Lessons from Civ:BE

So, Civ:BE has been out for over a week and while it has issues, I made a couple of interesting observations that are, I think, worth thinking about depending on what we are going to do with the CPP in the future since our balancing isn't "done" yet (and I'm somewhat suspicious of porting too much of CEP because, I think, it's very rooted in tackling Vanilla's problems which BNW "fixed", largely).

• Graduated Health/Happiness: Civ:BE's health system. While I think it's working a bit oddly in BE, I actually really like the graduated levels (-20, -10, 0, 10, 20) because it creates "buffer zones". I actually like this more than the scaling system CPP has at the moment because it means (unless I'm near a threshold), I don't sweat minor variations that much as I do now.
• Flatter Yields: While many Civ:BE wonders are super-disappointing, I actually like the move away from multiplier effects to "flat" effects. It means specialists and tile yields are more important - and I like that it keeps the gameplay "more on the map" so to speak. I think it's a decent design direction (and the large multiplier buildings were always "too good", like the observatory or university) we can keep in mind.
• Espionage: Civ:BE espionage is fun and faster. I think tech stealing at the moment is actually a bit slower than it should be and I really like that spies at the HQ give an indirect buff. Gazebo already included "random" spy actions, I think Civ:BE can give us a good pool for "random" spy events (and, apart from the highest level ones, they are pretty good at not being random screw-overs). There's definitely inspiration to be had.
• Favours: I'd love to lift a mechanic similar to favours - at least for CSD. Not 1:1 (as it has issues anyway), but it'd be nice to see something along these lines (though that also sounds hideously complex, only Civ4 Diplomacy features ever did something as complex).
• Trade Routes: Following Civ:BE's example, I think caravanseries should give you extra trade routes... just kidding. What I do think is interesting, though, is that internal trade route yields depend on the providing cities, it'd be an interesting way to encourage a small, tall empire, if the internal trade route yields were something like 5% of the origin city (that'd help a bit with the fact that wide empires profit more from internal trade routes, too).

Thoughts? These are really just starting points, of course, but who knows, might be an interesting discussion to have anyway. And I hope it revitalises the discussions here a bit!

Health: In CIV BE you will almost ALWAYS be in need of health, making all health buildings and decision a no brainer. If we make these treshholds too powerfull, all hapiness building and wonders will be King.

Flatter Yelds: Its nice really, prevents that snowballin you get easy on CIV 5, altough most wonders are terrible. Extra production towards wonders in the late game? WOW

Espionage: The concept is good but... meh. You need to wait AGES to get your intrigue built up unless you use the "Cheat" of constantly swapping out spies and extablishing networks.

Favours... In BE they are worthless, worth 50 gold, and the AI wont give you damn for them. As Adam Smith said: All your stuff for 3 favours is the lifeblood of nations.

Trade Routes: In BE they are OP as hell. You dont even need to bother capping them because of ridiculous yealds you get in a relativelly small empire, but I think its good that internal trade routes are actually worth something.


Overall I am disapointed with BE. A lot of things that should be better but some concepts would translate neatly into the CBP.

guto8797 said:

...If we make these treshholds too powerfull, all hapiness building and wonders will be King.

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That's more a matter with the lack of health in CivBE, we already have two hugely important happiness thresholds (0, -20). Plus, with the CPP happiness system, improving your cities is also a part of making them happy.

guto8797 said:

Espionage: The concept is good but... meh. You need to wait AGES to get your intrigue built up unless you use the "Cheat" of constantly swapping out spies and extablishing networks.

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I mostly thought of stealing the missions as effects for Gazebo's spy system additions, not porting it 1:1. I'll post in the appropriate thread in a bit.

guto8797 said:

Favours... In BE they are worthless, worth 50 gold, and the AI wont give you damn for them. As Adam Smith said: All your stuff for 3 favours is the lifeblood of nations.

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This is actually something where CivBE suffers from not having eras to scale the worth of it (or at least doesn't scale them fast enough), if the gold-equivalent worth of favours increases with eras and diplomacy modifiers add to favours (e.g. civs are friendlier to nations holding favours), there could be something quite neat - even if only to differentiate AIs asking or threatening you for stuff. At the moment they are so similar that it feels really odd. I think people overhyped it, though, an alternate currency is a neat system in itself.

My first thoughts from playing C:BE were "Man couldn't they just have added these things to civ5 instead?"

Most everything is better in C:BE, with some exceptions, mainly promotions, lack of leaders(I mean 8, really? come on) and leaders not being unique enough(Playing brasilia is like playing without any uniques at all). Their multiple choicethingie in the stertup didn't affect the game nearly enough making every game just feel the same really, also I'm not a huge fan of the terriancolors, it all just looks the same to me, and I think I don't like the spacesetting that well either.

However, what they did do good was the social policy system, the spysystem, the traderoute system (with some adjustment to the internal traderoutes because those are out of control), the tradesystem, the healthsystem, the tileimprovements, the randomevents, the quests, the combat system/units and the affinty system.

Some things I'm torn about is the energy system, it feels like it works better than the one in Civ5 for a while and then you end up with tons of it and nothing really to spend it on.
The wonders, some of them being borderline useless and some being damn close to overpowered.
The extremely passive AI, I mean I am a huge fan of peaceful play, but the AI in C:BE just wont try and stop me at all.
I like how you can expand pretty easy, and later settling can usually catch up with the earlier cites BUT it is just a tiny bit to easy to handle your expansions, sure you're gonna drop down to negative health but there are plenty of ways to handle that, and it is nowhere near as painful as negative health in C5.
Satelites, they are great but they feel way too cheap for what they do.
The Aliens, they are a huge step up from the barbarians of C5 but they are in the way everywhere and you kinda feel like you shouldn't kill them, but they just keep standing in the way. Also they are too damn weak.

Its not the gold valour, is that the AI doesnt give a damn about favours, if they hate you you cant trade them for ANYTHING. I dunno, I feel like deniying moderate favour request should be a AI penalty, as in if you refuse a moderate trade for a favour you owe they AI, all of them will trust you a little less

guto8797 said:

Its not the gold valour, is that the AI doesnt give a damn about favours, if they hate you you cant trade them for ANYTHING. I dunno, I feel like deniying moderate favour request should be a AI penalty, as in if you refuse a moderate trade for a favour you owe they AI, all of them will trust you a little less

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The AI have always had strange reasons to hate you.
You denouce someone you've made a declaration of friendship with: 'You denounced your friend, so we hate you!'
Someone you've made a declaration of friendship with denounces you: 'Your friends found reason to denounce you, so we hate you!'
And so on, I realize this wasn't what you were talking about, but my point is that for some reason firaxis feels the need to make everyone hate you.

And about the favor system, it was handled so badly that I just don't know what to say. The base idea was really solid, you collect favors over the entire game, your neighbors are heavily indebted to you and then you cash in by making an offer they can't refuse, like assisting you in a war, handing over a city or force them to peace out of a war.
Instead we end up with this weird IOU-system with favors being worth flat money and quickly losing their value over the game.

Funak said:

Instead we end up with this weird IOU-system with favors being worth flat money and quickly losing their value over the game.

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Well, in some way, everything must have a price!

But that's why I was also saying that holding favours should improve the AI's opinion of you - it would mean it would hate you... a bit less than usual. Together with some strong gold value scaling, a few favours could be worth a worthless city or enough to bribe the AI into war.

Parts of that could be done by making favours could "more" for certain trades and less for others (so it appears to be worth more than just the equivalent lump gold).

I think one of the biggest problems with the Civ5 diplomacy is that pretty much everything is tracked. What it really needs is some internal threshold system: if an AI has enough of a positive (or negative) history, it would ignore certain things like denunciations or expansion.

Well, removing a lot of the % scales from buildings (or at least toning them down) is very feasible, and would probably work to the benefit of simplifying tall v. wide development. In my opinion, a more powerful system (in terms of flexibility) would be to make all % yields a 'yield per x pop' model. This can be done with the current unified yields system, so it is not impossible. As far as the other ideas, they're possible, but would be easier to do if/when they give us the BE DLL.

G

Although Civ:BE Leaves a lot to be desired, I do really like these new changes:

1. Graduated Health and benefits for positive Health, as OP stated. This is pretty nice and gives more flow to the game.

2. Internal Trade Routes: They're a tad OP in BE, but I like how they give both food and production, and benefit both the source and destination city. Maybe have Civ5 Internal Trade Routes Give 8 Production 3-4 Food for Production Sea Routes, and 1/3 to 1/2 that for the source city as well? As it stands Internal Trade Routes rarely get used.

3. Espionage in Beyond Earth is just plain better, if a bit OP on some areas. I like the idea of having multiple options for using spies in an enemy city other than to steal tech.

4. Flatter Yields: These are nice for the early/mid game, but also lessen the usefulness of specialized cities.

5. Hover units. I know they probably don't belong in Civ5, but they're just loads of fun.

I also really like the depth of field effect in BE. I don't suppose there's some way to implement this in Civ5, the way Boris implemented ENB graphics mods for Skyrim and New Vegas (and a ton of other games)?

Gazebo: I do like the idea of turning some % yields into X per Y Pop yields plus a secondary flat benefit. It's the best of both worlds, rewarding both wide and tall playstyles in different ways.

Delekhan said:

Although Civ:BE Leaves a lot to be desired, I do really like these new changes:

1. Graduated Health and benefits for positive Health, as OP stated. This is pretty nice and gives more flow to the game.

2. Internal Trade Routes: They're a tad OP in BE, but I like how they give both food and production, and benefit both the source and destination city. Maybe have Civ5 Internal Trade Routes Give 8 Production 3-4 Food for Production Sea Routes, and 1/3 to 1/2 that for the source city as well? As it stands Internal Trade Routes rarely get used.

3. Espionage in Beyond Earth is just plain better, if a bit OP on some areas. I like the idea of having multiple options for using spies in an enemy city other than to steal tech.

4. Flatter Yields: These are nice for the early/mid game, but also lessen the usefulness of specialized cities.

5. Hover units. I know they probably don't belong in Civ5, but they're just loads of fun.

I also really like the depth of field effect in BE. I don't suppose there's some way to implement this in Civ5, the way Boris implemented ENB graphics mods for Skyrim and New Vegas (and a ton of other games)?

Gazebo: I do like the idea of turning some % yields into X per Y Pop yields plus a secondary flat benefit. It's the best of both worlds, rewarding both wide and tall playstyles in different ways.

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1.) The code for this already exists, but is disabled as there was a backlash against it (as it stacked with Golden Ages). I can bring it back, though, with a quick XML change.

2.) We can boost them a little, and I can add probably add functions that boost them (for example, the Forge could add to a city's internal production, etc.) if desired.

3.) The espionage system is functionally different from civ's, and would be a nightmare to try and copy. For now, we stick with what I've added.

4.) I think, if we do this, we shift yields to 'yields per pop.'

5.) Helicopters?

Gazebo said:

4.) I think, if we do this, we shift yields to 'yields per pop.'

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Yeah, it's a neat way to sort of keep the same yield range without allowing too much stacking. Seeing how total population already is a thing for national wonders, I'd really like to see something like that for social policies, too - granting bonuses dependent on your overall population.

I also quite like the "extra X while happy" mechanic, that'd go well with it as well.

EDIT: Finally, Biowell are tiles that provide health, I think we could steal this for the customs house: give it +1 happiness while worked (since the customs house is generally seen as a bit underwhelming) - fits thematically as well (think exotic imports making people happy, much like luxuries).

Lord Tirian said:

Yeah, it's a neat way to sort of keep the same yield range without allowing too much stacking. Seeing how total population already is a thing for national wonders, I'd really like to see something like that for social policies, too - granting bonuses dependent on your overall population.

I also quite like the "extra X while happy" mechanic, that'd go well with it as well.

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Most of the new policies are that way (at least the ones in Tradition). As we move through the branches, let's take out % boosts over 10% and/or bring them all down to that level. I think 10% is about the cap on a yield we should allow from a building/wonder/policy.

From what I can tell, these are the buildings that have % boosts:

- Floating Gardens
- Market
- University
- Wat
- Workshop
- Longhouse
- Bank
- Coffee House
- Hanse
- Observatory
- Satrap’s Court
- Factory
- Stock Exchange
- Research Lab
- Nuclear Plant
- Solar Plant
- Broadcast Tower

Wonders:
- Divine Court
- Holy Council
- IFC (CSD)
- National College
- PCS (CSD)
- Sacred Garden
- Hermitage

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Did I miss any? If not, I think we should change these to yield per pop and/or 10% yield boosts.

G

Very true regarding the redesigned social policies - just something to bear in mind once we tackle the rest!

Missing Bazaar and the Windmill, I think. The Sydney Opera House as well, but I don't know whether we should touch wonders - I think they have the "right" to stay special.

Lord Tirian said:

Very true regarding the redesigned social policies - just something to bear in mind once we tackle the rest!

Missing Bazaar and the Windmill, I think. The Sydney Opera House as well, but I don't know whether we should touch wonders - I think they have the "right" to stay special.

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I think we leave wonders as-is – buildings that can be built by all are the ones we should focus on. I'll work on this and see how the experiment goes.
G

Lord Tirian said:

Very true regarding the redesigned social policies - just something to bear in mind once we tackle the rest!

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Was thinking of redesigning tradition/liberty to be more like Prosperity/Industry, but I'm honestly not sure if it would be balanced in civ

Funak said:

Was thinking of redesigning tradition/liberty to be more like Prosperity/Industry, but I'm honestly not sure if it would be balanced in civ

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I think we need to forge ahead and actually have a look at the other policies first before we go back. I'll have to delve into Civ5's XML more, though, so we're not as dependent on Gazebo implementing things.

I agree that that would be an interesting direction, though, as really not a fan of our current Tradition (as I said in the thread). I do love the current Honour tree, though.

Lord Tirian said:

I think we need to forge ahead and actually have a look at the other policies first before we go back. I'll have to delve into Civ5's XML more, though, so we're not as dependent on Gazebo implementing things.

I agree that that would be an interesting direction, though, as really not a fan of our current Tradition (as I said in the thread). I do love the current Honour tree, though.

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I'm working on a few tweaks to the Tradition tree that should make it a bit more 'fair.' I'm also going through and reducing yields from all of the early policies just a little, so as to slow down acquisition of gold and science early. We'll see. The changes to the buildings (removing % yields, adding yields per pop) seems to be a positive change to the pacing of the game, based on the few AI runs I've dissected.

G

Here's my current working version of Tradition:

Tradition;
Opener: +2 Culture in Capital, +1 Food in Capital for every unlocked Tradition policy. Unlocks Hanging Gardens.

Aristocracy: +15% Production for World Wonders, +1 Culture from World Wonders.

Legalism: Capital growth increased by 25%, Golden Ages 25% longer.

Monarchy: Great Engineers/Merchants/Scientists earned 25% more quickly during Golden Ages.

Oligarchy: Capital gains +1 Production for every 5 citizens, and a free Engineer specialist slot.

Finisher: +25% GP rate, allowed for Great Engineer purchase with Faith in Industrial Era.

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Gazebo said:

Aristocracy: +15% Production for World Wonders, +1 Culture from World Wonders.

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I once again would like to point out that a policy that's completely dead on deity difficulty just isn't a good idea.

Funak said:

I once again would like to point out that a policy that's completely dead on deity difficulty just isn't a good idea.

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It is tradition (ha), though, to have a Wonder bonus in Tradition. I'd be sad to see it go, though I'm always open to new ideas (usually).

G

If I may add my humble opinion, I think that the flat buildings yield in BE is a terrible idea that I much dislike, especially when it is given by quests.

Such system make constructing building pretty boring, take for example 'Autoplant'. Gives +2 P, costs 220 P, it takes 110 turns to only pay for itself, and it gives you 2 pretty bad specialists and minor TR(Trade Route) bonus that is going to be nerfed any time soon anyways. You build it because the tech that give it to you is in the path to something other, and you are out of building to construct. Building Autoplants in cities other then your first three is a waste of P or Energy(Gold), even on Epic speed, from my own experience.
And there is a lot more examples from the same place, buildings and wonders.

Personally I think % bonus yield from buildings is very interesting mechanic because it makes you think not only in the short term but in the long as well.