Explore!

I'm far from an expert, but one thing I've figured out already. Those who played pre-release versions were right. It is very important to explore. I'm building two explorers first thing, which gives me three. I then beeline down the prosperity tree to the virtue that gives your explorers three expeditions. So far it has worked beautifully. I'm only playing on Gemini level right now, but I'm scarfing up more than my share of resources, crash sites, etc. As a result, in one game I got nine artifacts before turn 100. That was sweet!

By the way, that refers to CivBERT, not the generic CivBE.

I totally agree, before BERT I never took that prosperity virtue that gave the extra expeditions, but in my last game I actually took that before the free colonist. I had staggered landings enabled and was determined to strip the planet clean before everybody had landed.

Snownova said:

I totally agree, before BERT I never took that prosperity virtue that gave the extra expeditions, but in my last game I actually took that before the free colonist. I had staggered landings enabled and was determined to strip the planet clean before everybody had landed.

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I concur, that virtue was pretty much useless in BE but with RT I rush it almost every game! Even the Supremacy perk isn't enough - I need more than 2 expeditions

A lot of people have complained about the lack of changes to the virtue tree in RT but I think it has given some of the (previously) lacklustre virtues more worth.

I don't feel like rushing the free colonist is even the strongest build anymore - everything seems contextual - pick the best virtue build for your situation... Are you surrounded by artifacts? Rush some expedition virtues. Are you surrounded by aliens? Go might and farm them. Are you in a peaceful area without much to excavate? Go full econ (industry/knowledge). In vanilla BE this kind of attitude didn't work because you essentially gimped yourself by not going industry/prosperity. Now there are so many incentives to go exploring you can actually end up AHEAD of your standard pros/industry opener.

I played a game as NSA last night and rushed Knowledge for the 30 science from expeditions, then Prosperity for the 3 extra expeditions, then Might for the +str vs aliens/science for farming. I had so much bonus production/science from my explorers that I actually had 5 cities down within 35 turns or so, on Standard speed!

Overall I love exploring and the RNG aspect of it. Every game feels unique now.

I just started a new game on very hard difficulty a few days ago and went all-out on exploration. I've got 7 explorers roaming the planet, with 5 exploration modules each (got a bonus from combining some artifacts)... I completely steamed ahead of the AI despite their bonuses and my bad starting location.

I always made 2 extra explorers (for a total of 3) in the vanilla game. Remember, finding resource pods and expeditions is a zero-sum game. If you don't take it, someone else will and it won't be there any more.

I now make 3-4 extra explorers in Rising Tide, for a total of 4-5 total explorers.