http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/04/sid-meiers-civilization-beyond-earth.html
TRAILER - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2grKk4Fv0k
DETAILED ARTICLE - http://www.gamespot.com/articles/beyond-earth-takes-civilization-to-the-stars/1100-6418906/
INTERVIEW - http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/12/civilization-beyond-earth-interview-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-factions-aliens-technology-and-more/
INTERESTING QUOTES (taken from these two interviews)
'Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth begins at the end. Due to some sort of global catastrophe, which the developers only referred to as "The Great Mistake," Earth is experiencing a mass exodus. The various factions of humanity are piling aboard starships and setting forth in search of a new home for their species. With each new game of Beyond Earth, you play the role of one of these desperate expeditions.
In Beyond Earth, not only do you choose your faction, but also which spacecraft to take, what cargo to carry, who to bring, and the type of planet you want to inhabit. Each choice will greatly impact the start of your game.
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.
After the seeding, you make planetfall and establish your first human colony. It is also the only human colony. The next human player won’t arrive until much later. In the beginning, you are completely alone amid the wilderness. "What’s neat about it is the feeling you get from coming into this new place." Depending on the planet, alien lifeforms may be indifferent to your arrival, or hostile. You must decide how to deal with them, and in doing so the development team hopes the experience will feel more isolated, more alien, than in previous games. You are setting forth into the unknown reaches of space, after all. It could be 20 turns or more before you see another player make planetfall and introduce themselves, and another 15 turns after that until the next. And if you think these newcomers are going to be easy pickings just because they were late to the party, think again. Those who arrive after you receive an extra boost to help them catch up to your civilization.
[designer] I grew up on the Civ games. Like you, I played Alpha Centauri until my eyes bled. When we very first got the option to make the game, to us it was making a game about the idea of Alpha Centauri, the idea of the future of humanity. That as expressed by a Civ game, we sort of figured out. Part of that was inspired by Alpha Centauri, part of it was inspired by the Civ legacy, and part of it just invented. (...) The first thing we did was go on Wikipedia to the Alpha Centauri webpage, and it has the books that Brian Reynolds and his team read, so we read those, and that was our starting point. (..) Yeah, I'd say we went through the classics, the Arthur C. Clarke, the Carl Sagan, the Greg Bear, Dan Simmons is a big influence. The Great Mistake is a nod to him in one of his novels. Lots of sci-fi movies.
We cleared the decks and rebuilt the very idea of map generation. We have these biomes with whole-world palettes with unique plantlife and unique colour schemes and unique layouts and so on, so when you go to one it feels like a different world each time.
THREE IDEOLOGICAL WAYS:
- HARMONY: ecology, alien life, mixing humanity and alien biological forms
- SUPREMACY: robotics, advanced artificial intelligence, machinery, transhumanism
- PURITY: 'try to devote themselves to the conservation of the idea of humanity' [culture, military]
Supremacy doesn't always mean military. So the civ with the more militaristic bent, which is Brazilia? may pick Supremacy, but they may not. [hey, so we are going to have NATIONS?] Harmony would be just as good, Purity would be just as good as an expression of military strength. So the AI will make the same adaptive choices that you will.
One of the systems we're really excited about is the white hat black hat covert ops. It takes espionage from Brave New World and expands it quite a bit. (...) planting the Dune thumper device in their city and having worms pop out. Only the Harmony player can do that. Or setting off a nuclear explosion, a dirty bomb in their city.
[designer] I am a big fan of the way warfare was designed in Civilization V, 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." The orbital layer is the realm of satellites. These satellites can grant your civilization an economic, espionage, or military benefit, but their orbit will degrade over time and cause them to crash. (...) So depending on your playstyle you can look at these different styles of armies, and by the end of the game they're going to be totally different. Your army will be totally different than your neighbours, but balanced, so it's more like which of you is better at using your particular strengths?
Because this system can take humanity in some wildly different directions, chances are you won’t need to be researching all the same technologies as the other players. Therefore, the team at Firaxis has a new, non-linear technology tree for Beyond Earth. In fact, it’s not so much a tree as it is a web. As McDonough described it, this web was one of the team’s "first, favorite, and most fundamental redesigns." Each player starts surrounded by a web of technologies, with the technologies closest to you being something recognizable in today’s world, like engineering. From there you move outward in any direction towards more exotic--but still plausible--technologies.
You'll also be able to:
Do quests and side missions while exploring the planet.
Negotiate with other factions, build trade routes, and do all the other little management activities that make a Civ game a Civ game.
Find alien relics, not unlike in Alpha Centauri.
The five victory conditions are:
Harmony: awaken a semi-sentient super organism within the planet and reach a new level of consciousness
Purity: terraform the alien planet into a mirror of Earth and relocate Earth’s populace to this new Eden
Supremacy: embrace cybernetic augmentation, then return to Earth and "free" the people from their bodies
Contact: discover evidence of intelligent life and construct a means to establish first contact
Domination: actually, domination is the same as in every other Civilization
TRAILER - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2grKk4Fv0k
DETAILED ARTICLE - http://www.gamespot.com/articles/beyond-earth-takes-civilization-to-the-stars/1100-6418906/
INTERVIEW - http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/12/civilization-beyond-earth-interview-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-factions-aliens-technology-and-more/
INTERESTING QUOTES (taken from these two interviews)
'Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth begins at the end. Due to some sort of global catastrophe, which the developers only referred to as "The Great Mistake," Earth is experiencing a mass exodus. The various factions of humanity are piling aboard starships and setting forth in search of a new home for their species. With each new game of Beyond Earth, you play the role of one of these desperate expeditions.
In Beyond Earth, not only do you choose your faction, but also which spacecraft to take, what cargo to carry, who to bring, and the type of planet you want to inhabit. Each choice will greatly impact the start of your game.
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.
After the seeding, you make planetfall and establish your first human colony. It is also the only human colony. The next human player won’t arrive until much later. In the beginning, you are completely alone amid the wilderness. "What’s neat about it is the feeling you get from coming into this new place." Depending on the planet, alien lifeforms may be indifferent to your arrival, or hostile. You must decide how to deal with them, and in doing so the development team hopes the experience will feel more isolated, more alien, than in previous games. You are setting forth into the unknown reaches of space, after all. It could be 20 turns or more before you see another player make planetfall and introduce themselves, and another 15 turns after that until the next. And if you think these newcomers are going to be easy pickings just because they were late to the party, think again. Those who arrive after you receive an extra boost to help them catch up to your civilization.
[designer] I grew up on the Civ games. Like you, I played Alpha Centauri until my eyes bled. When we very first got the option to make the game, to us it was making a game about the idea of Alpha Centauri, the idea of the future of humanity. That as expressed by a Civ game, we sort of figured out. Part of that was inspired by Alpha Centauri, part of it was inspired by the Civ legacy, and part of it just invented. (...) The first thing we did was go on Wikipedia to the Alpha Centauri webpage, and it has the books that Brian Reynolds and his team read, so we read those, and that was our starting point. (..) Yeah, I'd say we went through the classics, the Arthur C. Clarke, the Carl Sagan, the Greg Bear, Dan Simmons is a big influence. The Great Mistake is a nod to him in one of his novels. Lots of sci-fi movies.
We cleared the decks and rebuilt the very idea of map generation. We have these biomes with whole-world palettes with unique plantlife and unique colour schemes and unique layouts and so on, so when you go to one it feels like a different world each time.
THREE IDEOLOGICAL WAYS:
- HARMONY: ecology, alien life, mixing humanity and alien biological forms
- SUPREMACY: robotics, advanced artificial intelligence, machinery, transhumanism
- PURITY: 'try to devote themselves to the conservation of the idea of humanity' [culture, military]
Supremacy doesn't always mean military. So the civ with the more militaristic bent, which is Brazilia? may pick Supremacy, but they may not. [hey, so we are going to have NATIONS?] Harmony would be just as good, Purity would be just as good as an expression of military strength. So the AI will make the same adaptive choices that you will.
One of the systems we're really excited about is the white hat black hat covert ops. It takes espionage from Brave New World and expands it quite a bit. (...) planting the Dune thumper device in their city and having worms pop out. Only the Harmony player can do that. Or setting off a nuclear explosion, a dirty bomb in their city.
[designer] I am a big fan of the way warfare was designed in Civilization V, 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." The orbital layer is the realm of satellites. These satellites can grant your civilization an economic, espionage, or military benefit, but their orbit will degrade over time and cause them to crash. (...) So depending on your playstyle you can look at these different styles of armies, and by the end of the game they're going to be totally different. Your army will be totally different than your neighbours, but balanced, so it's more like which of you is better at using your particular strengths?
Because this system can take humanity in some wildly different directions, chances are you won’t need to be researching all the same technologies as the other players. Therefore, the team at Firaxis has a new, non-linear technology tree for Beyond Earth. In fact, it’s not so much a tree as it is a web. As McDonough described it, this web was one of the team’s "first, favorite, and most fundamental redesigns." Each player starts surrounded by a web of technologies, with the technologies closest to you being something recognizable in today’s world, like engineering. From there you move outward in any direction towards more exotic--but still plausible--technologies.
You'll also be able to:
Do quests and side missions while exploring the planet.
Negotiate with other factions, build trade routes, and do all the other little management activities that make a Civ game a Civ game.
Find alien relics, not unlike in Alpha Centauri.
The five victory conditions are:
Harmony: awaken a semi-sentient super organism within the planet and reach a new level of consciousness
Purity: terraform the alien planet into a mirror of Earth and relocate Earth’s populace to this new Eden
Supremacy: embrace cybernetic augmentation, then return to Earth and "free" the people from their bodies
Contact: discover evidence of intelligent life and construct a means to establish first contact
Domination: actually, domination is the same as in every other Civilization
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