You don't get punished as much for negative health (happiness) as you did in Civ 5, but you still want to strike a balance between expanding and grabbing resources/gaining more slots for trade routes and keeping a happy empire. India is one state that gets faster growth, so they tend to go tall rather than wide, but even playing as them I finished a test game with four cities founded and two captured and only had minor issues with happiness overall.

In the end it depends on how much you want to focus on grabbing techs that improve health over techs that improve other things giving a bit of risk/reward and keeping you from zerging to end game techs.

I finished my contact victory. I'll second what Jub said about the punishment for extra cities - it wasn't bad when I added a fourth city just so I could get the petroleum I needed to build a Deep Space Telescope. I probably suffered more of a "healthiness" loss from adding my third city, and getting healthiness back into the green wasn't hard.

The alignment stuff is pretty cool along with the choices, although I get the impression that it matters more if you're doing conquests or going for an Affinity-tied Victory. I liked some of the upgrades I got with my increasing "Supremacy" affinity. I'll also reiterate that I like the much more non-linear "tech web", especially since you don't end up with a giant clump of obsolete units that you have to pay to upgrade.

I don't like the diplomacy, though. But that wasn't unexpected, since my favorite Civ-related game's diplomacy setup is still the one from SMAC.

Wow, I may have to go and get this! I loved SMAC but I hated how building cities was never a difficult decision - city spam was always a safe and effective choice. On the other hand, Civ 5's cap on cities wasn't much better (though at least it was different). But you guys are basically saying that in Beyond Earth, there are a couple of different and viable ways to go about expanding?

Yeah there are a few ways to get extra happiness. You can just eat negative health because you won't get rebels spawning or cities revolting, but you'll take big hits to science, city growth, culture, and other forms of income as well as losing bonuses for having positive happiness. So in some ways it's less harsh, but the hidden stick is that you can get huge bonuses for being happy that may outweigh what you get from grabbing that extra resource.

Also, if you have any doubts, you can likely find a youtube play through that you'll enjoy watching. I personally like Quill18's videos, but YMMV.

Generally I found that it was hard to support lots of cities to start with, but once you start getting to the tier 3 culture things/a decent stock of health upgrades, you can by the late game support just about as many cities as you feel like founding, I ran out of room well before I ran out of happiness.

But that kind of thing seems intentional, it's going to be hard to support a lot of settlements on an alien planet at first, so that might be what they were going for.

Four hundred flipping turns in and I get beaten to my transcendence victory by TWO TURNS. Curse you, Kavitha Thakur!

I like the new mechanics, they feel a lot more streamlined than Civ5 did even with its expansions. The planets feel pretty alien. The transcendence/supremacy/purity choice, the way it affects your diplomatic relations and even the leader portraits is fun. The alien life roaming about isn't as mindlessly aggressive as barbarians were, as long as you're keeping a little distance and don't provoke them, which feels very interesting. The long-running games I've played so far usually have large regions that are 'bug territory' with multiple nests that you're better off avoiding unless you wanna get eaten, at least until you've got late-game tech.

I will say though that although they seem to have tried Civ:BE doesn't quite have the atmosphere of Alpha Centauri. It has a similar progenitor tech thing going, but it's pretty sparse. There's no mind worms, no lore bits about Planet trying to mind-talk to you... The unit customizability is fun but very limited and honestly not especially inspired (it's mostly a mix of attack/heal/defense buffs). No planet busters or deformable terrain either, and although the faction leaders do have their own personalities they don't feel as fleshed out as people like Pravin Lal or Prokhor Zakharov. That might be a bit of rose tinted glasses speaking though.

I imagine more complexity will be added in the inevitable expansion DLC. For now though it's a perfectly serviceable and fun game. It could be because it's new, but I think I prefer it over Civ5.

Funny thing that, were you playing as Franco-Iberia? Because I just defeated them as Kavitha with a transcendence victory just a few turns before they pulled it off. On the second easiest setting, dear Zeus, I suck at 4X.

So far I like it, the planet could use a bit more variety and the leaders a bit more personality, but overall I think it's an improvement over Civ5 in most ways. The tech tree was however totally lifted from Endless Space, I swear!

This game is better out of the gate than Civ 5 was, but still doesn't have the same complexity as Civ 5 lacking analogues for the world councils and religions. More factions and some different color schemes to get away from the cool greens and purples would also be welcome in future expansions and/or DLC.

Metahive wrote:Funny thing that, were you playing as Franco-Iberia? Because I just defeated them as Kavitha with a transcendence victory just a few turns before they pulled it off. On the second easiest setting, dear Zeus, I suck at 4X.

I absolutely was. Culture Victory was my go-to play in Civ5 even though I rarely managed to pull it off (it felt too difficult compared to simply massing troops and steamrolling other players with nukes) so I naturally gravitated toward the Franco-Iberians. This was on Vostok difficulty, which I think corresponds to Warlord in Civ5?

So far I like it, the planet could use a bit more variety and the leaders a bit more personality, but overall I think it's an improvement over Civ5 in most ways. The tech tree was however totally lifted from Endless Space, I swear!

I really like the leaf system in Civ:BE, and how the research web forces you to specialize in certain things in favor of others especially if you want to max supremacy/purity/harmony levels quickly, and how that means you have to leave other useful research options by the wayside.

I also like the improvements to the espionage system. Sometimes it feels a little easy to rob your enemies blind, but the counter-espionage options and high-tier sabotage craziness (worm strike!) form a very interesting high risk high reward system.

Maybe I'll try a high-aggression style with orbital strikes and suchlike next, see how the AI reacts to that. It's easy to be friends with the AI even if you're a completely different affinity right now, I think because they attach a lot of value to the insane number of trade routes you can deploy. Probably that's not the case if you're a warlike dickbag, it'll be interesting to see what happens in that sort of playthrough.

Speaking of orbital strikes, they are one of my current issues with the game:

You can't clear enemy satellites out, other than by bringing artillery right next to them to shoot them down. Whats the point of armed satellites if they can't shoot down enemy ones?
I really love the orbital system otherwise, its a great improvement to the game and it really pays off to secure oil and titanium so that you can cover your cities with beneficial satellites.

The second grief is that aliens are not dangerous enough, even at higher difficulties and with their aggressiveness turned up via a game option. They really only guard their territory, even if you constantly attack them they will not really attack you back outside of it. At most the occasional siege worm wanders through your territory by accident, but that has no relation to aggressiveness.
Also, its way too easy to destroy alien nests - just get the first Purity-bonus and send explorers, no matter what they do they can move through to an unguarded nest in a few rounds and destroy it.

I'm fine with aliens being passive on lower difficulties, or if you don't take the option to boost their aggression. But is it so much to ask that you actually have to struggle against them on higher difficulties?

Siege wrote: I absolutely was. Culture Victory was my go-to play in Civ5 even though I rarely managed to pull it off (it felt too difficult compared to simply massing troops and steamrolling other players with nukes) so I naturally gravitated toward the Franco-Iberians. This was on Vostok difficulty, which I think corresponds to Warlord in Civ5?

It does, I played on Mercury which is the "normal" setting and still sucked at it because I played it old-skool and expanded and conquered too much early on which had my health in the toilet for most of the game although I specifically chose a faction that doesn't need to spread as much. Major DEERP for me here.

I really like the leaf system in Civ:BE, and how the research web forces you to specialize in certain things in favor of others especially if you want to max supremacy/purity/harmony levels quickly, and how that means you have to leave other useful research options by the wayside.

All I'm saying is that it is almost the same as the tech tree from Endless Space which looks like this:

This does look familiar, doesn't it? Coincidentally, Endless Space is the only 4X game I don't suck as much at.

I also like the improvements to the espionage system. Sometimes it feels a little easy to rob your enemies blind, but the counter-espionage options and high-tier sabotage craziness (worm strike!) form a very interesting high risk high reward system.

Maybe I'll try a high-aggression style with orbital strikes and suchlike next, see how the AI reacts to that. It's easy to be friends with the AI even if you're a completely different affinity right now, I think because they attach a lot of value to the insane number of trade routes you can deploy. Probably that's not the case if you're a warlike dickbag, it'll be interesting to see what happens in that sort of playthrough.

Heh, I defeated the Slavic Confederation by going overboard with covert actions and calling worm strikes on them non-stop which destroyed all their improvements and turned their cities into slums.

Purity is pretty OP at the moment as you can get Battlesuits at Purity 4, and all they need is a tech (which could be bulbed by some factions and quests) and 1 Titanium per powersuit in a time period when they have 40+ Str while most regular units have 20 or less.

Ok so I've been playing it for about a week or so and it is suffciently different from Civ5 "where it counts" IMHO.
Sure, visually it is very very similar.. But really what were people expecting?
So now for the actual review... Well just because I'm a Curmudgeon at heart, I'll start with my gripes.

1. Making sense of the Techweb:
Ok sure, I think it is new and an interesting idea.. BUT everything looks similar !!!.
Units. City Improvemnts. Wonders.
For a newcomer looking at the huge Tech Web, you have no idea what to go after. In past Civ games, I always play as a "Wonder Whore". Basically fast tracking tech to get me to wonders as fast as possible.
Here.. Well Lets say In my first game, I didn't successfully get to build my first wonder till turn 400! Usually by the time I found I could build a wonder, someone else was just finishing it!

2. Explores are SUICIDAL!
Remember when you could create a few 'scouts' or whatever in the start of every civ game, automate them and be confident they would eventually map the whole world?
This game... Not so much... Seriouslly Explores seem to have no regard for Miasma or Native Wildlife. I've seen explores attacking bugs over and over again! Not explores haplessly being attacked BY bugs.. Oh no.. They have been seeking out bugs it seems like!
And God Help you if you explore the oceans!
I remember making my first Ocean unit and was all excited... He lasted two turns before being killed by a sea dragon! The first time I settled a colony outside of area, I didn't safely get across the ocean till I had built a total of six ocean units to defend my works!
Seriously what is up with groups of four or even FIVE Krackens marauding around the seas?
I wasn't able to fend off a single Kracken till way waaayyy later in the game.

3: Greedy AI.
This isn 't a new gripe, but damn if it isn't still annoying!!!
So the rate of exchange for 'favors'... If I ask for 3 science for 1 "favor" This seems fair.
Apparently, if an AI wants to give me a favor.. Well THAT Will cost me about 60% of whatever my science output was.
Seriouslly when I was making 100 per turn, someone asked for 55. Later when I was doing about 300 per turn, someone asked for 180 scince per turn.
I have one AI that I have 12 favors with. I tried to get to cash them all in once... What did I get? 12 energy per turn, 300 energy, and some titanium resources... Woooooo.

4. Impotent City States.
Remember back in Civ5 where if you even sneezed at a City State, a half dozen AI's were ready to go to war with you?
Well I think they have gone a bit too far in the other direction.
A city state I had traded with since the start of the game was targeted by non other than my closest alley... And I could do nothing about it.. If I stepped in to save the city state, I'd have to sacrifice my biggest trading partner, as well as piss off the second most powerful AI player at the time...
Whatever happened to "These people are under my protection" stuff?

Don't get me wrong.. I am LOVING the new game... Again most of these are just gripes, and don't really break or detract from the game itself. The unit specialziation and the degree of "coose your own adventure" thing they have going on makes it rather refreshing.