Its on sale on Steam but its getting mixed review. Not sure if a bad game. a good game that just hasn't reached its full potential, or a good game but the civ fanboys are hard to please.
It's not bad. But it's not Civ, basically. There are also some really broken things in terms of balance if you play Multiplayer (and general instability surrounding MP, worse than Civ is in that regard).
Warlocks is wonderful until you realize the AI is an idiot, and the best Civ is Undead Vamp rush. Also DONT get 2. Microtransactions enough said.
Recently started Endless Space with friends. It's surprisingly good and was on sale on Steam recently (you can still get it for less than $10). The main problem with Civ 5 is that it get really slow around turn 100+ in multiplayer, as well as the not very well developed midgame. Is Beyond Earth faster?
The demo only goes to turn 100. By that time I had 2 outposts up and trading with my capital, was at the second 'teir' in the tech tree, made a couple of culture improvements but had yet to define my 'affinity'. At that point in the game I had made contact with one other ai player and had cleared out a few neutral creature nests. Not sure if this is considered fast or slow for a 4x as I never play them multiplayer.
I meant slow in the sense that when you press "end turn", it takes 60-120 seconds until the next turn begins. This was the case in multiplayer with Civ 5, and they failed to fix this issue.
We tried to play Civ V multiplayer for a few weeks recently. We got beyond turn 150 just once. Every other failed or broke in some way (4 other games) - none of which was our fault that we could tell. It'd just stop working. And yes, it lagged later on, tho it was never 60-120 seconds. Beyond Earth did not seem to have that issue... but this is largely because we could rarely actually get a Beyond Earth game going. 2 Player Multi was fine, but as soon as we added a 3rd player it just wouldn't even load properly. People couldn't settle Capitals, etc. ~ Endless Space is pretty cool initially, but multiplayer is largely who builds the most aggressive race with movement/production buffs combined with irrelevant drawbacks. Unlike Civ, once you start losing in ES, you just keep losing and have very little to do.
The lag intensifies as the game goes on. But even with only 30 seconds per turn, in a 200 turn game you spend 100 minutes waiting for the game to load. For us that was the main reason to abandon Civ 5. ~ It's true that in ES, military advantage snowballs very fast. But I don't agree that you can only win with the most aggressive movement/production race. Harmony can have an absurd science advantage because their tex adjustment gives a 0-2 multiplier to science in addition to the also multiplicative local +50% planet bonus on fully populated planets. Sheryden can forgo production entirely, since they can buy everything on the spot. Etc. ...
What a sad, bad game. Civ 5 is so wonderfully superior that there's no need to even begin comparing the 2. Overpriced too. And rushed. Think "Steam release" rushed. So much refining needed.
There was actually a study done detailing that Strategy War Games, are far easier to market to Europeans than it is to the Western, Eastern, or Asian cultures. I honestly thought when I first heard this. "Why are we not marketing this a a Fantasy TBS over there." I really do wish I could find the study that did this. Would love to give it a reread.
is it fair to compare BE to CiV5? I missed the sale and now that I see the full price Im not tempted. But next time one comes around ill probably bite. The game can only get better (they just released a patch and new DLC). So I expect it will improve with time like CiV did.
It is fair to compare them in the sense that that they are very smilar games. Same way as you compare HotS right now with LoL. However the point you raise is excellent, Civ 5 sucked just as much in the beginning, so comparing fully-evolved Civ to right-out-of-the-egg BE is deffo unfair. Let's hope it improves. Though personally I really don't like BE visuals too, which will 100% not change.
i'd say it's definitely fair to say that civ 5 now is much better than it used to be, and there's gotta be work done regardless for multiplayer BE to be a 'thing'
at least it has a built in following like hearthstone does. whatever its problems, I don't think a small playerbase will be one of them.