thelastleonida
Chieftain
I've been playing Civ games since Civ3 (plus Alpha Centauri) and quite a load of mods, but I never got involved in your forum. Guess it's about time.
I'm enjoying my time with BE and I hope we'll see some good expansions, however I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed: I expected more ambition.
To the point at hand (sorry, I felt an introduction was in order): I am not going to discuss the perks given by affinities (there's another good thread), but rather the system with which we gain affinity points.
At the moment, the system is static (i.e. it doesn't change continuosly with time):
I suggest to move toward a dynamic system, where xp points are gained - or lost - each and every turn depending on two factors:
as you can see from the image attached, the idea is that of a graph with "Empire Health" as its abscissa and "Xp toward a specific affinity" as its ordinate. The more extreme you are toward one of the two ends, the more points you'll gain toward Harmony or Supremacy affinity each turn; conversely, the more balanced you are around the centre the more points you'll gain toward Purity.
Naturally, this would mean a complete overhaul of the Health mechanic as a balance against fast expansion (more on this later); right now, what is important to undestand is that, in this concept, a high/low Health represents the Empire attitude toward peaceful/aggressive coexistence with the planet. For example, if a player is striving to get more production through factories and other improvements that have a negative impact on the planet, his society should drift toward Supremacy. There is a very fundamental change here: the drive toward a certain affinity would be based on players' history (did you build factories, petrochemical plants, cut down forests, etc.?) and not anymore on arbirtrary decisions with no regard on what you've done/become so far.
With this system in place, I would severely reduce the amount of xp gained from the discovery of new technologies and from quests; the latter could provide a small amount of pluses and/or minuses per turn toward a specific affinity. Even then, I find quests a bit too arbitrary at the moment.
World map effects: incindentally, this new system would allow for a proper "pollution mechanic" to be put in place, the same as in Civ4: Overall high Health among all the empires could mean the spread of forests (and maybe Miasm), while low Health could mean their disappearance.
Aliens: their aggressivity could be based on Overall Health; I would go so far as to base also their spawn rate on Overall Health: if the planet is under threat, it fights back.
Balance-wise, quite a lot of adjustments would be needed, I know...
Possible issues/concerns:
Purity from a lore perspective and affinity system representation: Purity wants to change the world, not preserve it... so a more coherent approach could be to swap Purity and Harmony positions on the graph and allow high Health to represent health itself but from an Earth perspective. But this apparent incoherence is the effect of the one-dimensional juxtaposition of the three affinities on the Health abscissa on the graph shown in the attachment. A more sensible approach would be to use a triangle: each vertex would be an affinity, while the center would be the "no-choice", which is a choice nonetheless.
The elephant in the room: health as balance against fast expansion
Currently, health is analogous to happiness in Civ5, except there are no luxury resources. My proposal would be to adopt a Civ4 maintenance system:
Phew, I truly hope someone will read this wall of text...
In any case, this forum is awesome
Cheers
/back to work, oh shhhh...
I'm enjoying my time with BE and I hope we'll see some good expansions, however I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed: I expected more ambition.
To the point at hand (sorry, I felt an introduction was in order): I am not going to discuss the perks given by affinities (there's another good thread), but rather the system with which we gain affinity points.
At the moment, the system is static (i.e. it doesn't change continuosly with time):
- points are gained through one-time events, that is unlocking a certain tech or through quests' results;
- once you get your point, there's no going back nor going forward: you will have to actively work your way toward the next tech (or wait for a certain quest to pop up).
I suggest to move toward a dynamic system, where xp points are gained - or lost - each and every turn depending on two factors:
- overall empire health;
- buildings, terrain improvements (through their health effects) and wonders (they could have health effects or straight-up "+xp/turn AND/OR -xp/turn");
- each tile with forest should yield a small health bonus.
as you can see from the image attached, the idea is that of a graph with "Empire Health" as its abscissa and "Xp toward a specific affinity" as its ordinate. The more extreme you are toward one of the two ends, the more points you'll gain toward Harmony or Supremacy affinity each turn; conversely, the more balanced you are around the centre the more points you'll gain toward Purity.
Naturally, this would mean a complete overhaul of the Health mechanic as a balance against fast expansion (more on this later); right now, what is important to undestand is that, in this concept, a high/low Health represents the Empire attitude toward peaceful/aggressive coexistence with the planet. For example, if a player is striving to get more production through factories and other improvements that have a negative impact on the planet, his society should drift toward Supremacy. There is a very fundamental change here: the drive toward a certain affinity would be based on players' history (did you build factories, petrochemical plants, cut down forests, etc.?) and not anymore on arbirtrary decisions with no regard on what you've done/become so far.
With this system in place, I would severely reduce the amount of xp gained from the discovery of new technologies and from quests; the latter could provide a small amount of pluses and/or minuses per turn toward a specific affinity. Even then, I find quests a bit too arbitrary at the moment.
World map effects: incindentally, this new system would allow for a proper "pollution mechanic" to be put in place, the same as in Civ4: Overall high Health among all the empires could mean the spread of forests (and maybe Miasm), while low Health could mean their disappearance.
Aliens: their aggressivity could be based on Overall Health; I would go so far as to base also their spawn rate on Overall Health: if the planet is under threat, it fights back.
Balance-wise, quite a lot of adjustments would be needed, I know...
Possible issues/concerns:
Purity from a lore perspective and affinity system representation: Purity wants to change the world, not preserve it... so a more coherent approach could be to swap Purity and Harmony positions on the graph and allow high Health to represent health itself but from an Earth perspective. But this apparent incoherence is the effect of the one-dimensional juxtaposition of the three affinities on the Health abscissa on the graph shown in the attachment. A more sensible approach would be to use a triangle: each vertex would be an affinity, while the center would be the "no-choice", which is a choice nonetheless.
The elephant in the room: health as balance against fast expansion
Currently, health is analogous to happiness in Civ5, except there are no luxury resources. My proposal would be to adopt a Civ4 maintenance system:
- more cities means higher energy maintenance;
- outposts: they should drain economy (energy) AND require a trade route to be put in place for them: no trade route = no growth;
- puppetted cities: they cost less to maintain and have the usual benefits of no-increase for culture threshold; however they could also have a penalty to production: when puppeting a city, a player is deciding "I don't care what you produce and I don't want you to slow me down in culture, however I want your strategic position and resources".
Phew, I truly hope someone will read this wall of text...
In any case, this forum is awesome
Cheers
/back to work, oh shhhh...
supremacy, 0 
