At the beginning of each game of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, the player must make some tough choices during the seeded start. These decisions will help shape the early game of every Beyond Earth match. Here's a quick guide to get you familiar with the process so you'll be ready to dive right into a game once the release date comes in a couple weeks.
In a game like Civ V, the player is posed with two main decisions before each game: which civ to play as and which map type to play on. Beyond Earth adds three more decisions into the pot during the seeded start: colonists, spacecraft and cargo. Each of these decisions comes with five different choices, each offering different bonuses that will significantly shape the player's early game.
These choices of bonus are added to the bonuses you get for the faction you choose to play with, of which there are eight. For you math kids, this means that there's 1,000 different ways to start your game, and that's not even counting the choice of which planet to land on.
The Official Beyond Earth Gameplay Trailer Is Here
Choose Your Colonist
The choice of colonist asks the player what kind of person he'd like to take with him on his journey into the unknown. These colonists provide bonuses to every city that the player founds throughout the game. For example, Refugees provide each city with a food bonus, which would work well with the food bonus of the People's African Union faction and provide the player with better expansion opportunities. Filling your spaceship with Artists will give your cities extra culture and health. If you pick this option as Franco-Iberia, you could earn Virtues more quickly, which means more free technologies thanks to that faction's ability.
Choose Your Spacecraft
The choice of spacecraft gives the player a Turn 1 bonus that helps the player get settled. Selecting the Continental Surveyor automatically reveals all of the planet's coastlines, a particularly powerful skill to have on an island-heavy archipelago map type. The Tectonic Scanner reveals resources like petroleum and titanium without requiring specific technologies so players can plan out their city locations earlier. These resources are often used in orbital units, making this choice a fine decision for the orbital unit-focused Slavic Federation. Perhaps the most practical of these options, however, is the Retrograde Thruster, which gives players more of an option of where to land their first settler unit. Creating your opening city in a smart location is critical for many Civ games, and Retrograde Thrusters give you plenty of help doing just that.
Choose Your Cargo
Finally, players get to choose a type of cargo, which gives your opening city a little boost. For example, the Laboratory cargo option gives players the Pioneering technology for free at the beginning of the game. Because this tech opens up trade units for production, this is a fine choice for fans playing as Polystralia, whose special ability allows the player to focus more on trade. Players can also choose the Weapon Arsenal, which provides the player with one free soldier unit. For people who choose the military-focused Brasilia as their faction, this could help them start building up and promoting their army early, especially if they revealed alien nests with the Lifeform Sensor spacecraft option.
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will launch October 24.
