SMAC's Spiritual Successor

[Lorizael]

This is what we've heard about government/civics/culture/social engineering/social policies/virtues so far...

In Beyond Earth, you lead different factions with contrasting cultures. One of the critiques of Civilization V‘s take on culture was that it felt like a second tech tree instead of a feature unto itself. How does culture work in Beyond Earth?

David McDonough: There’s a system called virtues, which is an expression of what your civilization cares about, so who they grow up to be, what their priorities are and so forth. It’s been totally redesigned for this game, meaning it’s different from any previous Civilization. Culture drives the acquisition of items within a virtue table, and those items have a lot of cross-linking benefits in and out of other systems in the game — everything from city progression to tile improvement to military strategies to territorial acquisition and diplomacy and so on.

Lena Brenk: The way Anton designed it, the trees are a lot deeper, so you have a tree that you can follow down, the whole column through, and the more points you spend in one tree, you get kickers — additional bonuses that you rack up. If you go very wide and select virtues from different branches of different trees, you get kickers as well, but they’re different in that they give you bonuses for going in very different directions and not focusing on one tree. So the system is quite different from prior Civilization games.

...which sounds an awful lot like Civ5. The only real difference is the idea that you get "kickers" for diversifying as well as for specializing.

[self biased]

I'm okay with that. the social trees always felt too shallow Civ 5.

[Lorizael]

I'm wondering if the civ 4 style social policies are obsolete gameplay at this point. We like being able to change our minds, but how often did we backtrack in Civ 4?

The problem with Civ4's civics was that the later choices were unequivocally better than the earlier ones. Greater bonuses, lower upkeep, etc. So you were ultimately going to end up like a western style democracy, which is what we equate with success these days.

One of the game design elements the CivBE people have stressed so far is that the future is not written. So if you want to become a superpowered AI with a robot army, you can do that (probably no time travel, though). I think the same could apply to the virtue system as well. We don't know what type of government/social policies will be powerful/possible in the future, so there's something to be said for there not being a single method of ruling your future civ.

Apart from your affinity, you could have technocratic oligarchies ruled by scientific elite; or collectivist societies using network tech and brain interfaces to create a real-time direct democracy; or libertarian societies where everybody lives self-sufficient lives thanks to an abundance of energy and replicators. Who knows.

[Guynemer]

Long before your time, this here site was the largest and most popular Civ site on the whole internet.

In the long, long ago. In the before time.

[onodera]

I mostly used state property in Civ4, and.
slavery too.

[Jon Miller]

The issue with SMAC is it was one of the rare strategy games which had a great story which was told through the game (in addition to short stories/etc). You could get the great story in game without ever reading the stories (although those also were very good). And the story was through the game, not through cut scenese and scenarios (yes, you could call the wonder videos/etc as cut scenes, but I consider those game).

In fact, it had a better story than many RPGs with 'professional' writers on board.

In fact, it had better story than a lot of the SF that is on Amazon these days.

I don't think that we can expect the same from BE, and probably shouldn't. It is too easy to mess up and get something that detracts instead of enhances. Better to have something more open ended.

JM
(WTB SMAC for OS X)
(SMAC had a better story than SMACX, as far as that goes. It is why in some ways I prefer SMAC over SMACX)

[Aeson]

Yah, I don't expect as much personality/story, but the hope is there

It does sound much more open ended with the tech web. The problem sounds like it will be that the tech web is really going to be more like a tech pyramid where you start somewhere in the middle and choose a corner to move towards. That would mean there's 3 basic stories, with slightly different starting positions based on what bonuses you pick to start with. Hopefully there will be valid hybrid approaches and not "one right way to play" for each victory condition.

[Urban Ranger]

Rats, I was hoping something similar to SMAC...
One thing I really really hate is micromanagement. I hope they do something about it. One of the good features (or perhaps the only one) in Call to Power is the public works system.

[Aeson]

Workers are still units. Spies appear to be more along the lines of public works now. (Not exactly sure on that.)

[gdijedi7]

I didn't like Alpha Centauri while it was the current game. When I went back to it years later, I wondered what was wrong with me, because it was a wonderful game.

That said, Alpha Centauri was a very pessimistic game. I'm not sad at all that Beyond Earth goes in the other direction. The way the novels ended was particularly terrible, even though I enjoyed the books.

My main beef with Beyond Earth so far is the social policies. I dislike Civ 5's system, and it looks like it was basically copy and pasted into Beyond Earth. The bonuses for broad movement as opposed to only deep movement is interesting, but it still looks basically boring. I would like branches in each policy tree that shout out options in the other branches. Make you make some choices instead of just going down the line.