Academies or Biowells ?

[NyQuil]

I tend to spam biowells too instead of farms.

It's tight on the budget, but the hit on health can be difficult when you're trying to have more colonies than your competition.

 

[ahawk]

If I go Knowledge, Academies are great.

I only build Biowells as a last resort; I prefer to use buildings and social policies to get health rather than something that takes forever to build enough of and drains my economy once I finally do get enough built.

All that said, if I don't go Knowledge, I try to build neither of these improvements, as there's probably then something more useful and/or cheaper and quicker to build.

 

[GenEngineer1]

If you can get the Extogenesis pod, just farm spam. Research techs that boost them. Watch as desert tiles suddenly yield 4 Food, 1 Production 2 Energy, and 1 Science for no maintenance. Use to fuel massive Purity Cities. Laugh like a lunatic.

 

[sherbz]

Biowells are useful if you are going very wide or war mongering. In my current game i got DOWd by 2 AI, took over all their cities and still had a massive continent to grow into. The health would have killed me. But the Biowells really came through for me. Certainly to be used until you get back into positive, then you can switch to academies.

 

[ahawk]

I just was on another thread about ICS and realized:

Biowells could let you ICS to a ridiculous extent. So, if you want to ICS, biowells would actually allow you to do this quite effectively.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I just was on another thread about ICS and realized:

Biowells could let you ICS to a ridiculous extent. So, if you want to ICS, biowells would actually allow you to do this quite effectively.

Why not ICS with academies?

 

[ahawk]

ICS with academies would start to be counter-productive unless you kept health up because you start to take %-based penalties to both culture and science as health drops into negative on top off the per-city penalties that ICS inherently incurs. So, it'd probably be best to spam biowells if you are going for a true and absolute ICS strategy.

On the other hand, once you have plenty of health and/or can no longer expand, I could see starting to put down academies at that point, at least.

 

[Ryika]

You can Rex and not care about Health at all, don't really see why you'd need to biowell everything up. ^^ I think it's even counter-productive, Rexxing at this times already gives you everything you need, thanks to trade routes, without having to spend any time growing your empire. Rexxing like crazy AND growing the empire seems to be way way too slow, compared with the victory times that pure expansion spam + Acadamies/Generators give you, at least that's the conclusion I got from my limited playtesting.

 

[ahawk]

You can Rex and not care about Health at all, don't really see why you'd need to biowell everything up. ^^ I think it's even counter-productive, Rexxing at this times already gives you everything you need, thanks to trade routes, without having to spend any time growing your empire. Rexxing like crazy AND growing the empire seems to be way way too slow, compared with the victory times that pure expansion spam + Acadamies/Generators give you, at least that's the conclusion I got from my limited playtesting.

Again, it depends on how low the health actually goes.

Even in what I said above, I sort of implied that the health system is way less punishing than Civ V happiness was, so I don't entirely disagree with you. However, if you get to -20 or lower, it really does become a problem because, IIRC, at -20 and lower you get not only the -20 penalty but also the penalty from -19 to -10.

In other words, the penalties to culture and science are cumulative rather than one replacing the other as you cross thresholds.

Further, because you get a good boost by being +20 or higher, it would make sense to try and maximize health simply to get the % modifiers that boost science and culture and whatever else.

So, while it may not mean having to truly spam bio-wells, there's definitely incentive to build enough to be +20 in health or higher for as long as you can while expanding, if for no other reason than to speed up science significantly and win quicker.

 

[Dellan]

I usually replace all of my farms with biowells as soon as I unlock them.

I rarely build Academies. Mainly around cities which I want to convert to research centers.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

this is not correct.
Tile MUST be worked in order to provide bonus health. 100% checked.

I play Biowell spam on Apollo as Brasillia Harmony now, combined with SC spam early in the game those things deliver.
I going mainly for never ending rex and conquest, so health is the issue.
In long term, you can benefit from BW more, because you can city spam/conquer and there will be no cap for your growth and TR spam. More cities = more buildings and TR

Are you sure its not just biowells->local health (which is limited by pop)?

 

[Autoclave]

Biowells don't remove forests, so you might take advantage of that.

 

[Ryika]

Again, it depends on how low the health actually goes.

Even in what I said above, I sort of implied that the health system is way less punishing than Civ V happiness was, so I don't entirely disagree with you. However, if you get to -20 or lower, it really does become a problem because, IIRC, at -20 and lower you get not only the -20 penalty but also the penalty from -19 to -10.

In other words, the penalties to culture and science are cumulative rather than one replacing the other as you cross thresholds.

Further, because you get a good boost by being +20 or higher, it would make sense to try and maximize health simply to get the % modifiers that boost science and culture and whatever else.

So, while it may not mean having to truly spam bio-wells, there's definitely incentive to build enough to be +20 in health or higher for as long as you can while expanding, if for no other reason than to speed up science significantly and win quicker.

I think you didn't understand me. What I'm saying is that, even with all the negative modifiers, rexxing and ignoring the whole health-nonsense is still the more effective way to play right now. You just don't need big cities, because you get production from trade routes, gold and science from trade routes, improvements and spies. If you seriously rexx like there's no tomorrow, then there's just no way to stay at +20 or more, unless you go for full prosperity in which case you'll still have a period of time where you'll be at negative health until the -25% kick in - and at that point you don't need to spam biowells, the bonus + health-buildings will get you back to positive if you really want to... but again... that's, in general, a waste of time, because at that point the game should already be entering the final phase and %-bonuses you get aren't really going to accumulate anymore. Pure, direct science from Academies will just steamroll you to your victory.

If you want to stay smaller, sure, then staying healthy might actually become a viable option... but such a playstyle just isn't as effective in general.

 

[Fabio1701]

perhaps I am doind something wrong here, but my health goes so freaking red that in almost every game I play I am forced to spam biowells and take one path in the tech tree (usually upper right) to ge as many health buildings as possible. Perhaps I expand too much? I can't help filling up all that valuable land!

I'm thinking it is very hard not to go in that direction in the tech web because my health is so impacted.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

The trick is Prosperity. It gives you lots of base health and reduces the health cost of cities (and pop), so you can effectively support a lot of cities with it. Since we don't have luxuries anymore that is the only way to get to positive happiness with many cities.

Health buildings can only give you back unhealthyness from population, not from cities. So that -4 health per city will always be there, dropping you below 0 during the early game.

 

[Gort]

I think the game is relatively well balanced and that is one of its strong points and that many of these things are not massively overpowered compared to others.

Relative to what, exactly?

 

[Aeson]

Biowells are positioned much better than Academies or Farm Boosts. It's on a better than free Tech (since it's with Institute which gives you a free Tech that will cost more than Bionics) right off of Robotics (Autoplant) ... and this path also opens up the techs for Battlesuits and CNDRs. It also opens up Harmony points which means even Xenoswarm rushes benefit strongly from this route. (Autoplants + cheapest 25 Harmony tech + 10 Healing)

Cognition on the other hand is out of the way for all victory conditions and doesn't lead to any units. Even Supremacy should go Robotics/Bionics first.

 

[ahawk]

I think you didn't understand me. What I'm saying is that, even with all the negative modifiers, rexxing and ignoring the whole health-nonsense is still the more effective way to play right now. You just don't need big cities, because you get production from trade routes, gold and science from trade routes, improvements and spies. If you seriously rexx like there's no tomorrow, then there's just no way to stay at +20 or more, unless you go for full prosperity in which case you'll still have a period of time where you'll be at negative health until the -25% kick in - and at that point you don't need to spam biowells, the bonus + health-buildings will get you back to positive if you really want to... but again... that's, in general, a waste of time, because at that point the game should already be entering the final phase and %-bonuses you get aren't really going to accumulate anymore. Pure, direct science from Academies will just steamroll you to your victory.

If you want to stay smaller, sure, then staying healthy might actually become a viable option... but such a playstyle just isn't as effective in general.

Yeah, that is true, admittedly: right now you can full-out rex and still beat-out playing small, even factoring in the health penalties. I've found that with the Prosperity policy for -25% unhealthiness, though, that it isn't as hard as you might think to stay above +20 health for a rather long stretch of the mid-game as you rex.

But yea, rex is back in full-force. I sort of feel like they wanted to get away from Civ V where the whole idea was to get 4 cities and go tall almost every time. They even nerfed Tradition in Civ V not more than a couple days after Civ:BE came out. So, they might have gone a little overboard with making wide strategies do-able in Civ:BE, because right now rex is insane given the trade-route situation and the weaker penalties when you have negative health.

 

[Aeson]

Biowells allow you to all out REX/conquer and remain Utopian. Getting bonuses is better than taking the penalties. There arent really any tradeoffs because of where Biowells are positioned and +2 Food is nice on it's own.

 

[Soffacet]

Once you unlock enough buildings and policies, it is easy to maintain Utopian state even with ~infinite cities and zero biowells. ITRs allow each new city to erect it's own set of health buildings in a trivial number of turns.