Sid Meiers Civilization Beyond Earth (2 DVD)
Sid
Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth shifts the series' brand of
turn-based discovery and conquest off-planet, and the sci-fi setting
puts a slick, chrome sheen on my old neurosis. But Beyond Earth also
calcifies much of Civilization V's vocabulary and play arc. You still
situate your capital city, and click it to designate the production of
military units or workers that can spruce up your immediate
surroundings. You still unlock new technologies and cultural policies
that ensure a steady drip of upgrades and benefits. There are the
familiar icons for production, food, and culture to illustrate the
quantified output of your cities, and a new one, energy, is a reasonable
enough stand-in for currency--its icon even looks a bit like a golden
coin to ease you into the transition. So despite the new trappings, it's
simple enough to slide back into routine. Create, explore, and
expand--or, if you're like me, create, explore, quit, and create again.
There
are a few welcome touch-ups to smooth over Civilization's old edges,
and they first appear in pregame as a series of decisions to make prior
to starting your bid for global domination. A first step can be taken
towards generating energy, science, culture, et alia, and you can opt to
begin the game with a military unit, or a clinic if you'd prefer.
There's more freedom afforded when picking out which parcel of land to
found your first city on, and there's even a perk that reveals the
outlines of the world's land masses. So much for my incessant
restarting, then--all things considered, Beyond Earth seems to output
viable starting situations more reliably than its predecessors.
But
viable doesn't necessarily mean welcoming--this is an alien planet,
after all, and colonizing it is going to beget some unfortunate learning
experiences on the behaviors of local wildlife as part of due course.
Maybe those lessons will come from the sandworm churning up your freshly
tilled farmland a few tiles from your capital and consuming any trade
expedition you send in its general direction. Or maybe from the creature
that's three-quarters mandible, just kind-of loitering ominously
offshore. Aliens play the role of the barbarian tribes from the last few
Civilization games, as an entity that's not exactly "in it to win it."
But they'll mess with your early game plans all the same, utilizing
better cunning and more imposing units than their old club-wielding
counterparts. Even Beyond Earth's loan translations of the previous
entries' forests, mountains, and livestock feel suitably threatening
here. A toxic miasma coats about a third of the surface of any map,
damaging human units and healing aliens. And while natural wonders are
conspicuously absent--robbing players of part of the draw of exploring a
new planet--the varied terrain is full of curious features like
resource pods, ruins and alien skeletons to seek out. The land is
pock-marked with craters and chasms, the grasslands have a sickly cast
to them, and I'm still trying to get comfortable with the idea of
constructing a paddock for giant beetles.
But
you're probably going to have to manifest some destiny sooner or later,
because advancement in Beyond Earth necessitates subscription to a
belief system and two of the three available are less than concerned
with preserving indigenous species. So-called affinities push your
development towards divergent goals: Purity, Supremacy, or Harmony. It's
a choice between Terran, Protoss, or Zerg, really. Purity marks a
civilization that concerns itself with recreating the comforts of home
and preserving humanity in a more-or-less recognizable state. Supremacy
is a technocratic zealotry that comes with all the haughtiness you'd
expect--really, its units bear names like "Educator" and "Prophet."
Harmony is there for us Truffula Tree-huggers, and since it lets you
ride an alien like a horse and sic giant space katydids on your enemy's
cities, I'd say it's the clear choice for the discerning Fremen.
Interestingly, the text that accompanies each new affinity level shifts
in tone along with the stage of the game, starting with earnest,
innocent theorizing and gradually taking on a more hawkish,
proselytizing inflection as the players start jockeying for position
near the home stretch.
The Civilization series
portrays a history that's not of people, but rather "the State." That is
to say, you don't play as Ghandi, or Gengis Kahn: you play as India, or
Mongolia, as well as a vision of those peoples united in a singular,
millennia-spanning focus on besting all other nations. Beyond Earth
expands upon this cult of the state, drawing the series' diverse cast of
historical cultures into eight broad, continental coalitions, and
rescinding the roles that individual artists, engineers, and scientists
had been enjoying in Civilization V. The loss of the latter means a less
celebratory, more overtly martial sort of strategy game, and I’m not
keen on this step backwards towards the series’ competitive, board game
roots. It’s echoed in the relative parity of the eight coalitions, which
lack the color and diversity of play-styles that Civ V furnished so
adeptly. In Beyond Earth’s eight-person multiplayer (local or online),
the terms have never been so even, but some of the fascination went out
the door with the asymmetry.
Affinities push your development towards divergent goals: Purity, Supremacy, or Harmony.
It's
a brave new world, with new lands to chart, resources to harvest, and
goals to pursue. But it's also as cynical as the old one, where most
actions serve competitive ends, and even the most cooperative and
well-maintained alliances will be shattered by necessity towards game's
end. To Civilization, the State is an entity that acts on only the
basest and most selfish of desires--consume, grow, and propagate. That's
become increasingly ironic, as Beyond Earth's web of discoverable
technologies introduces high-minded and esoteric futurisms like "Human
Idealism" and "Artificial Evolution." A little barbarism was to be
expected back when Civilization's tech tree was largely given over to
simply escaping the Dark Ages. But Beyond Earth suggests--and perhaps
not wrongly--that advancements like euthenics or microrobotics are
ultimately just the new sticks we'll use to club each other over the
head.
Beyond Earth's operatic opening short tells the
story of a young female colonist who bears at least some superficial
resemblance to National Geographic's famous "Afghan Girl." But it's
otherwise hard to get a sense of what these people look like, or what
their culture entails beyond that brief cinematic glimpse, because only
the military gets treated to any real illustration in the game proper.
Gone are the works of art, music, and writing that helped to redefine
the cultural victory in Civilization V, pared back to an abstract number
that's ultimately used towards more aggressive ends. World wonders do
reprise their role as larger constructive undertakings, but the bonuses
they proffer feel tepid and same-ish this time around. There are quests,
though--a first for Civilization. In practice, they're a limited set of
binary prompts with a light influence on your direction of progress,
but they nevertheless lend some helpful narrative context to the action,
and they can branch in unexpected ways. A newly founded independent
outpost might turn out to be performing questionable experiments on its
colonists, perhaps, or a plant brought along on the journey to the new
world might take root and begin overriding the local flora.
In
at least one case, you're tasked with spying on a particular city
belonging to a rival civ. It's a subtle guiding of the eyes towards
Beyond Earth's enhanced spy system, which requires regular management of
a small team that can siphon energy, science, or units from other
cities in addition to the last game's tech thievery and intel thievery.
Successful operations increase the intrigue rating for a city,
ostensibly granting access to higher-tier abilities like fomenting
rebellion or planting a bomb, but in practice it seems difficult to ever
reach those levels. Relocating a spy to one's own city might be too
reliable a means of reducing your intrigue levels when you see them
spiking.
Gone are the works of art, music, and writing that helped to redefine the cultural victory in Civilization V.
But
absent a more subversive method of dealing with your foes, there's
always old-fashioned battle. Military units still hold sway over most of
the game space, trading turn-based fire between the hexagonal parcels
of land and besieging cities. They fall back on Civilization's
traditional archetypes: melee, ranged, cavalry, and siege, even as their
outward appearances morphs from astronauts with rifles and moon rovers
to bipedal robots and giant kaiju. The ones you field depend on your
progression towards one of the three affinities, and in a welcome bit of
streamlining, the upgrades get rolled out automatically with each new
level--no more paying for promotions for each individual unit. Better
still, a new, similarly tiled orbital layer plays host to satellites
which can be launched for quick industrial bonuses, or support coverage
for your armies in the field.
Beyond Earth's combat
suffers from some balance issues though, and that's curious for a game
that leans so heavily on proven systems. Cities are comically easy to
take--most melee units fare much better at city capturing, and you can
often halve a city's defenses in a single attack--resulting in
situations where cities tediously trade ownership turn after turn. The
fragility extends to the units themselves, many of which die in a single
hit. By consequence, a small standing army is less tenable than it was
back on Earth, and I find myself less invested in the fate of any one
unit when it can be snuffed out by an orbital strike at any given
moment.
I am finding that I play more games through to
completion in Beyond Earth. In inverse of my experience with
Civilization V, my favorite part might be the ending, where a civ has to
lay its cards face-up in a bid for one of the five methods of victory,
and any semblance of "civilization" goes out the window as everyone else
tries to drag them back down like the proverbial crabs in the bucket.
The three affinity-specific victories don’t play out all that
differently, nor does a fourth concerned with making contact with an
unseen, advanced alien race. Each entails researching a few specific
technologies, then designating your cities to produce a structure or two
that sometimes have minor idiosyncrasies, like consuming your surplus
energy each turn. But the path to victory is more elegantly interwoven
with the early and middle game this time around, and of course, global
domination, ever the crude way out, remains as tempting as ever when
another world leader shows up uninvited to talk some smack. The more
things change, the more they stay the same, then; a journey to a planet
halfway across the universe reaffirming the draw of the same old
creature comforts--a plot of land, and just one more turn.