Could 'Beyond Earth 2' or a Alpha Centauri remake be on the cards now that Civ 6 is officially done?

[cbdeakin]

Would anyone want this to be made on the civ 6 engine?

Maybe as a side project, alongside releasing civ 7 probably in 2022?

"Please don't go, the drones need you"

[PhailRaptor]

I would love to see a second attempt at Beyond Earth. But it would definitely need to not be the B team working on it this time. There were some pretty clear miss-steps that occurred early on in development that, rather than getting reworked, were instead doubled down on. Immersion was difficult to find.

[Aachen]

ReBERT, with unstacked post-cities?

Maaaaaybe.

How would aquatic cities handle, hypothetically?

[Sargef101]

say guys yep i still like to play them from time to time
but a remake U GOTTA B KIDDING ME. RIGHT?

[Sargef101]

oh and one other thing. Y did u post this on Civ VI??
they got more problems then wanting a remake of them
did Beyond Earth run out of room ?????????

[Sticky Wicket]

A bona-fide Alpha Centauri remake is something that a lot of us old school civ players have been waiting for a long time.

I however have no faith that the current Firaxis developers have the imagination nor skills to make it properly. The utter mess they made of Beyond Earth being a case in point.

[captainpatch]

I think that a BE 2 would be doable, but probably not feasible. The hangup is is the tech development: Just how many futuristic, not-even-thought-of-in-the-here-and-now techs could they come up with? And limited as to the aspect that a _colony_ wouldn't outperform Planet Earth. That's the mistake that SM's Alpha Centauri made, Colony worlds just would NOT have a brain trust capable of pumping out techs soooooo powerful as to dwarf anything Mother Earth ever came up with.

[An interesting SciFi scenario is one where a massive colony Space Ark gets sent off, scheduled to arrive in a viable solar system in 100+ years -- only to find that Mother Earth came up with a tech some years after launch that enabled later colonists to get to the destination decades before the Space Ark arrived.]

The problem with SM's Alpha Centauri has to do with design credit -- AND copyright ownership. Besides Sid, the game had shared credits with Brian Reynolds, Bing Gordon, Douglas Kaufman, and Timothy Train. Since the game first came out. Several of them have since left Firaxis to join other companies or start new ones themselves. IF Firaxis ever considered a new AC product, it is fairly certain that those Firaxis ex-pats would tie up the issue in copyright infringement lawsuits. (Which is why Firaxis DID come out with BE rather than calling it AC 2.)

[Sargef101]

Holy crap(sxxx) I think 2K and Firaxis has a help wanted sign out?:)

[cbdeakin]

Originally posted by Sargef101:

oh and one other thing. Y did u post this on Civ VI??
they got more problems then wanting a remake of them
did Beyond Earth run out of room ?????????

There's always one lol.

Where is your sense of duty towards the drones, don't you know they need to be looked after 24/7?

[cbdeakin]

@captainpatch "The problem with SM's Alpha Centauri has to do with design credit -- AND copyright ownership. Besides Sid, the game had shared credits with Brian Reynolds, Bing Gordon, Douglas Kaufman, and Timothy Train."

This is a good point. But couldn't Firaxis flash the cash (pay them much more than they would earn elsewhere) and rehire them all to work on AC 2? Assuming they are all still alive. They'd be given full credit etc. I think if they did this, they would probably need to build a whole new game engine, not sure the CIV 6 one would be suitable.

[D34DLY]

I'd like a civ 7, but with real artificial intelligence. Use code from chess programs that looks into possible future moves to plan current strategy. Have heuristic algorithms where actual game play helps the AI to learn and remember strategies. There could be a local AI that is specific to the player, and a global AI that learns from many players thanks to the internet. There would also be different AI personalities representing different play styles and strategies.

Make it so damn smart, people have to turn down the AI difficulty level if they want to win, similar to a chess program. Or give the AI personalities handicaps so they play sub-optimally, but with goals other than winning. Some AI could be friendly, and truly want to help the player.

[alangriffith]

Originally posted by captainpatch:

And limited as to the aspect that a _colony_ wouldn't outperform Planet Earth. That's the mistake that SM's Alpha Centauri made, Colony worlds just would NOT have a brain trust capable of pumping out techs soooooo powerful as to dwarf anything Mother Earth ever came up with.

Did you miss the plot of Alpha Centauri? Earth was dying of overcrowding and pollution, the smartest (and richest) were those getting on the ship to escape. And there was no earth left to continue tech advance by the time they arrived on alpha centauri ("silence on all frequencies" ring a bell? Its in one of your earliest interludes).

Add in that a lot of the tech on alpha centauri came from the unique planetary stuff (not just mindworm taming and the farming techs, but the lack of any fossil fuels on the planet required synthsteel and synthetic fossil fuels, genuinely psychic alien life led to empaths, etc.), and some more was reclaimed from what earth and the colony ship already had (fusion power and, obviously, spaceflight). This is all made clear in the tech descriptions and quotes in the game.

By the time thing like quantum energy, matter transmission and digital sentience come along, it has been literally centuries. In Alpha Centauri it doesn't matter if earth could have been eclipsed or not in those centuries, because earth is dead.* You specifically go back there in one of the endings (if someone else achieves transcendence victory) to find it full of craters.


*Though if you think a colony can't eclipse its home nation over a few centuries, including in tech, then I've got some news for you about the USA (and I say that as a Brit. Britain was formerly 'workshop of the world' and source of the industrial revolution, but where is all the highest tech now? In our former colony and current superpower, the USA).

[captainpatch]

Originally posted by cbdeakin:

This is a good point. But couldn't Firaxis flash the cash (pay them much more than they would earn elsewhere) and rehire them all to work on AC 2? Assuming they are all still alive. They'd be given full credit etc. I think if they did this, they would probably need to build a whole new game engine, not sure the CIV 6 one would be suitable.

Much of the problem is ego. As in, the other developers felt that having ONLY Sid's name on the game(s) minimized their contributions. At least one, or maybe as many as three of the other devs would be more than willing to tie up the entire development, just to spite Sid. And the kind of cash that they would require to sign a Quit Claim would be so much as to make the entire project pointedly unprofitable. And in the final analysis, Firaxis IS a business.... and the business of Business is make the biggest Profit possible. And it takes money to make money. Which is why pretty much EVERY large Development company NEEDS big name publishers like 2K and EA to front the development money. Which the publishers WON'T do if they think there's a chance the development process is likely to end up in lengthy legal proceedings.

Other items.

The "smartest" Chess AIs have MASSIVELY _fewer_ variables to consider than ANY videogame. And that takes into account that after just 4 moves of Chess,... "There are 288+ billion different possible positions after four moves apiece." That's in a game that has only 32 pieces on a grid that has 64 (8 x 8) spaces. A typical game of Civ will have THOUSANDS of units x grid locations that can easily exceed hundreds of turns. [My games run 500-700 turns on a Colossal (mod) map.] What is amazing about the Civ AI is NOT that is sooooooo stupid, but rather that it is at least as "smart" as it is. To make Civ (or any other videogame's) AI as smart as a VERY "smart" Chess AI would require a gymnasium packed from floor to ceiling with state-of-the-art linked computers, each with HUMONGOUS memory capacity. And even then, you could expect ONE turn to take _hours_. [Trivia: Just ONE PC from Today with so-so hardware has significantly more calculating capacity than ALL of NASA's computers that managed the entire Apollo XI (moon landing) mission combined.]

***********

Despite the Prologue to AC, it is entirely unlikely that ALL of Earth's best and brightest would abandon ship on the planet, no matter how bad things got. And like any bacteria culture that experiences explosive growth, after a 95%+ die-off from swimming in one's own toxins, the life cycle inevitably resumes. What's 5% of 10-20 billion? (A: Lots.) And it's fairly certainly, that a large percentage of ^them would many/most of Earth's best and brightest that stayed behind. And unlike the space colonists, earth would still have its MASSIVE Research infrastructure relatively intact. (Minus any damage from outraged mobs' vandalism because they weren't given the chance to abandon ship with the space colonists.) More than likely, several of the world's most heavily armed nations WILL get VERY pragmatic of how to reduce the number of resource consumers sucking up the dwindling resource supply. (Think worldwide Holocaust-on-steroids, and 9 _billion_ people get "euthanized".) Which would also tend to concentrate what remained of Earth's best and brightest.

While the Prologue mentioned that communication with Earth evaporated, it could only speculate about _why_ communication ceased. But how long did the voyage take? In that length of time, Earth may very well have switched over to an entirely novel method of communication. (Consider just how long Earth has had _radio_. And just how quickly it went from Morse Code telegraphs to digital communications broadcast across a vast web of satellites.) For all the colonists knew, Earth's survivors may have developed full-on psychic communication channels that they can't pick up 4.3 kightyears away.

The REAL limitation in futuristic game design is that there is no simple way to anticipate what tech is likely to be available 100-200 years from now. Go back to 1900 and describe the Space Shuttle in detail to Earth's then-best-and-brightest and 99.9% of them would have said, "NEVER happen; totally impossible and implausible." [Though SciFi _writers_ like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne _did_ postulate some of the things we take for granted Today.] (However, most such postulations dealt more with, "Given, this thing exists in the Future" there was little or no postulation about _how_ it would be done.) So when it comes to game design of a FAR Future tech development, it's difficult to present something more plausible than "Future Tech #1, Future Tech #2, etc. (And trust me on this one, I've known enough designers and developers to know they DO NOT like being that vague.) The main drawback is ideas that get ruled out just because "Everybody KNOWS _that_ can't be done." Like conceiving of a human running a two-minute mile.

[RemiW]

beyond earth have so souless UI and ♥♥♥♥ gameplay not to mention it's science tree it's terrible, the 'simple, classic' technique is either forgotten or they remake it how they see it 'simple' or idk how retarded must be the guy who created this game to think it's good, besides it's the worst times since u up 'modern tech unit' to 'modern BETTER tech unit' lUl, simple as ♥♥♥♥ this game should not be made

[cbdeakin]

I actually quite liked the flexibility of the tech web in Beyond Earth, I think they just needed to add a lot more main techs and 'leaf' techs to it. The existing tech trees seen in civ 5/6 seem too basic in comparison. Another problem, was the AI didn't research very effectively, particularly in Rising Tide (often ignoring 'affinity' point techs), but this could be improved with mods.

There was nothing 'retarded' about BE (have some respect kid, lol), it just needed more time, better development tools and funding. It's a shame that it was relegated to being a low budget spin off of Civ 5, they need to go all out for a game like this.

The art design and music is still actually quite good. I liked some of the additions made in Rising Tide, like the agreements system, and powerful hybrid affinity units. The Aquilon was a cool unit.

[Sargef101]

WOW after reading these post i was wrong about that help wanted sign i think it should of said help needed PLEASE:)