As part of his last day at E3 2014, our representative Kerwin Tsang stopped by the booth for Fireaxis Games and checked out the upcoming futuristic Civilizations game, Civilizations: Beyond Earth.

It’s been a long time since Fireaxis last graced us with a civilization game set in the future. A LONG time. Since the release of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri in 1999 fans have been clamoring for another entry in the series exploring what happens beyond our own time, and our own world. Now, fifteen years later, we’re finally getting another such game from the company. Kerwin Tsang, our rep at E3 2014, checked out the newest title, Civilizations: Beyond Earth, live at the game’s official floor booth, and had a lot of great things to say about his experience.

The whole demo shows the campaign map, with the player’s expedition unit checking out some of the local flora and fauna. The developer notes various points of interest on the map. Capturing a building called Fort Miller gives access to siege units, but the fort has a siege worm close by, and getting too close or attacking it will be very bad, as the siege worm is too powerful for the player’s civ right now. Elsewhere, recovering alien bones will give the player an alien for them to control and do his bidding.

Civilizations: Beyond Earth looks to be making a natural progression on the foundations laid by the previous titles in the series. While the game is set to feature series staples such as diplomacy and the multiple threads for potential victory, not to mention a revamped Espionage system, it will be abandoning the historical focus of the past titles in favor of a conflict set among the stars. This will give the game a lot more freedom than past titles in the Civilizations series to experiment with more creative units and gameplay.

They talked about the three paths your civ can take, purity, which is isolationist and seeks to rebuild Earth as it was on the new planet, Harmony, which seeks to co exist with the native aliens and merge with them, and supremacy, which seeks to dominate the planet through force and the help of cybernetic augmentation. For the purpose of the demonstration they went with Supremacy.

They showed the game’s massive tech web, which the player has to choose techs from as they progress. This includes things like computing, autonomous systems and ecology. They chose to research tactical robotics.