![]() ![]() There's new prettiness to behold too - strange minerals and impossible science lurking beneath the water's skin. ![]() The aquatic stuff all folds in very naturally though, becoming part of your ongoing expansion and involving its own aliens, units and tense sieges. It's not as exciting as it sounds, and I found it more expedient to simply buy new hexes with Energy instead. They can also, as a build order, be made to move ever so slightly across the water, thus adding territory, as they can't acquire it via Culture, as the land cities can. The good news is that water is now effectively an alternative landmass, upon which you can construct new cities, which in turn have access to special aquatic tech that land-locked settlements do not. I often steer clear of naval stuff in Civ games if I can, because little grey boats are boring and it's just one more thing to manage amid millions, so I wasn't overjoyed that Rising Tide seemed to be fleshing out the oceans but not the land. Now, it's something to build on, and to fight over. There was some basic naval stuff in Beyond Earth, but fundamentally an ocean was just a body of water to cross in order to settle or battle elsewhere. The other big shift, in terms of lifting Beyond Earth beyond a retextured Earth, is sweeping change to water. A great shame: you're on a brand new planet! Dealing with brand new species is profound! It feels as though this is something Beyond Earth's oddly under-played quest system could toy with, but that's pretty much still the same dry, pop-up sideshow as before. So there aren't any real consequences to genocide, and I feel that, even with Rising Tide, Beyond Earth hasn't done anything more than reskin Civ's Barbarians as aliens. When you start building human-alien hybrids, it's nothing to do with what's actually on the planet, simply a result of research. You piss 'em off if you start attacking them, and other civs may raise a spoken eyebrow at your actions, but other than that it is hard to come up with a reason why you wouldn't wipe them out - even when placid, they simply get in the way. It also soothes my troubled soul a little - I don't like wiping out the natives just to clear space or so they stop bothering me, so this is a way to turn things to my advantage without resorting to genocide.Įven so, the politics and philosophy of alien engagement remains almost non-existent. One of several bugs I encountered in this very slightly pre-release code meant I could Leash those guys from the start, but fortunately it was much more a bit of a fun than an unfair advantage. With the right research, you can also Leash Collosal Aliens, including the mighty Siege Worm. Without Leash, it's a long wait for the game to give you anything that isn't Some Blokes, but with it you can have a more characterful army from the off. Realistically, most aliens are pretty lousy fighters once the human civs have progressed past basic technology, but it's both useful and fun to have free insta-reinforcements if you need them. The best addition is Leash, however, which lets you make any alien into your own personal fighting pet. For instance, there's a new tech which keeps them calm, so you don't have hell to pay every time you have to stomp one of their nests, and another which lets you sic 'em on an enemy. You can do more things with/to them, too. There are quite a few more alien species hanging around, for a start, a few of which are pleasantly enormous and more ambitious in their design than the 'just some big green bugs, I guess' approach of the vanilla game. While Rising Tide doesn't quite wash away the dryness, it does take Beyond Earth further away from Civ V, and closer to the otherworldly experience I know I'd been hoping for. Not being the spiritual Alpha Centauri successor many had long prayed for was one thing, but not creating a meaningful sense of strange new worlds was the kicker. While perfectly solid, it was greeted with no little gloom at its conservatism, at how it felt so much like Civilization V with rather dry sci-fi lip service applied. The good news is that, with its first expansion, Beyond Earth feels much more its own game than it did before. It's out tomorrow, but I've spent the last few days with it. ![]() Rising Tide is the first, and some might say much-needed, expansion pack for Beyond Earth, the sci-fi Civilization V spin-off which met a somewhat muted reception.
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