http://www.gamespot.com/articles/beyond-earth-takes-civilization-to-the-stars/1100-6418906/ Quote from the article:
Haha, super interested in this. That said I get the sense it's more of a "future civ5" rather than strictly trying to mimic Alpha Centauri? The feel is v. different.
It is a Civilization game. I will buy it at full price before it comes out. I care not about anything else.
I'm fully looking forward to this if it's not a carbon copy of civ5 in space (though I do like civ5 after all the expansions.)
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/beyond-earth-the-alpha-centauri-connection/1100-6418924/ I also am really excited about this. I love the civ series, but I'm also among the crowd who kept having his fingers crossed for an AC 2. Granted, this is not going to be AC2, nor did I mean by the title of the thread that it might be, only that it's by the same company and has a similar idea behind it.
I'll be following this too. I'm interested in seeing how they craft it. While Civ5 felt like a step backwards from Civ4 in many ways to me, I still liked it after the first expansion. AC2 would be great- I especially liked the ability to terraform and pick social policies in AC. Though I could never really bring myself to play anything but a greenie faction for very long... If this turns out to be Civ5 in space, I'll likely give it a pass until a large sale. Or expansions that "fix" it.
I mostly played the U.N. Peace guys, or Gaians (like you), or the technocrat faction, with occasional attempts at morganites (industrialists). That said, when I was playing in a couple of tournaments, I got to pick any faction I wanted so long as no one else picked it, and no one else wanted the Gaians except for me, in every round of every tournament. No one wanted Gaians because everyone thought that in a multiplayer game, they'd be too weak. Mostly people went for either one of the more militant factions (Spartans, 'fascist guys (whatever they were called) and religious nuts), except for one guy in the final round of one tournament who was crazy about Morgan. Punch line is that I won every game except the last round of the last tournament, in which case I came in second to... The Morganites who had finagled an economic victory, of course. I think I won like a $25.00 gift certificate or something like that for second place. Gaians are great, if you play to their strengths (plant lots of forests and later, fungus, tame the native wildlife, which can get you a nice early military force for cheap). And Morgan (mostly) sucks... unless you are allowed to get a good start, and you really know what you are doing (which this guy obviously did) and no one messes with you (Because Morgan sucks in most games). He was friends with almost everyone, eventually some of us noticed how well he was doing, but it was too late. Moral of the story is that in a multiplayer game, you never let Morgan get a good start, or he'll take off like a bandit. He seems fragile, but only because in single-player games, the ai alliances are too fluid to allow him to get off the ground.
Forests don't seem intuitively good early in the game -- sure they give decent production, but the food output from them is meager at first. But they do pay off once you have tree farms and hybrid forests in place to get tons of food from them. And later on... oh that delicious fungus ). Those other factions don't know what they are missing lol (I think it's funny that you pretty much can ski on the fungus eventually, or at least that's how it seems to me).
