Civilization: Beyond Earth is science fiction history. Whereas the long-standing Civilization franchise has mostly allowed players to tell their own stories of conquest, diplomacy, trade and scientific advancement throughout the ages, from the ancient world to the space program, Beyond Earth lets them tell stories about all those things on a future world, about a future humanity.

I say a “future humanity” because one of the central themes of the game is choosing exactly what form humanity will take when it’s separated from its home world and given the technology to fundamentally change what it is to be human.

If that sounds awfully high-brow for a video game, it is. But you’d expect nothing less from Civilization, always one of the smartest game franchises around. Whether you're new to Civ or a veteran, it looks like Beyond Earth will be worth checking out. It's a sophisticated exploration of humanity’s future, and a promising, leisurely strategy game that lets you build a new civilization exactly to your specifications. It's extra appealing if you’re a sci-fi geek, of course.

I spent nearly an hour playing Civilization Beyond Earth at the E3 games conference in Los Angeles this month, all the while chatting at length with lead producer Lena Brenk and designer Anton Strenger.

Different answers to 'The Great Mistake'

The producer and designer wouldn't tell me what “The Great Mistake” was, but I could deduce some things about the event that sets Civilization Beyond Earth in motion. Humanity messed up and damaged its planet to the point that it could not sustain long-term existence there.

As a result, many expeditions left Earth to new worlds across the stars. They would bring ships full of colonists, explorers, and various resources to these places, make landfall, and begin anew in strange new worlds.

When you embark on this journey, you choose a loadout of limited resources that you take with you — that’s new to Civilization. It’s a way to provide some additional early game strategy, and customization between play styles of different players. “There’s a lot more custom tuning,” said Strenger.

Once you land, over the course of 40 turns, other would-be civilizations land also. There are different types of planets, with different alien biomes of various properties, like fungal, arid and lush. You're vying for territory, resources, and the very future of humanity.

Throughout the course of the game, each civilization makes technological and other choices that lead you down three different “affinity” paths. Affinities are different ways of defining humanity’s future. For example, the Harmony affinity adopts the philosophy that humanity should change the heart of what it is to match its new environment through genetics and other technologies.

Adherents to Supremacy see technology as the thing that saved humanity from the Great Mistake, so they seek to merge humanity and technology at any cost. (Think cyborgs, if you must.) Finally, there’s Purity. These guys and gals believe that we should preserve humanity as it was on Earth, biologically and otherwise, and change the face of the new planetary home to match us.

But how do each of these affinities achieve their goals?

The branching tech web

Civilization’s tech tree has worked the same way since the beginning, but not anymore. Instead of a linear march forward, it’s now a sprawling web of different possibilities. “The tech web reflects that we as developers and designers don’t know the direction that technology is going to take,” said Strenger. “So we are taking inspiration from science fiction and also from science, and what futurists are thinking could happen.”

Within each major technology, there are “leafs,” which are deeper specializations. The major technology is usually something pretty recognizable to us today — such as “Genetics” — while the leaf is often a more unusual, theoretical tangent. Leafs let you specialize more within a discipline, and they often give you points towards a particular Affinity, also.

Producer Lena Bek mentioned that this was deliberate. The big picture should be understandable to us, but if we want to dig into the sci-fi speculation, that option is there.

"That’s one of the challenges. We want it to feel like not Earth, but players can be disoriented,so getting that balance right is tricky. We’re still polishing and working on it,” she said.

There’s a new system of specialization in the game similar to Civics in Civilization IV and V, too. These act kind of like a talent tree in an RPG — put points in them to get bonuses to in traits like expansion or economics. But the designers have taken a unique turn by incentivizing not just specializing, as many games with these types of trees do, but generalization.

If you dig deep into some part of the tree, you’ll get occasional “kicker” bonuses. But if you explore the various parts of the tree rather than specializing, you get milestones too. It gives you a lot more options for how to play the game, which is always welcome.

Surviving on an alien world

Civilization has always been about building a society to stand the test of time. That’s still true, but according to Strenger, it’s also about survival.

“Once you build a colonist and you build a city, it’s not a city — it’s an outpost at first,” Brenk said. “So it doesn't have any defensive capability — it has a few health points but that’s it.” She said it does become a real city over time, “but until then you really need to protect it. It really is the frontier.”

Even after you're settled, it's easy to be skittish. Early in the game, I saw an unknown alien lifeform approach. In a knee-jerk reaction, I attacked it. I was afraid it would put my expedition to a quick end if it got too close. Strenger noted to me that at first, the aliens don’t attack, so that wasn't necessary, but the reaction is natural — and not totally unreasonable.

Brenk said that getting the right level of aggression with the native aliens has been a challenge. “The aliens have been balanced a lot. There was times when you could hardly make it to turn 20,” she recalled. “Right now, if you leave them, you leave them alone. But if you walk around a lot and you get close to their nests, they kind of get riled up. And also, as soon as the other civilizations land, if they start attacking them, the aliens will get more aggressive overall, even towards you.”

I thought that was a very interesting way to sow conflict or cooperation between players and other civilizations. It’s easy to imagine a Harmony civilization trying to live peacefully with the aliens, only to have Supremacy and Purity-focused cultures riling the aliens up against everyone. That will be a common starting point on a road to a war, no doubt.

Building a civilization for the future

As you expand your civilization, you can do a lot of the things you enjoyed in the previous games in the series — trade, negotiate, build, explore, research and conquer. You can even do quests now. These existed in some small way with the city-states in Civilization V, but they're much more diverse and robust now. The tough choices you make in those quests will also contribute to your affinity direction.

There are many ways to win. Each affinity has a unique victory condition based on its philosophy, but there’s also a new victory condition called “Contact.” On the planet, you'll find evidence of a lost alien civilization. You'll dig up ruins, research artifacts, and begin to decode a signal. That signal will contain a blueprint to build a beacon that lets you make contact with that civilization far across the stars.

Strenger admitted that it was inspired by the film Contact. Add that to the strong influence of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, one of the most lauded strategy games of all time (and also a spiritual successor to the Civilization franchise made by its creator), and you have some serious sci-fi pedigree here.

The game feels very familiar to fans of the franchise. I was a little concerned about how different all the alien concepts are — about how I didn't know what certain foreign resources do to begin with, for example — but I'm confident that the learning curve will be quick.

If you like Civilization or Alpha Centauri, you're going to like this game. If you’ve never played them but all this sounds interesting, it might be as good a place as any to start. Civilization: Beyond Earth is slated for release on Windows PCs later this year.