Its funny how Firaxis keeps making new games that are in some ways a step back

[Question]

Same thing happened with civ 5 : it had some nice new stuff, but a lot of the good old stuff was missing.

If you compare BE to alpha centauri, you will probably be left scratching your head at how simple features are mysteriously absent.

Whats even stranger with BE is that simple features that were present in civ 5 itself are mysteriously missing from BE.

For example, the 2d strategic map? Thats mysteriously missing. For no apparent reason.

The diplomacy in BE is even worse than civ 5 which was itself worse than in older games. In civ 5 you could at least trade luxuries...in BE you can safely ignore the diplomacy screen for most of the game because theres nothing of value to trade. Favors are worthless because the AI is and demands unrealistic trade deals, not to mention they become worthless the moment the AI decides to randomly hate you.

The same diplomacy problem in civ 5 where everyone starts hating you because you take a few cities from a faction that attacks you is still there, so the moment someone declares war on you, everyone will end up hating you. At least in alpha centauri your allies would stick with you as long as you didnt run opposing social engineering choices.

Wonders are very city centric instead of the faction wide bonuses you get in alpha centauri. Not only that but most of the wonders are uninteresting and seem like a waste of time compared to civ 5.

The upgrade system is mostly an improvement, except that theres not much variety with only two perk choices per upgrade. You cant save upgrades either which is a rather odd choice. I was only able to get hybrid upgrades to work with the unique purity battlesuit unit, and the only difference was that one perk was slightly different. Not impressed. Even across the different affinities, all the base stats seem to be the same and only the perks differ slightly. The way the upgrades are spread out also means that you end up with rather odd situations in which say, you have a tier 3 ranged unit that is much better than the tier 2 artillery one. And the artillery units seem completley unnecessary given that they dont get indirect fire till very late game, cities are much weaker and the bonus vs cities isnt that large in the first place.

There seem to be far too few expedition sites available. You can easily get most of the ones on your starting continent with just one explorer and no module upgrades...

Same problem with civ 5 : buildings dependant on a particular resource, resource is just outside your workable range, no way to build the building. Where are my supply crawlers? You can launch satellites, but you cant figure out how to move the resource a few hexes?

>put in a satellite that creates new resources
>specifically make it not work on improved tiles
>dont let the player remove improvements

*slow clap*

Trade route spamming : Is it really so hard for firaxis to code in a "auto renew trade route" option? This was already a known issue with venice in BNW.

Factions are even more generic than before. Alpha centauri had very distinct factionst aht played differently, here, most of the factions play the same. ARC just rushes spy agency, PAC builds tile improvements faster, etc. Other than that, they play the same.

Virtues seem way too hard to get till the very late game and health is a major issue until you beeline the end game +4 health buildings AND pick up at least one health virtue. Im constantly stuck on 2 or 3 bases because of the crippling negative health from high populations.

Automated workers are still useless and have even less options than alpha centauri. Except that now they spam maintainance costing improvements to bankrupt you.

Seige worms and krakens showing up early in the game and hanging outside your cities in the early game are really obnoxious. Then when you do get the quest to kill a seige worm, they are nowhere to be seen.

9 turns to cut a forest down on standard speed. Seriously? And there doesnt appear to be any benefit to leaving forests around in BE...

Specialists seem underpowered in BE without great persons as well. I mean a mine creates 3 production...while engineer specialist gives 2. Its almost always better to work a tile than have a specialist.

 

[Jimbo30]

Virtues are easy to get, go with Artists colonists and you'll be fine.

There are various quests that let you speed up workers, though they do seem very slow compared to Civ 5.

Health isn't really an issue (most people are winning the game on huge minus health values) but if it was then just go industry for the bonus from buildings.

It's not that bad. There's nothing here that they can't fix it's just annoying that it'll take a few months.

 

[Brichals]

Well it's a big step up from Civ5 vanilla at release so that's one thing.

Balance is bizarre and it's too easy to win so you don't have to make any decisions, but I'm trying the Better Balance mod (BeBa) and it seems to be better. Only 100 turns in yet though.

 

[naturalmwa]

I think this is intentional. For years every version of CIV was more complicated than the last. Starting with CIV5, Firaxis seems to have made the decision to make the games simpler and more approachable for a new player. Releasing less features also gives them something to sell to you in an expansion pack.

 

[ddd123]

yeah, you cant cheat-trade luxuries
too bad this hax... ehm feature is missing

 

[Arklight]

They seem to be learning from the EA school of games making.

 

[Strickl3r]

It's all about the Benjamins.

 

[Oddible]

Actually the entire software industry is moving in this direction. Building an MVP (minimum viable product) a la the Lean model has become status quo. It is a good thing guys. Especially in Firaxis's case where they've released a solid product with no significant game breaking issues on day 1, something that has become increasingly rare. (And don't lump all the EA studios together, the EA sports teams and even Dice seem to be able to release solid product while Maxis is a disaster).

 

[JosEPh_II]

But how many Good space colony type games are out there now? Seems to be a dearth to me.

JosEPh

 

[Question]

While you cacn win with huge negative health, the problem is staying in the positive without late game virtues and buildings. Its really hard to do so even with minimal cities.

Other really annoying things ive found :

-Covert ops success chance is incredibly low. 4 agents with the increased success rate secret project and a special agent, with no defending spies, and i can fail to steal techs (easy difficulty) 4 times in a row. To make matters worse, the cheap and easily available survelliance web lowers max intrigue to 3, meaning that you cant do any advanced ops. The big problem with this is that you need to do a level 4 or higher covert op for the culper cult quest which is impossible once people build survelliance webs. AND you cant sabotage buildings either to destroy the survelliance web.

It also looks like theres no option to view city info screen through spying anymore nor can you view the list of researchd techs, etc like what you could in alpha centauri.

-No airbases as tile improvements. Another step back.

-Can no longer sort trade routes by highest gold. Why was this feature removed again?

-Still dont get a discount for partially built buildings when you purchase them, a basic feature available in alpha centauri....

-For some reason diplomacy screen doesnt seem to show who is at war with who

-Cant ask AIs to stop attacking a friendly station

-Constantly respawning alien nests unless you park a unit on the same tile

-No more unit XP buildings

 

[PhilBowles]

Same thing happened with civ 5 : it had some nice new stuff, but a lot of the good old stuff was missing.

Sid Meier has actually said this is a deliberate design decision - that the game is about as complex as they want it, so in order to make each new Civ version different and add new features to them, they remove other features.

If you compare BE to alpha centauri, you will probably be left scratching your head at how simple features are mysteriously absent.

No, not really. The only obvious omission compared with SMAC is a government system, which is a bizarre omission compared with any Civ game. Terrain elevation is 'mysteriously absent', but has been in Civs III through V as well.

Whats even stranger with BE is that simple features that were present in civ 5 itself are mysteriously missing from BE.

For example, the 2d strategic map? Thats mysteriously missing. For no apparent reason.

I never used it, but it's not clear why they took it out, certainly. Maybe it's there somewhere but because the interface is so bad no one's found it yet?

The diplomacy in BE is even worse than civ 5 which was itself worse than in older games.

The diplomacy in Civ V was better than in other Civ games, which did not in any meaningful sense have diplomacy (i.e. relations with other civs). Using diplomacy as a trade screen was worse in Civ V than in other games, which isn't really the same.

BE is worse than Civ V on both counts, though you can trade science per turn which is new. Some of the oddities in diplomatic behaviour that Civ V largely ironed out in patches and expansions is back - for instance, I had a cooperation agreement with the African Union and had agreed to attack Franco-Iberia with them. Come the turn of the attack, it's launched and the Africans immediately denounce me (the reason wasn't stated, although some denunciations do now state the reason for condemnation - I was denounced for my expeditions once). Check the diplo screen, they're still friendly and they have no negative modifiers with me. They aren't even flagged as denouncing me.

In civ 5 you could at least trade luxuries...in BE you can safely ignore the diplomacy screen for most of the game because theres nothing of value to trade.

This is sadly true, but this is more of a problem with diplomacy in the game having no purpose other than trade than because there aren't enough trade options. It doesn't seem that meaningful 'blocs' form or that tripartite relations matter, unlike Civ V.

Favors are worthless because the AI is and demands unrealistic trade deals, not to mention they become worthless the moment the AI decides to randomly hate you.

I found out by accident that you can use a favour to force someone to declare war on your behalf - the "shall we declare war?" option, when they refuse, has a new option if you have a favour owed, letting you spend the favour to have them declare war. This doesn't mean they'll do anything meaningful to contribute to said war.

Wonders are very city centric instead of the faction wide bonuses you get in alpha centauri. Not only that but most of the wonders are uninteresting and seem like a waste of time compared to civ 5.

They're uninteresting and generic, but most seem to have an empire-wide bonus as well as their city yield, except for a few like Ectogenesis Pod.

The upgrade system is mostly an improvement, except that theres not much variety with only two perk choices per upgrade.

Yes, the two upgrade option is restrictive, and the more I play the game the less I like the decision to tie upgrades to affinity. It turns the mid game into an affinity-level race with your most threatening or potentially threatening rival, and at least early faction uniques like the Purity Space Marines Battlesuits are only - at first - on a par with level 3 equivalents in other affinities, so don't give you any edge.

You cant save upgrades either which is a rather odd choice. I was only able to get hybrid upgrades to work with the unique purity battlesuit unit, and the only difference was that one perk was slightly different. Not impressed. Even across the different affinities, all the base stats seem to be the same and only the perks differ slightly. The way the upgrades are spread out also means that you end up with rather odd situations in which say, you have a tier 3 ranged unit that is much better than the tier 2 artillery one. And the artillery units seem completley unnecessary given that they dont get indirect fire till very late game, cities are much weaker and the bonus vs cities isnt that large in the first place.

I was just playing against a Purity AI whose Vipers (level 3 artillery) completely massacre any unit sent against them - the anti-city upgrades are pointless, but they're good units against ground units, especially as the basic ranged unit in the game is rather weak (though as an aside unit types are much better-balanced against one another than in Civ V; ranged are weaker and infantry/armour stronger).

The fixed order of affinity upgrades, I agree, is problematic. I'm playing on an archipelago map - are my engineers really going to wait until level 3 affinity to upgrade my boats? Conversely, on a Protean world why would they upgrade boats in preference to aircraft? You should be allowed to choose which unit to upgrade in which order in any given tier, with the condition that you have to reach tier 2 in each of them before progressing to tier 3.

There seem to be far too few expedition sites available. You can easily get most of the ones on your starting continent with just one explorer and no module upgrades...

It seems variable, but I agree that the placement of expedition module perks is bad since there are rarely enough to make more than 1 extra module useful, and that can come too late. There's some dynamism to it, since things like crash sites and derelict settlements (and, with at least one quest, progenitor ruins) can appear during the game, but there should be more dynamism still - and perhaps a small chance to get alien skeletons or an 'abandoned nest' type of artifact after killing aliens. There should be more seeded quests like the Augmented or the time tomb, and other random events that can just unearth artifacts without any associated story (what, storms only ever unearth relics that happen to contain human remains?).

Same problem with civ 5 : buildings dependant on a particular resource, resource is just outside your workable range, no way to build the building. Where are my supply crawlers? You can launch satellites, but you cant figure out how to move the resource a few hexes?

With its range of mid-game improvements and huge bonuses from internal trade, there's already very little relevance to city placement. Having to have resources within a specific radius gives some value to where you put your cities.

Trade route spamming : Is it really so hard for firaxis to code in a "auto renew trade route" option? This was already a known issue with venice in BNW.

The existing interface is clunky, but how would this work? You don't usually want to renew every one of your trade routes, after all.

Factions are even more generic than before. Alpha centauri had very distinct factionst aht played differently, here, most of the factions play the same. ARC just rushes spy agency, PAC builds tile improvements faster, etc. Other than that, they play the same.

I played AC again recently after BE was announced. The factions don't really behave very differently; they all city-spam, as was default in Civ II, they just differ in the order of techs they prefer. Which seems much the same as BE. I haven't seen enough to imbue any of them with clear personalities yet, of the sort that could take a full paragraph to describe for each Civ V leader.

Virtues seem way too hard to get till the very late game and health is a major issue until you beeline the end game +4 health buildings AND pick up at least one health virtue. Im constantly stuck on 2 or 3 bases because of the crippling negative health from high populations.

Virtues accumulate quickly if you focus on culture boost effects to any degree. Health is problematic - I can sustain about 5 bases, and did so on a static -5 health for a while, but now ill health is spiralling and there's not actually a lot you can do to prevent cities growing if you want to - trade gives them food, using biowells to boost health requires working those biowells, and those produce food, and specialist buildings are hard to come by for much of the game. I even went along a tech path where I got to Vivariums very late, but population is still growing.

While in general I think BE implements health better than Civ V did happiness - with buildings and improvements having negative as well as positive effects on health, and without Civ V's glut of things that produce happiness in quantity - and I can appreciate the direction they took in making controlling health a major focus of the game from the start (while with Civ V you don't notice unhappiness until your third city or later), there should be more ways to manage your population than the game provides, even if that means just going back to the 'workers cost food' model of older games.

Seige worms and krakens showing up early in the game and hanging outside your cities in the early game are really obnoxious. Then when you do get the quest to kill a seige worm, they are nowhere to be seen.

Aliens could do with better scaling - having wolf beetles suicide tier 3 soldiers is just sad. But at the same time having some exposure to larger components of the ecosystem early on does contribute to the atmosphere, and a siege worm would hardly be threatening if it didn't show up until you could realistically kill it.

9 turns to cut a forest down on standard speed. Seriously? And there doesnt appear to be any benefit to leaving forests around in BE...

The usual -1 production, but this is particularly trivial, and there's nothing like a lumber mill that needs forests. Forests were a bad idea - who says alien planets even need them? The game really should be a bit more of a struggle for resources early on (when instead you can start with a glut - I took a crew of engineers and just powered ahead), and forests should be valuable for their production at that stage (as they are in early stages of Civ V).

Specialists seem underpowered in BE without great persons as well. I mean a mine creates 3 production...while engineer specialist gives 2. Its almost always better to work a tile than have a specialist.

Specialists allow food control, and you don't take anyone off a mine to act as an engineer - you don't in Civ V, where they do have Great People. You take them off less productive tiles, allowing you to specialise in production you can't otherwise get. Before Civ IV added GPs, that was always the way specialists worked. It's fine.

 

[Thormodr]

But how many Good space colony type games are out there now? Seems to be a dearth to me.

JosEPh

If you are talking 4X Space games:

Pandora: First Contact looks decent. I've only watched some Let's play videos though and haven't actually played it. It is the most Civ style out there.

Gal Civ III is 4X but not really Civ style. It's a lot of fun even in early access beta, however.

Stardrive 2 certainly has potential to be pretty good. Not Civ style but real time space combat, x-com like ground combat with turn based strategy seems intriguing.

 

[PhilBowles]

While you cacn win with huge negative health, the problem is staying in the positive without late game virtues and buildings. Its really hard to do so even with minimal cities.

Other really annoying things ive found :

-Covert ops success chance is incredibly low. 4 agents with the increased success rate secret project and a special agent, with no defending spies, and i can fail to steal techs (easy difficulty) 4 times in a row. To make matters worse, the cheap and easily available survelliance web lowers max intrigue to 3, meaning that you cant do any advanced ops. The big problem with this is that you need to do a level 4 or higher covert op for the culper cult quest which is impossible once people build survelliance webs. AND you cant sabotage buildings either to destroy the survelliance web.

I've had the reverse experience - covert ops missions mostly work, and this is a problem given the huge payoffs and that the missions are free (no adverse diplo effects and no chance of agents being killed).

It also looks like theres no option to view city info screen through spying anymore nor can you view the list of researchd techs, etc like what you could in alpha centauri.

Establish Spy Network gives the same information as the city screen, just as a list.

-No airbases as tile improvements. Another step back.

Step back from what? Civ V didn't have airbases as tile improvements.

-Can no longer sort trade routes by highest gold. Why was this feature removed again?

No idea, but it's not very useful in BE. Most trade is internal, for production, and the only relevant external yields are culture and science. Energy is better-obtained from other sources.

-Still dont get a discount for partially built buildings when you purchase them, a basic feature available in alpha centauri....

BE isn't Alpha Centauri; Alpha Centauri was just a Civ II clone with a unit workshop and social engineering system added. With Civ V mechanics, the last thing you want is any discount on gold purchasing - with gold from tiles, trading posts available from the start, the brokenness of resource pods containing solar collectors, and covert operations siphoning off ridiculous amounts of energy, you're not exactly short of the stuff.

-For some reason diplomacy screen doesnt seem to show who is at war with who

Have to double-check that - I think it does. The diplo screen is the one part of the UI that actually improves on the Civ V diplo interface (but still no relationship web).

-Cant ask AIs to stop attacking a friendly station.

This is the least of the problems with the way stations were implemented.

-Constantly respawning alien nests unless you park a unit on the same tile

This is how barbarians have generally worked in Civ games (not in AC, but only because the aliens didn't have camps - instead mindworms would randomly spawn anywhere they wanted to); Civ V's camps do the same thing.

-No more unit XP buildings

Would be more of an issue if promotions did anything much.

 

[PhilBowles]

If you are talking 4X Space games:

Pandora: First Contact looks decent. I've only watched some Let's play videos though and haven't actually played it. It is the most Civ style out there.

That's what I've heard: it looks decent. It's possible the expansion may have shaken things up, but from what I've seen and read it's mediocre and very heavily focused on combat.

Gal Civ III is 4X but not really Civ style. It's a lot of fun even in early access beta, however.

Looking forward to seeing how this shakes up when it comes down to a reasonable price. I never got into GalCivs I and II, but haven't really given them a chance - the 'build your own race. No, not as an option - that's a command!' bit just to get into to the game turned me off. And the 'alignment' thing is just a bit too fantasy - I'd heard that's been ditched.

I still like Distant Worlds as a MOO successor, but I've yet to quite finish a session as the one thing it does really well - exploration - runs out of content long before you run out of game.

 

[markusbeutel]

But how many Good space colony type games are out there now? Seems to be a dearth to me.

JosEPh

Galactic civilization 3 beta is available on Steam right now, and it's already in better shape than BE....

 

[Marshall Thomas]

Galactic civilization 3 beta is available on Steam right now, and it's already in better shape than BE....

I'm on the fence about whether or not to buy it now or wait to it's full release. Would you recommend it? Is it already better than GalCiv2? Thanks in advance.

 

[rastak]

Galactic civilization 3 beta is available on Steam right now, and it's already in better shape than BE....

I'm having more fun with BE than I had with Galciv 2....hope it's as good as you say.

 

[subanark]

The main thing that annoys me is that internal trade routes are brutally powerful. Seriously, make your primary focus just connecting everything up internally and your economy will explode.

Also, finding out the bonuses to quests, and what triggers them causes all sorts of strategy headaches.

 

[markusbeutel]

I'm on the fence about whether or not to buy it now or wait to it's full release. Would you recommend it? Is it already better than GalCiv2? Thanks in advance.

I would - and it's definitely better than GC2 in its current state. The mechanics behind buildings and their placement is also really innovative, in that on the city screen, you see the terrain of your city, and your buildings get bonuses based on where they are built (like how your cities get bonuses based on what tiles they work in the CIV series. Additionally, buildings grant adjacent buildings additional bonuses, so there's this sort of meta game where you're able to intuitively customize each city.

But to each his own - I find I prefer Gal CIV's space environment, where you're colonizing new planets and such, interests me more than BE's focusing on a single planet.

 

[Chaos Blade]

indeed to the op, I feel this game lacks in personality and depth. I've been snooping though the files and it seems they have removed a lot of things prior launch, including religions, and some rather cool ones and Terraforming (and sawmills, in space nobody cares for wood it seems)

A real shame, this is the second time Firaxes let me down, the first being XCom. their games used to be immersive, now they are gamey, and very aware of it.

on the by, at least the texh web doesn't have the horrible immersion breaking flight before internal combustion engine of CiV, small miracles that...