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The overwhelming impression I get from Civilization: Beyond Earth is that interstellar pioneering is hard work. Firaxis has told us that starting a civilisation back on earth involves choices and opportunities. New beginnings are exciting and your people sprawl lazily across virgin lands like a cat on a sofa. Not so in space. Freedoms are replaced with responsibilities, possibilities with dangers. Almost from the moment you land on an alien world, you're beset on all sides by hostile alien life forms, hemmed in by a choking miasma and struggling to make sense of the things around you.The preview build of Civilization: Beyond Earth that has been distributed to games journalists can be very hard indeed. It defaults to the second-lowest difficulty level and even this feels like more than enough of a challenge. It's not because the game is particularly smart, nor is it because AI factions are coy or aggressive or duplicitous. It's because there are quite a lot of things that are trying to kill you and beating them back requires a serious commitment of time and resources. Quite early on, you may well find yourself deciding between trying to expand, which will put you in constant conflict with the local lifeforms, or just throwing up some ultrasonic fences and building a single megacity until, in time, new resources and technology allow you to decisively beat back the frontier.
That's not the most exciting approach, as it buries you in build queues and limits you to scuttling back and forth across your tech web (more on that in a moment), but it's safe and much less stressful. Angry aliens are a fine match for any early military units that you churn out (produced, of course, at the expense of civic improvements and infrastructure), and these aliens reproduce about as quickly as you can build troops, bursting out of nests hidden in undiscovered territories.
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