Each faction now has a Fear and Respect bar, the first based on your strength and the latter based on how your actions mesh with their philosophies, such as worrying about your peoples’ health. They’re still one of the least important fundamental changes Rising Tide makes. They’re fun to play with, both in their new mechanic of acquiring territory by moving around the ocean, and a rare example of something feeling like future tech instead of just modern military equipment with a chrome finish. It’s a more appropriate name than it might sound, and not really referring to its new aquatic cities. This is essentially Rising Tide’s approach across the board: big changes, important changes, but not necessarily dramatic changes that completely overhaul what came before. Why wouldn’t you combine technology and aliens? It’s just slightly morbid common sense.
This opens up new options, but more than that, it feels endlessly more appropriate. Rising Tide allows for Hybrid Affinities, mixing and matching them. I personally loathed this system, not for the core mechanical idea, but because it philosophically felt less like charting a future for humanity than signing it up to one of three dogmatic space cults, complete with silly space robes. In the original Beyond Earth, these had your society developing down one of three paths-Purity, Supremacy or Harmony.
For me, one of the changes I most appreciate is the reworking of Affinities.
