Argh! Every time I try to get back into Beyond Earth, I reach the end game, a climatic final push to victory... and the animations start vanishing. One by one. In the late game, on large maps, it only takes a few turns. Eventually the wakes behind ships just don't show up at all, even on a fresh reload.
I realize that this is not an issue for everyone, but I am part of a subset of gamers who enjoy my experience narratively. That is, I enjoy games much how I enjoy movies: I want to get a story out of the deal. All the greats, Civ, SimCity, Railroad Tycoon, they helped me build little (or not-so-little) adventures and sagas and histories all by myself. The were often more engrossing than any novel.
So this graphics bug is like a typo in a book—and there are lots of typos in Beyond Earth, too, for that matter. It's an error that breaks the narrative. Unlike a book or a movie, however, games can be fixed in the middle of the gamer's experience. Perhaps the more similar medium is live theater. Actors feed off their audience and can make the energy in a room manifest on stage.
That's my plea to Firaxis and 2K, on this most hallowed week of the release of XCOM 2—which I hear is experiencing its own technical snafus—get this sorted out. It may not be an easy fix, but you have to do it or, for me anyway, Beyond Earth just isn't a game.