Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth doesn’t officially arrive until next month, but gamers are already buzzing about this Firaxis/2K Games Civ-in-space entry.
Land on a planet and go to colonize it, and voilà, it’s a Civilization game with quests and aliens and space objectives. But October 24 seems so far away, you say. What will you do until then?
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I’ve picked out three options for you. Call them 3N games: They’re iN beta, iNclusive of a variety of audiences, and/or iNexpensive. And they’re just the thing to tide you over iN the meantime.
Yes, I’ll stop now.
Galactic Civilization III: Space is a big place
Galactic Civilization III, available from Stardock Entertainment via Steam Early Access when you pre-purchase it for $44.95, is the fully respectable entry of these three. Gaming publications have handed the previous entries in the series fistfuls of awards, and every installment just gets deeper.
Above: Pick a faction, any faction.
The game’s depth is obvious from the start. You choose from eight factions, including several new ones, each with their own bonuses to dozens of stats. Choose the opponents they’ll face. Choose your galaxy size and shape and options including how often asteroids and black holes happen and the incidence of interstellar rifts or habitable planets.
And then you choose how you want to defeat your enemies: Fight them? Overwhelm them with technology? Form alliances, influence others, assemble relics to “ascend to a higher plane of existence,” or just flat-out beat your opponents before a limited number of turns runs out? Sadly, most options aren’t available in the beta yet. Combat is one of your only choices here, though the other options are present, just greyed out.
Difficulty, pacing, events, and exploration are all in the menus (though again, all are not yet tweakable in the beta).
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Above: Grid, sweet grid: See, we told you it’d slake that Beyond Earth thirst. It’s got hexes!
Once you’ve made your choice, you’ll be dropped on a hex grid overlaying your fully animated home system. See that shipyard over there on the right? Double click it, and you’ll shoot over to the user interface to build new ships. And when I say build … I mean build.
Above: The screen where the magic happens.
Click on a part of your new craft, and you can flip it, rotate it, stretch it, move it around, and otherwise make it your own. You can also scale it up, save a group of parts as a new part, or change the speed and the nature of its animations. Later, you’ll be able to save your creations for others to see, but that feature isn’t yet available in the beta.
And this is just one tiny ship in one tiny system in a humongous galaxy (early promotional material promises thousands of stars and hundreds of empires, but even what’s in the game now is impressive).
You’re starting to get the idea.
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The game doesn’t occur only in space: On all of those planets out there, you’ll find resources and sites to build things and people to shoot at, in hexes on the ground, looking very much like … hmmm…. Beyond Earth. Unfortunately, diplomacy is not so much a thing in the beta, so you’ll have to shoot. I didn’t figure you’d mind. Currently, the beta supports four-player online competitive battles.
This isn’t a review or even a preview. So much of the game is not yet available — other than combat … lots and lots of combat — that all I can say is, well, the fighting is pretty entertaining. I like my ships and my amusingly described weapons, and I just want more people online to throw them at. Or, you know, talk with in a diplomatic fashion. Right?
Above: Resources are in! Governors and trade and colonies, not so much.
I’m willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt at this stage in the beta because of its impressive pedigree and the strong foundation you can already see in the game. It’s already worth playing.
You can see it for yourself in weekly developer livestreams (held Friday afternoons at 3 p.m. EST).
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If Galactic Civilizations III is just too much fussing for you, two other new games give the “4X strategy lite” experience. They include the basics of the genre but are very easy for casual players to pick up.
SpaceCom: a trippy, Asteroids-like real-time strategy 4X
SpaceCom from Flow Combine, published by 11 Bit Launchpad in Poland for PC, provides a simple, surreal gaming experience. The graphics are reminiscent of a high-resolution Asteroids remake: thin lines and type on a black background. The color palette is minimal and soothing — the game uses mostly primary colors.
Above: Two fleets/pie pieces tackle two objectives simultaneously in SpaceCom.
The soundtrack is space-y synth (reminiscent of the more mellow work of Blade Runner composer Vangelis, to continue the 1980s references), and the game takes it seriously. “For meditative strategy experience, headphones recommended,” the launch screen declares.
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“In SpaceCom, coincidence, luck, and fast clicking won’t get you far,” 11 Bit senior producer Marek Ziemak says in the video above. “The game is all about planning, all about strategic thinking, and executing your plan until you crash your last enemy.”
That philosophy translates into in-game action almost as sedate as the soundtrack. Moving a ship from one system to another takes in excess of 20 seconds, so while it’s real-time strategy, it’s delayed enough that opponents have plenty of opportunity to respond if they have a unit in the vicinity.
Above: The tutorial is as sleek as the rest of the UI — a few small movable windows that tell you what’s going on and what to do next.
You command three types of fleets. Battle fleets can engage other ships. Siege fleets attack ground forces, but are vulnerable themselves. And invasion fleets capture systems, but need battle escorts to protect them.
The interface to control your ships is actually lovely. The little pie-shaped outlines that represent ships contain three bands: the tip, the middle, and the crust, to extend that analogy. If the fleet contains battle units, the tip band will be solidly colored; if it has siege units, the center stripe is colored in; and if there are invasion units, the crust piece is solid. If a fleet has a combination of units, the stripes representing those units will all be colored. So a single fleet collection with battle and siege units would have both the tip and the center stripe solidly colored, for example.
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By looking at which bands have color, you can see at a glance which types of ships are in a particular fleet, and a tiny number next to it tells you how large the overall group is.
Above: Here, a battle fleet and a siege fleet converge on a system to capture it. The numbers next to the pie pieces are how many ships are in each; the numbers below are how many seconds are left before they arrive.
System hubs come in four flavors. Basic hubs expand your population limit, shipyards build you more fleets, repair yards fix your ships, and resource hubs provide supplies to fuel the rest. They come with sci-fi names such as Sigma Centauri and Nanga Oburu … and names that might sound exotic only in the developers’ home country, such as Denver and Yuma.
The strategy comes from your efforts to overwhelm your opponents or the AI; you have to set up tactical plans in advance. If your fleet is in painfully slow movement toward a faraway goal, it doesn’t matter if it takes the enemy 20 seconds to reach your planet — they’re still going to get there before you can turn around. And if someone destroys your resource hub or interrupts the flow of supplies, your shipyards can’t build reinforcements.
Above: The SpaceCom single-player mission control screen.
The single-player missions are satisfying, with obtainable goals and optional tasks that are mostly simple. One might ask you to capture an enemy base, while another tasks you with keeping all of your fleets alive. Unfortunately, no multiplayer games (or opponents) were available when I did my trial during the beta test this week. The game supports six-person multiplayer.
You can get a free key to the closed beta by visiting the SpaceCom Facebook page.
Starion Tactics: a traditional turn-based game for the more casual players
Strategy games in the 4X genre are traditionally turn-based, and Starion Tactics sticks to that tradition. Graphically, the game is a huge step up from SpaceCom, but the gameplay, while serviceable, doesn’t feel as elegant. Starion’s developer is Corncrow Games in Sweden, and it launches today on Steam for PC.
Until September 12, it’s $15; after that, it goes up to $20.
In Starion you capture neutral planets to harvest resources to build fleets to capture the enemy’s planets. These unclaimed worlds may or may not have defenses, depending on the game options you choose. Your ships take varying amounts of turns or resources to build, depending on their attack and defense characteristics.
You can move one system in any direction in the grid with your ships during each turn. As with most turn-based games, you queue up all the actions you’d like to take, then set them in motion.
Above: This is the piece of the grid you’ll see at the start; your randomly generated starting planet and those next door, which are neutral.
You move ships from place to place, start construction on new crafts, or use Cards or “Artefacts” that grant resources, extra abilities, or even game-changing events. For example, a Card might grant you a single resource unit or kill every active ship on the board, sparing only ships being built.
“This one is aiming a bit more toward people who are novices in 4X,” said lead developer William Gillström in an interview from Sweden. “It’s not as complicated when it comes to micromanagement. It’s for people like me. I’m a novice when it comes to strategy games.”
Above: The Starion Tactics manual.
The casual-gamer connection is clear: The manual is just a few heavily illustrated pages. Zoom out on the Starion Tactics system field with the fog of war (that obscures the enemy) turned off, and the display will resolve into fat, colored dots connected with lines, like a digital version of Connect Four.
The game strives for real 4X-style gameplay without the “crazy-long” game sessions, Gillström said. In that way, it’s much like SpaceCom. The game supports multiplayer with up to 4v4 in team play, but that feature was not available at the time of my test.
If you choose to host a multiplayer game — and you’re really hosting it; Starion’s servers are just for matchmaking — you set the time allowed per turn, from 5 seconds to an infinite duration.
Above: These slightly cheesy — but amusing — animated graphics for battles between ships are available as an option.
I found the gameplay unusually easy (I won the King achievement for capturing every planet in my first game), but I expect that will change fast once multiplayer arrives.
Galactic Civilizations III is the only real competition for Civilization: Beyond Earth in this bunch. But they’re all fun strategy diversions while you’re waiting for Sid Meier to launch into space.
GamesBeat received download codes for these games for purposes of writing this roundup.