If you want go deeper into Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, Andrew Frederiksen has just the thing for you. The lead game producer at Firaxis Games showed us a preview of the Rising Tide expansion of 2K’s Beyond Earth computer game at a recent preview event at its studio in Novato, Calif. The new content is coming this fall, and it is aimed at keeping players addicted to the sci-fi planet colonization game for many hours.
We talked to Frederiksen about the deeper diplomacy system, where you can get a better sense of your relationships with other faction leaders by knowing what they like and what they fear. And we also talked about the effort the team put behind making floating cities on the seas — the biggest feature addition in the expansion. The Rising Tide expansion is coming to Windows PCs this fall for $30. But here’s the latest details on how the game downloadable content (DLC) plays and its latest features.
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Above: Rising Tide expansion of Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth has plenty of water.
GamesBeat: Tell us the thinking behind Rising Tide. What did you want to achieve with this?
Frederiksen: One of the big things is just pushing the envelope more, taking it to places we couldn’t. You can’t take a historical Civ to some of these places. It’s opening things up more and giving access to new systems and expanding what’s already there. You look at water gameplay. That’s something Gandhi never had — floating cities in the Indian ocean. Queen Elizabeth had ships but not cities. That’s something you can do in all these new ways.
The affinity system, adding the hybrids and the new gameplay that comes out of having those hybrid affinities and how we’ve rebalanced that stuff. That’s new. And the diplomacy system is something we’ve looked at where we should have done more. It’s big. You saw it. This diplomacy chain is different from turn one.
GamesBeat: It seems like you get more choices in diplomacy for a start.
Frederiksen: It’s not just more choices. You certainly do have a wider variety of things to pick and choose, but it’s also this transparency you have into understanding other leaders — the fear and respect and how that contributes to their behavior, their options, who you can be friends with. With that transparency, you now have more ability to try to guide the diplomatic landscape. I know that guy cares about this thing, so I’ll do that thing, so he’ll like me more, so we’ll be friends, so I can get more capital. Then we can go to war together. Before, you would open diplomacy and say, “Wanna go to war?” They’d say no, and that was the end of it. You didn’t know why or what to do to change that.
Above: ArshiaKishk leads the Al Falah faction in Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide
GamesBeat: Are their intentions always transparent, or are they able to maybe hide some of their intentions from you?
Frederiksen: It’s transparent in that you can have an understanding of where things are and why they got there. You can infer where they’re heading. But you don’t have a “turns until they declare war” meter. You have those communiqués at the top where they say things like, “Hey, I notice your cities are starving. Why don’t you feed your people?” And you think, “Okay, this person cares about food. I should increase my food rate so they respect me more, and we’ll have a better diplomatic relationship.” You can look at the comments you get from them, look at their traits, and see what they care about. Then you infer what actions will help or hurt your relationship.
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GamesBeat: Could you also just trade food with them?
Frederiksen: The trading now is out of diplomacy directly. Trading is strictly in trade units, trade vessels, and trade convoys. You can send those. Those will yield not just food and gold and energy. They can also trade strategic resources, like firaxite and xenomass. If a city has those you can trade them. If someone says, “Your cities are starving. You need to give them more food,” I can say, “Hey, you’re good at food. Let’s make an agreement that my capital generates more food. Now you like me because we have an agreement together and because I’ve got more food, plus my city’s growing better.” It’s what we hope diplomacy creates in the real world, where everyone’s helping each other out.
GamesBeat: Is there some real-world science behind the floating cities? Is that possible?
Frederiksen: I’d like to think so. There’s plenty of research out there. Our designers are as much into real science as science fiction. Not everything is one to one, but there are lots of concepts, lots of ideas that get their juices flowing. One of the new wonders for water cities has to do with taking a mysterious alien organism and harnessing that to help our citizens be healthier. But when you read the fiction about it — it’s kind of like that Star Trek science, where someone takes something kind of real and works it into a new paradigm. “If we make a couple of logical conclusions beyond this, it could happen.”
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GamesBeat: Your borders, basically, are almost meaningless now. You can move your cities, so borders restrict you less?
Frederiksen: If you own territory, it’s just as much your territory on water as it is on land. If someone doesn’t have open borders with you, they can’t enter without going to war. You do gain it differently and manage it a bit differently. If you claim too much of it, you may not be able to work all of it. You may be out of range. If your empire is so wide, but you have only one city, can you crank out enough units to defend all your borders? It’s a tradeoff.
GamesBeat: Are there things you’ve fixed, so to speak, compared to the original?
Frederiksen: We have a lot of things we took feedback on and balanced as we were going and introducing things. The victory conditions for the affinities, where those lie and how much affinity you need to gain them and how quickly the AI will pursue them, we’ve done a lot of balance with that. That’s as much a factor of the feedback we got from the base game as it was introducing hybrid affinities, where we need to work out how much you gain from different affinities and where that fits in. I don’t know that I would call it a “fix,” but it’s a lot of balance in response to the feedback.
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Even when we’re working on something that people didn’t specifically talk about — people talked about the diplomacy system. Until you guys get your hands on it and start talking about it in detail, nobody really knows what it is, but we’ve heard what people want to do and how they want to be able to understand things. While we’re designing we try to fit that in.
GamesBeat: What can you tell us about the new characters, the North Sea Alliance?
Above: Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide adds a host of aquatic units that do more than look pretty.
Frederiksen: The North Sea Alliance, after the Great Mistake — these are a collection of the naval industries of the North Sea, the British isles and Scandinavia. They come together to survive, but eventually hit a point where they need to — the seeding already happened and all the initial factions left.
Now these guys need to leave too, but they have a nautical history. Their leader is one of those guys. He didn’t come with a silver spoon in his mouth. He wasn’t a politician all his life. He was a dockworker, a laborer, a bruiser. He’s as much a street guy as — I love his diplomacy lines, the voice over, because the voice actor who did this guy — we actually rewrote some of his lines for him, because he just had the character down, this rough and tough Scottish seaman turned politician.
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GamesBeat: They have an advantage in the water, I take it?
Frederiksen: The North Sea Alliance is very much your land in the water, control the seas faction. That’s their direction, their goal. They have the ability to move their cities faster and have a higher defense on the water. They can still go on land, but if they do, they don’t have that advantage for their cities.
GamesBeat: The water looks prettier. You can see things underneath. Is there any functionality under these layers of water?
Frederiksen: Graphically, we have new shaders, new textures, new water tech. That’s all brand new. It’s now transparent, like you said. A lot of work went into making that look very good technically, but also provide visual clarity — seeing where it’s deep and where it’s shallow. Certain resources will appear more or less on different types. Initially you can only land or settle or move on shallow water with your water cities. Then you can research a tech to move out into the deep ocean. That’s one thing to factor in. The tiles will also have different yields based on that.
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As multiple layers go, it’s not another orbital layer or anything like that. But you do have some things visually under the sea, over the sea. We have submarines coming in. Those are really fun, because we brought invisibility back. If you aren’t right there or if you don’t have the right unit in range, you won’t see the enemy submarines creeping around.
Above: Duncan Hughes of the North Sea Alliance in Rising Tide expansion for Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth.
GamesBeat: The tech research tree was always a little intimidating to me. It was confusing as to which direction to go. On that front, what’s a normal strategy, something that will lead you in a good direction?
Frederiksen: I’ve heard almost every permutation. It’s that theorycrafting people like to do. “This works out really well. But this works, and this works…” Any general idea is viable. We have a large number of people who tend to buy the branch techs, the circle right around the center, and then start to buy out from there based on what affinity they want or what resources are near them. It’s a lot of reacting to what’s already there.
The safe bet is still, buy that ring and then pursue from there. The nice thing about that is, when you start that pursuit, because of the affinity pacing and how we’ve added more affinity to the branch techs — it used to only be the leaves, those lower levels. Now you can get it off the branch techs. You don’t have to deep dive on a tech to get an affinity. You can keep going up the branches to get further out and you’ll still gain some affinity. You’re not falling behind in the affinity race.
GamesBeat: Are there some other new features we haven’t mentioned yet?
Frederiksen: I don’t know if you ran into one of the marvels. Every biome now has what we call a marvel, which has an associated quest. The marvels are kind of Beyond Earth’s — they’re not natural wonders, but I’d start there as far as the mindset. They’re unique per biome. It’s a very large piece of art, like three hexes. The fungal biome has a super huge crazy mushroom.
This isn’t just a piece of art, too. When you find it, it triggers a quest. The quest is to go out and find out these related nodes. In the mushroom’s case it’s some other moderately-sized mushrooms that are only one hex big. But when you find them and investigate them — you take a unit there and do an investigation action — you can unlock their secrets. You then gain a bonus that’s unique to each biome.
These can be really huge effects. This one makes it so each small mushroom gives you increased food around it. That’s a great place to found a new city. But you have to take risks and explore and find these. We also have unique new alien stats and behavior for each biome. One biome, the aliens move slower.
Another one they have higher defense, but they spawn less often. We’ve made biomes have a bigger impact on each game of Beyond Earth, without totally redefining the rules.