📌 See my other Civ projects here
A small mod for Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth to give it more flavour. Features include:
- Tech and wonder quotes are now spoken by sponsors
- More distinct leader personalities
- New intro text for all leaders
- Transcendence victory objective popups have been fixed
- Compatible with base game and Rising Tide
Install the mod from Steam here or see below for manual installation instructions:
- Install the mod
- Start Beyond Earth and go to the Mods menu
- Check Eclipse and any other desired mods
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was used as an inspiration for much of this; while it lacks the gameplay and user experience amenities of modern strategy games, it still has some of the best world building of any strategy game.
This mod was meant to bring out the world building that already exists in Beyond Earth but not to drastically change it. For mods that have a bigger gameplay impact, see:
All tech and wonder quotes from sponsors have had their audio overridden so that they're now spoken by the respective sponsor instead of the same narrator that narrates most of the rest of the game in order to add more variety to the spoken dialogue.
Leaders have been adjusted to have more distinct personalities:
- Stronger preference for a particular affinity
- More extreme values for leader traits (bold, loyal, guarded, deceptive, friendly, etc.)
- A strong focus on one or two aspects for each leader (growth, production, trade, espionage, military, culture, etc.)
Leaders have been given new intro text to align with the personality changes as well as fit the new story premise of the mod.
In addition, the intro text for any leader may show when the game is started, not just the currently selected leader. This helps increase world building, especially in the case for players who typically only play as certain factions.
Each victory has different objectives that can contain some interesting world building. In Rising Tide, functionality was added to show these objectives in popups except for the transcendence (harmony) victory. This mod fixes those popups.
Download the repository source file from Releases, extract it, and then run the install script:
./scripts/install-mod.sh
Or:
- Go to Releases and download the
.civbemodfile - Create a new directory named
Eclipse (v 1)- 👉 Update the value after
(vwith the version from the filename
- 👉 Update the value after
- Extract the contents of the
.civbemodfile to the directory you created (it's compressed using 7zip) - Move the directory to the mods directory
- Native: ~/.local/share/aspyr-media/Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth/MODS/
- Proton: ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/65980/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth/MODS
- Go to Releases and download the
.civbemodfile - Copy it to Documents/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth/MODS
It seems there are other leader quotes that haven't been replaced, such as affinity progress (see Harmony level 5 quote from Daoming Sochua, for example).
Rising Tide added affinity values to techs that previously didn't have any (like many branch techs) and also added multiple affinities to many techs. This was possibly to ensure players were more likely to interact with hybrid affinities in the game, but it made acquiring any particular affinity less intentional.
These changes were originally reverted in this mod, so that acquiring any particular affinity once again would be an intentional choice the player can make rather something they fall into as a result of progressing through the tech web.
However, after making this change the AI players seemed to progress through the affinities much more slowly to the extent that the game balanced seemed to be impacted, so the change was disabled. Other attempts were made with less negative results but still seemed to hurt the game balance.
Right now the unit promotion bonuses across the different affinities aren't differentiated enough. While this makes the game fairly well balanced, this results in a bit of "ludonarrative" dissonance in which the gameplay of each affinity does not necessarily match the world building.
It would be more interesting if, for example, harmony was given bonuses related to their harmonious relationship with the planet, so for example health and movement. Purity could be given bonuses of strength and attack. And supremacy could be given bonuses to technology and range.
One current problem with the affinities (and other game systems) is that there are few tradeoffs other than opportunity cost. Specifically, the player can max out all affinities if she wishes to do so. Instead, as the player progresses in one affinity I think it could be more interesting to gradually reduce the maximum level of the other affinities in such a way that only one affinity victory condition could be achieved.
For example, the max affinity level in Rising Tide is 18 and affinity victories need a minimum affinity of 15. If the player reaches affinity level 9 in one affinity, for every level after that, the maximum level of the other affinities could be reduced by 1. This would allow the player to reach level 18 in only one affinity (capping the others at level 9), or alternatively the player could reach level 15 in one affinity to fulfill its victory conditions while still reaching level 10 in at least one other affinity in order to take advantage of hybrid bonuses.
This could even be extended to include blocking higher level affinity technologies to make specialising in one affinity more of an interesting choice.
Affinity progress is almost entirely made through researching technologies. This isn't bad in and of itself, but it means that player actions have little impact on choice of affinity, potentially leading to bizarre outcomes such as a player who chooses the harmony affinity and proceeds to wipe out all alien life. Instead, it would be much more interesting if player action had a greater impact on affinity. For example, a player could receive harmony affinity points for every alien in her borders at the end of each turn that she does not attack, or every tile of miasma in her borders left untouched.
Quests do give some affinity points, but this could also likewise be given more weight.
The game has interesting story-building text for each victory as a prologue. This mod has code to show this prologue text in a popup, but in the end it got too complicated and messy to sort out. It might still be worth showing this text to add to the world building.