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Civilization: Beyond Earth

Affinities

There are three affinities (ideologies), each which come with their own victory conditions.

  • Harmony - Humanity needs to change to fit the new planet and its new ecosystem.
  • Purity - The new planet needs to be terraformed to fit humanity, local flora and fauna be damned.
  • Supremacy - Fuck it, let's become Borg and conquer all the planets.

Harmony is for builders. You build stuff, then you build more stuff. The end. The goal is to build up your tech enough to discover that the planet has an intelligence. You build a giant brain thing, then wait for it to connect to the planet's intelligence, then you win. While the brain thing is connecting to the planet, you can build "mind stem" in as many cities as you like to speed up the connection process.

The victory condition for Purity and Supremacy are almost identical. You research exactly the same technologies for your victory condition. The only techs that vary are the leaf skills you need to improve your affinity score. Research the relevant tech until you can launch a satellite to communicate with the Earth. Then research more tech to build a gate to allow travel between Earth and the new planet.

It's only after you get the gate built that the Purity and Supremacy victory conditions diverge.

For Purity, you need to pull settlers from Earth out of the portal, then find places for them to live on your new planet. Unfortunately, finding space for the Earth settlers late in the game is a monumental pain in the ass. Let me save you some pain if you haven't tried it yet.

First, you need to pull 20 Earth settlers out of the gate manually once per turn. You have to click on the gate, then click on the little grey button on the lower left corner of the screen to summon a settler. Once you have the settler, things get annoying. The settlers from Earth have only one move per turn (as opposed to the two moves of a normal Colonist unit). This means you have to plan ahead. Launch a portal satellite near the gate, and another portal satellite at the destination. If possible, have roads/magrails set up at the destination ahead of time.

You'll only need to build 4 or 5 cities with the Earthling settlers. After that, you can add up to 5 Earthling settlers to an existing Earthling city. You'll need to deal with 20 of them to meet the victory condition. Despite what the Civilopedia entry says, the Earthling settler cities follow the same spacing rules as every other city you found. If you don't have enough space on the map, you'll have to wage war and raze some cities.

The Purity victory condition is really annoying. Really, really annoying.

Supremacy is easier. Instead of pulling 20 Earthling settlers out of the portal, you have to send 20 military unites into the portal, one per turn. The good news is that any military units that you get back any special materials used to construct whatever military units you send through the portal. While the portal is being built, make sure you have 20 military units around and near the portal by the time it is ready to use.

Other Victory Conditions

The other two victory conditions are Domination and Contact. I have not tried either victory condition yet, so my information is third hand. Domination works pretty much like it worked in recent Civilization games: conquer the capital city of each of the other nations.

Contact is kinda broken right now, so I'm not going to waste my time even trying it. The problem is that there are no tech requirements, so if you get lucky and find an alien artifact near your starting point, you can win the game in about thirty turns or so. All you really have to do is spam a lot of Explorer units to scour the world looking for alien artifacts, which triggers a series of tasks you have to perform to win the game.

Until they fix this, I expect all multiplayer games will just be a race to see who can get the Contact victory condition first. Yuck.
 
In a recent game, one of my explorers got an interesting bonus from a goodie hut: a free affinity level.

While I was not able to choose which affinity, this effectively gave me affinity levels earlier in the game at every step along the way, which made the game a heck of a lot easier than normal.

I heard there are other interesting and rare goodie hut bonuses, like one that gives you a siege worm early in the game.
 
I should have said the Contact victory condition has low tech requirements, not no tech requirements. Sorry.
 
Addendum: for the Supremacy victory condition, it's not 20 units, but a set amount of firepower, so you send fewer units if you send more powerful units.
 
If you are using AMD hardware, launching the game prompts you to answer if you want to run the DirectX version of the game or the AMD Mantle version of the game. If you're not familiar with Mantle, here's the Reader's Digest version:

  • Mantle offers a slight performance boost in most cases. The performance boost is more significant if you have a very powerful GPU paired with a lackluster CPU.
  • Mantle leaves optimization in the hands of the game developers instead of the GPU driver developers, which comes with obvious up sides and down sides.
 
So far I've played it over the weekend. It's much more challenging than Alpha Centauri or Alien Crossfire, but then again those games are so much older that they required a patch and changing one of the text files to run properly on Windows XP. I can't compare it to Civilization 4 or 5 as I only played Civilization 3 in that series, before this game. So far I like the game overall.
 
Well, the "Fall" update has been released in December:

http://www.civilization.com/en/news/2014-12--civilization-beyond-earth-fall-update-now-live/

It looks like the devs are determined to undermine wide strategies. Ugh.

For those who don't play Civ, Civ players talk about "tall" versus "wide" strategies. Tall strategies involve building a small number of cities that are very well developed, while wide strategies involve building a very large number of cities that are not as well developed (because manufacturing resources must be spent supporting the continual expansion).

Earlier incarnations of Civilization had game mechanics that heavily favored wide strategies over tall strategies. The game developers introduced various mechanics to make large empires less efficient so that there would be balance between the two and either strategy could be valid for certain situations. Now it seems that the pendulum has swung the other way. Now it's almost impossible to expand rapidly without experiencing severe penalties. If you expand slowly enough to avoid all the health problems, money problems, etc., then by the late game your "wide" empire is pretty laughably small.

Damn you, fall patch!
 
Have to agree Underseer. The first Sid Meier game I played was Alpha Centauri & it's expansion Alien Crossfire I don't know if it predated the first Civilization game. The wide strategy worked quite well there (I used University in Alpha Centauri, and Cybernetic Consciousness in Alien Crossfire) My first 4 or 5 cities would be tall, subsequent cities wide.

Now I wouldn't make more than 4 or 5 cities because of the health penalties. The prosperity virtues help there, a lot, especially if you take the shortest route to the 3rd tier virtues possible. That being said I still would be disinclined to make more than 4 or 5 cities. There's also the biowell improvement that helps there, I think it requires Bionics tech to make them.
 
I can easily get more than 4-5, but I confess that's because I play on the wussiest difficulty setting.

Late game, you can expand like crazy with the right technologies and the right virtues, but by then you're concentrating on whatever victory condition you're going for.
 
Its on Linux, so I bought it. Just so weird when other AAA titles can play on the open source radeon drivers that this one cant... Better find my patience though!
 
crispy said:
Its on Linux, so I bought it. Just so weird when other AAA titles can play on the open source radeon drivers that this one cant... Better find my patience though!
Click to expand...

I wonder if that has anything to do with Mantle?
 
Terrell said:
Have to agree Underseer. The first Sid Meier game I played was Alpha Centauri & it's expansion Alien Crossfire I don't know if it predated the first Civilization game. The wide strategy worked quite well there (I used University in Alpha Centauri, and Cybernetic Consciousness in Alien Crossfire) My first 4 or 5 cities would be tall, subsequent cities wide.

Now I wouldn't make more than 4 or 5 cities because of the health penalties. The prosperity virtues help there, a lot, especially if you take the shortest route to the 3rd tier virtues possible. That being said I still would be disinclined to make more than 4 or 5 cities. There's also the biowell improvement that helps there, I think it requires Bionics tech to make them.
Click to expand...

Underseer said:
I can easily get more than 4-5, but I confess that's because I play on the wussiest difficulty setting.

Late game, you can expand like crazy with the right technologies and the right virtues, but by then you're concentrating on whatever victory condition you're going for.
Click to expand...

Health has replaced happiness as the limitation for empire growth, but it is not a one for one replacement. I currently play on moderate difficulty (forget the exact name, but it is the first one that gives some bonuses to the AI), and don't have much of a problem expanding beyond 4-5 cities. In Civ 5, negative happiness could be a killer, causing your cities to eventually rebel and spawn troops. You really had to carefully manage your happiness, and I would never consider creating a new city until I had 7-10 positive health banked. Negative health in Civ: BE does not cause as many problems as negative happiness did. I often find myself sending out colonists when I have negative health, as I can live with small penalties incurred. You don't get a hit to health as soon as you plant the colonist, because it takes time for the outpost to develop into a city. I have had some pretty major health penalties after waging war and annexing cities, but have never seen a city rebel because of it. You also have more options for improving health, from biowells to semi-random quest bonuses you can pick after the first time you make a building of each available type.

Try playing a game or two where you don't pay as much attention to negative health as you might have to negative happiness, and see if that helps your ability to expand.
 
Will try that, next time I play. Will also seek the Bionics tech more quickly so I can make biowells. I do already work on the Prosperity virtues first, because of the health bonuses, and reduction in health penalties, in the latter parts of the virtue tree. At this time, I play on the default difficulty setting.

When I played Alpha Centauri & Alien crossfire I played usually on the Librarian level of difficulty. I always did wish that game had an option, when playing huge worlds, to spread the factions out evenly on the planet. I always hated when I'd just make planetfall, and right next door was another faction's capital. Especially if it was one of the more aggressive factions.
 
Ugh.

I do not like the prosperity virtues.

The health bonuses don't really kick in until near the end of tier 2, which means that all those other bonuses in tier 1 and 2 that help you expand more quickly are completely wasted. I much prefer the knowledge and industry virtues, as both offer minor health bonuses at the beginning of tier 2, and offer plenty of other more useful stuff than expansion bonuses you can't really use until later.
 
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