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Civ BE: Rising Tide

Hmm. They are the last company that still has it, but with their last few releases, Firaxis has almost lost my unconditional buy-it flag.

In particular, the wartime diplomacy system in Rising Tide is so restrictive of player choices that Sid Meier ought to be turning over in his chair. This, and the other ways in which the new diplomacy system removes player agency, are well covered in the RPS article (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/08/beyond-earth-rising-tide-review/) so I don't need to repeat them myself. (Although the actual bug involving allies and war declarations was patched almost immediately.)

Overall, Rising Tide is a definite if not quite good enough improvement for BE, roughly like the first expansion to Civ5. It adds some important systems and addresses some balance issues, but is still not "done" yet. I hope the next expansion, like the second one for Civ5, will make it a complete and satisfying game.

One of the biggest handicaps that BE has compared to a mainline Civ is the lack of character for the different factions. Alpha Centauri very carefully crafted character for the factions, and reflected it in the AIs as well as the abilities. Moving from Civ5 to BE, the most noticeable thing is the loss of unique buildings and units, and the genericity and blandness of the "unique" abilities. Rising Tide works hard in this area, making the unique abilities much more distinctive. Sadly, it does this at the cost of balance - some of the abilities are totally naff, others are amazing. The three new factions with water starts are all crippled by the high startup cost of making a seagoing colony work - it takes them a long time to get their capital up to the productivity of a land-based starting capital. Two of the three have no particular synergy or even connection between being sea-based and their abilities; the remaining one sounds on paper like it might help make them competitive, but it's a late-blooming advantage which has a hard time overcoming the early problems.

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