For all the ahistorical directions you can take simulation games in, Civilization titles have always been grounded in the world of human history. That's a large part of what makes the recent announcement of Civilization: Beyond Earth such a departure for the series. By throwing the setting to faraway planets hundreds of years in the future, the team at Firaxis is free to take the game in a direction that's not as tied down to conventional, real-world situations. "I like the idea of a bunch of trash cans at Firaxis filled with historical text books," emcee Jeff Cannata joked during the game's unveiling at PAX East. "'We don't need these anymore!'"

Talking with Ars, Beyond Earth Co-lead Designer Will Miller said that joke wasn't completely accurate. For starters, the beginning point of the game's projected future history is still "where we are right now, our geopolitical spectrum in the real world." When the game's development began, Miller said he and co-designer David McDonough wrote out exactly how they see the world going from its current state to the "Great Mistake" that alters the course of human events about 25 years in the future. Miller wouldn't go into specifics on what form that cataclysm will take (and it won't be spelled out in the game itself), but he did say, "We hint that it was probably a nuclear exchange in the Asian subcontinent somewhere."

That might seem like a pessimistic view of the near-future for human history, but Miller argued that the longer view of the 200 or so years leading from the present to the start of Beyond Earth's gameplay is actually kind of cheery in its own way. "We didn't annihilate ourselves," he pointed out. "We had a minor nuclear confrontation, the effects of global warming really took hold, and there was a point at which the threshold was reached and it was accelerated—you saw in the trailer that the pyramids were flooded and all that stuff.

"But the story that comes before the start of the game is one of optimism. It's a positive story—we had this thing happen to us, but we came back. So these nations that you get to select as a sponsor at the beginning of the game, they all negotiated this terrible point in our history in their own unique way, and you get to play as the best and brightest of those nations. It's not apocalypse, but almost apocalypse."

Whether or not this is a realistic view of the future course of humanity, Miller seems to enjoy catastrophe as a way to move history (or fictional future history) forward. "I like to think that cooler heads will prevail [in the real world], but I think great things in human history happen when there are catalysts," he said. "We got to the moon because of our race with the Russians and the Cold War, all of the technology invented during World War I and World War II. I'm of course not advocating that we go to war to get to space, but it takes conflict to really drive these things. The story of humanity is a story of conflict and resolution, and if you play a game of Civilization that's exactly what it is—Gandhi nuked me, but we made peace at the end! It's the same with this product."

Historical grounding also comes into play in some of the game's artistic design. Miller talked about NASA and Russian space agency designs as an inspiration for the aesthetic choices in the early space-bound units at the beginning of the game. For the development team, though, creating a new future history doesn't mean forgoing research as much as changing the research material.

"There's still a research component," Miller said. "Whether you're coming up with the look and feel or how the game plays or whatever, we're just drawing from different material. Instead of the history books we're looking to the science fiction authors or films or comic books, things like that. ... We read the greats: Asimov, Heinlein, Orson Scott Card. Dan Simmons is a big influence, the Hyperion Cantos, we kind of lifted the idea of 'The Great Mistake' from that—that's an homage to him. He does a very good job of portraying space as this very strange place, a place that is so strange we can't even comprehend it. Even if we were shown it, we still can't really grasp it—it's so weird, so big, so old."

That's not the only homage to existing science fiction players will find in the game either. "One of the ways to win the game is called Contact, which you'll probably recognize from the [Carl Sagan] book or the movie of the same name," Miller said. "You research a signal that you find either by exploring alien ruins you find on the planet or receive from outer space via radio telescope or finding it in the mantissa of a transcendental number, and you build this giant thing and then you contact the aliens. So I think science fiction fans are going to find a lot of these little and more overt nods to their favorites. This is really a love letter to the genre."

The connections to common sci-fi themes extend to the gameplay, which is centered on three different "affinity" paths players can take toward story-based victories that are more than just "make this number bigger than everybody else's," as Miller put it. "The Harmony [affinity] victory is an homage to Alpha Centauri. You discover the planet is sentient, like Solaris or something. Then you build these machines that interface with it, and you win the game by awakening interfacing with the planet. But to do that, you have to build these big structures and protect them and turn them on and devote resources that you would otherwise be devoting to your cities. There's a give and take there; you're vulnerable when you decide to shoot for those victories."

"The Purity and Supremacy [affinity] victories are sort of two ends of the same coin," he continued. "In the game, about halfway through... you re-establish contact from Earth. You kind of left it in a nebulous space; you're not really sure what happened. About that time, you've also researched the technology to build a warp gate. So for the Purity player, you build a warp gate and bring settlers from Earth to the new world, and you have to protect them, settle a certain number of them, find space for them. There's a territorial problem you have to work out, which obviously causes conflict. That's one of your real-life conflicts today—that's the Israeli/Palestinian conflict right there.

"The flipside of that is what we call the Emancipation victory. That's the Supremacy victory where you build the warp gate to send troops through it to conquer Earth. So you have to sacrifice a huge chunk of your army to feed the warp gate while you're protecting yourself and protecting it."

While sharing space and interacting with semi-intelligent alien life is an important part of Beyond Earth, Miller stressed that going to the stars isn't simply an excuse to meet and fight strange new beings. The focus is still on humanity's story, even as the idea of what humanity actually is may change in drastic ways throughout the game.

"If you took a Homo sapien from the Stone Age and showed them us, they would think we were weird, but we still look the same," Miller said. "I think what we're suggesting in this game is a rapid acceleration of morphological change as well. We really do mean you will look different. You'll be recognizable I think as human, but when you invest in these different affinities, your leader starts to change, other leaders around you are changing, your cities change.

"I think that Civilization tells a very universal story. People are different and conflict arises from that and it's resolved—this rolling ocean of conflict and resolution. I think the fundamental story of people finding homes somewhere and eking out an existence, pushing back the darkness, is a story that's the same. You start at the Stone Age to the Modern Age, you're pushing back the darkness. In this game it's the same as well. That's sort of what we mean when we say the DNA of Civilization is in this game as well...

"Civilization is the story of humanity. Beyond Earth is the story of humanity in the future. So we didn't want you to play as aliens, we wanted to you to play as humans. The focus is on the interaction of humanity with this new world and with each other."