Played about 3 hrs last night. Underwhelmed. The graphics are bleh and are a turnoff for me. The AI civs have zero personality. The interface is black and grey and bland. Lots of the little flavor things that make Civ games immersive are missing. I'm sure I'll eventually get my $50 dollars out of it. Maybe the late game and meta game is more developed than Civ5 and others. Honestly, after playing for 3 hrs I was itching to play Civ5 instead. And why play Civ5 when there is an EU4 expansion coming out in 6 days?

I've never played Europa, is it anything like Crusader Kings 2? That game has a ridiculous learning curve, I couldn't get myself to invest 10 hrs alone in tutorials.

I've played roughly half a game today, and so far I've pressed 'next turn' more than any other button.

EU4 is much much easier than CK2. EU4 is also closer to civ in that you are controlling a country and not a dynasty like in CK2.

EU4 isn't nearly as complex as CK2. They are both fantastic games but my personal preference is that EU4 is a more polished and intuitive experience.

Will be picking up BE during the winter 2017 steam sale.

Any thoughts on how BE has affected the development of Civ6? Civ 5 came out 5 years after Civ 4, and next year will be 5 years after Civ5. Was Firaxis just working on BE, or do you think they have Civ6 up their sleeves?

I gave up on EU3, but CK2 seemed simpler in a lot of ways. (Still don't know all the courtly mechanics, but w/e). Maybe I was just missing something simple with it. Sendoka (or something like that) also didn't last long before I uninstalled it.

No chance C:6 comes out anytime soon. The next three years will be BE DLC and expansions.

The only way C6 comes around before 2018 is if C:BE just doesn't sell at all.

Considering C5 was trash on release and was the #1 single player game 3 years later I doubt C:BE will 'fail'

We don't even need to wait. Civ 6 isn't coming anytime soon

What's up with that Garry's Mod - it's been top of the charts since day 1, and yet I have never known or heard of anyone who ever played it.

You know a game is good when most of the posts after release are about other games.

Also my mini review. I did one play through getting Emancipation victory and starte da second game before getting bored. I doubt I will touch it again. I think there is a good core game that could eventually be built upon with massive patching or future expansions, but theres so many things that make no sense and easily could have been improved.

In no order
Cons:
0) Horrific, unintuitive UI

1) Covert ops are ridiculously OP

2) Aliens, world, factions, leaders, units, all vanilla/generic. Siege worms are the only interesting alien unit but they easily could have made them more interesting/interactive. Something like removing miasma attracts more worms or something. Worms should be a TERROR, not something you just see and then move 2 squares away from and ignore. Also, have aliens scale into late game better since they basically can be ignored early on and then killed/farmed for xp as soon as you get a few military units up and running.

3) Miasma itself seems like it obviously should be more interactive instead of just being annoying with its minor health damage. Removing miasma could attract aliens, miasma could wreck tile yield until being removed (making you want to remove it, which attracts aliens/siege worms...), and eventually maybe going Harmony makes miasma into a good tile (similar to how fungus in SMAC could be eventually good). Seems like there are so many completely obvious ways to better incorporate miasma instead of health regen bonuses for Harmony.

4) AI sucks. Haven't really played civ 5 at all and was able to easily stomp the AI in my first game on gemini difficulty despite having no clue what I was doing. Started a second game on soyuz and was already way ahead before getting bored. A lot of this is tied to one unit per tile still being a terrible decision in civ 5 and the AI being awful at combat because of it. It doesn't really matter how many bonuses the AI gets when it will attack piecemail or attack with sniper/arty units in the front because it can't manage OUPT.

5) AI seriously sucks. Why is it gifting me cities in exchange for peace when I am nowhere near taking them? Why are they so slow to get the very OP affinity specific units?

6) Trade brings in wayyy too much and seems OP. Was it like this in civ 5? Thanks to trade and covert ops you should be swimming in energy.

7) The anti-growth system is a joke, so sprawl away. The penalties for having low health seem hilariously low, like -10% tech, -10% growth, -10% energy. So you can essentially just ignore it entirely because you can offset the loss from that penalty by just building more stuff. I'm fairly sure this will be patched because it really feels broken right now. Low health should cause disease outbreaks, or riots/uprisings, or massive penalties idk.

8) No score, no graphs, no hall of fame, no cinematic or story upon winning, just a screen with a paragraph and boom game over. All this combined with factions all feeling the same and sharing the same units etc means an extreme lack of replayability. Why try to beat my previous score if there are no scores? Why play a different faction if they are all the same? Why try for a different victory condition when all you get is a paragraph and an end game screen?

Pro:
1) Tech tree is pretty cool
2) Virtues seem pretty cool
3) Not just a reskin of Civ 5, everything is actually new and not just a sci-fi name with the same effects/buildings
4) Quests are kind of cool in driving the story
5) Affinities and unit upgrades kind of cool.

Yea I've been watching a lot of BE for the last few days and there are some really questionable design issues.

Ug. Tried another 3 hr session tonight. I've gotten more enjoyment out of a $50 speeding ticket.

That's it for me.

I'm like only person enjoying this game :/

I tried very very very hard to like this game.

No go.

I was getting flash backs of SNES games where strategy revolved around exploiting ****ty AI and badly designed game mechanics rather than a grand plan.

This feels like a pick up the game bundled with expansions during a steam sale type game to me. So summer 2016?

Same way Civ5 was for me. Can easily pick it up for $20 with expacs in two years when it is patched and balanced.

This game is so much fun it made me decide to instead fire up Civ 4 with the K-Mod.

BE was such a dissapointment for me. I was waitng for a great return of the great Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and what did I get? Ugly miserable fake! I hated it since the very first minute. Waste of time.