Alien Evolution

an advanced Harmony unit

This is the third part of my commentary on the science fiction-oriented game Beyond Earth. In part one, I introduced the central game feature of combat against the native aliens of the exoplanet that you are colonizing during the game. In part 2, I explored the advanced technologies that can be used to capture and control alien creatures.

Late in the game, some of the advanced units mix together human and alien components. The idea that in the year 2800 you might create alien mounts for a cavalry unit seems more like fantasy than science fiction, but it reminds me of a scene in Araminta Station where the main characters go for a Bunter ride.

Technological Singularity

mind flower

The technology tree for Beyond Earth is an odd mixture of known technologies and imaginary ones. In the year 2750, you can find yourself at the point of having worked for 150 years developing futuristic advances such as "synergetics", then you are back to "reclaiming" older "lost" technologies such as a "network" that "links all of our systems". One way to win the game is to build a "giant bio-mechanical brain machine" that allows you to merge with the aliens of the planet and achieve "a new level of consciousness."

The next version?

Isaac Asimov wrote several stories about "conscious planets", the most famous being his world "Gaia" from the Foundation saga. In his novel Nemesis, Asimov depicted human colonists establishing telepathic contact with the alien "mind" of a planet called Erythro. It would be fun to have a version of Beyond Earth that simulated the development of planet Erythro into the group mind of Gaia, all in the context of Asimov's imagined Galactic Empire.

warp gate, version 1.0

When playing the low-difficulty training levels of the game, the computer-generated factions in Beyond Earth display no hint of human-like artificial intelligence. In fact, the computer-controlled factions seem designed to let you win. The game is more challenging when you play the difficult "Apollo" level, but I'm not sure that "intelligent" is the correct term to apply to the behavior of your opponents. Part of the problem is that there seems to be weakness in high-level strategy and an emphasis on brute force algorithms that are simply trying to goad you into fighting before you are ready.

phasal transporter orbital unit

In Search of Teleportation
In Beyond Earth, if you obtain the "artificial intelligence" and "hypercomputing" technologies, then you can build a "warp gate" that allows you to return to Earth. There is one teleportation technology that can be used to move your units around the exoplanet that you are colonizing: an orbital unit called a "phasal transporter" can bring units from your cities to a distant site, for example, on another continent. To get this teleportation technology you must develop these intermediate technologies: engineering, fabrication, cybernetics and "autogyros".

scout unit

teleportation near a distant firaxite (golden) deposit

Even with all of your fantastic future technology, it takes an explorer unit FOREVER to reach the other side of your exoplanet without teleportation. One "gift" that the game developers provided was the mysterious resource 'firaxite'. You can put a teleportation orbital unit near a distant firaxite resource and then quickly teleport land or sea units to that location from your cities.

A unit is ready to teleport from a city to a distant site.

The Beyond Earth game is designed to make you laboriously explore the planet one hex at a time. This made sense in the original Civilization game when you began playing in 4000 BCE, but it makes little sense for a future world where you have orbital satellites and advanced transportation. When playing Colonization, I don't mind if it takes most of the game to explore the map using slowly-moving scout units, but in the futuristic world of Beyond Earth, this kind of slow movement across the map makes no sense.

Nanohive unit

I wish teleportation of units arrived earlier in the game, perhaps in a limited or "experimental" mode that has risks of failed or inaccurate transport. As it is, teleportation can be useful for getting units quickly to the other side of the world, but only late in the game after you have researched advanced technology. Note: aircraft are limited in their ability to be teleported, but you can teleport colonist units.

soldiers passing through a cloud of miasma

One of the features of Beyond Earth is "miasma", what looks like a green mist covering perhaps 20% of the map hexes. The main effect of "miasma" is that it makes game designers stop thinking. All of your units in Beyond Earth wear special respiration equipment, but we are told that their health is damaged by passing through clouds of "miasma spores", even though any alien "spore" should be able to get filtered out of the air using the technology of the year 2800.

nanite engineers clearing "Black Miasma" nanites

This "miasma" could have been transformed by the game developers from "virulent spores" to a type of nanotechnology left behind by the Progenitors. There could have been different "types" or "levels" of Progenitor nanites scattered around the planet, with one "type" functioning in the way that "miasma" does, but another, thicker type of nanite cloud (call it "black miasma") would have functioned to obscure the ability of satellites to find the resource pods and expedition sites that are scattered around the planet. There could have been a special unit for exploring the planet and clearing the regions of "black miasma". These units could have been very fast in traveling to their destination, but slow to perform the difficult work of clearing away the "black miasma" nanites.

warp gate version 2.0

Hypercomputing and Hyper-drive
Needing "hypercomputing" to get a "warp gate" reminds me of an old story by Isaac Asimov in which a super-intelligent "positronic brain" invents "hyperdrive" technology. This "warp" technology in Beyond Earth could have been a bridge towards another game in which players spread to many worlds and develop a civilization that grows through the galaxy, but instead it is only used for a few silly purposes such as a return to Earth, apparently (see the "warp gate v1.0" image, above) so that you can defeat the poor Earthlings with your (what looks like) clone army. A slightly more interesting use of the warp gate technology is to bring  additional settlers to your exoplanet from Earth. Since this happens late in the game, it can be a challenge to find a place for these new settlers, which is part of the "Purity" Affinity's victory condition.

refugee camp

I was not impressed by the appearance of the Earthling settlements that house the teleported new arrivals from Earth. I was expecting settlement camps that would grow with each new settler arriving, but these camps have no interesting features and never change. They appear to have been a last-minute addition, a way to simply stretch out the Purity victory condition for another 20 turns. Boo!

make alien contact

Alien Contact

Besides the standard victory that can be achieved by capturing the capitol city of all the other factions, the remaining way to win is a Contact victory. This path to victory reminds me of Contact, by Carl Sagan.

building the Beacon

You can build and launch a Deep Space Telescope and use it to detect a signal from the Progenitors. However, to make contact with this mysterious alien civilization, you must then build the Beacon, a gigantic land-based transmitter that has similarities to the "Machine" in the Contact movie. You can only build this fantastic device by making use of instructions provided in the decoded signal.

transmitting Beacon

To activate the Beacon you need to have saved up 1000 energy units. Once the Beacon begins transmitting its signal to the Progenitors, you can not accumulate any more energy; the Beacon uses it all for transmission. In the end, with contact achieved, sadly there is no great revelation and not even a look at the alien Progenitors. A disappointment of the standard Harmony affinity transcendence victory is that you "merge with your exoplanet" but fail to actually contact an alien intelligence.

I hope that in the future there might be a Civilization game (this isn't it) that allows players to explore the galaxy and interact with intelligent aliens. Also, why not explicitly include a form of time travel as part of the game?

remains of a giant alien creature

Bugs
There are still some bugs in Beyond Earth. I'm not convinced that the game programmers ever actually used the lame diplomacy system that they created for Beyond Earth. Sometimes the "conversations" with other faction leaders get into endless loops of "let me think about it".

completed game "replay" list

There is a "Hall of Fame", but it only shows some of my completed games such as "Polystralia, Transcendence Victory!" Soon after I started playing the game, that page broke and it now shows the message: "You have not yet completed any games" and some of my completed games have not been added to the "hall of fame" list but they are visible in the "replay" list where you can review stats for past games.

There are some bugs in the user interface. Sometimes you try to give orders to a unit using the menu of orders, but then the available unit orders are covered up by a battle outcome popup message that you don't want. At other time, you can't read the name of a city because other on-screen information is concealing the name.

You have not completed any games!

the game has bugs

There are several problems with the "hot seat" mode. They messed up the timing and coordination of when some information windows pop up and the termination of turns for players. Sometimes a pop-up window is seen for only a moment and sometimes one will get frozen on the screen and it cannot be dismissed by clicking the "close" button.

different palettes of
unit action buttons

For me, the most annoying part of the user interface is the set of buttons for selecting actions for your units to perform. Rather than one standard pallet for the actions, the choices change and their positions on the screen can change for each new unit. You can accidentally push the wrong button if you don't pay careful attention to these annoying changes in the position of the buttons.

location, location,
location

Fantasy?
Some of the game features seem like fantasy rather than science fiction. You find the bones of gigantic alien creatures, so large that only a dozen could inhabit the entire planet at one time. Maybe the mysterious "Progenitors" who were on your new exoplanet in the distant past engineered creatures that had fantastically strong material components, allowing them to be gigantic?

game startup settings

The "world builder" for advanced game set-up and the system for selecting your landing site on the planet can be annoying. You can set your planet for "lush" growth but still find yourself landed on a part of the planet that is desert. There is a gigantic element of randomness in the game, so players should not hesitate to terminate a game early if your starting conditions are not favorable.

War fleet with upgraded carrier units, taking aircraft
to the other side of the planet.

For example, in my first game at the third level of difficulty, there was an alien nest right next to my first city, no access to the ocean (only a lake) and two nearby factions that created new cities at an absurdly fast rate, soon occupying all the nearby land that was worth developing.

I did not try for a "Domination" victory until I was playing at the 4th difficulty level. At the three easiest difficulty levels I used the maximum number of computer-generated opponents. To simplify my try for Domination, I decided to have only 4 opponents. None of the computer-controlled factions was located close to me, which gave me room to expand and build many cities without ever coming into conflict with another faction during the early part of the game.

A "Gemini" difficulty level military victory.

Eventually, I built a fleet to carry some aircraft within range of the enemy cities. Strangely, none of my opponents ever built any aircraft in that "Gemini" level game. Sadly, I was three turns away from being able to build my first orbital attack unit when I won the game using my air and sea power.

basic carrier unit before upgrade

If you are familiar with Civilization games, don't hesitate to keep advancing up the levels of difficulty with each game of Beyond Earth that you play.

collected artifacts (click image to enlarge)

Another gigantic source of randomness in Beyond Earth is the type of bonus that you get from finding a resource pod or from completing an expedition. This has always been a feature of Civilization games, but in Beyond Earth the most rare and interesting bonuses are the "artifacts". The artifacts that you collect can be exchanged for mundane bonuses such as some energy or special ones that you you are not able to get in any other way.

an artifact: the "God particle"?

Some of these special artifact rewards give you an immediate result such as increased strength and range for air units (Sky Chitin) or the ability to construct buildings such as the Warp Spire. When built in a city, Warp Spires provide a boost to your traded resources. I wish that the game developers had taken the opportunity to make these Spires into teleportation devices.

Some of the imaginary technologies in Beyond Earth are amusing. Here is one of my favorites, "machine-assisted free will" (see the image below)...

Sadly, for the developers of Beyond Earth, "research" is just a player wandering around and
collecting bits of information that can be combined in random ways for a bonus.

rocktopus orbital unit.

The developers of Beyond Earth seem to have had a motto: "Bigger is Better". One late-game unit for Harmony affinity is the giant "rocktopus". While on the ground, a rocktopus can shoot down other orbiting units. When in orbit, a rocktopus can attack enemy units on the planet's surface.

Ready to teleport

Like other land and sea units, the rocktopus can teleport. This image (to the left) shows that a rocktopus towers over a city.

giant Xeno Titan unit

Another late-game Harmony unit is the Xeno Titan.

While playing Beyond Earth, you may get the feeling that the computer-controlled factions don't always follow the same rules that constrain the growth of your civilization. Sometimes the other factions will miraculously have a dozen military units that seem to have materialized from thin air, but as often as not they will be engaged in some silly activity such as blasting aliens to bits rather than actually trying to win the game. Here is one such scene that I came across (below). The Pan-Asian Cooperative had declared war on me for no good reason. Many years went by and they never attacked me. I guess all of their military units were busy hunting worms.

A worm hunt with eight or more Pan-Asian units against a worm.

There are many ways for the computer to cheat. The computer will not let you build a new outpost within 3 hexes of an existing city, but the computer seems to allow itself to break that rule:

A computerized faction creates an outpost close to an existing city (Uspekh).

vexed and hexed

The fun to be had in playing Beyond Earth out-weighs the petty annoyances. When you defeat your military opponents, they will have a pithy final comment about having underestimated your abilities, but I wish the game was programmed for a more Sci Fi-specific feel at these moments.

final words of a defeated opponent (click to enlarge)

The vanquished foe could comment on the particular future technology that you used to crush your opponent rather that just utter a generic excuse for their dismal defeat.

an expedition

At the start of the game, growth of your new civilization seems slow compared to the pace of technological advance near the end of the game. This provides the player with some sense of an approaching technological singularity, but the fact that some key game units such as explorers never change through the course of a 2 or 3 hundred year game detracts from the feeling that you are rushing into a transformative future.

A useful mod:
explorer unit upgrades

Mods
I've investigated some of the available modifications for Beyond Earth. The never-changing, slow-as-a-snail explorer units are a real weak point in Beyond Earth. Modifications to the game that allow for more sophisticated explorer actions and upgrades are an obvious way to improve Beyond Earth.

Another constant source of frustration (particularly for players of other Civilization games) with Beyond Earth is the mapping of your exoplanet. In other games, factions can "trade maps" of the terrain that has already been explored. This should certainly be an available diplomatic agreement for two factions that form an alliance.

The potential diplomatic agreements with a newly allied faction when you have no orbital units.

joke science

By fully embracing some of the great science fiction themes such as nanotechnology, time travel, telepathy and teleportation this game could have been revolutionary rather than just an incremental variation on the typical Civilization game set on Earth. I feel like we are only teased with the science fiction elements of Beyond Earth and the game is mostly designed to prevent player boredom by assuring that the game experience involves lots of shooting, in the long tradition of Civilization games. I don't mind humor in science fiction, but it is hard to take the fictional science of Beyond Earth very seriously.

Still, if you turn off your analytical brain and enjoy the available eye candy, then the game can be great fun for science fiction fans like me and now that I've hooked up with Beyond Earth, I'm not sure that I'll go back to my old favorite, Colonization.

Beyond Exode

I am left with one additional question. Would it be possible to write a science fiction story based on a game of Beyond Earth? John Brunner once did this, starting with a chess game (Squares of the City). I'm currently playing a multiplayer game in which the 8 factions are run by characters from the Exode Saga and I've begun to use the game as a setting for a science fiction story that is set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe...

Next: The Exoditions of Cynk

This planet has been infiltrated by the Interventionist faction. Svahr must consult her council of advisors.