I have a higher opinion of Beyond Earth I think than most people (especially with Rising Tide), but it definitely suffers from not making things alien enough.
Like trans- or post-humanism is a big theme, but none of the leaders seem to have strong opinions or inclinations about it. All their political characteristics seem inherited from earth as opposed to responses to the new environment and as a result they feel super generic. They clearly wanted every civ to be able to pursue any path with similar facility, but that cost us a cyborg leader, or a weird alien hybrid one, or whatever.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I feel like they didn't take the sci-fi far enough. There could have been more interesting / crazy buildings and stuff. The orbital layer was a total waste of an opportunity too. We should have gotten cool orbital ships to fight with. I also think if an alien faction or two showed up late game that would have really been amazing.
But again for what it is, I have fun with it. I still like to load it up occasionally and play. The music and art design really appeal to me. It's kind of like the new MoO in that way, I load that one up sometimes too even though there are better games it still has some charm that brings me back.
DarkMecha on
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
The weird thing is that the leaders do have personalities and preferences for going purity/harmony/supremacy etc. There’s just nothing in the fluff to support any of it. For example, Rejnaldo is a warmonger who likes Harmony or Supremacy and rarely goes Purity. What in his background makes him so aggressive while also being distrustful of a human centric point of view and willing to experiment with tech and alien biology? Fuck if I know, the game never says.
The weird thing is that the leaders do have personalities and preferences for going purity/harmony/supremacy etc. There’s just nothing in the fluff to support any of it. For example, Rejnaldo is a warmonger who likes Harmony or Supremacy and rarely goes Purity. What in his background makes him so aggressive while also being distrustful of a human centric point of view and willing to experiment with tech and alien biology? Fuck if I know, the game never says.
The game is just, generally, too conservative. It's too much like the Civ games. Everybody techs the same. Everybody feels the same. Every game plays out the same (especially since, IIRC, terrain has less of an impact on overall game-flow than in the original Civs).
But it's really not uncommon for me to end games like 18/12/6 in affinities and have branches shooting up in each direction of the tech web, while the middle's all filled in.
Every game I played played out the same way. Now, you could argue that that's just me being a min-maxer, but this is a strategy game not an RPG. I'm trying to win, not lose in creative ways.
That's what Alpha Centauri did that was different than a lot of the other futuristic, Civ-inspired games. They took their alien premise/setting and rolled with it. The Civ games work, in a large part, because they re-enact real human history; in the absence of those guides, BE really suffered in terms of telling a coherent story of a civilization's rise, and ALSO failed to give players the ability to craft their own narrative, due to a confusing mess of a tech tree that didn't have any real breakpoints like Civ tech trees do (eras, key techs like flight, gunpowder) or direction to give you a sense of cumulative progress. BE tries to let you do everything every game; everything is tightly balanced, but not by trading off pros and cons, instead making everything generically equivalent and accessible. (E.g. Do you even care which ideology's ultimate unit you get?)
SMAC went the other way, and is one of the few Civ-like games to do so, and is maybe the only one to do it right. DON'T let the player do everything they want every game. BE strict about driving the player's strategic options in one direction or another. Construct the narratives you want your player to experience beforehand. And while you're at it, go HOG-WILD with new gameplay mechanics and ideas to take advantage of the freedom your setting gives you. I don't know if this was accidental or what, but they managed to address the major experiential difference between a historical 4X game and a science fiction 4x game. The only other sci-fi 4x games that have "gotten" this, as far as I've played, are space-based ones, like MOO2, GalCiv, or Stellaris, with MOO2 probably being the really classic one that did it all right: tech trees that force hard choices on you, racial attributes that can completely change your gameplay experience, this narrative story about Orion flowing through it, etc.. But even then, MOO2 probably wouldn't hold up now as a new space 4X due to its thinness; in comparison, SMAC has waay more narrative depth than MOO2 and way crazier mechanics, like mind worms and boreholes.
What makes SMAC stand out then, imo, is its willingness to stand out. I don't think it's one particular aspect or another, but rather that they "got" that they were really a different genre than other Civ games and they were bold in doing new things that hadn't been done before, and... they didn't fuck it up. There is absolutely some mediocre stuff in SMAC, like unit customization, but it wasn't bad; you just don't really hear about it from people who play the game. Mind worms, brain stapling, m-f-ing Sister Miriam: you'll hear all SMAC veterans gush about this stuff and more, and you'll go ??? unless you actually play it, because they're all just smaller contributors to an overall experience that's strange and foreign, but still accessible and empowering.
hippofant on
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Gennenalyse RuebenThe Prettiest Boy is Ridiculously PrettyRegistered Userregular
The thing Beyond Earth disappointed me about most was how inconsequential the whole colony ship loadout ended up being. From the early previews it looked and sounded like you basically got to build your own faction, selecting from different leaders, then sponsors and finally a whole load of other bonuses.
Then it ended up being just "pick a civ and some miniscule stuff to go with them". I was looking forward to something less lore-focused than the Alpha Centauri factions but way more dynamic, and only got the former.
Every game plays out the same (especially since, IIRC, terrain has less of an impact on overall game-flow than in the original Civs).
That really sums up the difference in design philosophy between Beyond Earth and Civ 6.
Beyond Earth prioritized giving the player total control over how their society develops. You get to customize your starting bonuses. You get to choose between two yields for every new type of building you construct. The tech web makes it easier than ever to just research whatever you feel like. It really is SimCivy in a lot of ways.
Civ 6, on the other hand, railroads the player. Because your starting region has a certain type of terrain in abundance, you prioritize building certain districts. Because you're building certain districts, you get certain research boosts. Because you want to research the nodes that have been boosted first to get ahead, you unlock certain buildings and improvements. Constructing those buildings and improvements in your cities gives you more research boosts, etc. While all this railroading takes away a certain degree of player freedom, it is also what gives the game its replayability. Even if you play as the same civ in every game, you can never really be completely sure what your society will become.
Started a new game... Realized that the mod I need most of all is if I kill an enemy scout, the unit that kills it gets it's dog to follow them the rest of the game.
And has enough bonus housing it's not totally useless, so that's neat.
If there's one thing I would add to Civ 6, it's that there would be an option to make it so that whenever your cities are within 1 pop of their housing limit (when the growth penalties start to kick in), they would automatically start working only enough food tiles to prevent starvation, and would otherwise prioritize all other yields above food.
It doesn't make any sense that cities continue to view food as equal to all other yields when the massive growth penalties caused by nearing the housing limit make any excess food beyond starvation levels completely worthless. At the moment, there is no optimal solution to this problem other than manually setting every citizen to work a specific tile. Switching food to anti-focus causes the city to avoid all food tiles, resulting in mass starvation. Setting a city to every focus except food gets better results, but can still result in minor starvation and requires the player to remember to switch the city back to default after they increase the available housing.
Maybe there's a mod that does this already, but if there is, I've never found it.
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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular
I guess my gamestop has a new physical copy of rising tide for 10 bucks, so I think I'll pick that up today. Seems like a good price. Between that and civ v complete, it should hold me off until I get a good deal on VI.
I don't know much about rising tide though. Does it add a lot?
It adds some units and wonders, tunes up diplomacy a bit (probably the same treatment V got in its last expac), and lets you have aquatic cities. Those are kinda fun.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Wow, start new civ patch as Gilgamesh, continents large, Start on the big continent apparently, Khmer, India, Brazil, Australia, Kongo, Russia show up in the first few turns. Australia is literally in my backyard, so I conquer them with 2 war carts. Few turns later Brazil and Khmer joint war me... Don’t have any clue where Brazil is, but Khmer is right there, so long story short that’s how I got 4 pop 3+ cities in the first 40 turns with no war penalties.
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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular
With a coupon ended up getting rising tide for 5 bucks. Not bad. Hopefully checking it out tonight.
Steam: offday
+3
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I took a break from this game for several months. Are there any up-to-date guides out there that I can peruse before jumping back in?
I took a break from this game for several months. Are there any up-to-date guides out there that I can peruse before jumping back in?
Lately I've been reading these super in-depth guides by Steam user Zigzagzigal. There's also some guy adding strategy sections to most of the pages in the Civilization wiki, but he has a tendency to make a lot of incorrect assumptions about how many of the bonuses in the game work.
I also have a digital deluxe coupon, if anyone else wants one
I also have a gift copy of civ4 from a million years ago that I've never been able to foist off on anyone
are any of the civ6 DLC civs particularly interesting or fun to play as? I have aztecs and persia/macedon, dunno if I wanna get any others. Nubia seems sort of interesting.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I also have a digital deluxe coupon, if anyone else wants one
I also have a gift copy of civ4 from a million years ago that I've never been able to foist off on anyone
are any of the civ6 DLC civs particularly interesting or fun to play as? I have aztecs and persia/macedon, dunno if I wanna get any others. Nubia seems sort of interesting.
So I just started a new game of this to check out the patch.
I've found 3 goodie huts so far and only 1 has actually had anything in it (free scout unit) as far as I can tell. The last two have popped up no alert, and I can't see that any of my resources or techs have changed.
So I just started a new game of this to check out the patch.
I've found 3 goodie huts so far and only 1 has actually had anything in it (free scout unit) as far as I can tell. The last two have popped up no alert, and I can't see that any of my resources or techs have changed.
They can drop gold/faith as well but it feels like they greatly reduced the pause time to let you see that.
Started a game as India and every single city state spawned next to Rome on the other end of this asia sized land mass. Was super weird.
It is weirdly working out as Rome actually offered an alliance to me which is a first from the NPCs. I normally find it impossible to get one of those.
So I just started a new game of this to check out the patch.
I've found 3 goodie huts so far and only 1 has actually had anything in it (free scout unit) as far as I can tell. The last two have popped up no alert, and I can't see that any of my resources or techs have changed.
They can drop gold/faith as well but it feels like they greatly reduced the pause time to let you see that.
I know they can, it just didn't look like they did. I think also the issue is the units that hit it already had planned moves to go to the tile, so it did it at the beginning of the turn before the map was scrolled over, and since it puts the alert on the map, I never saw it.
Apparently the old placement code would evaluate sites for civ placement and if they met a score for suitablility it would place a civ there, and if it ran out of suitable sites before it ran out of civs and city states to place it would place the remainder in a random location. They updated the function to try to look for the best remaining territory instead of just dumping them anywhere, but a greater than sign got flipped, so the game is actually putting the leftover civs in the worst possible place instead. Which is why you would get a big clump of city states in the desert somewhere right on the border of a civ.
Just won my first religious victory since the new patch. The A.I. is definitely smarter about using inquisitions to prevent you from religiously steamrolling them. They also use the new guru unit to save any inquisitors who are on the verge of death, but that goes both ways since I was using them to save my debater apostles.
Thanks for the coupon! Is digital deluxe all the DLC
All of the current DLC, I believe the khmer/indonesia pack is the last one included with the season pass.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I just got this game because Steam decided to give out an amazing coupon for the Deluxe edition.
So coming from part 5 as the only game I've played (well, a bit of FreeCiv in college), um, I dunno what I'm doing. I'm playing as the Aztecs and met the Russians, fine, we're friends now, but I also met the English and am IMMEDIATELY wary.
I just got this game because Steam decided to give out an amazing coupon for the Deluxe edition.
So coming from part 5 as the only game I've played (well, a bit of FreeCiv in college), um, I dunno what I'm doing. I'm playing as the Aztecs and met the Russians, fine, we're friends now, but I also met the English and am IMMEDIATELY wary.
I just started an Aztec game! Spam eagle warriors and pick a fight with someone. Use your eagles to enslave their duders and get a ton of workers. Aztec workers can rush districts.
Early game, Eagle warriors are great, and can get nearly as strong as swordsmen. Build a few of those and attack your nearest neighbor. Work towards the battering ram technology because a battering ram and 3 eagle warriors can take out most defenses.
Late game, you can lean on your workers' ability to rush districts. You can get a policy that gives your workers extra charges, and that is great for you. No other civ has the ability to rush districts (I think,... Nubia gets a bonus though). You can purchase workers and have districts going in minimal time. I just spam as many cities as i can with them.
So this patch is much better, I feel like it's worth playing now. Still a few issues I'm running into (the civ placement thing, I still have some issues where the tooltip for a great person says he should be giving me 3 eurekas/inspirations but I only seem to get 1 or 2 which is either a bug or poorly explained, etc). It feels like a good late early access game, I guess? Which is better than where we were a month ago, but not quite where I'd expect to be in a game that's been out this long.
last time I played Civ 6 was near release. I know there have been some changes....
The way districts worked previously was that their build cost was determined from when you placed them, so you wanted to place them ASAP and then complete them as you could. Has this changed?
Also I remember there was a thing with production districts having this crazy proximity synergy, I know it was somewhat reduced or patched out entirely. How does it currently work?
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I decided to actually use the tutorial and it eventually explained what Amenities are. It's the happiness system. So, okay, cool. What I want to know is, though, is it the same as in part 5? Where once I have cocoa, it's an empire-wide effect? Or is it city-by-city? Can I still trade luxury goods (I haven't touched the diplomacy system yet)?
Oh and what's the delegate (I think that's the word) system about?
I decided to actually use the tutorial and it eventually explained what Amenities are. It's the happiness system. So, okay, cool. What I want to know is, though, is it the same as in part 5? Where once I have cocoa, it's an empire-wide effect? Or is it city-by-city? Can I still trade luxury goods (I haven't touched the diplomacy system yet)?
Oh and what's the delegate (I think that's the word) system about?
Luxuries are one per civ, and you can still trade the extras. Basically each luxury resource gives 1 amenity to 3(?) cities, which is auto distributed. Aztecs get more per luxury iirc. Additional luxuries do not help you with cities 4,5,6 etc.
Delegates have to do with city state relations. They accomplish two things:
1. At tiers 1 delegate, 3 delegates, and 6 delegates you get a bonus to your civ, usually applied to either you capital or your districts.
2. If you have at least 3 delegates AND you are in the lead for that city (ties do not count), they become an ally, and you get a city state specific bonus AND they go to war with you when the time comes. They usually don't contribute a ton to the war effort, but if they are located in the correct spot it can be pretty nice.
Posts
The drones need you.
They look up to you.
The complete void of personality in the world and characters still engulfs the entire game though.
Like trans- or post-humanism is a big theme, but none of the leaders seem to have strong opinions or inclinations about it. All their political characteristics seem inherited from earth as opposed to responses to the new environment and as a result they feel super generic. They clearly wanted every civ to be able to pursue any path with similar facility, but that cost us a cyborg leader, or a weird alien hybrid one, or whatever.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
But again for what it is, I have fun with it. I still like to load it up occasionally and play. The music and art design really appeal to me. It's kind of like the new MoO in that way, I load that one up sometimes too even though there are better games it still has some charm that brings me back.
The game is just, generally, too conservative. It's too much like the Civ games. Everybody techs the same. Everybody feels the same. Every game plays out the same (especially since, IIRC, terrain has less of an impact on overall game-flow than in the original Civs).
I wrote a long post a million years ago about some of the changes I'd make to Beyond Earth in its thread (https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/31170717#Comment_31170717), but it basically comes down to this sentence for me:
Every game I played played out the same way. Now, you could argue that that's just me being a min-maxer, but this is a strategy game not an RPG. I'm trying to win, not lose in creative ways.
That's what Alpha Centauri did that was different than a lot of the other futuristic, Civ-inspired games. They took their alien premise/setting and rolled with it. The Civ games work, in a large part, because they re-enact real human history; in the absence of those guides, BE really suffered in terms of telling a coherent story of a civilization's rise, and ALSO failed to give players the ability to craft their own narrative, due to a confusing mess of a tech tree that didn't have any real breakpoints like Civ tech trees do (eras, key techs like flight, gunpowder) or direction to give you a sense of cumulative progress. BE tries to let you do everything every game; everything is tightly balanced, but not by trading off pros and cons, instead making everything generically equivalent and accessible. (E.g. Do you even care which ideology's ultimate unit you get?)
SMAC went the other way, and is one of the few Civ-like games to do so, and is maybe the only one to do it right. DON'T let the player do everything they want every game. BE strict about driving the player's strategic options in one direction or another. Construct the narratives you want your player to experience beforehand. And while you're at it, go HOG-WILD with new gameplay mechanics and ideas to take advantage of the freedom your setting gives you. I don't know if this was accidental or what, but they managed to address the major experiential difference between a historical 4X game and a science fiction 4x game. The only other sci-fi 4x games that have "gotten" this, as far as I've played, are space-based ones, like MOO2, GalCiv, or Stellaris, with MOO2 probably being the really classic one that did it all right: tech trees that force hard choices on you, racial attributes that can completely change your gameplay experience, this narrative story about Orion flowing through it, etc.. But even then, MOO2 probably wouldn't hold up now as a new space 4X due to its thinness; in comparison, SMAC has waay more narrative depth than MOO2 and way crazier mechanics, like mind worms and boreholes.
What makes SMAC stand out then, imo, is its willingness to stand out. I don't think it's one particular aspect or another, but rather that they "got" that they were really a different genre than other Civ games and they were bold in doing new things that hadn't been done before, and... they didn't fuck it up. There is absolutely some mediocre stuff in SMAC, like unit customization, but it wasn't bad; you just don't really hear about it from people who play the game. Mind worms, brain stapling, m-f-ing Sister Miriam: you'll hear all SMAC veterans gush about this stuff and more, and you'll go ??? unless you actually play it, because they're all just smaller contributors to an overall experience that's strange and foreign, but still accessible and empowering.
Then it ended up being just "pick a civ and some miniscule stuff to go with them". I was looking forward to something less lore-focused than the Alpha Centauri factions but way more dynamic, and only got the former.
How do you like the religion changes?
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
My first game I'm totally isolated so I dunno. The lens is way, way better though.
That really sums up the difference in design philosophy between Beyond Earth and Civ 6.
Beyond Earth prioritized giving the player total control over how their society develops. You get to customize your starting bonuses. You get to choose between two yields for every new type of building you construct. The tech web makes it easier than ever to just research whatever you feel like. It really is SimCivy in a lot of ways.
Civ 6, on the other hand, railroads the player. Because your starting region has a certain type of terrain in abundance, you prioritize building certain districts. Because you're building certain districts, you get certain research boosts. Because you want to research the nodes that have been boosted first to get ahead, you unlock certain buildings and improvements. Constructing those buildings and improvements in your cities gives you more research boosts, etc. While all this railroading takes away a certain degree of player freedom, it is also what gives the game its replayability. Even if you play as the same civ in every game, you can never really be completely sure what your society will become.
If there's one thing I would add to Civ 6, it's that there would be an option to make it so that whenever your cities are within 1 pop of their housing limit (when the growth penalties start to kick in), they would automatically start working only enough food tiles to prevent starvation, and would otherwise prioritize all other yields above food.
It doesn't make any sense that cities continue to view food as equal to all other yields when the massive growth penalties caused by nearing the housing limit make any excess food beyond starvation levels completely worthless. At the moment, there is no optimal solution to this problem other than manually setting every citizen to work a specific tile. Switching food to anti-focus causes the city to avoid all food tiles, resulting in mass starvation. Setting a city to every focus except food gets better results, but can still result in minor starvation and requires the player to remember to switch the city back to default after they increase the available housing.
Maybe there's a mod that does this already, but if there is, I've never found it.
I don't know much about rising tide though. Does it add a lot?
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Lately I've been reading these super in-depth guides by Steam user Zigzagzigal. There's also some guy adding strategy sections to most of the pages in the Civilization wiki, but he has a tendency to make a lot of incorrect assumptions about how many of the bonuses in the game work.
I also have a gift copy of civ4 from a million years ago that I've never been able to foist off on anyone
are any of the civ6 DLC civs particularly interesting or fun to play as? I have aztecs and persia/macedon, dunno if I wanna get any others. Nubia seems sort of interesting.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I’d love one! My steam is casualeddy
I've found 3 goodie huts so far and only 1 has actually had anything in it (free scout unit) as far as I can tell. The last two have popped up no alert, and I can't see that any of my resources or techs have changed.
They can drop gold/faith as well but it feels like they greatly reduced the pause time to let you see that.
Started a game as India and every single city state spawned next to Rome on the other end of this asia sized land mass. Was super weird.
It is weirdly working out as Rome actually offered an alliance to me which is a first from the NPCs. I normally find it impossible to get one of those.
I know they can, it just didn't look like they did. I think also the issue is the units that hit it already had planned moves to go to the tile, so it did it at the beginning of the turn before the map was scrolled over, and since it puts the alert on the map, I never saw it.
which is dumb.
Edit:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/assignstartingplots-lua-from-v-1-0-0-167.623581/
Apparently the old placement code would evaluate sites for civ placement and if they met a score for suitablility it would place a civ there, and if it ran out of suitable sites before it ran out of civs and city states to place it would place the remainder in a random location. They updated the function to try to look for the best remaining territory instead of just dumping them anywhere, but a greater than sign got flipped, so the game is actually putting the leftover civs in the worst possible place instead. Which is why you would get a big clump of city states in the desert somewhere right on the border of a civ.
All of the current DLC, I believe the khmer/indonesia pack is the last one included with the season pass.
So coming from part 5 as the only game I've played (well, a bit of FreeCiv in college), um, I dunno what I'm doing. I'm playing as the Aztecs and met the Russians, fine, we're friends now, but I also met the English and am IMMEDIATELY wary.
I just started an Aztec game! Spam eagle warriors and pick a fight with someone. Use your eagles to enslave their duders and get a ton of workers. Aztec workers can rush districts.
Early game, Eagle warriors are great, and can get nearly as strong as swordsmen. Build a few of those and attack your nearest neighbor. Work towards the battering ram technology because a battering ram and 3 eagle warriors can take out most defenses.
Late game, you can lean on your workers' ability to rush districts. You can get a policy that gives your workers extra charges, and that is great for you. No other civ has the ability to rush districts (I think,... Nubia gets a bonus though). You can purchase workers and have districts going in minimal time. I just spam as many cities as i can with them.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
The way districts worked previously was that their build cost was determined from when you placed them, so you wanted to place them ASAP and then complete them as you could. Has this changed?
Also I remember there was a thing with production districts having this crazy proximity synergy, I know it was somewhat reduced or patched out entirely. How does it currently work?
Oh and what's the delegate (I think that's the word) system about?
Luxuries are one per civ, and you can still trade the extras. Basically each luxury resource gives 1 amenity to 3(?) cities, which is auto distributed. Aztecs get more per luxury iirc. Additional luxuries do not help you with cities 4,5,6 etc.
Delegates have to do with city state relations. They accomplish two things:
1. At tiers 1 delegate, 3 delegates, and 6 delegates you get a bonus to your civ, usually applied to either you capital or your districts.
2. If you have at least 3 delegates AND you are in the lead for that city (ties do not count), they become an ally, and you get a city state specific bonus AND they go to war with you when the time comes. They usually don't contribute a ton to the war effort, but if they are located in the correct spot it can be pretty nice.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453