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[Niveras]

Sounds possible, though I'm not 100% sure if what you describe was what was actually happening or not. The station stopped taking damage on that turn, and when I explored around it further there was nothing that I could see that was causing it to take damage. There was a nearby civ territory that was still unexplored, so maybe that AI was attacking it and retreated for whatever reason rather than destroying the station, or maybe it was an alien unit that was destroyed (though I doubt it, just based on the surrounding terrain).

./shrug

[GiglameshDespair]

A rather... interesting bug. In the little models in the upgrade screens, it just stacks all the models on top of each other. It makes it look horrbily messy and stupid whenever I upgrade my units, but it doesn't actually have any effect. Same thing happens with the little models it makes on the screen that pops up when you're about to attack an enemy - the aliens all had overlapping models, and my soldiers overlapped with artillery. Weird, but harmless.

[Eagle_eye]

The jump in strength from standard units to the lowest level affinity uniques is absolutely absurd. I went from barely holding off the alien horde with my gunners to one hit killing them while sustaining single digit damage with CNDRs.

[MaximumZero]

Well, between that and the fact that leveling your units up doesn't seem to matter at all, it can make combat feel very unwieldy.

[Chiefwaffles]

Purity's first level uniques are probably the best.
They're basically WH40k Space Marines, complete with a cool banner.

[Vortex Rikers]

This post has about as much effort put into it as the developers of BE put into their game.

Game is extremely barebones.

No cultural victory, no diplomatic victory, no analogue to SMAC's council.

AI still hasn't improved a bit.

Combat, combat, combat, combat everywhere.

Maps are too small which practically forces factions to fight for territory right off the bat. Impossible to ignore them even in early game.

Aliens are boring as hell, just reskinned 'barbarians.

The factions, oh god the factions are so boring. Absolutely hollow, no identity whatsoever, almost nothing to differentiate them. The world itself is also just another Earth, no mysteries nothing worth exploring.
The writing of SMAC was thought provoking, an interesting insight into each of the factions strongly worded ideologies;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Prokhor Zakharov: Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist. "

Contrast that with Beyond Earth's;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Instruct the children not to dream of toys and sweets. Instruct them to dream of infrastructure.

So deep, so profound, thank you Vadim Kozlov, mat' tvayu.

Really I'd rather play that Pandora game, at least it attempts to mimic SMAC more.
The buildings, the wonders, they're all utterly sad. Yay, I get +2 food, great. None of those neat mini movies to show off your unique achievement, nothing noteworthy whatsoever.

Managing trade routes is a micro HELL.

It's sad, it cannot compete with Civ5, at best it's currently just a reskin with less features, and definitely does not even come close to matching its spiritual predecessor from 1999.

Save yourself the money, this thing will need more than a few expansions/DLCs before it's worth the price tag.

[Chiefwaffles]

I can't help but find that little mini-review blatantly incorrect. Let's dive into this.

This post has about as much effort put into it as the developers of BE put into their game.

Woah. Now that's just needless aggression.

Game is extremely barebones.

Hardly. It has Civ 5 + Expansions + A ton of other things. Too many things to list, even.

No cultural victory, no diplomatic victory, no analogue to SMAC's council.

Fair-ish. Cultural victory was only in the expansion pack for Civ 5, and doesn't really make sense for Beyond Earth's setting. SMAC's Council - Sure, I suppose.

AI still hasn't improved a bit

Uhhh.. no?
Experiencing a pretty improved AI over here.

Combat, combat, combat, combat everywhere.

Just like Civ 5 and SMAC.

Maps are too small which practically forces factions to fight for territory right off the bat. Impossible to ignore them even in early game.

Maybe increase the map size?

Aliens are boring as hell, just reskinned 'barbarians.

Except they have a much more relatively advanced AI. SMAC's aliens are just barbarians with a bit of a different attack mechanic.

The factions, oh god the factions are so boring. Absolutely hollow, no identity whatsoever, almost nothing to differentiate them. The world itself is also just another Earth, no mysteries nothing worth exploring.
The writing of SMAC was thought provoking, an interesting insight into each of the factions strongly worded ideologies;

Can't argue with you there

The buildings, the wonders, they're all utterly sad. Yay, I get +2 food, great. None of those neat mini movies to show off your unique achievement, nothing noteworthy whatsoever.

..just like SMAC, Civ 5, and just about every other civilization game out there? And as for the mini movies, those only accompanied SMAC's wonder equivalents. While I do miss them, it's not surprising at all that they don't have them, considering that Civ 5 didn't either.

Managing trade routes is a micro HELL.

They can be a bit annoying at worst, but it's just clicking a button once every X turns.

It's sad, it cannot compete with Civ5, at best it's currently just a reskin with less features, and definitely does not even come close to matching its spiritual predecessor from 1999.

I.. what?
This makes no sense. Beyond Earth can easily compete with Civ 5, and in my opinion, is much better in most if not all aspects. Calling it a reskin is drastically incorrect, looking at all the (fun, I may add) features it implements. And it does come pretty close with SMAC. I played both today, and much prefer Beyond Earth, though SMAC does have its advantages.

Save yourself the money, this thing will need more than a few expansions/DLCs before it's worth the price tag.

I quite like the game myself. While it isn't amazing, it's a solid, fun, game, as most people have said already. $40 can be a bit much, depending on the person, but I believe it was worth it.

[Tarran]

Combat, combat, combat, combat everywhere.

I've finished 1 game with 1 war, 1 game with multiple wars then peace with 1 AI, and 1 game with no wars at all. In addition, I've rarely had to fight the aliens, so I disagree with you here.

If you're talking about the AIs, well, this is absolutely nothing new. AIs in all civ games I've played war a lot.

Maps are too small which practically forces factions to fight for territory right off the bat. Impossible to ignore them even in early game.

Try picking a bigger map? Try going into advanced options and removing some AIs? Really, the tools are on your desk to give yourself more room.

I mean, I've played 3 huge map games so far with the full 7 AIs and only once was I truly boxed in. The problem was more of where the AI spawned rather than how much total room was on the map. Poor AI spawns are as far as I know nothing new.

Aliens are boring as hell, just reskinned 'barbarians.

At least they're better than Civ5 barbarians, you can actually go through the game without attacking them. I don't know about you but I think that's an improvement from constant random units showing up to steal workers or pillage random tiles.

Really I'd rather play that Pandora game, at least it attempts to mimic SMAC more.

Why not just ignore both this game and Pandora and just play SMAC if you believe it's already about as good as it gets?

It's sad, it cannot compete with Civ5, at best it's currently just a reskin with less features, and definitely does not even come close to matching its spiritual predecessor from 1999.

For you, maybe. I, on the other hand, believe it is a thinner, rougher, yet more interesting version of Civ5 at release that brings the series to some other place besides earth for once in a long while. As for comparing to its predecessor, well, it's like comparing X-COM to XCOM. I don't see a point in it, they're both good games in their own way, and arguing just disrespects both games.

[Sergarr]

Tell me, in what ways the planet in BE is different from Earth?

[Tarran]

Miasma, completely alien resources, different looks... but really, do the specifics really matter? They certainly don't to me, I just rather be somewhere else than sitting with Napoleon or Ghandi fighting for access to Aluminum for the hundredth time, even if it is just thematically.

[Sartain]

One thing I really like about this game is the large amount of different terrain improvements that your workers can build (on land only unfortunately) that offer a lot of different option for customizing your cities.

[umiman]

Until you unlock terraforming, at which point your workers will only ever build jungles at the expense of everything else.

[Niveras]

IMO, one failure in terms of "atmosphere" is that all the voice blurbs are by the same actor. In SMAC, each faction head had their own actors, and on top of that there were at least two different persons who did generic "datalinks" entries (one male, one female), and a few more than that (the Network Node blurb, for example). I find the inflections in BE's blurbs are also very strange, like the person is trying too hard to make something simple sound profound... or maybe it just lacks any kind of emotion. It is particularly obvious as in the example quoted previously. In SMAC, they more or less spoke naturally (even, at some points, sounding amused) or formally, not impassively - except, arguably, the datalinks, but even some cases there, the voice overs emoted as they spoke. The difference between Nimoy's deadpan "Beep. Beep. Beep." in Civ4 and the "Let it whop, let it whop, that steel on down" in SMAC.

Pandora had this problem too. Only one voice actor for everything and no emotion to really differentiate between any particular blurb.

And to be honest, I fully expected this would happen. I mean, in terms of Civ history SMAC is unique for this: Civ 2 and 3 did not have spoken blurbs, while Civ4 only had Nimoy and Civ5 only had HeyItsThatGuy (I don't remember his name but his voice is very unique). My expectation was always that BE would try to mimic SMAC (and it did, in terms of what's being said), without necessarily grasping or understanding why it was that people liked SMAC (the atmosphere, ambiance in terms of how its being said).

[pisskop]

Wait. . . could this be described as a civ V overhaul mod?

[Niveras]

Until you unlock terraforming, at which point your workers will only ever build jungles at the expense of everything else.

From what I can tell, the terrascapes aren't necessarily a good thing to spam because they don't add to the yields of a tile, only set them to 2/2/2. Kind of like the monoliths in SMAC, except they cost maintenance and don't have any techs to improve their output. (I forget if monoliths on fungus also benefit from techs which improve fungus yields; perhaps only when the fungus yield exceeds the monolith yield).

There's some exceptions, though. A flood plain tile with terrascape is still 2/2/2 even though it already has 2 food and 2 energy (actually 2/2/2/-6: it negates the base 2 energy of the base flood plain entirely), but a desert tile with terrascape and vivarium in the city (+1 food on desert tiles) is 3/2/2. Never tried a terrascape on a resource.

Personally, I've been building other improvements instead (mainly biowells in place of farms), even though terrascapes are probably higher yield overall. There are some late game techs which improve farms and various buildings which improve various improvements but I haven't kept track.