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  • Civilization: Beyond Earth Announced At PAX East

    PAX East is generally a place for indies and publishers alike to show off already announced games to the masses. It’s rare for one to announce a new game at show, and it’s even rarer for that game to be a part of a beloved franchise.

    2K Games and Firaxis announced at PAX East that they’re working on the next Civilization game, but it’s not Civilization VI. Instead, the team is ditching Earth entirely in favor of the cosmos in a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri called Civilization: Beyond Earth. The game will task players to “lead their people into a new frontier to explore and colonize an alien planet, and create a new civilization.”

    So, why go with a new Civilization game instead of Alpha Centauri 2? For starters, EA owns the rights to the Alpha Centauri game so making a direct sequel is impossible. Secondly, Beyond Earth has a bit more going for it then the original Alpha Centauri. Instead of simply being Civilization in space, it will have players face the potential challenges humanity will run into as they colonize worlds beyond its own.

    For the first time, players will lead factions divided by contrasting cultures and evolve their new civilizations to reflect their chosen destiny. Players will experience an array of new gameplay possibilities, including nonlinear technological progression, deeper customization of chosen factions, and an entire alien world that will change the very identity of each faction based on their choices.

    Series creator Sid Meier says the new direction allows the team to really run with their imagination instead of being confined to human history:

    “The Civ team was excited about the opportunity to continue the story of Civilization into the future, because it allows the team to break free of historical context,” said Sid Meier, director of creative development at Firaxis Games. “We’ve always let our fans create the history of mankind, and Civilization: Beyond Earth will now let them create the future.”

    Here are the features of Civilization: Beyond Earth that Firaxis is willing to talk about:

  • Seed the Adventure: Players will establish a cultural identity, select a leader and sponsor an expedition by assembling the spacecraft, cargo and colonists through a series of choices that directly impact starting conditions when arriving on the new alien planet.
  • Alien World: Exploring the benefits and dangers of a new planet filled with dangerous terrain, mystical resources and hostile lifeforms unlike those of Earth, players will build outposts, unearth ancient alien relics, tame new forms of life, develop flourishing cities and establish trade routes to create prosperity for their people.
  • New Technology Web: Reflecting forward progress in an uncertain future, technology advancement will occur through a series of nonlinear choices that affect the development of mankind. The tech web is organized around three broad themes, each with a distinct victory condition.
  • New Quest System: Quests are infused with fiction about the planet, and will help guide players through a series of side missions that will aid in the collection of resources, upgrading units, and advancing through the game.
  • New Orbital Layer: Players will build and deploy advanced military, economic and scientific satellites that provide strategic offensive, defensive and support capabilities from orbit.

    • It certainly sounds interesting and Civilization fans have a right to be excited. Not only is Firaxis returning to a theme they haven’t touched since the 1999, but they’re adding a lot of tweaks to the formula to make sure it’s more interesting than just a spiritual successor.

    Civilization: Beyond Earth will launch later this year on PC, Mac and Linux.

    Image via Official 2K International/YouTube

  • Study: Pollen Tells Us What Killed Bronze Age Civilizations

    Study: Pollen Tells Us What Killed Bronze Age Civilizations

    The New York Times reported that a recent study of pollen may explain the sudden collapse of what were, at the time, highly successful civilizations like the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Hittites.

    3200 years in the distant past, Tel Aviv was a major trading center in Israel, Ramses II ruled over a vast Egyptian empire, and many other cultures from Mycenaean Greece to Canaan engaged in trade and commerce along the Mediterranean Sea. 150 years later, every empire would be either dead or a mere fragment of their former glory.

    What caused this sudden collapse, until now, was the subject of much historical debate. A variety of theories cast blame on bloody warfare, unpredictable earthquakes, or perhaps one of a variety of plagues.

    But today, a study conducted in Tel Aviv and Bonn, Germany on fossilized pollen and published in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University is suggesting that between the years of 1250 and 1100 B.C.E., a terrible drought took place that wiped out several civilizations.

    The new theory is due, in no small part, to massive advances in climate science that permitted the researchers to make such a precise conclusion. Similar studies that examine long-term processes like pollen buildup often require analysis of strata roughly 500 years apart, but this particular study analyzed strata at 40-year intervals as opposed to 500, which Professor Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv says is the most precise resolution of study yet performed in the region.

    Finkelstein and another professor, Steve Weiner from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, had previously received a grant from the European Research Council to attempt a reconstruction of ancient Israel.

    A Tel Aviv University pollen researcher, Dafna Langgut, was brought in alongside Professor Thomas Litt of the Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn in Germany to conduct the climate-side of the research. The entire project was initiated in 2010, and has taken the full three years to complete.

    The research team had to extract nearly 60 feet of soil core samples from the Sea of Galilee, going deep enough to reach sediments from the last 9,000 years. They performed the same extraction in the Dead Sea.

    Their final conclusion: the Mediterranean area suffered a sharp decrease in trees like oaks, pines, carobs, and olive trees. Since olive trees were essential for local cultivation, the experts believe repeated droughts were required to achieve this result. The consequences would have been apocalyptic, particularly for city-states like Megiddo.

    In the historical record, the first hint of the problems to come was a letter from a Hittite queen to Ramses II circa-1250 B.C.E., which read, “I have no grain in my lands.”

    “Understanding climate is key to understanding history,” Finkelstein added. “The authors of the Bible knew very well the value of precipitation and the calamity that may be inflicted on people by drought.”

    Read the full Times piece here.

    [Image via a YouTube lecture on the Bronze Age]