I am looking at the number 585. It's below the "hours played" tab for my copy of

But absent a more subversive method of dealing with your foes, there's always old-fashioned battle. Military units still hold sway over most of the game space, trading turn-based fire between the hexagonal parcels of land and besieging cities. They fall back on Civilization's traditional archetypes: melee, ranged, cavalry, and siege, even as their outward appearances morphs from astronauts with rifles and moon rovers to bipedal robots and giant kaiju. The ones you field depend on your progression towards one of the three affinities, and in a welcome bit of streamlining, the upgrades get rolled out automatically with each new level--no more paying for promotions for each individual unit. Better still, a new, similarly tiled orbital layer plays host to satellites which can be launched for quick industrial bonuses, or support coverage for your armies in the field.

Beyond Earth's combat suffers from some balance issues though, and that's curious for a game that leans so heavily on proven systems. Cities are comically easy to take--most melee units fare much better at city capturing, and you can often halve a city's defenses in a single attack--resulting in situations where cities tediously trade ownership turn after turn. The fragility extends to the units themselves, many of which die in a single hit. By consequence, a small standing army is less tenable than it was back on Earth, and I find myself less invested in the fate of any one unit when it can be snuffed out by an orbital strike at any given moment.

I am finding that I play more games through to completion in Beyond Earth. In inverse of my experience with Civilization V, my favorite part might be the ending, where a civ has to lay its cards face-up in a bid for one of the five methods of victory, and any semblance of "civilization" goes out the window as everyone else tries to drag them back down like the proverbial crabs in the bucket. The three affinity-specific victories don’t play out all that differently, nor does a fourth concerned with making contact with an unseen, advanced alien race. Each entails researching a few specific technologies, then designating your cities to produce a structure or two that sometimes have minor idiosyncrasies, like consuming your surplus energy each turn. But the path to victory is more elegantly interwoven with the early and middle game this time around, and of course, global domination, ever the crude way out, remains as tempting as ever when another world leader shows up uninvited to talk some smack. The more things change, the more they stay the same, then; a journey to a planet halfway across the universe reaffirming the draw of the same old creature comforts--a plot of land, and just one more turn.