Let's break down some of the basic features, as described to me by the Firaxis folks.

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Pre-game preparation is a big thing here. "When you start a game of Civ: Beyond Earth, your choices start before turn zero," said Strenger. "You're composing your spacecraft on your expedition to this new alien planet." So you'll get to make some basic decisions—colonists, cargo, type of spacecraft—before the game starts. That, the designers say, will impact the outcome of your entire game.

"Even when you arrive you're not just this kind of pre-baked factional identity, you're this composition of different choices that plays out a little bit different every time," Strenger said. "That goes for the human player and also for the AI players as well."

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Factions are a little different than they are in Civ. Instead of playing as familiar civilizations like, say, the Romans, or Russia, you'll play as futuristic fictional factions—like the American Reclamation Corporation. Or the Panasian Cooperative.

"Factions each have distinct personalities," said producer Dennis Shirk. "You might have an aggressive personality and they have a specific trait, but it's going to vary greatly, because depending what they start out with, those loadouts are gonna mean that you're gonna get a different experience each time."

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You can't play as an alien race. Sadly. Maybe that'll come in an expansion pack later, like it did with Alpha Centauri's Alien Crossfire. For now, aliens in Beyond Earth will be more like barbarians in a Civ game—you can ignore them or pick fights to clear them out of your way.

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The tech tree is non-linear. Really, it's more web than a tree, the designers say.

See, in most Civilization games, you go through technologies by progressing linearly, moving from discoveries like masonry and writing to philosophy and mathematics and eventually working your way up to modern times, where you can learn how to blow things up. In Beyond Earth, you'll be able to pick one of a few different branches—like chemistry or engineering—and head down that particular branch. As you progress through the game, you can either stick with the branch you chose, or switch paths to unlock other kinds of stuff.

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"Once you go to ecology, for example, that can lead into technologies for terraforming, and for advance satellites, and for geoscoping," said Strenger. "Whereas if you go down the engineering route, that leads to civil support, cybernetics, and other technologies instead. You can advance in many different directions, and at any point you can go back and say, 'OK I've gone enough down this branch for now,' and go back and focus on other things."

You probably won't be able to get every piece of tech by the end of a match, Strenger said. "Each decision you make, each thing that you wanna go for is gonna come at the cost of not being able to get something else."

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Surrounding that technology web are big-picture decisions. Themes, really. The developers at Firaxis call them affinities. Based on how you choose to progress through the tech web, you'll find your civilization leaning toward one of three different "post-human identities": purity, harmony, or supremacy.

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"Purity is very concerned with maintaining the glory of old earth and the tradition and the culture," Strenger said, "so they're kinda rejecting these new influences on the alien planet. The harmony affinity embraces genetics and alien life forms on the planet and tries to integrate with the planet. And then supremacy does the same sort of integration and moving past what humanity was, but they do it in a technological direction. So they implant cybernetics into their own bodies, and they link up their minds to neural networks."

You'll also be able to...

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Hopefully they can capture what made Alpha Centauri so great. Anyone who spent long nights battling with Zakharov and Santiago undoubtedly has fond memories of transcending humankind and merging with the Planet in Firaxis's sci-fi classic. It was a top-notch game, and though the Civilization series has been consistently great since Sid Meier programmed the first Civ back in 1990, Alpha Centauri always stood out, possibly because it could create its own story, unconfined by history or realism.

The folks at Firaxis seem to agree. And if anyone can pull off a great spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, it's Sid Meier and crew. Who else could do it?

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"This is, for the whole team, just an amazing thrill to be able to cast off the shackles of historic context and work on something amazing like this," Shirk said. "Because it's been a while since Firaxis has gone into space, outside of XCOM. So just to go through the whole process, watch the designers go through the whole process, has been amazing."