Okay, but eats up resources.

I’m afraid that I think earlier games in this series were better, and that CIV V and Beyond Earth are fairly weak. So here are my complaints:

1. Combat is simply not very interesting. In earlier versions, particularly IV, you zoomed in to the combat, and it was a bit more realistic (for the values of realism inherent in a game). Frankly, I enjoyed hearing the sounds as cities were taken. It’s relatively quiet here.
2. No Nukes. There’s nothing more satisfying than dropping a nuke on a place, and seeing and hearing an earth shattering kaboom. Take that Napoleon.
3. It is difficult to build large armies. Those take vast amounts of resources, and long periods of time, or available energy (used in place of gold in BE).
4. Diplomacy is not improved by having the leaders offer favors in exchange for their demands.
5. There is, as far as I know, no option to exchange technologies with leaders.
6. The leaders are still irrational. They’re friendly one moment, then the next they’re condemning you.
7. There’s a limited set (8) of leaders and factions.
8. The end of game shots are bad. I think it was Civ IV that had the animated movies at the end. Here you get a static image.
9. Replay doesn’t. All you get is a static chart. There are a bunch of static charts connected to the main one.
10. Switching between the normal layer and the space layer is awkward. As the game gets on, and you try to place satellites the game may become unstable and crash.
11. It is moddable, but not not easily. You have to edit a couple of files by hand, and the instructions for doing so (from an external site) aren’t terribly clear.
12. Espionage is quirky. Frankly, I’d rather have the spy as a unit, and the results more immediate.
13. If you’re playing with a startup disk that is relatively full, and have a number of programs open, particularly Safari, the disk space will start to go down, and the program will become sluggish and crash.

Game play is okay. My personal problem is that I preferred the earlier games, some of which are no longer playable under OS X to the current ones.

tehart about Civilization: Beyond Earth