Firaxis has, ahead of E3, revealed a ton of information regarding the recently announced Civilization: Beyond Earth. The images pertains to the faction leaders and the colony sponsers that'll be appearing in the game, which places players in charge of a fledgling civ as it struggles to get a foothold on a strange foreign planet. To avoid confusion we've added the text for each leader directly to the pictures below.
And now, from left to right, here's the descriptions of the colony sponsors:
Although badly affected by the Great Mistake and the upheaval that followed, the Pan-Asian Cooperative emerged as a strong, transnational entity. Centered around the old People's Republic of China, the Cooperative spans Asia from the Mongolian steppe to the megalopolis of Bangkok, with even former regional rivals South Korea and Japan laying aside their differences to work in the framework of the PAC. It is a powerhouse of industry, home to world-class R&D and high-tech corporations, and boasts a skilled population living in Earth's most populous cities. Although relatively new to spaceflight and space colonization, the PAC has quickly caught up to or passed the old Space Bloc as it embraces the Seeding.
The third-largest economy in the world is the American Reclamation Corporation: the world's first and most powerful megacorporation. Beginning as a geo-engineering firm specializing in environmental risk mitigation, the ARC is credited with designing and carrying out the recovery plan that saved the United States from dissolving after the Great Mistake. Now ARC is involved in almost every nation's Seeding project and recovery plan. From crop sciences to tidal power generation to security contracting, the ARC has a project or product for every problem. Unique among Seeding projects in that they are entirely private, many other Seeding programs rely on ARC financing.
After its population was displaced by the Great Mistake and rising sea levels, many commentators were quick to dismiss the Indian Protectorate - to their great loss. Where other countries might have been content to wallow in despair, the Indian Protectorate underwent one of the greatest cultural transformations that a civilization has undertaken, becoming culturally dynamic, indomitably optimistic, and cleverly resourceful. With one-sixth of the world's population within its borders, and under the charismatic, enlightened guidance of syncretic religious mystic and prophet Raj Thakur, the Protectorate has launched a space program that is the pride of its people, celebrated in song and movie, with every boy and girl from Punjab to Tamil aspiring to work on "our Prophet's Dream." Now Raj Thakur's only daughter, Kavitha, has assumed her father's mantle. Work continues on the Prophet's Dream and life on new worlds.
The chartering of the People's African Union is the culmination of what has been called the sub-Saharan renaissance. A new generation of political thinkers and cultural organizers used the chaos of the years following the Great Mistake to build pockets of good governance and stability, then gradually expanded and combined, focusing on continental self-reliance, traditional values of communalism, and a newly-developed sense of shared destiny. These states were able to create strong stewardship of Africa's ample mineral and biological resources and rebuild ecological damage within their borders. The People's African Union was one of the earliest backers of the Seeding, and has profited greatly by its equatorial positioning in serving as a launch base for many expeditions.