Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide

Rising Tide is the first Civ expansion I’ve played that makes its host game worse overall. It’s not immediately apparent that it will do so, though. In fact, most of its changes sound like good ideas on paper. It adds new faction customization options, overhauls Beyond Earth’s weak diplomacy mechanics into something completely unique, introduces hybrid affinities that eliminate the need for narrow tech tree progression, and includes mobile aquatic cities as an obligatory nod to Alien Crossfire. The new diplomacy system is arguably the biggest draw, and it’s simultaneously complicated, streamlined, and unusually transparent. It revolves around “diplomatic capital,” a new resource that kind of works like tourism in Earth-based Civilization games. Among other things, it can be exchanged for intercolonial agreements that offer bonuses to the beneficiary based on the provider’s chosen personality traits.

Those personality traits play a major role in the initiation of wars and alliances as well, which is ultimately one piece of Rising Tide’s most significant failing. The other piece is rooted in how all of its new features are the definition of power creep: they all provide more resources and capabilities even though the game remains balanced as if they’re not there. This isn’t a problem on its own; it means players don’t have to be slaves to the “health” resource as much as before, and it means they’ll get access to all the cool endgame stuff much earlier. The problem is that the CPU players are astonishingly bad at using any of the new mechanics, in the same way the AI in vanilla Civ 5 was weirdly terrible at combat. Combined with their transparent preferences, it’s incredibly easy to remain in the good graces of most opponents, creating the most passive, uneventful gameplay loop in the series.

Beyond Earth somewhat struggled with making good on the multiplicity usually promised by Civilization. It was mostly from an artistic perspective – faction leaders had little to no identity of their own, monochrome unit and building icons were hard to differentiate, and research goals made of pure technobabble felt thematically hollow. Rising Tide exaggerates this to the point where every match feels interchangeable. As much as I love the idea of a less-restrictive tech tree, downplaying affinities ensures that every colony will develop into the same jumble of disparate selections. Additionally, while aquatic cities have some differences from terrestrial ones, they’re so similar overall that it manages to make the difference between land and water, of all things, almost negligible.

Mechanically, the base game still retained much of the strategic spark of earlier titles. The exception came in the form of occasional binary choices where one option seemed obviously better than the other. This too has been exaggerated in Rising Tide. One thing the computer never figures out is that diplomatic capital is so useful that there’s almost never a reason to refuse a proposed agreement. Furthermore, resource trade and peace terms are now arranged automatically via convoys and combatants’ “war scores,” respectively, robbing players of multiple forms of agency. Importantly, though, because many of these issues involve AI interactions, most of them are minimized or downright irrelevant in multiplayer. In that context, Beyond Earth with Rising Tide installed remains a solid albeit bland Alpha Centauri successor. In single-player, however, it becomes about as one-note as something with this level of complexity can possibly be.