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Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#1
The official trailer for this game looks awesome.

From what I can gather from the trailer, it's set in the near future after we've overbreeded ourselves on Earth, and so we create a colony ship to send out to find "a new home, a new beginning for Mankind" so that we can destroy that one too.

From the Gamespot article:
Cast upon some unknown world, you will encounter alien life, push the limits of humanity, and inevitably come to blows with your fellow man over whose vision of the future is "correct."
[...]
Before you land on a new planet and start shaping humanity’s destiny, you must first equip your expedition. Referred to as "the seeding," this is an expanded version of your civilization selection in previous games. In Beyond Earth, not only do you choose which faction (read: civilization) to play, but also which spacecraft to take, what cargo to carry, who to bring, and the type of planet you want to inhabit. Each selection you make will greatly impact the start of your game: you could carry high-quality cargo that grants additional funds up-front, for instance, or hard-working, production-oriented colonists who build structures faster. The Civilization series has always been about defining a strategy early on, and then adapting that strategy to accommodate whatever curveballs the game throws your way. These choices should give you greater control over how you define your opening gambit.
[...]
When other players start showing up, it will most likely result in open warfare. It was at this point in the interview that I asked whether Beyond Earth would bring back unit stacking, or continue using the one-unit-per-hex rule introduced in Civilization V. According to lead designer David McDonough, Beyond Earth will not have military unit stacking. "I am a big fan of the way warfare was designed in Civilization V," McDonough added. "I thought it was very elegant and would make a good fit for this game as well considering we’ve added these alternate game layers--such as the orbital layer--which sort of let you break that rule by launching units into space and having them effect units on the ground without being stacked on top of them."
Last edited by ThymineC on Sat Apr 12, 2014 11:59 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#3
The usual BS "humanity is killing itself" narrative excuse for why we choose to go to the Moon (and other places), and to do the hard things. Bah.

I'm assuming the rest of the game will be equivalent in enjoyability to the original SMAC, and will be a PC-centric game rather than designed for consoles. But I'm mostly hoping (especially after seeing this intro for C:BE) that, like the original SMAC, this game will expose the parameters of the various social settings so that players can modify them to correct for developer biases or just to try out different challenges in replays.
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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#5
They did. But they're franchising.

The apocalypse scenario is very popular in sci-fi. That's enough reason to choose that path I think. For those interested in scientific consensus on earth sustainability, check out this video of the authorative IPCC 2013 Climate Report, and also this popular video by statistician Hans Rosling on how to address the current exponential population growth (spoiler: it's by increasing the living standards of the poorest). I think an informed debate would merit it's own thread though.
Last edited by Eery Petrol on Sun Apr 13, 2014 5:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#6
Eery Petrol wrote:They did. But they're franchising.

The apocalypse scenario is very popular in sci-fi. That's enough reason to choose that path I think. For those interested in scientific consensus on earth sustainability, check out this video of the authorative IPPC 2013 Climate Report, and also this popular video by statistician Hans Rosling on how to address the current exponential population growth (spoiler: it's by increasing the living standards of the poorest). I think an informed debate would merit it's own thread though.
Very informative and entertaining videos, thank you Eery. :thumbup:

One thing I noticed Hans didn't cover, though, was the fact that people living in countries at different levels of economic development impose different levels of burden upon the world. For instance, a person living in the UAE or USA will on average have a global hectare footprint of 10.68 and 8.00 respectively, whereas in Haiti, Bandladesh or Puerto Rico this figure is below 1, based on data gathered by the Global Footprint Network published in 2007. As Hans said, a country's birthrate will decrease in conjunction with decreasing infant mortality rates as it transitions from stage 1 to stage 3 of its demographic model. But if everyone on Earth started living like the average American does today, we'd need around 3 more Earths to support ourselves.
Flatfingers wrote:Consider just one example. As I linked to in my comment, we didn't develop the technology required to send representatives of humanity to the Moon and safely back again because we had to in order to avoid species extinction or any other self-induced disaster. We did it because we don't only destroy; we also dream of better things, and then we build them. There are times when we choose to create, to explore, to exceed our limits. (Sound familiar?)
That was back in the 60's. As Hans Rosling points out in the video that Eery linked, the population of the world has more than doubled in that time - the population has more than doubled within the space of this one man's lifetime.

So whether we landed on the Moon because of curiosity or an urge to explore, or whether the primary motivation was the space race, it's largely irrelevant now - the world is far more overpopulated than it was then and addressing the issues that arise from this will become our primary motivators. We destroy 10s of thousands of square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest each year, there are dozens of species of life going extinct every day, oceans are warming, sea levels are rising, and all this time we continue to spread and breed like parasites, putting further pressure on the planet's natural resources and inflicting greater damage to the environment. Now there are some antinatalists, such as The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who wish for our species to go extinct out of a strange little fantasy they have that a world without us would be some kind of Eden paradise for the rest of the animal kingdom. I'm not one of them and I don't really care if animals go extinct or the planet gets destroyed, but it seems that we probably are going down that route and that if anything will motivate us to explore space, it'll be that.

You mention that humans have a desire to dream of better, to explore, to exceed our limits...if so, why the heck hasn't anyone gone back to visit the moon in the last 42 years? We achieved it the first time with spaceships hosting computers less powerful than mobile phones today, and yet it doesn't seem like any effort is being made to go back out there. It honestly seems like the main factors that drive any progress in our species are war, the threat of war, and the threat of extinction.
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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#7
Keep this topic on the game and not about the theory behind humanity's space flight. If you want to create a thread like that, do it in off-topic.

Edit: Nevermind, I'll do it myself.

That being said, I'm definitely interested in this game. Been a big fan of Civ ever since I (albeit really late) came to the party with Civ V.
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Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.
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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#8
One thing I'm excited about the game is that I've heard it won't have a linear tech tree :D. It one of the features that makes the least sense in a modern game like civilization V where you can even make your own religion. One thing that I hope they will have is the ability to colonize more than one planet. If they don't then, it's really counterintuitive (and would seem to go against the presented storyline in which we're trying to escape a dying world and give our species a better chance at survival by putting all of our eggs in one basket and then watching them fight to the death :roll: ) as civ has procedurally generated terrain, LT shows that it can be done with solar systems with much higher fidelity than is needed in a civ game, and doing so incredibly increases the replay ability of the game. That was one long sentence. :shifty:
True understanding comes when you can explain to someone why something works the way it works, not just that something works. I'm talking to you Quantum Mechanics :).
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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#9
Played the original Sid Meier's Civ and Colonization back when I was a wee person. Next in franchise to gobble my hours was Call to Power. I've played some Alpha Centauri.. nothing to brag of..
Recently, Civ V (especially the expansions) has claimed over 600 hours, my Steam stats say. :shock:

Needless to say, madam sexy voice has tickled my ears with some welcome news. But isn't LT projected to be out by then? (quiet, you pessimist--er, realists!) :ghost:
"omg such tech many efficiency WOW" ~ Josh Parnell
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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#11
PLEASE tell me this brings back stacks. I HATE the one unit per hex thing they brought into Civ5. I hate it so much it makes Civ 5 a worse game overall for me than Civ 4 (though still an overall good game) even though they made a bunch of other improvements. I admit there was a killer stack issue that needed to be resolved but the solution to that for me was something along the lines of limiting stack size by the stacks commanding units leadership score or upping maintenance costs to something to make killer mega stacks prohibitively expensive or some other creative solution... not just dumping them entirely.

I really do like the embark ability though. That's a huge add to the series (just not enough to offset the negative of losing stacks). I love that I don't have to build stupid transports anymore and ferry units a few at a time. That was tedious for no good reason. I'm also glad to see Age of Wonders 3 has embark as well and still has stacks... I'm liking Age of Wonders 3 more than I did Civ5 (but less than Civ4) as a result.
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Re: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

#12
Asmodai wrote:PLEASE tell me this brings back stacks. I HATE the one unit per hex thing they brought into Civ5. I hate it so much it makes Civ 5 a worse game overall for me than Civ 4 (though still an overall good game) even though they made a bunch of other improvements. I admit there was a killer stack issue that needed to be resolved but the solution to that for me was something along the lines of limiting stack size by the stacks commanding units leadership score or upping maintenance costs to something to make killer mega stacks prohibitively expensive or some other creative solution... not just dumping them entirely.

I really do like the embark ability though. That's a huge add to the series (just not enough to offset the negative of losing stacks). I love that I don't have to build stupid transports anymore and ferry units a few at a time. That was tedious for no good reason. I'm also glad to see Age of Wonders 3 has embark as well and still has stacks... I'm liking Age of Wonders 3 more than I did Civ5 (but less than Civ4) as a result.
This game will have one unit per hex.

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