Cid Meyer's Civilization Beyond Earth

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth launches players into space.That is new. We look at trailers and it is looking promising, we will se what the developers have come with.

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is an upcoming turn-based, strategy video game in the Civilization series developed by Firaxis Games, planned for release on Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux in the third quarter of 2014.

Trailer:

A spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, Beyond Earth shares much of that game’s development team, as well as many concepts which were introduced in the famous title. The game’s setting is unique to the Civilization series in that it takes place in the future, with mankind traveling through space and founding colonies on extraterrestrial planets following an event called “The Great Mistake”.

Beyond Earth will be a turn-based strategy game played on a hexagonal-based grid, iterating on the ideas and building upon the engine of its predecessor, Civilization V.Co-lead designer at Firaxis David McDonough described the relationship between the two games by saying

“The bones of the experience are very much recognisably Civ. The idea of the cities, city-base progression, leaders, the passage of time, tile-based, turn-based, building improvements, technologies. A lot of them are very familiar themes to the Civ player.”

There are a number of significant breaks from the Civilization model. In previous Civilization titles, players selected from historical empires led by historical figures, each with preset personalities. In Beyond Earth, players make choices at the beginning of the game, including what organization backed their expedition, what kind of vessel they used to reach the planet, and who and what they brought to the new world, allowing players to create a customized civilization of their own. Early decisions have a significant effect on the gameplay. While previous Civilization titles have had linear tech trees, Beyond Earth has a “tech web” which branches off in several directions, forcing players to choose only one. The game intentionally does not allow for technology trading between civilizations, and it is impossible to unlock all of the game’s technologies in a single playthrough. The game also has several “affinities”, overarching philosophies on human advancement that shape players’ technological advancement and unlock affinity-unique units. The Harmony affinity tries to co-exist with the planet, utilizes genetic modification, and is able to domesticate the native species. The Supremacy affinity puts its trust in advanced technology, and utilizes highly specialized units that aid each other in the field. The Purity affinity is isolationist, building powerful defensive structures and attempting to make the new planet more Earth-like.

In designing the tech web, the Beyond Earth team began by going to the Wikipedia article on Alpha Centauri, as well as reading books the article listed as sources of inspiration for Alpha Centauri designer Brian Reynolds.The events of the game are set roughly 200 to 300 years from the present, and the development team are using modern day space sciences, such as the SpaceX launches and the lessons of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, to develop their vision for the game’s future. The game was also announced to support AMD’s Mantle API in a post-announcement interview.