Redspyder: As long as they're intending to stick with 1UPT (1 unit per tile) , I won't be buying. Which is a profound pity, says this long-time Firaxis fan whose first Firaxis purchase was a new copy of Civ1 (yes, I'm old) and who has bought all the products up to Civ5. Civ5 I played a few times and found utterly repulsive, because of the 1UPT (Dale of Civ modding fame and several others have gone into detail as to how 1UPT affected all the other design decisions -- negatively). I nearly fainted when I heard abotu Beyond Earth -- then I swore mightily when I read the lead dev's comment that he likes 1UPT and will be sticking with it.
Oh, well. I'm content playing Alpha Centauri and heavily-modded Civ 3 and Civ 4. (Hell, Civ2 is still on my hard drive).
Adokat: May I ask why you dislike it so much?
One of the reasons that I strongly prefer Civ 5 to 4 is the 1UPT rule and the removal of 4's doomstacks. It's a feature that I think works well with a hex-based system (I wouldn't use it with a grid layout). I felt like the removal of doomstacks added more complexity in unit choice and placement.
Of course, I shouldn't overstate its importance either way, since SMAC is an amazing 4x game, and I was never bothered by unit stacking there. I think SMAC balances it a little better. Other approaches I've heard are concepts like allowing multiple units per tile but having some sort of supply/logistic requirement to hold multiple ones.
A little more on topic: I haven't been too impressed by Beyond Earth. I guess I was hoping for something with as strong a personality and an interesting setting/story like Alpha Centauri. Nothing's really grabbing me right now. Of course, judging a 4x game isn't best done from a few youtube videos, so I'll still keep an eye on it.
Many others have gone into it better than I, including Jon Shafer (dev on Civ5), and how 1UPT breaks more systems than just itself.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonshafer/jon-shafers-at-the-gates/posts/404789 Further, a game like CIv5 is strategic, not tactical. 1UPT works in Panzer General because it is a tactical game. England, for instance, in PG is several HUNDRED hexes, whereas in Civ5 it's something like 5 hexes. In PG, 1UPT works because you have room to maneuver and it makes sense inherently to be maneuvering small units. In Civ, nothing is a small unit.
A better solution to the "stack-o-doom": add to the tech tree "command and control" philosophies. Each unit gets an effectiveness rating -- 100% meaning it uses 100% of its power. But for each unit stacked in a single hex, degrade effectiveness by, say, 25% (where effectiveness can only degrade to 0.1). Command and Control would improve that, letting you create (and manage) larger stacks more effectively. Now we bring back in a unit from Civ3 -- the Army, which is a "container" that can contain a number of other units (in Civ3, the upper limit I think was 4 units). Now we rate each unit for its chief purpose (anti-tank capability, which does x2 dmg versus tanks, for instance). The Army unit contains the rating for each unit -- allowing a genuine use of the combined-arms philosophy. It fights as a whole, with the strongest power unit + 10% from each included unit, +(all tags) from the units within.
This would not be an arbitrary rule (1UPT), it would be a far more realistic solution, and it would allow actual, real-world tactics and strategies (combined arms, command and control, etc) to be realised in-game. IT also would acknowledge that Civ is a strategic game, not a tactical one. Tactical -- archers shooting 2 hexes make sense; Strategic -- archers shooting hundreds of miles by shooting over a hex is ludicrous. But you can an archer value through combined arms (first shot, perhaps).
1UPT was brilliant in PG; it was ridiculous in Civ5. (I use PG in the example because the Civ5 folks told us quite blatantly that they took their inspiration from PG in re-designing the Civ series to be 1UPT)
But again, that's my opinion. Civ5 sold well. More power to them. For some of us, 1UPT is unnecessary and flawed and there are far too many good solutions out there (as above, which would limit stacking not through an arbitrary rule but from rules that spring from actual history and actual military philosophies and allow more variety through an actual combined-arms capability) for 1UPT to be the one they go with. They did go with it, they did sell well, and good for them. As a buyer who's been there since Civ1 and bought all their products up to and never including Civ5, it was quite disheartening to not buy any of their products CIv5 and forward. But that's their choices, and my choice in response.