You can also turn the alien population against your adversaries.

There's the direct approach with an orbital strike laser you can also surround your enemies' civs with toxic miasma, or use your satellites to assume control over units underneath your orbital layer airspace. Besides providing surveillance, your satellites in the orbital layer can wreak havoc in multiple ways. You can go to war in some pretty ingenious waysįor those who prefer world domination, Beyond Earth offers plenty of creative methods for exterminating the opposition.

Supremacy gets the opposite side of that same coin in Emancipation, in which you decide that Earth's population is hopeless-so to usher them into the future, you send a sizable army back to Earth for a hostile takeover. Purity has Promised Land, where you reestablish contact with Earth and fulfill your mission to find a new homeland for humanity. Harmony gets Transcendence, where you awaken the planet's latent sentience ('an homage to Alpha Centauri,' says McDonough). Then there are Affinity-specific grand projects. Two win conditions are Affinity-neutral: Domination, where you're the last civ standing, or Contact, the pacifistic win condition where you make first contact with an ancient alien race. Besides informing the aesthetic of a given civ's cityscape and leadership, your Affinity can also determine how you attain victory. These are civ-wide philosophies that come in three different flavors: Harmony (humans should alter their genetics to adapt to alien worlds), Purity (people have the right to reshape the world in order to make it most amenable to humanity), and Supremacy (the belief that augmentations and cybernetics are tools to overcome one's environment). 'Affinities in Beyond Earth are sort of visions for the future of mankind,' says McDonough. Your choice of Affinity can change your end goal Few things in life are more satisfying than watching an army of giant alien worms demolish your enemy's real estate. 'This can range from simple things like smuggling operations, which allow you to steal Energy each turn, to really complicated stuff, like planting attractors for Siege Worms,' says Firaxis' Pete Murray. And beyond just siphoning resources, your Covert Ops can lead to much more sinister tactics. There are no nukes in Beyond Earth-instead, you can get a spy to plant a dirty bomb in an opposing capital, which will instantly halve that city's population when detonated. 'If you're really good at spying, you can gain a lot more resources by stealing or smuggling.' 'We wanted that to really become a secondary diplomatic channel-an under-the-table way of waging war, or filching off of other civs without actually declaring war against them,' says McDonough. Espionage isn't entirely new to the Civilization series-but in Beyond Earth, your network of spies can play a much bigger part in your overall plan.

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