Thumbs up for murdering and/or being nice to aliens.
Firaxis’ Pete Murray has been streaming some early moves from Civilization: Beyond Earth, and those videos are now up on YouTube. They might have been around on Twitch too, but who knows what’s going on with their archiving system right now.
Anyway, the purpose of this 50-odd minute presentation is for Murray to demonstrate two ways of approaching indigenous alien encounters in Civilization: Beyond Earth. In his introduction, he says there’s been a tendency for testers and players at game events like E3 to treat the alien life like the barbarians from other Civ titles. As an annoyance to be eradicated, pretty much.
In his first 35 turn or so demonstration of the game, this is how he plays it. Attacking the aliens immediately and attempting to wipe out their nest. Doing so gains his troops some experience, and earns some energy resources too. Unsurprisingly though, it makes the local wildlife increasingly hostile.
Throughout this video series you’ll also get an idea of the Civilization: Beyond Earth user interface and some of the other features like affinities, or explorer-based expeditions.
The alien war crimes policy is working pretty well by the close of the first part of the presentation, but only because pretty much all of Murray’s research and production is geared towards the military. In doing so, other opportunities have been lost and every single alien on the planet is now hostile. It’s a viable path, but looks like a dangerous one that you have to commit to.
In the second portion (around 11 minutes into the second video,) Murray takes a different approach with the aliens and tries not to antagonise them. There are still scuffles around alien nests, but pulling troops or other units away from nests will cause the wildlife to back off in kind. This frees up time and resources to spend on trade opportunities, non-military research and so forth.
Civilization: Beyond Earth will be released on 24 October. You can watch the three part video series below.
