Twisted Game Time

CivBE fan art (source)

This is the second part of my commentary on the science fiction-oriented game Beyond Earth. In part one, I described the fact that there are many opportunities to blast either the native life forms of the exoplanet that you colonize in Beyond Earth, or the other human factions who "share" the planet with you. Blowing things up is certainly one element found in many science fiction stories, but for me, military science fiction and fictional politics are dreadfully dull. What other types of Sci Fi play can be had in a game of Beyond Earth?

 Time Travel

Travel to the future.

I like to imagine that time travel is an important science fiction element of Beyond Earth. If you get into a difficult situation, you can go back a few turns and replay, making slightly different choices. The game will then generate alternative events, often much more favorable to you than what you experienced previously in the timeline. I prefer to view this ability to "travel back in time" as being part of the game, not a form of cheating.

Some of the terrain improvements: manufactory,
geothermal well, quarry, plantation.
click the image to enlarge

For me, it is fun to micro-manage and develop the resources available around my growing cities during a game of Beyond Earth. Other players prefer to automate their worker units and not have to pay attention to all of the details. After investing so much care in the placement and development of my cities, it is a major disappointment to discover some small annoying fact such as an alien nest that is close to your city and is going to be a cause of serious conflict with the aliens.

air attack against a colossal alien

There are some features of Beyond Earth that can make you feel like the game is stacked against you. For example, you might spend a dozen turns carefully preparing to start a new city at a particular location, only to have the computer suddenly place a trade Station where it will block you (you can't build a new outpost within two spaces of a Station). Why not go back in time and make a simple change such as moving the location of the city over a space or two?

black smoke plumes rise from a damaged facility.
Click on the image to enlarge.

Part of the problem for me is that the graphic depictions of the cities and the terrain improvements are so beautiful in Beyond Earth. It is fascinating for me to see the transformation of the original forests and other terrain features into the developed landscape of plantations and other improvements. It is not hyperbole to say that I fall in love with my growing civilization in each game. If an annoying Makara decides to lumber into my developed land, damaging roads and improvements, I'm seriously offended. The game developers did a good job of making ugly damaged versions of improvements, including dark plumes of smoke rising from some pillaged features such as oil wells.

A petroleum well (left); click image to enlarge.

The developers of Beyond Earth made petroleum a strategic resource that has tempting benefits and significant costs. You can receive large production bonuses from developing petroleum resources, but there are also health costs. Late in the game, you can build and deploy the "Planet Carver" orbital military unit if you have both petroleum and titanium.

Promethean wonder (click to enlarge)

If you build the "Promethean" wonder in a city then that city no longer has health penalties for the use of petroleum resources. That benefit covers both your nearby oil wells and the Petrochemical Plant building in the city.

A blast from orbit:
the Planet Carver orbital unit attacks
an enemy ground unit

A Planet Carver can destroy an enemy unit with a single laser blast from orbit or completely weaken a city's defenses. In comparison, it might take four aircraft bombing runs to accomplish the same mission.

A Planet Carver orbital unit in position unit over an enemy city.

However, as powerful as the Carver unit is on offense, it is weak defensively. Like other orbital units, the Carver can be shot down and destroyed.

A strange feature of Beyond Earth is "covert ops". You can deploy secret agents to enemy cities. Doing so provides you with the ability to target a city and its nearby military units for air attacks. Strangely, it can take as long as 5 years for your agents to travel to a foreign city, even if they move between two sister cities that are right next to each other. This long delay could have been modified by the game developers if teleportation of spies was a part of the game upon developing some advanced technology. However, the spies are not even depicted as units in this game, unlike some other Civilization games. It is particularly annoying when early in the game it takes "only" three years for an agent to reach some cities, then later, it takes five years to reach another city right next to where your spy has been operating recently. Yawn.

An agent arrives in the foreign city of Ard and reports on the city's production capacity.

A "Science Stolen" covert operation is completed.

During the game, some of the available rewards involve speeding up worker actions and covert operations: take these reward options when they are available or it will take 20 years to steel some science and magrail improvements for your transportation network will will take a long time to build.

recruiting defectors

Some of the covert operations seem like a big waste of time. You can spend years trying to complete a mission such as "recruit defectors" and end up with nothing or just a single weak military unit. Similarly, you can have a spy work long and hard to steal some technology from another faction. If your spy is not captured and eliminated, you might only end up with as much scientific information as your own researchers can create in a year. At the very least, there should be some imaginary technologies that can improve your spy efficiency rather than just leaving your espionage efforts stuck in the past while all around your spies there is a great technological revolution taking place.

global mini-map

One disappointing limitation in Beyond Earth is the limited mapping technology. First, you are limited in the scales at which you can observer the planet. Zoomed in,  I see a small area of about 4 hexes square. Fully zoomed out, there are about 22 hexes across the screen. However, there are about six or seven such "screens full" to get entirely around the "massive" size planets that I have used. You can't see the whole layout of continents. There is a tiny global map, but I wish I could see it at different scales.

Xeno siren keeping an
alien Makara contained

A great source of frustration is that there is no way of annotating the map or adding markers. Also, the game software is not helpful in showing you where your orbital units crash out of orbit. Often you want to replace the old unit, but you have to do boring visual scans of your territory in order to find the location of lost orbital units.

solar collector

One of the earliest future technologies in the game is an orbital solar power satellite that beams energy down to a city. This is a useful way to obtain energy early in the game, since you can sometimes "magically" obtain a solar collector while exploring the exoplanet. Eventually you can attain the ability to manufacture a solar collector for your colony after having first research the needed technologies. Mysteriously, you must obtain these technologies: chemistry, "organics" and "photosystems".

Station Sentinel orbital unit

These space-based energy collectors in Beyond Earth remind me of Isaac Asimov's science fiction stories (for example, "Reason") that involve collecting solar energy in space and "beaming" it to Earth.

There are other orbital units, including the "station sentinel". A station sentinel can double the yield of trade with a station. These trading stations appear randomly and you should support them with your patronage when they offer large rewards. 

Domestic trait: Developer (click image to enlarge)

One of the key features of Beyond Earth is "health". Your cities and your entire colony must keep earning "health" points or your growing civilization will grind to a halt. There are many choices that can lead to better heath and one way to get an early health boost is using accumulated "diplomacy" points to obtain the domestic "Developer" trait.

This planet isn't big enough for the two of us.

I like to imagine that a new exoplanet should be large enough for 8-10 factions to spread out and cooperate in exploiting the available resources. However, the game is designed to provide opportunities for conflict with both the alien creatures and the other human factions. Early in the game (for the easier difficulty levels) when your military technology is primitive, you are roughly an equal match for your opponents. After you begin to make a few key technological advances, your fighting strength leaps ahead and conflicts become easy to settle by military brute strength.

As shown in the image to the left, sometimes you begin a game located very close to another faction. In this case, the other faction declared war against me early in the game when it had no visible military units. I simply ignored them through the entire game. Eventually, after about 100 years with no fighting, they ended the "war".

The makers of these Civilization family of turn-based strategy games have always allowed exponential growth to be a big part of the game. Once your new civilization gets established, it grows exponentially. At the end of the game there is supposed to be an exciting opportunity for one faction to make a dramatic attack on a Warp Gate (see below) and snatch victory from impending defeat. However, such "last minute" efforts are pitifully ineffective when the faction approaching victory has a vastly superior level of technology.

A level 4 degree of difficulty game (click to enlarge).
After about 100 years the "singularity effect"
takes hold and you move into the lead.

In the level 3 difficulty game that I played, the computerized factions seemed to have been programmed to attack trading stations and destroy them. To protect a station that I was trading with, I went to war. It was not too hard to defeat my opponent given my superiority in military technology.

in game art for flying units

For no apparent reason, a second faction took the opportunity to declare war on me while I was already fighting my first foe.

an aircraft unit before any special Affinity upgrade

The game is obviously programmed to try to prevent you from completing your long drawn-out projects that are required for victory, but have no fear of quickly advancing up the difficulty levels as you try the various victory conditions. In order to survive wars against two factions at the same time it was handy to have highly-mobile aircraft that I could quickly shift from one front to the other. Until later in the game when you obtain teleportation technology, the "re-basing" of aircraft is the fastest way to move around the planet.

The "shrike" aircraft unit; a special Harmony upgrade

Eventually, both of these computerized players asked for peace. I think it would have been fun if Beyond Earth had been designed to gradually shift you from aircraft to using some sort of teleportation technology. I deal with teleportation in detail in Part III of these comments on Beyond Earth.

The aircraft in Beyond Earth are rather limited in diversity. I think there should have been multiple types of aircraft with specialized units such as fighters, bombers, black miasma-clearing units (discussed in Part III) and reconnaissance units.

Summary graph for a level 1 (easiest) game.

At the first difficulty setting, it is very easy to pull ahead of the computerized factions. As shown in the graph to the right, after about 50 turns you will have a higher overall "score" than your opponents. The weak opponents will often declare war if they are close to your territory. On the easy setting, it is not hard to eliminate these computerized factions from the game. It is not unusual for an opponent to assemble most of their military units and send them half way around the planet to confront you. By the time they arrive, the war might already be over, having been ended by their request for peace!

click image to enlarge

The timing of when an opponent might ask for an end to fighting is mysterious in Beyond Earth. In the image shown to the left, I tried to speak to an opponent and got the cold shoulder.

now she's tired

On the very next turn, she called me up and asked for peace (see the image to the right). In this "Soyuz" level game, the "peace terms" included me receiving several useless cities that I did not want. The computer seemed to have calculated that by giving me those cities, I would be forced into a low health situation.

turn-based gambling game

These Civilization games are called "strategy" games, but there is so much randomness in what happens during a game of Beyond Earth that I feel better calling them gambling games. I suppose some of what seems random to a player such as me was actually programmed into the game. Part of the fun of a game is that the rules are known. Some people study the Civilization games and publish arcane lists of the hidden "rules" used by the game engine. If these "rules" are not explained to players then I view them as "tricks". Sadly, these games try to create a challenging situation for players by trickery rather than by having the computerized opponents play by defined rules. Each player must try to find a difficulty level that maximizes the fun and minimized frustration.

Sci Fi Resources

obtaining energy from floatstone

Some of the technologies, units and buildings require access to strategic resources. Some Beyond Earth resources are very odd, such as the mysterious "floatstone". Is this some remnant from ancient Progenitor civilization, some abandoned component of their anti-gravity technology? With the development of ecology and the imaginary technology "terraforming" you can obtain energy from floatstone and use it in the construction of some futuristic units and buildings.

A worker unit on a farm hex adjacent to a xenomass well.
Click on the image to enlarge it.

Another strategic resource in Beyond Earth is "xenomass". Xenomass reminds me of the organic "pold" in a story by Jack Vance. Check out some xenomass fan art by Runolite.

xenomass well by Runolite

Xenobiologist

Even with an entire planet to explore, aliens to meet and a civilization to build, the game is designed to bring you into conflict with other factions. If you try to ignore the diplomacy part of Beyond Earth you still receive an endless stream of annoying commentary from the computer-generated factions. Some of these communications are simple saber rattling while others are technobabble such as, "Your production procedures are not fractal." There are some useful "diplomatic agreements" that you can "negotiate" with the other factions, but many of them can be ignored. The game could easily have been improved if the human factions were mostly concerned with studying their shared exoplanet and exchanging information about the alien life and recovered Progenitor technologies. Instead, be prepared for endless taunts from your computerized opponents about the small size of your army.

land and sea trader units

The other diplomacy "trait" that I like to have early during the game is the "character" trait "Common Bond". This allows for several "free" robotic cargo transports to be available so that they can move between cities, generating useful resources by means of simulated trade. However, one danger is that alien units can destroy roads and trade units. Another good source of energy is from trade with the cities of other factions.

siege worm passes through a trade vehicle

Your trade units can be destroyed at any time by alien creatures or by the military units of other factions during a war. Eventually you can obtain protection against having trade units destroyed by aliens, so don't pass up getting this perk when the opportunity arises. Having protected trade units can lead to absurd scenes in which a siege worm seemingly grinds a trade vehicle to shreds, but the trader suffers no damage.

Trader units can move over land or across water. Most units are either restricted to land or water. The explorer unit is amphibious and also has one special feature that I like to obtain early in the game...

colossal aliens

Capturing Aliens
I'd rather capture an alien creature than destroy it. When there are many alien creatures near my cities, then my first priority in research is often the development of the means to capture alien creatures. At first (after you develop genetics and the "alien lifeforms" technologies), your special exploration units can capture the smaller alien creatures. This is all you need: sometimes the aliens get in your way, blocking a resource pod. With the technology-endowed "leash" ability you can capture the alien creature and it becomes a unit that you control. Eventually, with the full development of advanced technologies (level 9 Harmony and "alien domestication"), your units can capture even the larger aliens such as the amphibious Makara.

Drone unit discovers alien skeletal remains.

Another science fiction homage is the Kraken unit. These can appear early in the game and damage your water improvements, in the same spirit as siege worms. Carl Linnaeus included the legendary kraken in his first edition of the Systema Naturae.

affinity levels (click image to enlarge)

If you want to use the game's provisions for capturing aliens, then you need to accumulate "Harmony" points and attain the level 3 "Harmony" affinity.

mixed units

Even if your game strategy involves an emphasis on one of the three affinities, you will accumulate points towards all three. There are important synergies between the three different affinity types including special "mixed affinity" units that become available when you attain high enough levels in two of the affinities.

a quest has been completed

A major game feature in Beyond Earth is the "quest". When you complete these tasks you are given a reward. The "Strength and Decay" quest involves exploring the planet and doing a "biopsy" on the skeletal remains of giant alien creatures. Amazingly, study of the bones leads you to a great discovery concerning alien neurobiology.

If you complete the "Strength and Decay" quest then your combat units will also be given the ability to capture alien creatures. The explanation given for this by the game designers is that special radio frequencies can activate an alien brain region involved with "stress relief". Right.....

An expedition being conducted near
Black and White Cookie Island.

Expeditions can be conducted on abandoned Progenitor sites, crashed satellites and abandoned settlements. Sadly, for all of your advanced technology it is amazingly hard to find these sites and impossible to send expeditions to some locations.

One odd variation on the idea of capturing alien creatures for your own use involves the discovery of other, smaller skeletal remains of alien creatures that can be the target for an expedition.

Two types of expedition sites marked by pick and shovel.

By digging into this type of alien remains, you are rewarded with a live alien unit. This is a great way to obtain a few alien units early in the game. The alien Drone units move relatively quickly over all terrain and are great for picking up resource pods, particularly at the icy poles of the planet. What do these Drones eat while spending years in the arctic ice fields? Such biological mysteries are never resolved in Beyond Earth.

Drone units are great explorers. They can slip between alien units, nests and hydracoral to get resource pods.

orbital laser strike against a ground unit

Another mystery in Beyond Earth is that some of the orbital units are directed to attack ground units by means of an interface that makes it look like the orbital unit is on the ground (see the image to the right). This knocks you out of your already weak acceptance of the very limited spacecraft in Beyond Earth. Other orbital units actually appear to be firing from above on the ground units below, so it is hard to understand why the Orbital Laser unit looks like it was a carry over from an early draft version of the game.

In my next blog post, I continue my exploration of the science fiction themes in Beyond Earth. In particular, I look at the role of teleportation in the game.

Next: part III of my Sci Fi-oriented commentary on Beyond Earth.

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