We chat to the lead designers of Beyond Earth about their first expansion
Civilization: Beyond Earth was a fun game, but it felt a little empty and flavourless next to its sprawling predecessor, Civ 5. Of course, that game had already benefited from several weighty expansions, adding countless new mechanics and bits of new content - if there’s one developer out there still getting expansion packs right, it’s Firaxis. Which is why I’m pretty intrigued to find out what the team has in store for Rising Tide, the first major addition to Beyond Earth. I tracked down lead designers Will Miller and David McDonough to discuss the new diplomacy system, water-based empires, giant alien coral brains and more.
GameWatcher: A major focus in Rising Tide is improving the way you interact with other Civs, hence the revised diplomacy system and new leader traits. How do those new systems change the diplomatic game?
Will Miller: I think the issue with base Beyond Earth was that because we didn’t have these historical figures in the game, the novelty of Gandhi or Montezuma calling you up and interacting with you was sort of lost. So we wanted to make more of a system out of the diplomatic process, put a game into that space that’s fun to play and that the player can do things in, solve problems in. That’s where the diplomacy system originated.
It does a few things; one is that it builds a progression out of your personality, your character’s personality, over the course of the game. By that I mean you’re assigning and upgrading traits to your character, while the AI is doing the same thing. Those traits are what govern how the AI reacts to you. So I can go into the diplomacy screen and say “okay, this guy has these traits, so he’s probably going to respond well to these things”. So I know how to make friends, make enemies, how to exploit the things he wants. The other thing is that we wanted to make it possible for players to trade power in a way they haven’t been able to before.
That’s where the new yield in the game, diplomatic power, comes into play. It’s a measure of your power and influence as a diplomatic entity, and you can spend it to upgrade and add traits to your leader, but also to set up ‘agreements’ with other Civs. If I know another leader has the ‘tycoon’ trait, I know that he’s going to be able to offer me mostly trade-focused agreements, and I can spend my diplomatic capital to get the benefits of his traits. It’s a fairly simple mechanics with a fairly simple economy, but it lets players solve problems through the diplomatic landscape that they couldn’t previously, which is really cool.
GameWatcher: One of the new factions is based around the new diplomatic system. Will there be new techs and wonders related to it as well?
David McDonough: Well, diplomacy is folded into the game at kind of every level. The traits and agreements that you get can influence every part of what you do, from military to food production, to building wonders to covert ops. So there’s no part of game that diplomacy cannot touch. In return you can improve your diplomacy not just by taking part and selling traits to other leaders, but also by building things in your cities. Mostly by building wonders, but also in other subtle ways. So even if you are isolated diplomatically, you can still generate diplomatic capital and use it when you need to. Or you can be a power player, play diplomacy very aggressively, have trading deals with every other leader, and have an awful lot of power to leverage.
Will Miller: Another thing you can do once you have a lot of diplomatic power is actually purchase units, much like how you could spend religious faith on new units in (Civ 5 expansion) Gods and Kings. So if you’re that player, like Dave mentioned, who really has a strong hand in the diplomacy game, you can turn that into military production and power in the late-game, which is pretty cool.
GameWatcher: The other major addition, obviously, is the ability to build a sea-based faction. Aside from using lots of boats and submarines, how does the game play differently for naval Civs?
David McDonough: It changes it from every perspective, really. Many of the things you would take for granted in a land-based game - having water as a natural barrier, armies having to travel across arduous terrain, natural defenses – that’s all gone. The whole surface of the planet is playable, you can drive your starting game units off the coast right into the ocean, and they’ll work just as well. They need nothing new to survive on the sea. If the ocean is providing a good opportunity, area to expand, valuable new resources - and the aquatic tiles have an all-new selection of valuable resources – you can just make that part of your territory. Competing for space and conquering other factions is a whole new game when anyone can be all or partially aquatic. So yes, you need a robust navy, but it’s also a good idea to have a strong presence on land as well. That’s not to say that you have to. You can play an equally powerful land or water Civ, or something in between.
There are also a couple of new factions that are aquatic-themed. One which we’ve already revealed is the North Sea Alliance, who very much focus on the naval stronghold style, and there’s another one we haven’t announced yet. Everything you want to do, all the basic systems of establishing power and building your dominance, that’s all turned on its head by the ability to use the oceans to power that. Like I said, many of the old problems go away, and many new ones raise their heads.
GameWatcher: Is one of those new problems a greater quantity of hostile life-forms? I played a couple of hours of the expansion, and it certainly seemed as if aquatic wildlife was more aggressive than what you find on land.
David McDonough: Well you definitely see a lot more aliens in the sea than in the base game, that’s for sure. Land aliens in the base game had a thriving ecosystem, there were lots of different types, they have all sorts of interesting relationships and reactions to your activities. Aquatic aliens were a bit lighter. So with the expansion, with all the opportunities the ocean gameplay gives the players, we’ve given the aliens a lot of new stuff as well. So they have their own ecosystem, their own agendas, there are aquatic nests, spawning areas, places which the aliens will try to defend. Obviously the new Kraken monster can take out a sea-based city if you leave it poorly defended. So it can feel like there are a lot more alines in the world, but that’s because the whole planet is now alive, whereas previously the oceans were kind of a side-show. It’s definitely something you have to think about.
GameWatcher: You’ve also added a new Artifact system, where you can find these relics that give you resource bonuses, and if you combine them in the right way you can unlock new buildings. Is that a kind of shortcut to structure you’ll eventually unlock in the tech tree, or are they entirely unique?
Will Miller: The buildings you unlock through Artifacts are unique to that system, so you’ll have to put the effort in order to get them. There are seven or eight buildings and wonders… don’t quote us on that exact number (laughs). But yeah, the Artifact system is a really cool and natural extension of the quest system from the base game. It gives us an interesting way to reward the player, other than yield-based rewards from low-level quests. There’s a bunch of cool stuff that players can get their hands on, and the fiction and art behind each item is really cool. The benefits you get form such a simple system are manifold.
GameWatcher: I also managed to get surrounded by these weird things called Hydrocoral Brains at one point, which lead to an extended quest-line. Are there more of those more in-depth quests in Rising Tide?
Will Miller: I think you’ve run into one of our ‘Marvel Quests’. You’ll notice that actually in every Biome there are now these giant, multi-tile structures that are unique to that Biome. Each one has a special quest associated with it, so that if you can find all of its smaller, associate parts spread across the map, you get a special benefit unique to that environment. Every player can get this, it’s not zero-sum, but it is kind of a race to be the first. We just really wanted to see giant things on the map (laughs).
GameWatcher: You’ve added new Hybrid Affinity units for the first time, with new visual styles and statistical bonuses. How deep does that mechanic go, can you also get hybrid techs and buildings?
David McDonough: A lot of the existing content has been rebalanced with hybrid affinities in mind, the tech tree for example has been extensively rebalanced, so there’s a lot more Affinity XP scattered about. That makes hybridisation a much more natural process, along the way you’ll pick up a lot of XP that will keep your options open throughout the game. There aren’t hybrid-specific victory conditions, because the individual Affinities are still really the way you need to go to win, but along the way you can pick up a lot of power from hybridising left and right depending on your style.
It’s mostly expressed through your military; most of your core units, soldiers, air fighters, siege units and all those kind of troops, they have hybrid options at the top level, and then there are three new unique units per hybrid option, for nine in total. Each of those has an upgrade tree as well. So depending on what you find you like to do, hybrid units add a lot more nuance on top of the strategies found in the core game, so you can develop your own personal style by choosing hybrid uniques that match the way you want to play. Most of the hybrids, not all of them, operate as a kind of supporting, diversification role. Not necessarily frontline troops, but ways to make your frontline troops different, or alter the way you engage and so on. There’s so many different combinations to try.
GameWatcher: Civilization expansion typically tend to focus more on the mid to end-game, offering new ways to win, new late-game strategies. With this, from what I’ve played, it seems more like a general expansion spread across the entire playthrough. Is that the case with Rising Tide, or will there be lots of stuff to discover at the end-game?
Will Miller: You’re right, that’s a great observation, we generally target specific parts of the game. But this was a holistic expansion, to the entire product. That’s how you’ll see us approach expansions from this point, we’ll look at the entire project and we’ll make holistic changes. We really liked what the XCOM expansion, Enemy Within, did. If you look at that, it’s not targeting one point in the core game, it really changes the entire feel of the game, and the way it plays. It’s almost a new product. That to me, is worth the thirty dollars that you pay. You get a brand new experience. We wanted to do the same thing with Beyond Earth. We had a lot of great feedback and excitement from our fans, and we wanted to put as much of that in there, as much iteration in there as we could.
This is a very content-heavy game, more so than other Civ games have been in the past. It almost turns into an RPG at points, in terms of some of the stuff we’re adding in there. And now we have this pipeline set up, we can really just fill the game with stuff. There’s so much new stuff. As you play different games with different setups, you’ll notice a tonne of stuff you haven’t seen before. So yeah, this was a chance for us to really hone what was in the base game, but also introduce new mechanics that touch the entire experience.
Many thanks to Will and David for talking to me. If you’re interested in finding out what I thought after two hours with Rising Tide, check out our hands-on preview. The expansion is set for release on October 9.
