The net effect is that once you've defeated the challenge of taming the planet and eliminating the aliens as a threat to your expansion, then the rest of the game is a competition between civs to be the first to reach any of the victory conditions.' Without a genuine shared victory, there's also no systems in place to share your colonial success with your fellow colonies. Aren't we all just colonists from the same earth who are supposed to be trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past? Aren't we trying to preserve the human race? Without the various civs starting the game with any sort of pre-established ideology or agendas, there's no reason for them to be competing with one another. ' One of the things that bothered me about Beyond Earth was the way that the victory conditions create an unnecessary competition between the different civs.

Sadly, these efforts don't really address one of the underlying, fundamental, disconnects that the game has with me: The expansion, Rising Tide takes steps to address this with some of its new gameplay mechanics and revised diplomatic engine. Maybe I'll even mod it in myself if I get time and motivation.Ĭivilization: Beyond Earth really struggled to separate itself from Civ V. Even if these ideas aren't fated to be implemented for Beyond Earth, it's still an opportunity to look at a way in which the game could have differentiated itself from Civ V, and they could serve as a template for future Civ titles (maybe even Beyond Earth 2) or for modders. However, I still want to present these ideas, so I've re-written this post to be less speculative and more retrospective. This post may be entirely moot now that Civ VI has been announced, and it seems unlikely to me that Beyond Earth will see further expansions. I started writing this post months ago (back in 2015, I think) - long before I had any inkling of the impending release of Civilization VI.

Steam civilization beyond earth running