Finally, Supremacy lets you make your civ’s humans into cyborgs with giant robot friends.Įach affinity allows for slightly different victories and affinity-only units, and can have a dramatic effect on your overall game. Purity focuses on genetic manipulation of the human genome to build better versions of your civ. The Harmony affinity is what it sounds like, allowing you to meld with the new planet’s lifeforms and create new alien units. Trade routes feature prominently in Beyond Earth, for one thing, as does a new strategic component much like Gods & Kings’s religions, called Affinities.Īffinities allow you to evolve your Beyond Earth civ beyond its human origins, focusing research on technologies that will play to how you want to interface with your new world and its inhabitants. Beyond Earth brings some of the better reinventions along with it. On the one hand, there are many worse 4X strategy games to emulate than Civ 5, and as that game’s expansions have proved, while it redesigned much of the original Civ formula, it left a lot of room on the table for reinventing itself. But the experience of cracking it open, watching my colony ship settle onto a completely dark map and then setting foot onto this alien world felt just like playing Civ 5-at first. Beyond Earth has a lot of new looks: new units, new victories, a completely new tech tree (actually, it’s a web), new leaders, new civilizations and a handful of things under the hood that are also completely new.

Sid meiers civilization beyond earth