Also a new Black Market for spies where you can trade diplomatic capital for strategic resources, and trade convoys are all amphibious now.

Nothing addressing some of the core concerns here about the boring late game, lack of faction personality, etc. But at least they fixed one of the glaring problems in the new diplomacy system.

The late game is pretty tedious, though I don’t know that it’s demonstrably worse than Civ. The Promised Land victory, in particular, has enough moving parts that it stays engaging throughout. I suspect that being able to purchase items with Capital will speed up Emancipation. It’s really just Transcendence and Contact that are difficult to make bearable.

I don’t have a problem with the game being a bit too easy, weirdly enough? They’ve moved things closer to the Alpha Centauri approaches of having several different approaches that are all equally broken, and a human is always going to be better at exploiting those than an AI.

That being said, the AI has been pretty terrible at adapting to the new whole-map playstyle. In Civ V it’s a colossal dick about expansion, but here the maps are now too big (because you’ve effectively doubled or tripled the settleable tiles) and the AI is really bad at expanding into all that new space. This means the human player isn’t pressured at all in the early-to-midgame, which gives them a free run to set themselves up in a favourable position.

Weirdly I find myself liking it too now, despite everything. I played three games over a week and enjoyed them all, endgame excepted, and another expansion could push it to the point where it is mechanically an equal of Civ V. It’s just there are a whole bunch of what are (to me at least) fairly quick wins that Firaxis are totally ignoring, and until they address them Beyond Earth will always be a lesser game that I play mostly because I fancy something a little bit different.

I do like the new treasure hunt dynamic for Artifacts, and the aliens seem at least a little less like reskinned barbarians this time around. A little more unpredictable, which I like. But there is still so much that’s unbalanced and tedious, especially in the late game. The Warscore dynamic in diplomacy just isn’t working, but at least the devs have said they’re looking to fix that soon.

My guess is that there’s one more expansion in the works to address the late game shortcomings, roughly following the Civ 5 expansion model. Maybe adding three more Victory conditions for the hybrid paths, and tightening up the whole end game with a few new features/units? I’m not sure one more expansion will be enough to save this from being a very mediocre and too-easy strategy game, but at least they’ll probably have one more shot at it.

I like the diplomacy system, but it’s a big change from Civ’s traditional model, so I’m more willing to forgive its flaws. The specificity of the deals helps or hurts depending on your style and needs (extra orbital coverage sounds pretty good for my current game as Space France, for instance), but what irks me is that the AI is still prone to accept or dismiss offers if it seems like they would help you press a significant advantage, Respect and Fear be damned; this makes the deals functionally absent in the late-game, as the AI, which is still too passive, almost inevitably falls far behind the player as the game progresses.

So it’s still a flawed game, but I actually kind of like it now. It does enough things differently from Civ now that I don’t think it’s basically a reskin, and at least some of the features, I assume, might be included as a testing ground for the inevitable Civ VI. At the very least, at least leaders no longer take up the whole screen and demand attention just to remind you what they think about you.