Firaxis Games developers said they wanted to make the ideas for the new expansion pack for Civilization: Beyond Earth all wet.
Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide will debut for Windows PCs this fall for $30. Published by 2K Games, the expansion to the space strategy game will feature new units and settlements for the watery landscape (and new graphics for how that water is displayed); a new diplomacy system; four new factions; hybrid affinities with their own units; an artifact system that gives players’ civilizations new powers; and two new biomes/landscape types.
GamesBeat chatted with David McDonough, co-lead designer for Civ: BE, and producer Andrew Frederiksen about the new expansion pack.
McDonough said the team landed on the idea of a watery expansion after thinking that perhaps Civ: BE could get a little weirder.
“We did a lot of trying to make the landscape look alien and feel alien,” he said. “Beyond that, it was still very much a Civ game in the way that you built cities, developed territory, and all that stuff. We were looking for a way to really differentiate it further, make it feel not just like a Civ game but a game about the future.
“Obviously we did a lot with the orbital layer, but we decided that the biggest untapped territory was the oceans on the new planet.”
It wasn’t enough to just plunk existing units on new blue hexes, though. They wanted it to look and feel significantly different than the existing game, the men said. So they revamped the graphics engine that displayed the water so you could now see through it, added shallow and deeper areas with their own characteristics, and even toyed with the beasts that live there.
“There’s one in particular that you’ll see in the near future,” Frederiksen teased, “that just kind of changes what you’d think of as an alien, and something you have to deal with as far as terrain or navigation around the oceans.”
Above: Oooo, pretty. Until those things eat you.
How deep is your ocean?
The depth of the seas will affect what resources are present and how rare they are, he said. The waters will feature new units, new abilities, and new aliens.
“Some of the concerns may be that okay, krakens are pretty nasty creatures, you see those out in the water,” he said. “They still are. But we’ve expanded that catalog so you’re going to have to deal with navigating around these big guys as well as some newer guys in the ocean as well.”
McDonough said the new setup will affect strategy as well, especially as amphibious units make the transition smoothly from sea to land. Two new biomes will include Primoridal World, full of volcanoes (and, one assumes, water.)
“You can play an entire game on a completely water planet, or a totally aquatic civilization, and not be behind the power curve with a terrestrial competitor,” he said. “This came along with carrying a lot of the gameplay from land to sea but changing it in really key ways so that it was the same yet different, so there would be unique strategic challenges that would be appropriate to the water environment.”
Above: Arshia Kishk leads the Al Falah faction in Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide
New factions add depth of their own
Rising Tide was also named after the new factions, McDonough said, and the tension they’re expected to bring. The expansion brings an overhaul for the diplomacy system, giving A.I. leaders much more personality — and the ability to change their minds. It also adds four factions, including one they’re announcing today: Al Falah, from the Middle East.
“They’re emblematic of the attitude for the new factions … a bit more radical, a bit more extreme than the original eight,” he said.
Al Falah represent the people who refused to be driven out of the Middle East by the ecological crisis that makes up part of the Civ: BE backstory.
“They fought through the crisis, they reclaimed their homeland,” he said. “And when they did go into space, it was as much an exercise of will as it was economic or technological power.”
One interesting note is that they never developed cryogenic abilities, making their space ships generational — meaning that the ones landing on your Civ: BE planet are manned by people who have never lived on a planet before.
“So as you can imagine, when they land on the new world, they’ve got pretty stark ideas of what a planet is and what it means to live there and what they’re there to do, which can raise the stakes and upset the balance of power for everybody else who’s got a more conventional perspective,” McDonough said.
The new factions will add new types of gameplay, he said.
“Obviously they have to play by many of the same rules for the game to operate. But their unique abilities and the particular advantages that they have let them bend rules that other civs have to abide by,” McDonough said of the new Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide factions. “You might take for granted how cities grow, or how production is made, or what culture of science means and what they’re used for if you’re a conventional civ. Al Falah and the four new civs maybe don’t have those same rules.”
New ways to piss other leaders off
Above: Andrew Frederiksen
Andrew Frederiksen said the new diplomacy system will take gameplay beyond the old choices of “Do I declare war, make peace, or trade goods” approach of the core Civ: BE or earlier games in the series.
“If a leader has the trait that I care a lot about economy, they’re going to respond to strong economies one way, weak economies another way,” he said. “That’s going to provide what deals you can make with them, how you can interact them diplomatically. Those can change and evolve as the game goes.
“If you have a leader who’s very passive and focused on trade, and then they get backed into a corner by a bunch of other civs, building really big warlike nations, they’re going to react. They’re not just going to stay there and be the same civ and get stomped under a boot.”
You can develop your own diplomacy personality as well, McDonough said. The idea was to make the A.I. diplomacy almost as interesting as playing another human being.
“Diplomacy was a whole lot more nuanced between human players than between human players and A.I.,” he said “We really want that nuance, that richness, that actual real interpersonal relationship that human players bring to the game. We want to put that into a system where it’ll work even if it’s an A.I. on the other side.”
Choosing an affinity doesn’t mean giving up the others any more
That addition of details plays out in the hybrid affinities in the expansion as well. You build up the three original affinities via your approach in the game, giving you bonuses, abilities, special units, and upgrades. (They consist of Supremacy, focused on robotics; Purity, focused on human development; and Harmony, focused on genetics and adopting the benefits of alien life.)
In Rising Tide, you’ll be able to reap benefits by striking off on some tangents from your main affinities into hybrid trees.
“Players really liked affinities,” McDonough said. “But the one thing that they didn’t do was really offer you the opportunity to multiclass.”
The new hybrid affinities don’t just add more types, he said. You’ll still need to pursue one affinity or another to the end if you want that type of victory. These just reward you for combining them at points along the way.
“They’re more ways to augment, or twist, or otherwise personalize your game along a dominant affinity,” he said. “So they’re expressed as player unique abilities, they’re expressed in the balance of victory points and the victory conditions themselves but most especially expressed as unique military units and unit upgrades for the standard units. ”
They also look pretty “wild and strange,” he said. They tried to find hybrid units that weren’t just blends of the parent affinities, but things that truly added a different flavor. So biometallurgy, for example, and other things that you used to only find in the spider-like web of tech progress the game would allow you to progress down.
Above: The Primoridal biome, one new place where the “wild things” are.
“As a result, not only do they look crazy, but they have wild abilities,” McDonough said. “They’re strange new units that let you do things that you couldn’t do in Civ in the past. It can really twist the way you think about how an army should play.”
Frederiksen said they expect the changes to diplomacy and hybrid affinities to help players tell a more complex story about their civilizations and what’s important to them.
You can also affect your civilization with the new artifact system, which rewards you for scouring the landscape, finding nifty items, and combining them in the right ways.
“They can almost end up being like wonders, where you’re the only one on the planet who found this particular group, so you get benefits nobody else can get,” McDonough said. “It’s dependent on what you manage to find, so every game is different.”
That’s the aim of the whole expansion, the developers said.