Civilization : Beyond Earth

[ancalimon]

Well, yeah.

I just don't think it's as bad as people make it out to be.

Actually it's pretty much one of the best games that has been released in the last few months.

 

[Jhessail]

Are you on drugs or something?

These are all from different people:

Played 100 turns.

It's not very good.

Aside from lacking in personality, and generally feeling insanely empty considering its setting, there's also a lot of bugs and general oddities in the design choices. Too many to list, really.

I played until about 200 turns and I still had not done anything worth remembering and was basically just hitting the end turn button the whole time.

after less than 24 hours i'm already fed up with this.
one of the pros of civ5 was how units were much more durable. in be it's common for units to die in a single hit because scaling and balance are absolutely off.
every city, EVERY. CITY. can be taken with 1 laser satellite and 1 grunt because satellites have 1 tile longer range and only artilley units, which are extremely fragile, can fire at satellites.
aircrafts are useless.
managing a small bunch of trade routes in civ5 was something new and powerful which had to be carefully thought out sometimes. in be there are so many of them it's retarded, and they must be set up or you'll lose, but if you have 10+ cities (in late games) and 30+ trade routes it feels as entertaining as closing your fingers in the car's door. wtf, all you had to do firaxis was to add a button "renew route" or a tick "keep this route forever".
it's obvious the game has never been actually played, it's just a high budget mod which steals a couple ideas from ****ing fall from heaven 2, a decade old mod, and can't even keep up with that crap named "faerun".
stations? even duller than city states. how can this even be possible? that's beyond earth.

Just finished my first Transcendence Victory after 6 hours. Yeah, the game is a big fail even when compared to vanilla Civ 5.

The Transcendence Victory feels completely empty. It's just a few sentences saying "yo we are one now" and then off to the main menu you go. Compared to SMAC in which the Transcendence Plot there was a long storyline spanning from the beginning till the end, BE's Transcendence plot feels more like the designers have never played SMAC and just put this victory condition inside because "the managers told us to do so".

The game feels very soulless compared to Civ4/5 with all xpacks installed. Back in Civ4/5/SMAC there was seldom a boring moment - You could really see technology advancing, new toys appearing, new playfields (religion, corporation, tourism, etc.) coming up, etc. Wonders back then were fun and often critical to rush toward as they all feel unique, not to mention all the pretty cinematics/custscenes when a wonder is built.

BE feels dull at this moment. No religion/tourism/etc means there is very little variety you need to focus on. You just need to build combat units to protect yourself, and the AI is passive. Orbital layer doesn't feel very fun as the impact it brings is far from religion etc. And the game's wonders suck. There are several high-end wonders that provide like +6 culture or something. Utterly useless. Normal buildings are dull as hell as well, all are just +3 energy, +1 food, etc etc yawn.

The technology web looks interesting but it also diminish the feeling of having progress, because you can beeline to practically everything from the mid-game on. Not to mention it feels extraordinary weird to have nanorobotics researched but no biology or network.

UI problems, trade route problems, diplomacy etc are all well discussed by other guys.

Not really worth the 50 euros at this moment (I bought it for 25 though thanks to Russian steam codes), it feels like an indie 4x SMAC wannabe CIV 5 mod. Probably fixed after 1 or 2 expansion sets just like Civ 5.

Played this for a bit, stopping maybe 10-20 turns away from purity victory (walking all those settlers in is just a chore).

What I most noticed as different from Civ5 is that there's even less real decisions to be made regarding your strategy, and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more banal micromanagement. Every ****ing turn you get bombarded with trade routes having expired and cities needing new things to build. Except there's nothing fun to pick. You don't really specialize your cities, you just sorta build everything. All the yields are so small it doesn't feel like anything you do matters. And the ai is just as inept at war as it always was.

I see pretty much no reason why anyone should play this instead of SMAC, or even CiV5 bnv for that matter. I thought the tech web would be cool, but there's so few techs that actually feel like they do something.

The game has a lot of weaknesses that will probably get ironed out with patches and expansions, but the factions have no identity and the world and aliens no mystery. There's very little sense of advancement beyond seeing your score increment, and very little reason to continue playing except to win. I'm disappointed, even if I am sporadically having fun.

Yeah, I give up too. None of the other factions even have any soul. Even Civ5 did that better with a peaceful Ghandi who wanted to nuke the **** out of you.

It really feels like I'm playing a cheap indie 4X. There's no point to this game.

The problem is the AI have no much idea of what to do, they can decllare war simply because you have wonders but they are dumb to the point were they will NOT try to wipe you when you are going to get a Science Victory, I also suppose that if you build the Beacon or a Gate the AI will simply ignore it despite being a victory condition.

The AI always been trigger happy but the small maps simply make the situation worst because it just gives them more reason to attack because they want to go wide and simply there isnt enough room.

Also what you said about Diplomacy is true, in older Civ games we had the ability to trade maps, technology ... that is gone, the diplomatic victory is gone too ... only thing that they added was favors that would have worked if we had a World Congress because then we could trade those favors for votes but since there isnt favors are just crap because you never get what you payed for them and they have no use, why bother with favors for science if you can just pay for science?

Its about as bad as in vanilla Civ V, at least the expansions given us the World Congress and the Diplomatic Victory.

Another idiocy is were they land, tried standard map and they ****ing drop next door, optimal city deployment is six hexes away and they will drop something as stupid as within 15 hexes, there is no room to expand without tripping on a ****ing faction.

Plus this seems to been build around 5 factions, everyone is simply dropping next door and its a perpetual state of war.

this crap manages to be worse than vanilla civ5 under each and every aspect.
ai, diplomacy, improvements, even graphics and unit variety and customization.
i expected a mess of a game but not such a disgrace.

the Ai didn't build ANY decent defense on it's cities while he was amassing a big army at it's border for 20 turns and the only thing that took to capture them was two barrages of artillery and one or two tanks on each one. The Ai tried a counter attack with the few units it had but by the time he had to retreat, the most productive cities of the Ai, including the capital were razed. Before fighting the Ai, he had to fight with the aliens that, by the way, are just reskinned barbarians. They are an annoyance at best but the Marines you get on the start of the game are more than enough to deal with them with the exception of the siege worm and can be easily cleaned. If it wasn't that bull**** of having your units automatically expelled when you declare war, he could had use an open border treaty and erased the Ai from the map on one turn.

Won a game by Transcendence.
Visuals, they're alright, but no matter how I tried with .ini file, couldn't turn off the incredibly annoying blur.
Trade routes, **** them in the cargo bay.
You get bombarded with multiple petty decisions all the time.
I got all my units to hover tanks but still can't grab resource in canyons cause it generated out of worker's reach and workers don't change at all.
Barebones options, although a bit more interesting combat for Harmony since you can launch satellites and use workers to spread Miasma.
Setting is boring
Decision making is boring
No cool movies for wonders and wonders are boring
No cool movies for winning the gaem
AI is bugged, will hate you for things you didn't do and stuff

Fap on golden, purple or blue thingies, press End Turn

Installed it. Played through the whole early part of the game. Saw a siege worm near an AI settlement. Saw it get hit turn after turn by the base defenses without the worm reacting in any way. Uninstalled.

1. UI is atrocious. Queuing is so bothersome and retarded that I don't use it - you have to click three times on different menus to put something on queue...only from city queue - no hotkeys, Ctrl or Alt modifiers from main map. In other words - you will waste more time on clicking than if you manually issue orders.
2. Diplomacy somehow managed to become even worse than in CivV, which is achievement on its own. With reduced unity types AI knows only ONE tactic - swarm of suicidal berserking human/tank waves.
3. Absolutely primitive execution of advertized features. Ie. Alien agressiveness is linked only to alien nest destruction it seems. You can shoot dozens upon dozens of aliens standing outside 2 tile radius from their nest without any fear of counterattack - Ai cannot into attack.
4. Absolute lack of any automation. If you have 10 cities then you have to manually isue each and every production order.
5. Leaders lack any personality - they are just animated talking heads.
6. Once again you are spammed with approvals, denouncations and gazillion other meaningless and useless notification via leader animation screen "we like that you like X", "We do not like that you like Y" etc every turn.
7. Trade routes - Firaxis showed phenomenal ability to make their own idea as terrible a possible - if with CivV you had to deal with 5 or so TR now you have 3 per city, you have to manually reassign EACH an EVERY of them.

Also this:

Gaming journos, gaming journos never change.

 

[Austupaio]

Yes, and the drug is hype.

 

[Mage246]

Considering who you are talking to, yes I'm going to say drugs are involved.

 

[Catholic]

It has a pretty clear majority favorable reviews on Steam.

 

[MaHuD]

I am sticking to Pandorra. It's also not superb, but at-least it's a lot cheaper.

 

[ancalimon]

Considering who you are talking to, yes I'm going to say drugs are involved.

I like your weirdness. How can you relate how I liked Beyond Earth with your delusion of me being a drug addict?

 

[Austupaio]

It has a pretty clear majority favorable reviews on Steam.

It has favourable reviews on Metacritic and IGN, too.

 

[Amagic]

I started my first game on Marathon, hard setting and jesus **** I'm bored to tears. 550 turns into the game and the only interesting thing so far was me conquering a neighbouring city, then the owner peaced out by offering me a better one. Discovering all the new stuff is only interesting once, so while I'll probably play this game through, I likely won't start a second one.

I can rarely decide what tech to research next because its all so goddamn boring, the wonders are boring and likely rushed by the AI, the troops are uninteresting and slow to upgrade. Its all just so ****ing boring.

EDIT: Also **** trade. So much ****ing unnecessary micromanagement.

 

[K-64]

I just finished a normal game and it's quite the opposite for me. I really enjoyed it.

Despite being a heavily militarised Space Russia I didn't do terribly much conquering (only eliminated one of the other colonies), more occupying large amounts of neighbouring territory for protection money (Just like modern Russia). So there I go, things going well, supremacy tree maxed, as you do and I decide to go with a Contact victory after realising "Oh ****, the capitalist pigdogs are going for emancipation".

Anyways, 3 turns off the beacon being made at my capital, a wild coup-d'etat appears and I have to reclaim my capital back from the filthy Americans. Luckily, rebuilding it didn't take nearly as long this time since I had already got my infrastructure for massive production set up (aka. trade routes from every other city to the capital). Beacon got built and signal was away, so I thought I had a nice 30 turns to wait until victory.

7 turns off, turned out the capitalist folks managed to get their victory first. Even though it was more than certainly a coincidence, the apparent strategic maneuvering was magnificent.


So yeah, I found the game pretty damn fun. At the moment, yeah it's a bit sparse but I'm hoping they do a Civ V with it and have fancy expansions and **** to add more but for the unit upgrading stuff, I really liked that aspect. I guess it's a rather hit or miss game with folks.

 

[rebelknight]

What the hell.
I'm playing on the second difficulty setting (after the easiest one).
I have 4 cities and everything is fully developed and i have a decent army (am on turn 50-60+)

But when i enter diplomacy each factions hardly fear me (the fear factor thingy), they are always higher than me.
Sometime its even 1/9.

****ing hell, how can they be so powerful?
I even had time to develop before they landed.

And i don't think i suck that bad...
On harder difficulty on CIV 5 i was always in the top 3 (out of 8-10 A.I.)


Like i said, I'm only using the fear factor thingy as reference, i didn't see their territory.

 

[Anarion]

I always focus too much on developing my civilization and too little on the military, because meh military. So the other civilizations usually have bigger forces than me in all Civ games.

 

[rebelknight]

I always focus too much on developing my civilization and too little on the military, because meh military. So the other civilizations usually have bigger forces than me in all Civ games.

How can i win?
Am on the second easiest setting.

 

[Anarion]

You could go for a cultural or space race victory. Just keep doing what you're doing but try to keep at least a small army in case your neighbours get any ideas.

 

[rebelknight]

You could go for a cultural or space race victory.

You sure we're talking about the same game?

 

[Anarion]

Oops, sorry! 
I've never played this game.

 

[Do not look here]

Well, if civV is any indicator, you can brake through Zerg hordes with 3-5 experienced units as long as you have 1-3 more to rotate the frontlines. Though, admittedly, I'm not making the same mistake with BE and am just waiting for complete Complete Edition (even though BNW was like Second Coming of Jesus after absolutely massacring my spare time with G&K).

Also, it's just one factor, right? Dunno, just play the game and watch how it unfolds. AFAIK, other factions in BE get some ridiculous amounts of units to begin with, I believe I've read on civfanatics forum or Steam that AI ain't problem as long as they don't decide to immediately rush you with this advantage.

 

[Arcadius112]

What the hell.
I'm playing on the second difficulty setting (after the easiest one).
I have 4 cities and everything is fully developed and i have a decent army (am on turn 50-60+)

But when i enter diplomacy each factions hardly fear me (the fear factor thingy), they are always higher than me.
Sometime its even 1/9.

****ing hell, how can they be so powerful?
I even had time to develop before they landed.

And i don't think i suck that bad...
On harder difficulty on CIV 5 i was always in the top 3 (out of 8-10 A.I.)


Like i said, I'm only using the fear factor thingy as reference, i didn't see their territory.

I'm pretty sure that it's largely dependent on unit count, not strength. Luckily, the AI is braindead in terms of combat so you can win with basically anything. I never develop military until I reach the top tier on this game and I haven't lost a match yet.

In the end, if we're talking about Beyond Earth, you don't even need a large army for any of the victories besides annihiliation. You can literally just tech up to the gates or hive mind stuff, build them or the signal in peace and barely anyone will attack you while you build new units to send through.