About beelining...

[Makenshi]

In previous Civ games [I to IV], was it possible to beeline techs, like Civ5, or was it necessary to close an era before entering another? I for one hate beelining, and thank God there is a mod for Civ5 that eliminates that.

Also, with a new civics tree, will the 'beelining possibility', if present, apply to either, both or none? I hope there is no beelining; discovering engineering and physics without ever knowing how to write is silly. Not to mention producing battleships without sailing, optics, astromy AND navigation...

What are your thoughts on this subject?

 

[Red Pearl]

I hope the tech are more balanced so that it is not good to beeline for the same tech every game. @Makenshi Why do you hate beelining?

 

[stealth_nsk]

In Civ3 you had to close the era, although there were a couple of optional techs in each. It didn't work well as it limited strategic choices a lot.

I'd say the main limit to beelining in Civ6 will be eurekas, so if you target some late techs earlir, not only they are expensive, but you'll also need to pay full science price for them and their prerequisites as you most likely will not have time to fulfill the necessary eurekas. That's the wild guess, of course.

 

[Makenshi]

@Makenshi Why do you hate beelining?

Because Washington always ignore everything and go straight to Gunpowder, to get his precious Minuteman. Dude once started coastal and never cared for Sailing!

Also, it is too unrealistic for my tastes. Aaaand I like to enjoy all units of a given era, even if just via barb-hunting [when there is no war going on]; when the AI beeling the military techs, I'm forced to do so in order to survive, and the fun of using all units is lost.

Funny enough, I didn't have a problem with it in CivBE and its tech web. Maybe because the outer techs costed an arm and a leg if researched before too many of the inner ones.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Beelining itself isn't bad, if it's only one of viable options. The problem in Civ games is what often there's a tech, beelining to which is always good thing. This situation reduces strategic choices.

 

[Martin Alvito]

You could beeline in CIV pretty reliably through Emperor, and up through Immortal with some success for certain civs. On Deity the AI just teched too fast to make beelines viable until the mid game.

I actually liked some of the idiot military beelines that were possible in the early versions of vanilla CiV. They at least gave you something to do other than bull rush Universities to pump out as many Great Scientists as possible. Riflemen in the late 70s on the turn counter was hilarious.

What I'd like to see (and what the Eureka system hopefully delivers) is a bunch of early game beelines with roughly equal power. That way, you're forced to react meaningfully to the terrain rather than simply having the terrain determine how fast you can pull off one of a very few viable options.

I think that focused midgame and late game beelines are totally fine as long as they don't pop a win condition; there should be specific techs that warmongers, science civs and economic civs want to focus their efforts on. This adds flavor and differentiates games.

 

[ftl]

The best is probably when there's a mix. It's a little boring if you always have to fill out all the techs in an era to move on, but it's also a little silly if you can, like you said, build battleships without knowing sailing, the compass, or navigation. The techs just need to have enough interconnections that you can't get TOO far ahead in one area without needing to fill out a different one.

 

[Verrucosus]

Since the sense of (alternative) history is the game's main attraction to me, I find it also helpful when its concepts reflect a minimum of historical plausibility. The usual step-by-step character of scientific progress (admittedly an important feature of history) seems well enough represented in the rule that most advances have prerequisites. In my experience, the possibility and occasional practice of beelining does not really prevent me from immersing myself in the alternative science history of my civilisation. It helps that there are historical examples of unusual technology "profiles"; the Incas had no written language, yet they were pretty good at engineering.

Surprisingly, my sense of history is not bothered either by the rule that a civilisation can direct its research right from the start although it does not really fits with my ideas of how science worked at least until the pre-industrial period. For some reason, directed research does not feel implausible in the world of Civilisation. Oddly enough, I prefer the "blind research" rule in the near-future scenario of Alpha Centauri where directed research appear more plausible than in the bronze age. ("Blind research" means that you can only pick a broad focus like military, research or infrastructure or a mix of those, but have no direct choice of the specific technology that gets researched.) I would not mind to see a "blind research" feature in Civilization, either as an optional rule or as a limitation during the early game that gets lifted once a certain advance is discovered. It might lead a less optimized early game which could be a nice change of pace, given how a "perfect" early game sometimes takes away the excitement from the rest of history.

 

[qadams]

My biggest problem with beelining is that it is clearly not realistic and not historical.

In real life, a civilization cannot possibly look ahead a hundred years or a thousand years and then decide in advance which techs to research in order to arrive at a certain endpoint. Every discovery or accomplishment may reveal unexpected advantages (or disadvantages) and often can lead in directions unseen beforehand. Thus it seems to me that Civs in our game should not be able to know for certain where their extended path of research could be taking them.

My dream idea:

Instead of players being allowed to see the entire tech tree right from the start of the game, everything further than perhaps one or two stages beyond the tech currently being researched is hidden. In addition, the tech tree should have some randomized variability from game to game, so that players can't simply memorize the tree or consult a reference to know what's coming.

I know almost nothing about programming, but would this be terribly difficult to implement?

 

[stealth_nsk]

My biggest problem with beelining is that it is clearly not realistic and not historical.

1. These are not arguments for a computer game. You could always found historical evidence for one thing or another, but you can't do nothing with gameplay sacrificed for "realism".

2. Speaking about historical reality of beelining. China had machines so complex, Europe had nothing like that till XVIII century, but it lacked a lot of other things known in Europe much earlier. This could be clearly considered "beelining" for them (or beelining for military techs if we look at Europe).

 

[Felis Renidens]

I hope the eureka system will solve it. I don't think I ever beelined more than 1 or 2 techs in advance, and even that is rare (except, maybe on Civ3, go figure). But then, I play on easy difficulties that allow me to be less efficient and have fun exploring the tree and still be an era and a half before my opponents.

 

[Verrucosus]

I have no idea about whether qadam's proposal would be a programming challenge, but a randomised tech tree would certainly be almost impossible to balance and (if randomised too heavily) be the source of far more serious lack of realism.

I'm afraid that this is a point where players who really want to play without hindsight just have to get into character and imagine what kind of considerations would have made Alexander the Great take a pick between Engineering and Literacy (not a very realistic scenario to begin with).

 

[qadams]

I have no idea about whether qadam's proposal would be a programming challenge, but a randomised tech tree would certainly be almost impossible to balance and (if randomised too heavily) be the source of far more serious lack of realism.

I don't mean, of course, that tech order should be entirely random each time. That would be ridiculous. But if there were, say, half a dozen different overall trees with small but significant variations, and if you didn't know which tree you were playing within any given game, that might be pretty cool.

 

[kaspergm]

I actually think Civ5 came pretty close to a good middle-ground between no beelining and extreme beelining. Sure, there were a couple of cases that didn't make much sense logically (like being able to reach Ironclads without researching Sailing), but very few of those actually had serious impact on gameplay. Worse were the balance issues that meant that beelining Education was pretty much default strategy in non-modded games, which obviously was very bad for gameplay.

What I liked about Civ5 was the it used the concept of partially disconnected branches. There was clearly a science/culture branch (upper half) and a production/military branch (lower half), and you could proceed a couple of eras down either without going too deeply into the other. This gave a distinct feeling of having the choice between different styles of play (even if poor balance heavily favored one over the other). Naval branch was almost completely decoupled from the others, which made sense for balance, because you could have games where you didn't need naval techs at all.

The good thing about Civ5 was that once you hit medieval era, the two branches started to interlock, which meant you couldn't go through entire game in just one branch. A tech like Civil Service is a prime example of how the science/culture and production/military branches cross and then spread out again, so that you can't really go into renaissance era without having a solid basis in all areas, which makes sense both logically and is good for balance (actually you could beeline all the way to Industrial through Fertilizer and only research lower half of the techtree, but chances are you would not survive that long).

So I think Civ5 tech tree worked well but the game suffered from poor balancing. It might not have been perfect in all ways - and personally, I really missed a cylindrical joining so that the bottom and top techs could have dependencies "around" the tech-tree, so to speak - but I personally like it better than an era-complete tech tree where no beelining at all is possible.

 

[JtW]

I don't mean, of course, that tech order should be entirely random each time. That would be ridiculous. But if there were, say, half a dozen different overall trees with small but significant variations, and if you didn't know which tree you were playing within any given game, that might be pretty cool.

It would make things extremely hard to balance. Example: if you had consistent "sub-trees" but the prerequisite for each would be changing, and one civ gets access to a military tree before everybody else - how do you make sure that they can't simply beeline that subtree and steamroll everyone? Also: this is the kind of thing that the AI wouldn't understand at all, and would result in a strong advantage to the human player.

 

[Valmighty]

With only limited technology in Civ (especially V), beelining feels unrealistic because you can get an advanced tech but never knew a simpler tech. Which in real life is 100-200 years apart.

Civ IV is a little more realistic, because even if you beeline to certain path, you are required to have certain tech on the other path like writing. Writing (and some other tech) is a very important. For instance, to get Feudalism or Code of Law, even it's on the other side of the tech tree, both need Writing.

I, personally, prefer this kind of tech tree to Civ V. But i think and do hope Civ 6 will have better mechanics instead of going back to Civ IV tech mechanics. Separating the science tech and social/culture tech is already a good start.

 

[Felis Renidens]

One of the things I really liked in Civ2 was to see how far I can get without a basic technology like horseback riding or alphabet or something. In CiV you can do without sailing at least to the renaissance. And who said technology had to progress the way it did?

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Civ IV is a little more realistic, because even if you beeline to certain path, you are required to have certain tech on the other path like writing. Writing (and some other tech) is a very important. For instance, to get Feudalism or Code of Law, even it's on the other side of the tech tree, both need Writing.

Not really, it was just visualized differently. In CivIV you could build caravels that have cannons on them, but not have the tech for land-based cannons themselves.

 

[Bandobras Took]

You could beeline in CIV pretty reliably through Emperor, and up through Immortal with some success for certain civs. On Deity the AI just teched too fast to make beelines viable until the mid game.

I actually liked some of the idiot military beelines that were possible in the early versions of vanilla CiV. They at least gave you something to do other than bull rush Universities to pump out as many Great Scientists as possible. Riflemen in the late 70s on the turn counter was hilarious.

What I'd like to see (and what the Eureka system hopefully delivers) is a bunch of early game beelines with roughly equal power. That way, you're forced to react meaningfully to the terrain rather than simply having the terrain determine how fast you can pull off one of a very few viable options.

I think that focused midgame and late game beelines are totally fine as long as they don't pop a win condition; there should be specific techs that warmongers, science civs and economic civs want to focus their efforts on. This adds flavor and differentiates games.

This cannot be said enough. Though I would add that they also need to take a long look at how the human player has been able to piggyback on the AI advantages of harder difficulties in most versions of Civ.

 

[chaosprophet]

With only limited technology in Civ (especially V), beelining feels unrealistic because you can get an advanced tech but never knew a simpler tech. Which in real life is 100-200 years apart.

Civ IV is a little more realistic, because even if you beeline to certain path, you are required to have certain tech on the other path like writing. Writing (and some other tech) is a very important. For instance, to get Feudalism or Code of Law, even it's on the other side of the tech tree, both need Writing.

I, personally, prefer this kind of tech tree to Civ V. But i think and do hope Civ 6 will have better mechanics instead of going back to Civ IV tech mechanics. Separating the science tech and social/culture tech is already a good start.

It don't particularly bother me, but I wouldn't mind if they at least make it so you can't get a later naval tech without an earlier one, for example.

I do think Civ6 will make things go even stranger though, with the separation of civics and tech trees. If the Civics trees were only governments and polices, that would be one thing. But as we know it has things like districts, buildings and wonders, which can easily let you do weird things like getting a building/wonder on the civics tree that needs metal without iron working or advanced engineering. Although those may likely be more rare cases when someone actually makes an effort for it to happen.