Affinities are (still) a nonsensical wash.

[Westwall]

I agree with OP. Perhaps each personality trait should have a fourth upgrade that is unique and dependent upon the affinity. But generally I agree that I never "feel" like I'm adopting the ideology that I do (esp since it's so easy to be hybrid) The affinities should almost feel like terran-protoss-zerg.

And of course the devs say not to think of it like that.

Every time they tell us not to think of certain things like certain other things, I'm starting to realize it's not because they want them to stand out as their own thing, but because they don't want to be compared to something they obviously fell short of achieving.

 

[MrFrodo]

I would agree with the lack of personality in Affinities. I usually played Harmony, and tried to stay off the Aliens the majority of the time, but I never got any tingly role-playing feeling where I felt like I was one with the Harmony philosophy and its champion in the new world. I often got that feeling in Civ games.

 

[nimling]

There are far bigger things to point at with BE doing things wrong. The devs are right in this case - Affinities are not intended to bludgeon the player into a specific strategy, but have an indirect effect on tech path and a direct effect on unit formation. On the second front, the problem is that 1UPT negates tactics, so the military effects of affinity might as well be irrelevant; and economically, the game doesn't encourage tradeoffs and tough decisions, so the game turns into a giant optimization problem that is trivial to solve, an optimization problem which includes manipulating broken mechanics like TR yields.

If I want to kill the bugs, I shouldn't have to avoid Harmony, but Harmony should (and does) have incentives to preserve native life, and fewer benefits to killing it. Alien nests in RT are too valuable not to plunder, but again that's a global balance problem (and a problem with the broken new content RT used, to patch over the game's underlying flaws) rather than a flaw in affinity.

If I were in charge I'd look at rejigging the basic game economy and unit management, so the game is no longer a Civ5 expansion gone sour. You could keep the tech web and inclinations of each affinity and still have a decent game, but the Civ5 elements were a bad base to build the game on.

Take AC compared to Civ2 - AC is in many ways Civ2 in space, but enough is distinct from the very start that it's clearly a different kind of game.

Hell, to start, BE could just lift Civ4 mechanics and transplant them on a hex grid, and it would be better... as would Civ5 in all its incarnations. That would be boring, but it would work and I'd feel like booting BE again.

 

[Galgus]

Why shouldn't the Affinities be strategy defining, at least as much as Ideologies were?

Pushing Affinity, Aliens, Quests, and Wonders further as well as fixing trade routes and, if we are feeling ambitious, splitting affinity gain between culture and science and giving more reason to research underused techs would do wonders to bring BE up to its potential.

1UPT is far, far more tactical than ye olde stacks of doom: and the clutter rough terrain problem isn't even a factor in Rising Tide sea battles.

It works quite well anywhere that isn't totally choked by rough terrain.

Not sure what you mean by tradeoffs and tough decisions, but I agree that trade routes are broken.

Whenever raising local production is actually a penalty, something has gone horribly wrong.

What, specifically, was a bad base in Civ 5?

Aside 1UPT, because you write a paragraph on that at every opportunity and pretty much all that can be said in response to it has been said to you.

 

[nimling]

Affinities are about as much definition as Civ5 ideologies - or would be, if not for issues with global game balance that make choice irrelevant. Freedom, Order, and Autocracy are all designed to be capable for any victory condition, even though the optimal strategy is domination and unit tactics are irrelevant. Most games are also typically won before ideologies matter, so the correct decision is mostly a matter of prior decisions and whether Autocracy is better in the short term than Order - Freedom is generally inferior to both, Statue of Liberty notwithstanding.

If anyone keeps claiming 1UPT is "tactical", they're wrong and upon playing enough games against decent opponents (i.e. other humans) the reasons why 1UPT fails should be obvious. All 1UPT has done is neuter strategic options, because ranged spam and risk-free damage are the obvious best choices, and over half the unit types (including all the high-end affinity units) are irrelevant. Only Orbital lasers make a big difference, and that's due to ill-thought counters to orbitals and the dronejam created by 1UPT.

1UPT took whatever tactical thinking there was and replaced it with ranged unit spam, and clicking the bombard button. It is even more egregious in the standard MP settings, to the point that most MP games are totally unplayable, but even with sequential turns there is no variety in strategy or tactics, only one way to play the game and most games are effectively decided by start terrain. Since there aren't any real economic tradeoffs in managing an empire, the entirety of the game is figuring out an optimization problem, and micromanaging units (due to the jankiness of 1UPT and the UI being annoying in MP).

That doesn't even start to describe the AI's inability to play 1UPT, those are problems that crop up in MP and why few people take Civ5 MP seriously.

Blaming affinities for not being different enough isn't the problem, the problem is that the Civ5 fundamentally bludgeons the player into a limited playing style, both in war and in peace. That has little to do with Ideologies or Social Policy choices, but 1UPT (and thus no military tactics) and science-on-rails / obvious improvement options.

Civ5 suffered greatly, largely due to the continued decision to stick to 1UPT. If BE started out by scrapping 1UPT early in the process, it would have gone a long way towards rehabilitating the rest of the game's balance problems, even ones as vast as the economy problem inherited from Civ5.

 

[Galgus]

Actually, all the ideologies were made to pursue two victory types each.

With Affinities, the current options are affinity victory, contact, or domination: with tough luck for hybrids.
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More open terrain, lower / practically nonexistent ranged melee defense, a larger rough terrain cover penalty for ranged, and possibly even nerfing ranged damage are all viable balance levers for ranged units.

Good luck winning with nothing but ranged units when a couple of tanks can run over twice their number, for instance.
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What, precisely, do you mean by economic trade-offs?
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The AI plays well enough when they make enough units and the terrain isn't terribly crowded.

But the main problem is typically not making enough units, not keeping them alive, and not replenishing them.

Just see them in naval wars, where clutter is a non-issue.
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Improvements could be better balanced, but what is your complaint on science and economy?

Civ 5 has issues, but it is still a good game.

 

[nimling]

The Civ5 equivalent that people here are suggesting is stuff like "Freedom should be forced to build great works and be trade-focused", or "Order should build Factories and Mines everywhere" - i.e., they have a preconceived notion of a single playstyle that an ideology is suited for. This is the kind of thinking which led to Civ5 strategies being so narrow, something Jon Shafer himself criticized after the fact (along with other commentators).

Going back to BE and taking the example of Harmony and native life... why should Harmony players be forced to get along with the native life, or Purity be forced to destroy it for that matter? The real problem is that everyone has to fight the native life in order to compete or survive, and people who want Harmony in order to match with their Xenomass resource shouldn't be forced to get along with natives. Nest artifacts break the game for all affinities because they were poorly thought-out and patched on top of already-broken mechanics.

Ranged units in Civ5 and BE are game-breaking, just due to their effective mobility and risk-free damage. A unit that can move+shoot and suffers no damage on attack will either be strong enough to be an obvious choice, or too weak and might as well not exist. There is no middle ground where rangers are balanced with melee. The situation in BE is better than Civ5 with its brokenly strong chariot archers, but it still sucks. If Ranged units had to setup to fire, it would be somewhat close to balance, but siege remains crucial.
None of this will change the other problems with 1UPT - dronejam, bloated unit costs, carpetdooming. The problems with 1UPT are too numerous and well documented by people who know how to make a game - this is like the only place I've seriously see people claim 1UPT is a good thing and rail against people who know better.

Play an MP game and it is clear as day that Civ5 combat is unworkable and exploitable to the extreme

Moderator Action: This thread concerns Affinities, not 1 upt or the power of ranged units. Please come back to topic and cease your rants. Also, please stop discounting the arguments of others that disagree with you.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Actually, all the ideologies were made to pursue two victory types each.

.

Actually it was 3, each affinity was designed so they would have one victory they were NOT good at

Freedom - conquest
Order- diplomacy
Autocracy- space
(all good at culture)

Now that obviously wasn't perfectly achieved (Freedom had some great military benefits, and the three weren't balanced themselves)

But there were definite differences in
-great improvements
-tall v. wide
-peace v. war
-etc

and which would be favored (although you could really play however you wanted and still win, certain ways would be better with certain ideologies)

I think Affinity Should force you in certain ways, and more so than ideology was designed to.

Since you are changing what humanity is, that should have significant effects on visible portions of the game... more than just the units and cities

Ideally I'd like to see a drastic change in what type of yields you want, Purity should get more benefit out of culture, Supremacy energy, and Harmony food... AND the 'affinity flavored' tile improvements should get boosted.

so that by the end game, you want
-affinity improvements, resource improvements, and the occasional other 'special improvement' (Manufactury, Academies, Arrays, etc.)

There should be more than 1 strategic option per affinity, but 2 or 3 seems like enough.

 

[Galgus]

@nimling

Because if every Affinity can do everything equally well, they may as well not exist mechanically.

Needing to choose a specialization deepens decision making and creates more diverse playstyles.
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@KrikkitTwo

Good point, I hadn't though of Autocracy as a culture victory civ, but it makes sense looking at their bonuses and recalling the militaristic nature of that victory.

Anyway, we agree that Affinity should be more pronounced than Ideologies were in pushing certain playstyles.
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I've been working on an Affinity building overhaul mod that essentially gives each affinity a building list that is incompatible with those of other affinities, while removing tech requirements in favor of affinity level alone unlocking them.

Though it won't completely solve all the problems with affinities, each Affinity gains a focus in how they play.

Purity buildings tend to get stronger the more Virtues and Kickers you unlock.

P/H has the best health buildings, tons of diplomatic capital to adapt to new situations or quick buy, and eventually increased benefits for positive health on top of some general bonuses, with a focus on national wonders requiring their other buildings.

Harmony focuses on using local organic resources as well as powerful food and health bonuses.

H/S currently has strong yield multiplier buildings that require non-affinity strategic resources, encouraging specialization.

Supremacy focuses on specialists generally, eventually abandoning food improvements.

S/P has the best energy generation and drone buildings which let cities work more tiles than they have population.

 

[Xinotine]

I would say they already have lightly such a focuses.

Supremacy gets Neurolab and Hypercore, clear science focus. Harmony gets equilelevant to Neurolab (i don't remember name) but not anything like Hypercore, but they get bonuses around Miasma and other things (I mainly play Supremancy so I don't remember what others get). Purity gets powerful farms, good military units and culture.

 

[Makavcio]

In my humble opinion, devs just got a little lazy with CivBE. We are already accepting the fact that AI is Trump-like, and it only gets % bonus to its yields. Apollo is so laughably easy... But I'm getting off the topic.

Affinities are no different from each other. They only pretend to vary. Especially now, in BERT, when hybrid affinities just happen by themselves, I don't really feel like I'm playing any affinity at all. I almost always go for supremacy because its victory is the easiest and fastest to achieve no matter what. Along the way, I make sure that I have health bonuses from hybrid affinities, and AI gets stomped without a real effort. I could yet again digress about AI getting in pointless wars with each other all the time, but it's not the place.

I dream of affinities that really are different.
Harmony, a faction well adapted to the environment, hence able to grow quickly and build quickly, but struggling with any culture at all, and unsympathetic to scientists.
Purity, a faction with blossoming culture, still curious and quite laborious, yet struggling to grow because they refuse to adapt.
Supremacy, a faction of rapid scientific development and staggering manufacturing capabilities, however increasingly unconcerned with culture and unwilling to grow.
It would be something. Supremacy could abandon the concept of food in the 2nd half on the game, and harmony could use food for both growth and production. Such things would be amazing, but I strongly doubt the people who work at Firaxis now would even consider balancing something like that. They are choosing the easiest path here. All we get now are building that offer 10% of a yield, and you can afford them in 3-4 cities max. Not to mention they become available usually only when the game had already ended and you are toiling towards completing the inevitable victory wonder. That's why I'm saying that factions only pretend to be different.

I'd love at least to see a mechanism that prevents players from maxing out all affinities. Sure, if you go for all, you cannot specialize in any of them at the same time. But, e.g., when I play supremacy and I take a slight detour to get +1 food and +1 energy to my farms, growth generated by this improvement gets back to me thanks to population boom. I'm not behind with units either because hybrid supremacy-purity units kick in.

How such mechanism could looks like? Just make all affinity levels more expensive by 1-3 points for every affinity level you get. This way going too wide would prevent you from reaching affinity-specific victory types at all, or at least would make you pay a lot for that additional 2-3 points more in affinity you don't need. Now it's possible to just go for everything and it pays off because what you are losing in time, you get back through more yields and powerful synergies.

 

[sugerdady87]

I almost always go 5-5-5, and sometimes 8-8-8, in affinity values simply because of the yield bonuses hybridization provides. Since the introduction of hybrid affinities, that seems to be the only purpose for affinities now, at least for me in my games. Even when selecting which unit to upgrade, I simply hold out to pick and choose between the different normal and hybrid affinity options for the best unit upgrade path. I no longer care about the ideologies between the different affinities as I once did when the game was released.

If the devs wanted us to become immerse in the game with the affinity system, then they failed.

 

[Starrynite120]

I am currently working on a mod that is seeking to make affinities more distinct. I am doing this primarily by changing victory conditions to force different playstyles. Purity needs culture, harmony growth, and supremacy energy. For example, purity will need to have adopted 25 virtues before they can build the exodus gate (this is the only one scripted yet). I am also changing affinity bonuses to reflect there different play styles. I am also changing affinity gain to be much less tech dependent. You may now again affinity from tech still, but also from affinity buildings, tile improvements, and wonders (I should mentioned these will all be small boosts, so no building should give one whole level). These are also instant boosts, like when you research tech, rather than a yield style like affinity as yields. I am also redoing all buildings sand have already redesigned the tech tree so that each affinity goes in a different direction. If you want to see what I have so far you can check it out in mod development, it's called Into the Nebula. The version posted there is a week or two old, but you'll see some of the work that's been done.