The Gaming Den

I've got to say that many aspects of this game, as seen in the trailers and YouTube playthroughs, don't make sense to me. Why do you need scout units when you have satellites capable of reading newspapers from orbit?

They were needed in Alpha Centauri because the ship was mostly destroyed by infighting among the various factions, and nothing got appropriately released. Once you re-develop the ability to enter space, you revealed the entire map.

I have a sneaking suspicion the game is just Civ V with some tech tree changes and flashy new visuals.

Honestly, that's all I really care about in a new iteration of Civ. Well, that and the specific pack of leaderheads/civs, but I can always custom that.

Yes, rght now it very much looks like Civ5 in spaaece.
I'll give it a show, see if it manages to pull me in as 5 did.

The part about unit customization you'd remember from alpha centauri is completely missing, but there was a different game that basically was a complete overhaul of alpha centauri with new graphics that allowed that.

I'm sure there'll be some novel new subsystem, like how Civ 5 did religion or espionage, but honestly... what do you really want from yet another Civ other than new techs and what comes with them, and better graphics?

They did away with the tech tree and instigated a tech web.
I want the unit modification system from alpha centauri
The start of the game, selecting your faction and what you can do better than the others seems pretty damn lacklustre compared to Civ5 from what i have seen on youtube . .
The orbital layer was done better in alpha centauri as well, if i remember correctly, with actual stationary bases not just sattelites that fall from the sky after a while.

I bought the pre-order, so I'm all in when it drops.

I think the reasoning for the rise in tech for this game is that the alien life is really smart and weird and hostile, and you are just colonists. This means that there are weird sci-fi reasons for things not working correctly until you get the right tech tree (probably "energy fields" because those tends to tech-xplain everything in sci-fi).

That being said, I am really going to wonder how this game stacks up to Pandora. Pandora is a pretty clear Alpha Centauri clone, and it does a lot of neat things. I am going to be very disappointed if CivB ends up being the lesser of the two games.

Overall, I find Civ5 boring and slow. Hopefully CivB learned a lesson from that and went back to the faster-paced gameplay style of Alpha Centauri where everything felt dangerous because mindworms might be lurking in the fungus and any particular turn might turn into an existential battle for a unit or city you thought was safe.