Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth takes the series somewhere it has never been, beyond the planet it has always called home. After the Great Mistake left the old nations broken, humanity pins its future on colony ships bound for a distant world, and you lead one of those expeditions. Firaxis Games, the studio behind Civilization and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, builds a science-fiction 4X around a single question: what does humanity become when it starts over on an alien planet?
Seed the Expedition
Every game begins before landfall. You choose one of eight expedition sponsors, among them the American Reclamation Corporation under Suzanne Fielding, the Pan-Asian Cooperative under Daoming Sochua and the Slavic Federation under Vadim Kozlov, each with its own leader and unique gameplay benefits. From there you assemble the mission itself by selecting your colonists, spacecraft and cargo. These seeding choices directly shape your starting conditions on the new planet, so no two expeditions touch down in quite the same position.
A Planet That Pushes Back
The new world is not an empty map waiting to be painted. Toxic Miasma drifts across the land, strange resources such as Xenomass and Firaxite wait to be claimed, and native life ranges from packs of Wolf Beetles to Siege Worms large enough to flatten a careless army. The aliens largely leave you alone unless you go looking for trouble, which turns every nest you clear into a deliberate decision rather than a reflex. Build outposts that grow into cities, unearth ancient alien relics, tame new forms of life and link your settlements with trade routes to create prosperity for your people.
The Tech Web and the Three Affinities
Instead of a linear tech tree, research spreads outward across a nonlinear technology web of branches and leaves, letting you chase the discoveries your colony needs rather than march down a fixed line. The web is organized around three broad themes, and the path you favor pulls your people toward one of three affinities, each with its own victory condition.
- Harmony
- Harmony adapts humanity to the planet rather than the other way around. Genetic engineering lets your people thrive in the Miasma and work alongside alien life, and the long road ends in Transcendence, awakening the planet's dormant consciousness through the Mind Flower and joining with it.
- Purity
- Purity holds on to what makes us human, reshaping the land to resemble the Earth that was left behind. Its victory, the Promised Land, opens an Exodus Gate so the millions still waiting at home can follow you to a world made ready for them.
- Supremacy
- Supremacy sees the future in machines, augmenting colonists with cybernetics and treating the body as hardware to be upgraded. Its Emancipation victory builds a gate back to Earth to carry that transformation to everyone the expedition left behind.
Contact with a mysterious intelligence and outright domination of your rivals offer two further routes to victory, so the finish line is never fixed.
Orbit, Armies and Rivals
- The Orbital Layer: a second strategic layer sits above the map. Deploy military, economic and scientific satellites that provide offensive, defensive and support capabilities from orbit, changing the ground beneath them for as long as they stay aloft.
- Unit Customization: upgrades unlocked through the tech web let you tailor your units to your play style, and as your affinity deepens, your soldiers and vehicles take on a look that matches the future you are building.
- Multiplayer for up to 8 Players: compete with up to seven other players for dominance of a new alien world, where the same sponsors, affinities and victory paths make every rival's strategy a puzzle worth reading.
- Mod Support: robust mod support lets you customize and extend the experience with new content and rule changes long after your first colony has taken root.
Write the Next Chapter
Beyond Earth rewards the one-more-turn instinct Civilization players know well, only now each turn nudges humanity toward a future no one has seen. If you have ever wondered what your favorite strategy series would feel like with the map turned alien and the ending left up to you, your colony ship is fueled and waiting. Choose your sponsor, pack the cargo hold and find out what humanity becomes on the other side of the stars.
