Hybrid Affinity Synergies

Playing civ:BE I started to realize that supremacy gains a huge advantage in terms of extra energy when they hit the 3rd affinity level. Then I remember seeing a video that showed some changes to affinities so I looked it up. Still the lvl 5 Hybrid affinity bonus reduces my concerns with the health gains from virtues. You are getting the lvl 10 affinity build quest from the low hybrid affinities.

Here is the complete list:

Harmony
2: Trade Routes can be made through miasma.
5: Each improved Xenomass provides two more resources than normal.
8: Units take no damage from Miasma
12: +1 science from Biowell improvements

Harmony/Purity
2: +1 Culture per level of Harmony or Purity
5: Unhealth from number of cities reduced by 25%
8: damaged units heal at least 3 HP per turn
10: +25% Production towards Military Units

Purity
2: +20% Strength and Ranged Strength when attacking or defending against Aliens.
5: +1 energy and +1 culture from floatstone
8: +2 energy and +1 health from terrascapes
12: +1 Food from Dome Improvements

Purity/Supremacy
2: +2 Energy per level of Purity or Supremacy
5: Unhealth from global size of Population reduced by 25%
8: +10% energy for cities with a defending military unit on its tile
10: +10% production and +10% culture for cities in range of a friendly orbital unit

Supremacy
2: Explorer Units can build an additional Expedition
5: Orbital Coverage on and next to any tile with Firaxite
8: -25% maintenance to units
12: +1 production to nodes

Supremacy/Harmony
2: +1 Science per level of Supremacy or Harmony
5: + 5 Health
8: +10% Growth in all Cities
10: +0.4 Health for every Military Unit under your command

Here are my notes on the Rising Tide Affinity bonuses:

Harmony

• 2: Trade Routes can be made through miasma.
• 5: Each improved Xenomass provides two more resources than normal.
• 8: Units take no damage from Miasma
• 12: +1 science from Biowell improvements

Harmony/Purity

• 2: +1 Culture per level of Harmony or Purity
• 5: Unhealth from number of cities reduced by 25%
• 8: ?
• 10: +25% Production towards Military Units

Purity

• 2: +20% Strength and Ranged Strength when attacking or defending against Aliens.
• 5: ?
• 8: ?
• 12: +1 Food from Dome Improvements

Purity/Supremacy

• 2: +2 Energy per level of Purity or Supremacy
• 5: Unhealth from global size of Population reduced by 25%
• 8: ?
• 10: ?

Supremacy

• 2: Explorer Units can build an additional Expedition
• 5: Orbital Coverage on and next to any tile with Firaxite
• 8: ?
• 12: ?

Supremacy/Harmony

• 2: +1 Science per level of Supremacy or Harmony
• 5: + 5 Health
• 8: +10% Growth in all Cities
• 10: +0.4 Health for every Military Unit under your command

Well I can only assume that the supremacy 12 lvl will be something related to a tile improvement. Science from biowell will help a lot at end game. The food from domes is questionable since domes are bad. Unless they have improved the base stats of domes(either 1 production or food). I do not see anyone using domes over anything else.

So the free road maintenance disappeared ?

Shame if they removed it for Supremacy, if they didn't just raise it to a higher Supremacy level. It looks like pure Harmony gets some very useful bonuses, so I hope the other pure Purity and Supremacy ones measure up, since that dome one doesn't sound too great, and the hybrid Supremacy ones are quite nice.

I hope they don't make pure affinity seem like a lackluster choice to encourage going the new hybrid routes, since those hybrid bonuses seem very helpful all around.

aguliondew said:

Well I can only assume that the supremacy 12 lvl will be something related to a tile improvement.

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I think it will be +1 energy to nodes, since nodes seem to be the supremacy tile improvement. Science from biowell will help a lot at end game.

The food from domes is questionable since domes are bad. Unless they have improved the base stats of domes(either 1 production or food). I do not see anyone using domes over anything else.

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I don't know about that. Domes also give your city extra strength so an additional +1 food, makes them an interesting tile improvement. A Purity player can go tall and get some tough, high pop cities if they spam domes.

SupremacyKing2 said:

I don't know about that. Domes also give your city extra strength so an additional +1 food, makes them an interesting tile improvement. A Purity player can go tall and get some tough, high pop cities if they spam domes.

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By the time you get 12 affinity most of your improvements are set, so that extra food will not help alot at the end. The buffs to dome enhances that improvement more but if you have none down the it does nothing. Yea you can since your worker army to improve a city with at the end but the effect is minor by that time. Well just repeated myself in three different ways .

aguliondew said:

By the time you get 12 affinity most of your improvements are set, so that extra food will not help alot at the end. The buffs to dome enhances that improvement more but if you have none down the it does nothing. Yea you can since your worker army to improve a city with at the end but the effect is minor by that time. Well just repeated myself in three different ways .

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Waiting until you reach level 12 to start building domes might not make sense. But, I think this creates an incentive to build domes sooner. Domes gives +10 HP and +2 culture. If you build them early, you can buff your city's strength and get extra culture. And then when you do reach level 12, you get a windfall of extra food.

SupremacyKing2 said:

Waiting until you reach level 12 to start building domes might not make sense. But, I think this creates an incentive to build domes sooner. Domes gives +10 HP and +2 culture. If you build them early, you can buff your city's strength and get extra culture. And then when you do reach level 12, you get a windfall of extra food.

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Other improvements take priority over domes. I will have maybe 5 or so unimproved areas in most cities. I start replacing farms/generators with biowells/academies before I consider anything else. The +10 city hp helps on your border cities but having a army their is better.

I Just value culture as much as energy so I am not gaining much from a dome. That is why I hope they improve domes to make them more useful earlier. Instead have having to get other techs to make it useful (+1 Energy from a 2 ring purity tech).

The only possible use I can think of for Domes with +1 food/+2 culture is a late game expansion phase. The culture helps you expand borders quickly, the city hp extends the lifespan of the new city if the AI takes umbrage at your territorial acquisitions, and the food helps grow the population a little bit in the mean time.

The problem is, there's little point in settling new cities in the late game as it currently stands, particularly for a Purity player who's going to need space for Earthling Settlements as soon as the Exodus Gate comes online. I suppose if they were to tweak the AI to respond more aggressively to your impending victory then there might be a point in cordoning off a stretch of land behind fortress cities.

The problem with Domes as a mid-game improvement is that by the time you get them, you likely have your critical virtues already in play, greatly decreasing the value of racking up more by pumping up culture yield. Much more important is pumping up your science yield, which either involves spamming academies for direct beakers, or spamming Biowells for food and health for more population for indirect beakers. Now, if the game lengthens to the point where developing an additional virtue tree (namely, Knowledge) becomes a viable alternative to zerg-rushing your victory techs, and they take away Biowell's bonus culture from Alien Genetics, I could see Domes becoming a useful improvement.

Maybe Domes will figure more prominently into a revised Purity victory.

Well from the look of the BERT affinity bonuses it seems that way. Now each affinity will have a common tile improve theme instead of farm/academy everywhere.

aguliondew said:

Well from the look of the BERT affinity bonuses it seems that way. Now each affinity will have a common tile improve theme instead of farm/academy everywhere.

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This is a good thing. It will help differentiate each affinity's gameplay strategies. It will also give each affinity a more distinct look too. Purity territories will have lots of domes, battlesuits and LEV tanks, Supremacy will have lots of nodes and robotic units, Harmony will have lots of biowells and alien units. Cool!

Would be good if late purity got a big bonus to terrascapes,-33% build time and maintainance .

A cool Victory condition would be a certain global earth like number where miasma tiles and nests affects negatively and and domes and terrascapes positively.

Purity would need the number to be above a Certain number to be able to seattle the immigrants and harmony would need a negative number to trigger transcends.

Supremacy would make have to build a Nettwork of nodes and satellites to use their warpath or someting.

aguliondew said:

Well from the look of the BERT affinity bonuses it seems that way. Now each affinity will have a common tile improve theme instead of farm/academy everywhere.

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That's true only if they've nerfed academies or really steered people toward some other improvements. With the info we have so far, the changes do make some of the other improvements a bit better but still don't seem like they'll rival carpeting most cities with academies.

I do hope that doesn't turn out to be case though, since I sure am tired of academy spam and really want a good incentive not to do so.

One thing I'm having a lot of difficulty with is conceptualizing these hybrid ideologies in terms of lore, or game immersion. They did a good job in solidifying what it's like to have a society devoted to one of the three affinities, but my brain has a hard time understanding what a hybrid society looks like and why such a hybrid society would get the bonuses that they get. I think someone somewhere mentioned that in each hybrid, one of the affinities should still be thought of as the "dominant" one, which did help me a little.

I mean, all of us can creatively think of ways why each hybrid bonus is the way that it is, but the concept should be relatively easy to grasp.

BarshyJ said:

One thing I'm having a lot of difficulty with is conceptualizing these hybrid ideologies in terms of lore, or game immersion.

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Hopefully, when Firaxis releases more info on the hybrid affinities, it will help us understand them better. The devs did describe purity-supremacy as a society where humans are the upper social class and AI and robots are subservient. So, purity is dominant. Essentially, it is a Purity based society that adopts the best of Supremacy to serve their needs. We can speculate about the other hybrid affinities. I see purity-harmony as a purity based society that uses the best of harmony to serve its needs by using alien animals as slave labor or use some genetic engineering to help them adapt to the alien planet. Essentially, it is a Purity society that says "hey, just because we believe in staying human, does not mean that we can't try to make this planet work for us". I see harmony-supremacy as being a harmony dominant society that uses technology to serve their needs. In other words, the society very much tries to adapt to the alien world but uses AI and robot to help them do that.

The affinity 2 hybrid bonuses seem pretty significant to me. They say "or" which I suspect means you use the higher of the two. This makes them a good incentive to go pure. If you are Supremacy 10 and pick up Harmony 2 you are now getting an extra 10 science per turn. That is no small thing.

SupremacyKing2 said:

Hopefully, when Firaxis releases more info on the hybrid affinities, it will help us understand them better. The devs did describe purity-supremacy as a society where humans are the upper social class and AI and robots are subservient. So, purity is dominant. Essentially, it is a Purity based society that adopts the best of Supremacy to serve their needs.

We can speculate about the other hybrid affinities. I see purity-harmony as a purity based society that uses the best of harmony to serve its needs by using alien animals as slave labor or use some genetic engineering to help them adapt to the alien planet. Essentially, it is a Purity society that says "hey, just because we believe in staying human, does not mean that we can't try to make this planet work for us".

I see harmony-supremacy as being a harmony dominant society that uses technology to serve their needs. In other words, the society very much tries to adapt to the alien world but uses AI and robot to help them do that.

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I disagree with using the term "dominant affinity" when dealing with a hybrid. Based on what we've been told about Purity/Supremacy; I see aspects present and absent from both affinities. If Hybrids are to truly be New solutions, one cannot be dominating the other.

I don't see it as Purity dominating Supremacy. I see it as man dominating machine.
There is a nuanced distinction between the two.

Purity...

• Wishes to preserve human form which they see as ideal.
• Desires to transform new Earth into a form more compatible with Humanity.

Supremacy...

• Fully embraces robots and drones, artificial intelligence (with bonus autonomy) and neural uploading.
• Desires to transform humanity into a state that is independent of the planet.

Purity/Supremacy...

Seems to have no qualms with using AI and robotics to the extent where I'm sure they'd come into conflict with straight Purity. "You pride yourself on your alleged command over machines, when really you've enslaved your yourselves with bonds of dependence". You know, something Purist and overdramatic.

Meanwhile Supremacy would also hold enmity towards them due the their "narrow minded" adherence to human form and look down on them for the same "enslaving" of AI and machines.

So to reiterate, if Hybrids are to truly have their own identity, they need to be a synthesis. So I think thinking of it as one over the other is flawed.

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On the matter of the actual bonuses, I'm a fan of the Harmony 2 effect. The early ability to make trade routes immune to miasma grants a more flexibility in trade than Purity and Supremacy.

I also like that there are health bonuses for each of the affinities in some way. Some are stronger than others, but at least there is more potential health seemingly available.

Based on Harmony 5 and Supremacy 5, I think Purity 5 might have something to do with Floatstone to go with the others dealing with Xenomass and Firxite.

I agree that Supremacy 12 will probably be a yield bump to the Node improvement. I'm going to guess Energy? If so, I hope its more than +1. Like +2 or something.

I agree, the hybrid affinities do not have a dominant affinity.

Hybrids need agreements and disagreements with both of their parent affinities, and from what we know of Purity / Supremacy it fits that bill nicely.