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Sid Meier's: Civilization Beyond Earth

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Posts

  • CalixtusCalixtus Registered User regular
    Glyph wrote: »
    There's some major shit flinging going on right now on boards like 4chan about how there's a distinct lack of Caucasian males as faction leaders, and how unlike in SMAC, they're based on regional Earth groups instead of ideologies.

    Then there's the mainstay concerns about basically using a modified Civ 5 engine and the lack of a unit workshop, as well as the inability to change terrain levels and rainfall patterns, etc. like in SMAC.

    Any of this grinding any gears amongst you rabble?
    I actually really miss the terrain modification options available in SMAC.

    Call it equal parts "these small islands here could be made into a Pangeanic Mesa of Greater World Domination" and "That's a nice contintent you've got there, shame if someone were to drop a planetbuster or three on it."

    And I think it'll be difficult to build the same kind of, well, personality cults that SMAC managed around the alignment system of CBE.

    "Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?"

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  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    Calixtus wrote: »
    And I think it'll be difficult to build the same kind of, well, personality cults that SMAC managed around the alignment system of CBE.

    If you're referring to faction leaders, that's because SMAC leaders were easily identifiable. They were caricatures after all. You have the Science! Civ, the Capitalist Civ, the Religious Civ, the Eco Civ, the Commie-Borg Civ, the War Civ and the Peace Civ. The problem of course is that while they provide a very effective "us versus them" theme, they seemed less like civilizations and more like gangs or ideological fanatics.

    One thing I have to credit the factions in CBE with is how they seem more established and grounded. They're representatives of their respective Earth-bound sponsors. Makes sense. They're mega-corporations and supranational entities. They're more rounded out, less one-dimensional. I feel like these are futuristic regional societies with possible cultures and subcultures revolving around more than just one aspect of modern society as we know it.

    It was a more mature step to take in terms of overall sci-fi lore and predicting a possible future geopolitical landscape. The alignment system adds yet another layer of complexity on top of that. Obviously it's never going to be as engaging (and entertaining) as seeing a faction leader attempting character assassination against another by disparaging their way of life, but then a little more nuance couldn't hurt.

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    Disagree.

    While SMAC leaders were clearly inspired by an ideological theory they were developed enough that they were not wholly one dimensional. Further, I don't think it's fair to call them caricatures, they really came off as trying to fairly portray the ideology they were representing.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    They did so in spite of themselves though, with the support of a wealth of background material and quotes hinting at their individual convictions and experiences peppered throughout the technology tree. They were still caricatures though, and rightly so. More than mere representatives or leaders, they're meant to be larger-than-life personifications of their empires.

  • CaedwyrCaedwyr Registered User regular
    Glyph wrote: »
    DodgeBlan wrote: »
    I agree that the sci fi world build stuff seems pretty generic and... not compelling this time around.

    I think this owes more to there being less early fluff released to us this time around. Like with SMAC, we were constantly getting story chapters about
    what happened aboard the ship and on the early days of planetfall.

    Do you have a link or remember where you found the post-planetfall story chapters? I've got a copy and enjoyed reading about the events that happened on the ship, but don't remember anything about the early days of planetfall.

  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    It's a trilogy of SMAC paperback novels by Michael Ely - Centauri Dawn, Dragon Sun and Twilight of the Mind.

    https://www.goodreads.com/series/86500-sid-meier-s-alpha-centauri

    Some excerpts can be found online though I'm not sure about full PDF files.

    There's also a graphic novel called Power of the Mindworms.

  • StormwatcherStormwatcher Blegh BlughRegistered User regular
    Brasilia fuck yeah

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  • CaedwyrCaedwyr Registered User regular
    Glyph wrote: »
    It's a trilogy of SMAC paperback novels by Michael Ely - Centauri Dawn, Dragon Sun and Twilight of the Mind.

    https://www.goodreads.com/series/86500-sid-meier-s-alpha-centauri

    Some excerpts can be found online though I'm not sure about full PDF files.

    There's also a graphic novel called Power of the Mindworms.

    How are they in your opinion? Worth reading, or more typical video game tie-in books (pretty bad reads)?

  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    Caedwyr wrote: »
    Glyph wrote: »
    It's a trilogy of SMAC paperback novels by Michael Ely - Centauri Dawn, Dragon Sun and Twilight of the Mind.

    https://www.goodreads.com/series/86500-sid-meier-s-alpha-centauri

    Some excerpts can be found online though I'm not sure about full PDF files.

    There's also a graphic novel called Power of the Mindworms.

    How are they in your opinion? Worth reading, or more typical video game tie-in books (pretty bad reads)?

    Well they're not Asimov or Banks but as far as these kind of stories go, they still expand the world of SMAC and its ideas.

  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    edited July 2014
    Brazilian leader revealed:

    http://www.civilization.com/us/news/civilization-beyond-earth-brasilia-commander-bolivar-addresses-troops/

    Commander Rejinaldo Leonardo Pedro Bolivar de Alencar-Araripe
    "We stood guard over the UN camps in central Asia, our planes carried the relief supplies in and the refugees out of the fallout zones, and we took down the warlords and carved out a space where an effective government could be formed. We did what the Norteamericanos or Chinese would not do."

    So 200 years from now, Brazil will be America, but better I guess.

    Glyph on
  • jdarksunjdarksun Struggler VARegistered User regular
    When Brazil's soccer-based nationalism failed, they turned instead to military power.

  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    Well this could go a long way in explaining why there's no Germanic faction.

  • NotoriusBENNotoriusBEN Registered User regular
    "We did what the Norteamericanos or Chinese would not do."

    That line right there. That explains a lot of what this faction is about. Something even the Chinese went and said, "Whoa, bro, that aint happening."

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  • SynthesisSynthesis Honda Today! Registered User regular
    edited July 2014
    "We did what the Norteamericanos or Chinese would not do."

    That line right there. That explains a lot of what this faction is about. Something even the Chinese went and said, "Whoa, bro, that aint happening."

    Actually, given that very consistent, rather long tradition of political non-interference held by Beijing, for better and worse, it doesn't really tell us that much.

    Unless Central Asia actually is in China (since it's not in the ocean). It could really go either way.

    But hey, BRIC powers, man.

    Synthesis on
  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    Franco-Iberia leader announced... but only on select French and Spanish language sites. Very coy.

    civilization_beyond_earth-2577150.jpg

    http://www.3djuegos.com/juegos/avances/19049/4263/0/civilization-beyond-earth/

  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    edited July 2014
    Dedwrekka wrote: »
    SMAC faction leaders were based on specific regions, the factions they led were based on ideology. Also there were only three european-descended faction leaders in SMAC out of the original seven factions. Crossfire isn't even worth describing people as of a specific earth race as it's based after the first landfall and blooming.

    I thoght the fiction was like only a few years after planetfall and most of the new faction leaders (besides the aliens and the child cult leader) had positions on the Unity.

    Like, Aki was a computer lab technician, Cinder Roze was the Unity Network Administrator, and the pirate dude was the "Unity Astrogator"

    Undead Scottsman on
  • Professor PhobosProfessor Phobos Registered User regular
    The leadership was present, but in terms of the "plot" the five human crossfire factions are best seen as emerging sometime after Planetfall, amidst the chaos of factional conflict already taking place between the seven originals.

  • DrascinDrascin Registered User regular
    Glyph wrote: »
    Franco-Iberia leader announced... but only on select French and Spanish language sites. Very coy.

    civilization_beyond_earth-2577150.jpg

    http://www.3djuegos.com/juegos/avances/19049/4263/0/civilization-beyond-earth/

    So apparently they're the Culture Civ, with an advantage in "green technology" and a very high standard of living for its people. They get free techs every so often from Culture, allowing them to have a culture focus without hobbling themselves. Élodie herself is apparently a magnetic sort of personality with aristocratic origins and a vice grip on media that she used to position herself through popularity as head of the whole space business and create great centralized art and culture collections. There's more said but I don't have the time to translate to English the whole thing.

    Also, this interview has a seriously stilted Spanish, you can tell they translated it from English, badly.

    Steam ID: Right here.
  • M-VickersM-Vickers Registered User regular
    Drascin wrote: »
    Glyph wrote: »
    Franco-Iberia leader announced... but only on select French and Spanish language sites. Very coy.

    civilization_beyond_earth-2577150.jpg

    http://www.3djuegos.com/juegos/avances/19049/4263/0/civilization-beyond-earth/

    So apparently they're the Culture Civ, with an advantage in "green technology" and a very high standard of living for its people. They get free techs every so often from Culture, allowing them to have a culture focus without hobbling themselves. Élodie herself is apparently a magnetic sort of personality with aristocratic origins and a vice grip on media that she used to position herself through popularity as head of the whole space business and create great centralized art and culture collections. There's more said but I don't have the time to translate to English the whole thing.

    Also, this interview has a seriously stilted Spanish, you can tell they translated it from English, badly.

    I love how culture works in Civ 5, so this might be my starter faction.

    I realised the other day that BE launches halfway through a trip to the USA. On the bright side, a cheaper game. Down side, I have to wait an extra week to play...

    Is there a special edition planned ? There's nothing on Amazon, but I'd be really tempted to spend extra if there was a nice book or something included...

  • Inquisitor77Inquisitor77 2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club Champion A fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
    Drascin wrote: »
    Glyph wrote: »
    Franco-Iberia leader announced... but only on select French and Spanish language sites. Very coy.

    civilization_beyond_earth-2577150.jpg

    http://www.3djuegos.com/juegos/avances/19049/4263/0/civilization-beyond-earth/

    So apparently they're the Culture Civ, with an advantage in "green technology" and a very high standard of living for its people. They get free techs every so often from Culture, allowing them to have a culture focus without hobbling themselves. Élodie herself is apparently a magnetic sort of personality with aristocratic origins and a vice grip on media that she used to position herself through popularity as head of the whole space business and create great centralized art and culture collections. There's more said but I don't have the time to translate to English the whole thing.

    Also, this interview has a seriously stilted Spanish, you can tell they translated it from English, badly.

    Maybe it's a dialect thing? She's supposed to be from "future Europe", so she may have a different way of speaking than, say, current Latin America.

    I only say this because a poor translation would be an unfortunate issue, given how relatively cheap high-quality translation services are nowadays. We're talking a couple-hundred bucks for several pages of text.

  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    M-Vickers wrote: »
    Is there a special edition planned ? There's nothing on Amazon, but I'd be really tempted to spend extra if there was a nice book or something included...

    Yeah the Civ 5 Special Edition came with Pewter miniatures and a decent art book. I like those little goodies. Wouldn't mind seeing something similar with CBE, like a full-on collector's edition complete with a Supremacy soldier or Harmony tank figurine and a book with all the concept art and design/fluff notes.

    CivBE-affinities.jpg

  • DrascinDrascin Registered User regular
    No, I mean the inteview with the developers in the linked page. They clearly did the interview in English and then translated near verbatim. You can see the English grammar still there.

    Steam ID: Right here.
  • Inquisitor77Inquisitor77 2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club Champion A fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
    Drascin wrote: »
    No, I mean the inteview with the developers in the linked page. They clearly did the interview in English and then translated near verbatim. You can see the English grammar still there.

    Oooohh ya that makes sense now lol. They probably ran it through Google Translate and called it a day...

  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    edited July 2014
    So... Purity, Harmony or Supremacy?

    http://strawpoll.me/2148357/

    CiviBE-aff.jpg

    Glyph on
  • M-VickersM-Vickers Registered User regular
    Glyph wrote: »
    So... Purity, Harmony or Supremacy?

    http://strawpoll.me/2148357/

    Only 18% for Harmony ?

    Can't we all just yet along ? :-(

  • CaedwyrCaedwyr Registered User regular
    Don't Harmony get bio-titans later on? I imagine that when people realize that Harmony lets them build Kaiju they might become a bit more popular.

  • KadokenKadoken Giving Ends to my Friends and it Feels Stupendous Registered User regular
    But, Robuts.

    Although, I was reading up on a civ wiki, and the Supremacy victory seems major sketch. Apparently, what you do is build a teleporter to "free" the peoples of Earth from their weak bodies. With a requisite of putting military troops through the portal.

    Yeah...

  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    Kadoken wrote: »
    But, Robuts.

    Although, I was reading up on a civ wiki, and the Supremacy victory seems major sketch. Apparently, what you do is build a teleporter to "free" the peoples of Earth from their weak bodies. With a requisite of putting military troops through the portal.

    Yeah...

    I like it. It has a hint of that darker tone that was pervasive in SMAC. If it helps, just think of them as security forces there to ensure Supremacy diplomats and those who wish to join the Singularity aren't attacked by the paranoid luddite denizens of Earth. The same way aid workers in Pakistan need protection from Islamic militants who think vaccinations are just a Western ploy to infect/sterilize them.

  • AistanAistan Tiny Bat Registered User regular
    Or you can think of them as the Borg, which is what i'll be doing.

  • wiltingwilting I had fun once and it was awful Registered User regular
    I'm a little annoyed I won't be able to play a proper pan-European faction.

  • DrascinDrascin Registered User regular
    M-Vickers wrote: »
    Glyph wrote: »
    So... Purity, Harmony or Supremacy?

    http://strawpoll.me/2148357/

    Only 18% for Harmony ?

    Can't we all just yet along ? :-(

    Honestly, with this being a poll in /tg/ according to the title, I'm just surprised Purity isn't winning by a landslide. /tg/ is pretty, to use their own terms, "Humanity Fuck Yeah".

    Steam ID: Right here.
  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    Drascin wrote: »
    M-Vickers wrote: »
    Glyph wrote: »
    So... Purity, Harmony or Supremacy?

    http://strawpoll.me/2148357/

    Only 18% for Harmony ?

    Can't we all just yet along ? :-(

    Honestly, with this being a poll in /tg/ according to the title, I'm just surprised Purity isn't winning by a landslide. /tg/ is pretty, to use their own terms, "Humanity Fuck Yeah".

    It was also spammed on /v/, which is considerably less 40K-centric and more Deus Ex.
    CivBE-Deus3.jpg

  • Lord_AsmodeusLord_Asmodeus goeticSobriquet: Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered User regular
    The thing is, I personally wouldn't necessarily go for any one of the factions. I'd probably go for a mix and a balance

    I.E. humanity must stay true to its roots, but also not try to radically transform this unique biosphere and learn to live with it, while also not being afraid to upgrade our bodies with cybernetics to improve ourselves, but we shouldn't abandon our old bodies entirely either.

    Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
  • enlightenedbumenlightenedbum Registered User regular
    We're all going to play them all, so it's kind of silly.

    Says the guy who would have all the win with a Civ achievements (on Emperor!) if he hadn't been distracted by Mount and Blade for the last week and a half.

    Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
  • Maledict66Maledict66 Registered User regular
    I wonder if the missing countries are lined up for DLC. I mean, Germany and the UK vanishing off the face of the map is strange and they must have some idea behind them as they specifically went with France / Spain rather than a pan-European faction.

  • Professor PhobosProfessor Phobos Registered User regular
    I suspect there's a reason the US faction is called the "American Reclamation Corporation", a "Great Mistake" is in the backstory, and UK/Germany/Russia/China are missing...

  • Maledict66Maledict66 Registered User regular
    Russia I presume is part of the Slavic Federation? Sort of seems Putin is aiming for that nowadays anyway...

  • enlightenedbumenlightenedbum Registered User regular
    UK is an island and the trailer has the Pyramids flooded. So I'm thinking the UK is pretty much gone.

    Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
  • GlyphGlyph Registered User regular
    edited July 2014
    @ Maledict66 and Professor Phobos

    According to the official lore, the EU collapses at some point during the next hundred or so years while East Asian tensions boil over and eventually lead to war, with Franco-Iberia and the Pan-Asian Cooperative (PAC) emerging from the aftermath, as the EU and the governments of China, Japan, the Koreas and possibly parts of Southeast Asia have effectively been wiped out. The American Reclamation Corporation (ARC) was responsible for rebuilding North America after whatever cataclysm/nuclear holocaust and subsequent mass migration occurred, going on to form a kind of megacorporate super-state.

    It's implied that the Great Mistake was related to tensions in Asia between nuclear powers, specifically India and Pakistan, which when combined with conflict sparking over escalating hostility in the South China Sea, ended up dragging the rest of the world into a third world war. South America, as led by a more hegemonic Brazil, at some point ends up sending troops into Central Asia to stabilize the situation. India, having lost much of its population to either war or mass migration into the West to escape destruction, reforms into a theocracy under a new spiritual leader and a tighter Australia-New Zealand union eventually expands its influence to encompass much of the Pacific/Polynesian states and territories.

    African nations, now completely isolated from the rest of the world and any outside influence from either China or the West, along with any assistance that had previously been supporting warlords and corrupt governments, undergo a revolutionary period that gives them enough breathing room to work through their own problems, which eventually leads to a new Renaissance of introspection, revitalization and cross-tribal diplomatic efforts that transcend and eventually overcome old ethnic blood feuds, in time leading to a stronger, more binding and representative African Union.

    Meanwhile, Russia, having lost its main geopolitical ally China, even as other previously balkanized Eastern European states no longer have the EU as an alternative to the Russian economic and sociopolitical sphere, now suddenly have a common cause under which to form a tighter, more federalized union in the face of a rapidly changing social and geopolitical landscape.

    And that's where we're at now, after the world has been rebuilt around these powers and presumably others yet to be mentioned.

    Glyph on
  • StormwatcherStormwatcher Blegh BlughRegistered User regular
    Commander Rejinaldo Leonardo Pedro Bolivar de Alencar-Araripe

    Jesus fuck how did they come up with this
    At least get the spelling right, it's Reginaldo. And we don't usually have 3 first names. and Bolivar is not a Brazilian name, it's Latin-Spanish

    Steam: Stormwatcher | PSN: Stormwatcher33 | Switch: 5961-4777-3491
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