Affinities are (still) a nonsensical wash.

[KrikkitTwo]

A large amount of the available strategies of any game (with strategy) will always be "suboptimal". The optimal path in any game which offers a multitude of variable paths will always ever be a minority of the overall content.

The argument's getting a bit nonsensical at this point. Yes, you can make the available strategies more balanced, but in doing so you will find it very hard to change the % of dominant / optimal strategies. Balance will just make the others not as bad by comparison, over time.

You could say "well that's all I want", and that's fair enough, but it doesn't change the fact that even with your perfect ideal of design and balance, there will still be a select amount of optimal strategies that dwarf all others.

Well there is The optimal strategy, and then some number of 'near optimal' strategies.
You focus on

Then there are the 'sub optimal strategies'.

To get an interesting game
1. each affinity should have a at least 2-3 (hopefully more) 'near optimal' strategies (not all would be near optimal in every map/condition..but at least one should be for each affinity)
2. those strategies should be different in many ways from the 'near optimal strategies' of the other affinities
3. the 'near optimal strategies' should be very close to the optimal strategy... and far from the 'sub optimal strategies'

Currently you have the problem that
1. the only real difference between near optimal strategies in the affinities is a little bit of military tactics
2. the improvements (which are an Excellent way to show non military characteristics of a society) are basically the same for all affinities (ie they are Near equally good/bad)

I understand that some things should be affinity agnostic (military v. peace, which of the 4 Virtue trees, etc.) but there needs to be Some ability to reflect changes other than just the tactics and look of your unit if they want affinities to be interesting.

Adding more perks might work, but I think it would be better if the way affinities 'fleshed out' depended on
1. player choice ( a few different ways to be 'extremely Harmony')
2. something that was more exclusive (picking X means it is much harder/impossible to get Y)

My personal favorite is an Affinity Virtues system, but it could also be done with a much more significant quest system.

 

[Amrunril]

Tile improvements have been getting a lot of attention in this thread. This is certainly a worthwhile angle, and I would love to see the affinities vary more in how they use the land. That said, there hasn’t yet been much discussion of buildings, which I think have quite a bit of unrealized potential to distinguish the different affinities.
Each affinity, in theory, has a unique set of mid-late game buildings scattered around the tech web, but these buildings are rarely worth constructing. This is largely a function of game pacing and affinity distribution (inner rim techs giving as many affinity points as outer rim ones), but even if these issues were resolved, the buildings would still be underwhelming- a building that requires an outer rim tech, a major production investment and consumes strategic resources, it needs to give more than a 15% boost. If late game affinity buildings were actually impactful enough to enable new strategies they would allow for a great deal of variation between the affinities, while at the same time ensuring that each affinity has multiple strategies rather than being pushed into a single path.
Meanwhile, a few affinity specific buildings (such as Gene Gardens) do come early enough to be useful, but their prerequisites are balanced around the vanilla game, where it was entirely plausible to have no points in your non-dominant affinities, rather than Rising Tide, with its adjusted affinity distribution. It would be one thing if Harmony and Supremacy colonies could choose to make a minor investment in Purity to unlock Gene Gardens, but when they can do so simply by researching Ballistics (which unlocks affinity-agnostic Rocket Batteries and Station Sentinels), Gene Gardens really cease to be Purity-specific in any meaningful sense (I think this is primarily an issue with excessive affinity gains from cheap techs, but some tweaks to affinity prerequisites may also be necessary).

 

[Makenshi]

If in vanilla I advocated for an alternative system, where some formula involving science and culture should be used to get affinities separately form techs... with BERT I call for it even more, because affinities became a fest somehow. Probably because of hybrids, I don't know... but the fact is my affinities in vanilla by end game were usually something like 3/12/3, maybe 4/15/14 when i pushed further, delaying my victory to 300 turns or whatever. But now? Daaamn, I'm halfway through the beacon and my affinities are 10/17/12 on turn 210!


Reference: quick speed, but with a mod that makes techs beyond that inner ring cost from 150% up to 300% more [depends on how far from the center they are]. No mods messing with affinities are used.

 

[BroOfTheSun]

Just posting some of my findings of the game. I've played a lot of BERT, tried out several different strategies at the Apollo difficulty, and consistently get < 200 turn wins. I've found that you can make most of the improvements in the game work for a good win time. Farms are good, but definitely not the best improvement. I think someone already pointed out that the upgrade for +1 food and +1 energy requires 2 expensive techs that are out of the way. By the time you get that, that requires almost the same amount of time it takes to tech for Biowells and get the first biowells improvements complete. So that seems pretty balanced to me.

I'm not sure what the best improvement for a good strategy is. I think it's more important to get cities up and running via trade routes, and some improvements help more with that than others. More cities is definitely better to getting a good win time, as long as you can get them up and running quickly via trade routes.

Also, one of my best games so far (as in fastest win times), was from testing a Purity domes spam, playing as Franco-Iberia. I forget the win time (~170-180), but by the end, I had completed 3 virtue trees. I think the bonus health from positive health plus the bonuses from Knowledge tree made that a really good strat. I didn't have a total beaker count higher than maybe a AU specialist strat or academy spam strat, but the % bonuses from health and science reduction virtues in knowledge made up for it.

Edit: Just adding that playing on 'Eridani e' map makes the game much harder, just by having closer borders and more aggressive neighbors. Try it out if you haven't already.

 

[Gorbles]

No, not really.

Just because there is not a firmly objective standard to measure all of them by does not make them equal.

Though admittedly it makes them hard to judge, more about defending and attacking arguments than a clean measure.

Sorry, let me clarify. All opinions about the subjectively-best way to balance a video game are valid and equal.

Opinions about more controversial, real-life subjects, might not be. But this isn't that. This is about the best way to approach design in a video game, where there are a multitude of "right" answers. The more you rail against other peoples' answers by that logic (instead of actually, well, just arguing the point), the less time you'll find they have for yours.

Well there is The optimal strategy, and then some number of 'near optimal' strategies.
You focus on

Then there are the 'sub optimal strategies'.

To get an interesting game
1. each affinity should have a at least 2-3 (hopefully more) 'near optimal' strategies (not all would be near optimal in every map/condition..but at least one should be for each affinity)
2. those strategies should be different in many ways from the 'near optimal strategies' of the other affinities
3. the 'near optimal strategies' should be very close to the optimal strategy... and far from the 'sub optimal strategies'

Currently you have the problem that
1. the only real difference between near optimal strategies in the affinities is a little bit of military tactics
2. the improvements (which are an Excellent way to show non military characteristics of a society) are basically the same for all affinities (ie they are Near equally good/bad)

I understand that some things should be affinity agnostic (military v. peace, which of the 4 Virtue trees, etc.) but there needs to be Some ability to reflect changes other than just the tactics and look of your unit if they want affinities to be interesting.

Adding more perks might work, but I think it would be better if the way affinities 'fleshed out' depended on
1. player choice ( a few different ways to be 'extremely Harmony')
2. something that was more exclusive (picking X means it is much harder/impossible to get Y)

My personal favorite is an Affinity Virtues system, but it could also be done with a much more significant quest system.

I agree that more could be done with tying Affinity into the game world, but I don't think tying up large parts of game content to Affinities specifically is a good way of getting people involved in the game.

Improvements are a large part of the game. Cutting off large amounts of them because you don't have the right Affinities makes it messy, especially when the whole point about military Affinity progression is that everyone always gets cool toys to play with, a lot of which can have similar generic upgrades (+1 range, no setup before firing, fire over terrain, heal every turn. The Affinity-specific perks are very specific and relate to the intended playstyle of that Affinity - but they aren't necessary).

I'd much rather explore different ways of making Affinity more impactful than hiding away existing, pre-designed game content behind parts of it. I mean sure, it's doable. But there are easier things to do, in my opinion, that would have just as good results.

Redesigning Virtues from the ground-up with Affinity would be an interesting start. Make it less Science-related, more Culture-related. Which is thematic, too, as your Affinity is basically the overall cultural representation of your faction.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Just posting some of my findings of the game. I've played a lot of BERT, tried out several different strategies at the Apollo difficulty, and consistently get < 200 turn wins. I've found that you can make most of the improvements in the game work for a good win time.[...]

That's because the impact of improvements is quite low. A significant amount of your food and production yield comes from trade routes and your main science yield comes from the conversion processes.

I am sure you can achieve a <T200 win without building a single improvement past the resource ones needed for the Lasercom Satellite.

...actually, I'll try that right now.
EDIT: Okay, close. T202 win, with "meh" starting spot, 2 early colonists lost to aliens, an unwanted AI war inbetween and pretty bad luck with ruins/artifacts.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Sorry, let me clarify. All opinions about the subjectively-best way to balance a video game are valid and equal.

Opinions about more controversial, real-life subjects, might not be. But this isn't that. This is about the best way to approach design in a video game, where there are a multitude of "right" answers. The more you rail against other peoples' answers by that logic (instead of actually, well, just arguing the point), the less time you'll find they have for yours.


I agree that more could be done with tying Affinity into the game world, but I don't think tying up large parts of game content to Affinities specifically is a good way of getting people involved in the game.

Improvements are a large part of the game. Cutting off large amounts of them because you don't have the right Affinities makes it messy, especially when the whole point about military Affinity progression is that everyone always gets cool toys to play with, a lot of which can have similar generic upgrades (+1 range, no setup before firing, fire over terrain, heal every turn. The Affinity-specific perks are very specific and relate to the intended playstyle of that Affinity - but they aren't necessary).

I'd much rather explore different ways of making Affinity more impactful than hiding away existing, pre-designed game content behind parts of it. I mean sure, it's doable. But there are easier things to do, in my opinion, that would have just as good results.

Redesigning Virtues from the ground-up with Affinity would be an interesting start. Make it less Science-related, more Culture-related. Which is thematic, too, as your Affinity is basically the overall cultural representation of your faction.

I wouldn't advocate hiding them behind Affinity, as much as making them clearly suboptimal for other affinities.

ie
Mid-early game (when improvements are available)
Resource improvements>>Farms/Generators ~ Biowells~Terrascapes~Domes~Nodes (mostly depends on specific situation)

late Purity
Resource improvements>Terrascapes~Domes>>Farms/Generators ~ Biowells~Nodes

late Supremacy
Resource improvements>Nodes >>Farms/Generators ~ Biowells~Terrascapes~Domes

late Harmony
Resource improvements>Biowells+Miasma*>>Farms/Generators ~Terrascapes~Domes~Nodes

You can do this by tying a boost to the improvement itself to Affinity (through quests/buildings/virtues)
OR
by boosting the benefit of the improvements based on Affinity... ie Purity gets extra bonuses from culture, Supremacy gets extra bonuses based on energy, Harmony gets extra bonuses based on food/health.


They have done this Slightly (level 12 boost and 8 Purity Terrascapes) but it is too little too late. (make the game competitive a bit longer and introduce the boosts a bit earlier, and it would work)

*Miasma really needs to have some economic penalty, that becomes a bonus with sufficient Harmony.

 

[Gorbles]

To be honest, given how many people rail against suboptimal, that's kinda the same result. You're basically not going to use them if they're suboptimal (again, going on popular logic in this and other threads).

I'm not sure. I think more improvement, um, improvements (I hate doing that) by Affinity level might work? Like more than the +1 Food from Domes or whatever Purity 10 (12?) gets at the moment.

I had plans to do a lot more with Affinity levels in a mod, but Real Life took over. Maybe if I'd got a popular working version of that out Firaxis would've picked up on it more? Unlikely, as they still haven't done Affinity Explorers

 

[EpicWestern]

I actually find the tile improvements to be the most balanced factor of the game. While significantly nerfed, I'm still spamming academies quite a bit but its not an absolute must. I've always found biowells to be a bit overrated but since the institute quest bonus doesn't really make them a tech detour I end up building a few. Manufactories are a lot better since its so much easier to get ridiculously high health levels late game, and its pretty standard for me to spam around 8-10 before its gate building time. Nodes are also solid late game improvement. Domes, arrays, terrascapes, and generators need a boost.

 

[Galgus]

@Gorb

I wouldn't say that all opinions on design and balance are equal, but that there is grey area in determining what is better.

Of course different people enjoy different things, but there are clearly things that are generally more or less enjoyable.

If we all thought that other opinions are equal, why would we spend any time trying to convince others?

Anyway, this is off-topic.
_______________________________________________

On Affinities, I hold that if they can all do everything equally well they don't really have a unique playstyle, and feel bland.

I'd much rather take six unique playstyles over a few mushy sub-optimal playstyles.

Part of the problem is the excessive Affinity bonus overlap in Rising Tide, which would have made Hybrids overpowered if the devs had bothered to give them victory conditions.

With neutral victories and two core affinities' bonuses, they probably are overpowered really.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

To be honest, given how many people rail against suboptimal, that's kinda the same result. You're basically not going to use them if they're suboptimal (again, going on popular logic in this and other threads).

I'm not sure. I think more improvement, um, improvements (I hate doing that) by Affinity level might work? Like more than the +1 Food from Domes or whatever Purity 10 (12?) gets at the moment.

I had plans to do a lot more with Affinity levels in a mod, but Real Life took over. Maybe if I'd got a popular working version of that out Firaxis would've picked up on it more? Unlikely, as they still haven't done Affinity Explorers

Well the idea is they don't Start as sub optimal, they start out optimal*(depending on situation), but become less and less so.

So a Purity player might have some Biowells+Nodes, but would eventually replace them all with Domes and Terrascapes.

Also there is plenty of Other neutral improvements (Academies, Manufacturies, Arrays)

 

[MAMoob]

Well there is The optimal strategy, and then some number of 'near optimal' strategies.
You focus on

Then there are the 'sub optimal strategies'.

To get an interesting game
1. each affinity should have a at least 2-3 (hopefully more) 'near optimal' strategies (not all would be near optimal in every map/condition..but at least one should be for each affinity)
2. those strategies should be different in many ways from the 'near optimal strategies' of the other affinities
3. the 'near optimal strategies' should be very close to the optimal strategy... and far from the 'sub optimal strategies'

Currently you have the problem that
1. the only real difference between near optimal strategies in the affinities is a little bit of military tactics
2. the improvements (which are an Excellent way to show non military characteristics of a society) are basically the same for all affinities (ie they are Near equally good/bad)

I understand that some things should be affinity agnostic (military v. peace, which of the 4 Virtue trees, etc.) but there needs to be Some ability to reflect changes other than just the tactics and look of your unit if they want affinities to be interesting.

Adding more perks might work, but I think it would be better if the way affinities 'fleshed out' depended on
1. player choice ( a few different ways to be 'extremely Harmony')
2. something that was more exclusive (picking X means it is much harder/impossible to get Y)

My personal favorite is an Affinity Virtues system, but it could also be done with a much more significant quest system.

I read through your stuff and it's quite similar to some of the things I thought about, but is more structured. I like quite a few of the ideas, although I don't necessarily agree with everything. Anyway I think more terraforming mechanics and an influence/tension system would work very well in BE.

I'm not sure if anyone read through my last post but the basic idea is that improvements can be used for different strategies with the added affinity tension/pollution/terrafroming mechanics.

For instance a Purity player surrounded by harmony players that spam miasma and supremacy players that spam manufactories and increase pollution can chose to play defensively and build domes negating the health penalties from hostile environment or can play agressively actively removing miasma, declaring wars to pillage factory improvements and go for terrascapes. Or if he wants to get serious production himself he can mix factories and domes.
Likewise, supremacy player can go for mass production, ruining the environment for other affinities, which would likely give an objective reason to go to war with him, even if there are no land disputes ()but this is what this production is for ). Or he can chose a more peaceful approach using academies and/or nodes and arrays that just improve ecomy and spread influence without ruining economy of his neighbors.

If going for a more simple approach i'd say yields should be balanced a bit better in the first place (e.g. energy should be more important due to increased building upkeeps). Then there's an overall usefulness of the techs that unlock improvements. Biowells are better than many other improvements because they are unlocked by Bionics, which is one of the most useful purity/harmony techs and is even useful for supremacy since the free tech more than makes up for the investment. Nodes and academies are both on the supremacy tech path (especially nodes), but not so useful for others. Terrascapes clearly lose out to biowells for purity in terms of teching (and are kinda nonsential for supremacy even though it's a purity/supremacy tech now). Same for domes, mass fabrication is usually suboptimal compared to bionics for purity.

 

[Aea]

This may be explained by me being lazy, but one of the things I really like about Farms is that you can improve them progressively.

You may need to grab several expensive technologies (Vertical Farming, and more so Industrial Ecology and Artificial Evolution) but this means that all of the Farms you've already built are upgraded, instantly. No re-jigging of improvements, no worker time spent, etc.

That to me is more then worth the high science cost and I will skip the other improvements (which may get picked up anyway for the affinity points or other items on the tech) and just go for Farms + Academies, and of course any resource specific improvement. If I have a city on Tundra / Desert I will consider Terrascapes, but they're only worthwhile if I've picked up something to reduce the ridiculous construction time.

I could buy the argument for Biowells since they can be built directly on forest and the upgrade for them is super cheap science wise, and Domes are as well (and culture is always nice), but Nodes require an end-game technology to really be worthwhile. By the time I'm getting Hypercomputing I don't care all that much about science, and that +1 science on an improvement that's been mediocre all game (exception being for repairing air units) will mean that I probably don't have many (if any) of them, and it's just too late to make any difference worth caring about.

 

[Roxlimn]

The Nodes can work out - they're available on an earlier tech branch so you can start work on them somewhat earlier if you can snag a hefty leaf tech discount. The output is Energy, which means that you're going to want a strategy wherein you buy a lot of things - basically Al Falah and Convert all that production into Research right from the get-go. Not sure how that breaks down. The Energy is very good for rushing things, but as bare tile output for mainline things, they're inefficient. That said, Nodes are +3 Energy, so you're 5 Energy up from a Dome player for every improvement, though you're 2 Culture down. Imma have to actually try a Node game to see how it performs.

 

[Eji1700]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=552832

A lot of my thoughts posted there. Short version "decouple affinity and tech web" and make it more about playstyle than research. This has the advantage of also hopefully giving more value to other yields besides science.

 

[Gort]

Kinda feels like affinities should be based on culture AND science. Like, science might give us the ability to replace our bodies with robotic ones, but it would take a society some time to make the adjustments necessary for it to be normal - if a country developed robotic drones that were superior soldiers to humans in every way it might still take decades for them to replace humans in every part of the military, even if they were clearly better in every trial. You'd have to overcome public perceptions of cold, unthinking machines gunning flesh-and-blood people down, and vested interests in the military who'd be looking at losing their careers to a machine.

So maybe a good system would be this:

1. Affinities are social policy trees.
2. Different policies are unlocked - but not enabled - by certain technologies. So the "robotic soldiers" policy might be gated behind the robotics and artificial intelligence technologies.
3. Enabling a social policy takes culture.

This way, you could end up with a civilisation that knows all about HOW you would go about domesticating aliens (IE: It has a bunch of harmony technologies), but has decided to roboticise its citizens instead. In the current system this is impossible to achieve since just gaining the technology gives you the affinity points - you pretty much always end up with a mish-mash of affinities.

It'd also mean that science isn't the god-resource that determines everything about your military - you also need culture.

 

[WiseGreen]

Kinda feels like affinities should be based on culture AND science. Like, science might give us the ability to replace our bodies with robotic ones, but it would take a society some time to make the adjustments necessary for it to be normal - if a country developed robotic drones that were superior soldiers to humans in every way it might still take decades for them to replace humans in every part of the military, even if they were clearly better in every trial. You'd have to overcome public perceptions of cold, unthinking machines gunning flesh-and-blood people down, and vested interests in the military who'd be looking at losing their careers to a machine.

So maybe a good system would be this:

1. Affinities are social policy trees.
2. Different policies are unlocked - but not enabled - by certain technologies. So the "robotic soldiers" policy might be gated behind the robotics and artificial intelligence technologies.
3. Enabling a social policy takes culture.

This way, you could end up with a civilisation that knows all about HOW you would go about domesticating aliens (IE: It has a bunch of harmony technologies), but has decided to roboticise its citizens instead. In the current system this is impossible to achieve since just gaining the technology gives you the affinity points - you pretty much always end up with a mish-mash of affinities.

It'd also mean that science isn't the god-resource that determines everything about your military - you also need culture.

How many potential policies would each tier have, then, and how would they be organized in a virtue window? This may sound as nitpicking, but it does matter, as the game's UI is far from simple as it is. Affinity upgrades, affinity bonuses, and everything diplomacy are already buried two screens away from the main game UI, should virtues be so as well?

 

[Gort]

I'd probably aim to make them no more complex than the current virtue system, so probably roughly 15, arranged similarly to the current virtue system. I guess you could either do a "virtue web" kind of thing similar to the current tech web in order to get your hybrid affinities, or you could use the synergy bonuses the current virtue system has.

 

[Galgus]

I'd prefer a trait system over a virtue system for affinities, since I think it could make for more decisions within an affinity.

Hybrids would probably take one option from each parent affinity as their options in such a system.

 

[Stringer1313]

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.