Trade Route Simulator Pro Beyond Earth: Hugely disappointing. Okay... that's unfair. It is a *great* tech demo in the sense of some of the art assets, music, and so on with some placeholder rips from Civ5 for a system. It missed out on 6 months of balancing, giving good options, and having a real writer actually make things worth a damn. Here are some good reviews that mirror my thoughts:
http://www.pcgamer.com/civilization-from-alpha-centauri-to-beyond-earth/http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2014/10/25/occasionally-thrilling-beyond-earth-cant-quite-get-beyond-civilization-v/#more-33473On the bright side, Civ5 vanilla with a new coat of paint isn't *bad*, exactly. But there's just plain bizarre unforced errors. The style / writing / environment just plain is not up to snuff with SMAC, and I'm fairly certain this isn't just misty nostalgia talking. The balance is awful. But most damningly, the gameplay isn't compelling. Everybody knows that Civ games are secretly giant board games where you're filling up meters in the background so you can fill your meters faster; more food -> more pop -> more dudes -> more science -> etc. However, there need to be some key decision points that allow you to customize your game. And it's okay if the human is better at doing this customization than the AI, that's what more cheating is for.
In SMAC, this was done via Wonders (Secret Projects) that offered unique powers, the faction abilities, and social engineering. You could use these combinations to create genuinely different playstyles, and hey, the ideological nature of the factions ALSO tied gameplay into a good reason to brawl. (Or, for that matter, to make allies - perhaps at the cost of others!) Just looking at the military, you could have an army of mindworms, which fought differently than out-of-date Believer rovers with an attack boost that made them scary anyway, which fought differently than an endless Hive horde, which fought differently than Morgan bribing your units with probe teams, which fought differently than Zakharov who was 4 techs up on you. And beyond that, there were a ton of customizations, so you could go equip nerve gas pods and get a big attack boost but screw up your trade income, or get anti-air / anti-psi boosts, etc. And yes, the AI wasn't perfect at handling this, but whatever. Same thing economically - Green does not play the same as Free Market which is not the same as Planned. In Civ5, the civ abilities are huge, and then there's the culture trees, which are flavorful and also instruct how you play the game - going Wide with Liberty is different than Tall with Tradition or religion-mongering with Faith.
In Beyond Earth, it's all just bigger numbers for those gauges mentioned above. I'm fine with making Affinity matter more than nation-sponsor choice, but it doesn't really matter which Affinity you pick, it doesn't instruct the way you play the game much at all. A Harmony player might get units styled Gaian-y, but they really aren't that different from Supremacy robots or Purity humans. They all have a bigger number, which is about it. A Gaian we-like-fungus strat isn't really doable. The Wonders are all fine as *placeholders* but are incredibly lame. They're basically like standard buildings except cost more and have random technobabble behind them - oh boy, extra energy & defense in a city, or extra food. A few simple Wonders like this are fine, especially when it's something flash like "double science in one city." But they're almost all really safe and boring and flavorless! WTF. I'm fine with *weak* Wonders to make getting them not too crucial, but at least offer unique, splashy, MTG Mythic Rare effects that can't be easily duplicated [even if overcosted]. The virtues (=Civ5 culture) system is way too bland and also unbalanced, with Prosperity >>> you, but the blandness is the real problem. It's harder to balance crazy powerful boosts, but at least encourage different playstyles rather than "your bars fill up faster!" Which is really what everything there is.
This game horribly violates the maxim of Sid Meier that it's better to offer a few compelling choices than many irrelevant ones. Beyond Earth gives you lots of almost meaningless, flavorless technobabble about whether you want to use your super-algae for production or food, or use some building for science or orbital coverage, but who cares, the difference is generally tiny (and in the two cases it isn't, there is one Really Right answer and one Wrong answer - Autoplant & Ultrasonic Fence).
There's also some baffling omissions - SMAC had the Planetary Council, Civ5 had the UN, you're doing vast planetwide terraformy things, why can't you have some international council? It's already coded up in Civ5, surely...
Anyway, I can forgive unbalance, maybe I'm asking for even more unbalance, but *support different modes of play*. I want the patches to go all-in on making running a Supremacy civ totally different than a Purity civ which is totally different than a Purity civ, and if one ends up "better" oh well. And to get some memorable characters and story going. As is, the strategy is just to spam ridiculously OP trade routes and manage them with some awful UI and watch as your gagues go up faster than everyone else. They need both UI help *and* a savage nerf. Hell, go back to SMAC / Civ4: make trade routes 100% automatic but weaker. Sigh. (as a side note, I found out I'd been interpreting BNW trade routes wrong; I thought internal trade routes COST one city food & resources to power up the other city, hence being a Venice-only thing. Sheesh, they're probably OP in BNW too, although less so, since you need a few external ones to keep the AI pacified, and it's per-civ trade routes there rather than 3-per-city trade routes of doom in Beyond Earth.)
To be clear, there's some solid ideas in BE, so I'll hold out hope for a patch. I like the Affinities & the victory conditions, for example, even if the UI is grindy in practice for finishing them (oh boy wait a bunch of turns). We'll see.
