Civers unite!!!!

[Natirasha]

I mean, I don't know why you'd ever do an external trade route, really. Maxing out on internal trade will let you build pretty much everything, then just jam generators/build energy buildings(or use the hilarious spy stealing to steal thousands of energy lol).

This will be tweaked first patch, though, guaranteed.

[quadz08]

Oh, man, the spy energy stealing bullshit is totally fucking broken

[Natirasha]

I've thought about it and here's what I'd like from the first patch.
--Trade Depots give 1 trade route, add an additional building(or attach it to something else) that gives the second route and Autoplant still gives the third.
--Reduce internal trade routes to Civ V levels
--Swap Pathfinders and Frugality's positions on the Virtue tree OR swap Colony Initiative and Pioneer Spirit
--Remove the 1 Health/City from Artists.
--Reduce Titanium's tile yield to max 5 production.
--Reduce the size of UI elements all-around, especially on the city screen.
--Toggle colorblind mode or otherwise make miasma viewable to those not on max specs.
--Generally clear up UI, it's currently very murky and samey in colors and things are not clear at all. I blame the fact fucking everything is transparent and blue + the fog is black.
--Make capitals immune to coup d'etat.
--Balance spy science/energy theft amounts.

[quadz08]

Where's the first patch info?

[quadz08]

oh, what you WOULD like

[quadz08]

Remind me to post here tomorrow, I have some Opinions to share after completing my 2nd full game

[quadz08]

OPINIONS TIME

Let me preface this by saying that overall, I think BE is a good game. It's entertaining, I will play far too many hours of it, I enjoy it a lot. HOWEVER, there are some issues.

1 - The game simply doesn't feel very strategically deep. It feels like Civ Lite to me. Now, that might be for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the game itself (I'm older than I have been when other Civ games came out; I've only played single player, and only on the Mercury difficulty; I am used to playing Civ V with two expansions), but regardless, it still seems a bit one-note. Past games have had multiple systems that relate to one another, but you have to build them separately (religion-science-culture/tourism in Civ V), but in this one, the Affinity-Research-Virtues thing all feel very much like one thing (which I don't think is good). Thinking critically about it, I don't know why I feel that way about Virtues in particular, since they really don't have anything to do with anything else (other than the fact that it benefits the same basic statistics in the long run), but it really doesn't feel like a separate system, for whatever reason.

2 - Some of the quests are bugged / coded poorly / badly designed / something. At least a couple of times now, I've gotten quests that are literally impossible for me to complete. "Build a petrochemical plant in City X." Oh, wait, there are no petroleum deposits close enough to City X for a petrochemical plant to ever be an available building. I guess I could build all the way out to the edge of the research web for the orbital that grants random strategic resources and hope / wait for it to make petroleum appear, but unless I'm playing supremacy and think that's a worthwhile tech for me to have

anyway

, the game is going to be practically over by the time I complete that quest. OR the one where it wants you to build X number of Y building (two observatories, for example). Well, shit, I've already built 4 of them. Is that not good enough? No? I have to found

two new cities

specifically to complete this quest? Not a fan, thanks.

3 - The flavor feels extremely lackluster. This is in no small part due to the fact that the FIRST THING YOU SEE whenever you kick up the game is an utterly beautiful cinematic, which tells an incredible, poignant story in about 3 minutes of time. You never see anything even remotely similar to this cinematic ever again (which I know is standard for Civ, but this one in particular was so moving that it really made me want more). I would have happily waited for a Christmas release for a game-ending cinematics of similar length and quality, one for each victory type (and perhaps some for a loss). Maybe I'm underestimating the cost / time / effort of making a cinematic like that, and it would have been an extra for those 5 or 6 cinematics. If so, fair enough, but it won't stop me wishing. Apart from the lack of cinematics, I wish they hadn't recycled so much AI dialogue. So much of the text is straight up copied from Civ 5, which just feels gross to me. ("Oh, now I have to deal with you AND [x leader]? I guess the vermin are breeding," etc.) They also only have 8 leaders and 3 affinities; would it have been that hard to write dialogue for the AI leaders that was unique to that leader/affinity combo? When Militant South America Guy and Daoist Asia Lady both tell me the same things because they both happen to be building towards the Harmony affinity, it rather breaks the illusion. It's not that difficult to invent motivations for each of the three affinities based on the personalities they were clearly trying to create for each leader. ALSO, friggin' let me see what my own leader looks like, please? They have this mild thing going on where leaders change appearance as the move further into a certain affinity, and I want to know what mine looks like! I played the whole first game as Brazil and only knew I was a male leader because my name is Alfonso or Alejandro or whatever. I just want a place where I can see the basic info for my colony (what starting options did I choose, what are my civ's unique abilities, image of my leader).

4 - The four victory types that are not Domination are literally

the same thing,

just reskinned slightly. Build a tile improvement that is also a building, and then wait for Some Number of Turns. Yes, there are different sacrifices to be made for each (must sacrifice military units or build settlers for Emancipation Gate / Exodus Gate, must have positive energy economy for Beacon, build speedup buildings for Mind Flower), but they're all pretty much the same in practice. I imagine that in a multiplayer game, this makes having a strong military absolutely crucial, regardless of what type of victory you're aiming for, since even if you're not going for Domination, your Planetary Wonder can be destroyed by any individual enemy unit walking on top of it, and the whole planet is made aware that you've completed said Planetary Wonder. Maybe that's the case for multiplayer games in past civs as well (I haven't been much of a PVP person in Civ until quite recently), but I'm not convinced I like that. Also, for fuck's sake, let me

turn the Beacon off

if I want. Sometimes I'll decide I need the energy to help prevent Joe Blow from winning in 15 turns, more than I need to win in 23 turns.

5 - The affinity-specific resources seem frustratingly difficult to get enough of to build both your unique buildings and unique units. In my first game, I got to level 18 on harmony, but never once built a Xeno Titan, because I never had enough xenomass for it. Similar goes for my supremacy game, where I basically never built a unit that required firaxite. I mean, when one unit costs me

7 firaxite

, and some buildings cost as much as 4, and etc., it just seems like there's never enough. Maybe that's intentional, I guess, but in practice it just seems that unless I'm aiming for a domination victory, I'll just never build the Big Scary Unique Units.

6 - Deal-making / diplomacy seems functionally useless in this game. Again, possibly a function of single-player on Mercury difficulty, but my trade with AIs thus far has consisted of "Open Borders for Open Borders?" Cool. "Wanna be allies?" Cool. "Can you help me out, I'll give you a Favor (tm)?" Sure, I guess. There's nothing that the AI seems to have that I want, except maybe more of my specific type of resource (and even then, not really?) now that there are so few types of resources, and luxury resources don't exist.

7 - Aliens are basically meaningless after the first 50-100 turns , since you can build repulsor fences and extend them to your trade units (and this is despite the stated goal of making aliens relevant through the entire game). I want to be able to do more things with them, or understand how they work more clearly, or be able to see the benefits of a Harmony affinity in action (can I convert Aliens to my own units? Can I build an improvement on alien nests in my territory that give me production for domesticating this nest? etc). They're interesting, because they're extremely numerous while not being inherently aggressive, but I just want them to be more useful during the game.

8 - The UI is fairly dull, and available actions are sometimes unclear. (Sometimes important quest-y actions appear above the standard actions. Sometimes they are to the far right of the standard actions.) I appreciate that they're going for a spacey feel with the metallic-y grey, but it just makes production menus SUPER BORING.

8 - Nati's points on balance are pretty on-point, from what I can tell.

[Lord Mhork]

Well I mean it's less strategic than civ v, but that's kinda always bound to be the case since five bad two expansion packs and a bunch of dlc to improve and expand. Like, as a self contained game it's pretty good.

The only real things that I would like at present are more aggressive AI and aliens that react to you more. I've been clearing out swaths of colonies and all the aliens are still super chill

Oh and I think the sonic fence is a really silly building and I'm not 100% sure why it is one

[quadz08]

sonic fence is basically the early game decision point "do you want to kill aliens for military experience or let them be to keep them from being Super Attack Mode Guys," but it's a bad decision point, because aliens are so strong at the point the building becomes available that anyone who

doesn't

build it is asking to get their shit kicked in by aliens real quick. They'll waste production time on units that die instead of buildings that are useful. Plus, the quest decision on Sonic Fence or whatever it's called has the Super Broken Option of shielding all your trade routes from alien attack.

[Natirasha]

In other news, LOL.

[Sudo_Nym]

I really like that the game was better synergy than Civ V does between it's systems. I feel like, in Civ V, you need to pick one of culture/religion/tourism and forget the other two. I like that BE lets you build up everything together, but it feels like it's way too easy. If they're going to offer increased synergy, they need to offer smaller bonuses or make advancement more difficult to balance it out.

And trade routes are ridiculous. Don't know how they missed that, since it was a thing in Civ V.

Aliens are tough, which I think actually breaks Purity- get level one, and they'll never attack a tile with an explorer on it, so you can just build some explorers to escort your army and the aliens will never bother you. It also makes Harmony a little worse, since you need Xenomass, but Xenomass is generally found underneath Nests.

[quadz08]

I mean, "never attack tiles with explorers on it" means only that, as far as I can tell. They'll attack all the other units around your explorer without issue, I'd imagine.

[Natirasha]

The issue more being you can just surround aliens with explorers and farm them.

The flipside, though, is that aliens always attacking your explorers is really dumb and annoying.

[Sudo_Nym]

It's more than that. Explorers count as non-combat units, so you can stack them on the same square as your soldiers. Then the soldiers can march into battle without fear of counterattack, since they're on a tile with an explorer on it, which the aliens will never attack.

[kanyeknowsbest]

even w. frenzied aliens turned on the only time theyll attack your explorers w.o. the purity is when you get near a nest zzz

basically agree w. everything said, biggest complaint is how braindead a choice going wide and spamming internal traderoutes it is and how fucking tedious that makes your turns redoing traderoutes late game. even on appolo the computer is a complete pushover right now. a large part of that is probably the power of traderoutes + the fact that the difference in power between unit tiers is disgustingly huge and the computer does not build affinity fast enough to pose any sort of threat. fix the interface and the balance and this is a fun game i think.

thnink i need to try playing real liove ppl but its always been such a pain to make games w. more than 3 or 4 human players work.

[Natirasha]

The NQ group is doing mostly 4p games atm because the ICS problem is exacerbated by larger maps.

[quadz08]

Oh, I forgot that explorers were non-combat. That sounds like an easy fix to that issue - make explorers combat units.

what is NQ / ICS?

[Natirasha]

ICS is short for Infinite City Sprawl--aka what happens when the negatives for producing more cities are minimal.
NQ is the No Quitters group, which is the officially unofficial semi-pro Civ V/BE group.

[Titus]

Surviellance web is op. Have any of you ever done a dirty bomb or siege worm?

[Titus]

I am hoping to make a mod to fix most gripes.

[quadz08]

I did a siege worm. Didn't seem particularly useful, though; maybe it's better if they're already being invaded.

[Titus]

The NQ group is doing mostly 4p games atm because the ICS problem is exacerbated by larger maps.

Perhaps suffer affinity penalty or have non alien units against you?

One civ game did this where a revolution occurred and half your cities would be a new civ.

[quadz08]

Titus, what's your steam?

[Titus]

mhtitus

[quadz08]

friend invite sent woot