An update from Firaxis Games regarding Beyond Earth feedback

[Roxlimn]

I feel we do not really talk about the same thing when assessing trade route issues. To be honest my biggest problem right now is with the number of them not because of internal routes but external ones.

Currently the problem comes from the abundance of external routes you can make while still keeping some internal to shape up new cities. I basically use 1 internal for 2 external. This is in my opinion the fastest current way to victory.

I have nothing against the current strength of an internal route but their total number has to be cut down so that you can't make new cities always instantly profitable from a science point of view. Science is only what matters currently unless you go domination. The game basically uses 3 different form of a science victory and more than half of your science will come out of external routes. Even before you start making academies.

Yeah. I suspected that that was the other problem. The output of the routes on Apollo is completely out of whack because of how jacked up the AI is. It's a different manifestation of milking the AI for money at the higher diff settings. Even on Gemini, I have a hard time finding any external for more than 10 bpt at turn 200.

 

[Esperr]

If we look at the apollo challenge thread we see that the best victory times are made by players who put all trade routes external, and only use internal routes to build the affinity wonder at the end. This is because science is needed to win, and money is production(except for wonders, which dont have any more impact than one or two trade routes). This also has to.do witht eh fact that production is irrelevant(you dont need wonders and gold is production for everything else), and food is irrelevant because a size two and size twenty city both still have three routes.

 

[tombakerwho]

Here are some things that I would like to see, which don't seem like they would take a long time to implement:

Change the auto plant quest to offer +1 trade route, but only in capital. I have played multiple games thinking this was the already true, and the Apollo turn to victory times are much closer to Civ V Deity if you play under those rules. Obviously, there is also less trade route management, as there are less trade routes. It also makes the wide/tall choice more balanced.

Add affinity boosts to some of the weaker wonders. Most of the wonders are very high production and not any better than a trade route, or some basic buildings. This would make them more potent, and worth building.

Remove the station quest where you approve X or Y, or push it out later. The player wants to choose neither at the time it comes up.

Change stations trade routes to scale up better with later turn times. Some of them are viable up front in the early game, but tend to have no value later on. Also, include health boost bonuses to make them more competitive.

Allow the player to build multiple exodus gates, to make the victory more competitive with harmony, and make the settlers pop out automatically. Remembering to click on the gate is not a fun mechanic, it is also not intuitive to a new player.

Pretty sure this is already going to happen, but move Servomachinery somewhere else in the tech tree.

Add civ-specific bonuses to tile improvements, civ-specific unit upgrades to key units, civ-specific building bonuses. The civilizations are too generic, this is the number one thing I am missing from Civ5. The differences right now are negligible, make them actually different. This would add to replay, and provides civ-specific strategies.

I think there are lots of "easy" changes possible that would improve the game dramatically.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Here are some things that I would like to see, which don't seem like they would take a long time to implement:

Change the auto plant quest to offer +1 trade route, but only in capital. I have played multiple games thinking this was the already true, and the Apollo turn to victory times are much closer to Civ V Deity if you play under those rules. Obviously, there is also less trade route management, as there are less trade routes. It also makes the wide/tall choice more balanced.

Add affinity boosts to some of the weaker wonders. Most of the wonders are very high production and not any better than a trade route, or some basic buildings. This would make them more potent, and worth building.

Remove the station quest where you approve X or Y, or push it out later. The player wants to choose neither at the time it comes up.

Change stations trade routes to scale up better with later turn times. Some of them are viable up front in the early game, but tend to have no value later on. Also, include health boost bonuses to make them more competitive.

Allow the player to build multiple exodus gates, to make the victory more competitive with harmony, and make the settlers pop out automatically. Remembering to click on the gate is not a fun mechanic, it is also not intuitive to a new player.

Pretty sure this is already going to happen, but move Servomachinery somewhere else in the tech tree.

Add civ-specific bonuses to tile improvements, civ-specific unit upgrades to key units, civ-specific building bonuses. The civilizations are too generic, this is the number one thing I am missing from Civ5. The differences right now are negligible, make them actually different. This would add to replay, and provides civ-specific strategies.

I think there are lots of "easy" changes possible that would improve the game dramatically.

The Station X or Y quest could be dependent on your researching Pioneering/building a Trade depot.

 

[Roxlimn]

Centralizing more of the TRs would do a lot to balance smaller Civs with more expansionist games. I think Autoplant granting only +1 TR to the capital is a good idea in keeping with other building bonuses of that nature. Cuts down on micro, but I think the UI will have to be redone, regardless.

 

[Bandobras Took]

Yeah. I suspected that that was the other problem. The output of the routes on Apollo is completely out of whack because of how jacked up the AI is. It's a different manifestation of milking the AI for money at the higher diff settings. Even on Gemini, I have a hard time finding any external for more than 10 bpt at turn 200.

And can actually be found in Civ 4 with piggy-backing on the AI's research rate through tech trading, come to think of it.

 

[Acken]

That is quite impressive. Would you mind uploading the save game and coaching me in PM? I want to replicate the result in one of my own games, to see how the factors interact the way you play the game.

Just for reference I've broke my record and got a T145 harmony victory with no personal rules and all exploits I now of. See this post:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13567412&postcount=36

 

[sprang]

But when considering all other factors, Tech and Virtue rate will be faster with ~20-30 really good cities. At some point, adding more cities for Trade Routes becomes a net negative in regards to Science and Culture, because it raises the costs by a larger % of total than the city output represents. This number is actually lower for crappy cities when there are some good cities, as the crappy cities already represent a lower % of total output due to their nature.

Good point. But not 20-30 cities... that's gotta be wrong. 10 tops.

Each city adds 10% of science cost. To maintain a constant tech rate, your science would need to rise by 10% to keep pace.
A new TR-spam city 3*15/t = 45/t
So once you are making 450 science per turn, it is no longer efficient to found new cities solely for TR spam.

Note that if you dedicate one route from each new city back to your Super-City Capital, that leaves only 30/t, and so the break-even point is at 300 science per/turn.

Certainly, if all your cities are generating science roughly equivalently, then your 11th city will be the breakeven. Any more than that is counter-productive (for science) without the Knowledge #cities virtue boost.

 

[sprang]

Centralizing more of the TRs would do a lot to balance smaller Civs with more expansionist games. I think Autoplant granting only +1 TR to the capital is a good idea in keeping with other building bonuses of that nature. Cuts down on micro, but I think the UI will have to be redone, regardless.

SOunds like what I proposed earlier:

HQ allows one TR.
Depot allows one TR, cannot be rush-bought, cannot be built in city smaller than size 4.
Autoplant allows one TR, cannot be built in city smaller than size 8.

Effect: capital gets 3 total TR. Cities max at 2 TR, and they come slower. Not a lot, but probably enough.

 

[Roxlimn]

sprang:

Nah. I don't like cities that take forever to get up, so requiring a 20 turn Depot to be built is just a no-go for me. I like that part of the TRs. I don't want to see that go. That'd be worse than Civ5 - Civ5 Cities get up faster than that!

 

[Aeson]

Good point. But not 20-30 cities... that's gotta be wrong. 10 tops.

Each city adds 10% of science cost. To maintain a constant tech rate, your science would need to rise by 10% to keep pace.
A new TR-spam city 3*15/t = 45/t
So once you are making 450 science per turn, it is no longer efficient to found new cities solely for TR spam.

Note that if you dedicate one route from each new city back to your Super-City Capital, that leaves only 30/t, and so the break-even point is at 300 science per/turn.

Certainly, if all your cities are generating science roughly equivalently, then your 11th city will be the breakeven. Any more than that is counter-productive (for science) without the Knowledge #cities virtue boost.

On standard settings:

For Science it's 5% increase per city. That can be reduced by 40% via Virtues, so 3%.

For Culture it's 10% increase per city, again reduced by 40% via Virtue, so 6%.

Also there's a benefit for always have some new cities at any point in the game. That way you can have dramatic discrepancy in yields, which make all your internal Trade Routes more powerful. Thus you can use fewer internal and more external to boost Science.

There's also use in having dedicated Production powerhouses. Again to share the wealth through Trade Routes, but also to quickly build Wonders and expensive units. These cities won't have great Science output, and may be substandard Culturally, so pull down the average.

For ultra-early victories that of course goes out the window since you don't really have time to build 20-30 powerhouse cities. I'd say that's more a problem with the VCs being way too simplistic and detached from actual in-game power. Win Domination without ever fighting, Contact from Expeditions, or grab some techs and build a Wonder. They're all just ways to short circuit actually playing a 4X game.

 

[Xenotitan]

Good point. But not 20-30 cities... that's gotta be wrong. 10 tops.

Each city adds 10% of science cost. To maintain a constant tech rate, your science would need to rise by 10% to keep pace.
A new TR-spam city 3*15/t = 45/t
So once you are making 450 science per turn, it is no longer efficient to found new cities solely for TR spam.

Note that if you dedicate one route from each new city back to your Super-City Capital, that leaves only 30/t, and so the break-even point is at 300 science per/turn.

Certainly, if all your cities are generating science roughly equivalently, then your 11th city will be the breakeven. Any more than that is counter-productive (for science) without the Knowledge #cities virtue boost.

First of all, the penalty is 5% per non-capital city, not 10%. Second, it's a 5% increase of the base cost of the tech, not the current cost. This is equivalent in research time to your science being divided by 1 + 0.05x, where x is the number of non-capital cities. If all your cities create science roughly evenly, then your research time will be proportional to (1+x)/(1+0.05*x). The derivative of this is 0.95/((1 + 0.05*x)^2), which is always positive, so it would always be beneficial for science to found another city under these assumptions.

Of course that is just an abstraction. A decently developed city will generate a good chunk of science from buildings, pop, and academies that compare with its external trade routes.

 

[Xenotitan]

If we look at the apollo challenge thread we see that the best victory times are made by players who put all trade routes external, and only use internal routes to build the affinity wonder at the end. This is because science is needed to win, and money is production(except for wonders, which dont have any more impact than one or two trade routes). This also has to.do witht eh fact that production is irrelevant(you dont need wonders and gold is production for everything else), and food is irrelevant because a size two and size twenty city both still have three routes.

Production is more efficient than energy. The flexibility of energy is nice but it is impractical to build everything with it. Also, a size two city can work two academies, a size twenty can work twenty academies. I can believe that external trade routes are more powerful than internal ones, but to say production and food are irrelevant is quite an exaggeration.

 

[Carl_Bar]

Production is more efficient than energy. The flexibility of energy is nice but it is impractical to build everything with it. Also, a size two city can work two academies, a size twenty can work twenty academies. I can believe that external trade routes are more powerful than internal ones, but to say production and food are irrelevant is quite an exaggeration.

Yes and no, it's absolutely worth building stuff with production, but you can boom energy income fairly hard to the point where your getting a low level buildings worth of energy every turn, an expensive every two. At that point you can buy a lot of stuff, (like autoplants), straight out with money. Go industry and the virtues will add even more to that by cutting costs to buy.

Sure you can't flat out replace production, but you can make it so you buy as much as you produce.

Also the thing with a size 20 is it may be able to work 20, but you should never have more than 14 or 15 tiles you want to work. there is zero reason to space cities in BE so go super dense and let the cities overlap a lot, cuts needed population a LOT. At that point base tile yields plus city buildings make food production from any other source merely a freebie that barely matters in real terms.

 

[Dactyl]

I didn't know about that favors-gold exploit until I read this thread. Wow, that's really a game killer, and being the undisciplined guy that I am, if it's there, I'm going to use it. Leads me to wonder though. What kind of people do these companies have designing and testing these games? (I'm not just referring to Firaxis here.) This exploit should have been obvious to anyone who was intimate with the game, which I'm not yet.

 

[Bandobras Took]

For ultra-early victories that of course goes out the window since you don't really have time to build 20-30 powerhouse cities. I'd say that's more a problem with the VCs being way too simplistic and detached from actual in-game power. (. . .) or grab some techs and build a Wonder. They're all just ways to short circuit actually playing a 4X game.

Do you then disagree with Esperr's assessment?

If we look at the apollo challenge thread we see that the best victory times are made by players who put all trade routes external, and only use internal routes to build the affinity wonder at the end. This is because science is needed to win

The problem with affinity victories seems to be trade routes allowing piggybacking on the AI's tech rate at higher levels. Do correct me if I'm mistaken; I may not be understanding what people are saying.

 

[Xenotitan]

I don't think the science bonus the AI gets on Apollo (I assume they get one, are these listed anywhere?) boosts the external trade route yields that much. The science yield from trade routes is based on the difference between the two cities' science. So even on Apollo your big city trade routes will profit the most from trading with new AI cities, and you get the most profit there if the AI science yield is low, so the AI bonus is detrimental. Your small cities would benefit from the AI bonus though because they'd be trading mostly with AI capitals or other major AI cities. So it probably evens out mostly. Also, the yields from trade routes flattens out quite quickly so once you start getting 10 or more beakers a route you have to increase the difference a lot for a couple of beakers; the AI bonus probably doesn't affect trade yields very much.

It's just that in general external trade routes yield a lot of science. I generally play 1 internal to 2 external and my routes make up about 40 to 50% of my science. If I went all external like Esperr is suggesting then I'd be making over half my science from trade routes.

 

[Manannan]

This is because science is needed to win, and money is production(except for wonders, which dont have any more impact than one or two trade routes). This also has to.do witht eh fact that production is irrelevant(you dont need wonders and gold is production for everything else)

Not quite. The issue is that production as it should be is irrelevant because money is production (and money is basically infinite right now), but production is also science (or culture or more money or food if you're some sort of deviant) disgustingly early as is when you realize most of the buildings you can build/buy don't do much compared to just putting a quarter of your production towards science. So production IS relevant, just not in the way it should be if you care about things like balance.

 

[Roxlimn]

I don't think the science bonus the AI gets on Apollo (I assume they get one, are these listed anywhere?) boosts the external trade route yields that much. The science yield from trade routes is based on the difference between the two cities' science. So even on Apollo your big city trade routes will profit the most from trading with new AI cities, and you get the most profit there if the AI science yield is low, so the AI bonus is detrimental. Your small cities would benefit from the AI bonus though because they'd be trading mostly with AI capitals or other major AI cities. So it probably evens out mostly. Also, the yields from trade routes flattens out quite quickly so once you start getting 10 or more beakers a route you have to increase the difference a lot for a couple of beakers; the AI bonus probably doesn't affect trade yields very much.

It's just that in general external trade routes yield a lot of science. I generally play 1 internal to 2 external and my routes make up about 40 to 50% of my science. If I went all external like Esperr is suggesting then I'd be making over half my science from trade routes.

You don't have to speculate. You can just start up a game on Mercury, play about a hundred turns and see how your external routes are like.

 

[Aeson]

Do you then disagree with Esperr's assessment?

I would say the issue of internal/external balance is the wrong issue. They both are OP. External are OP in regards to Tech beelines and short term economy. Internal for fast expansion and large military, and long term economy.

Long term economy doesn't matter though. I think that is more of a problem with the VCs themselves than with internal/external balance. Long tech beelines don't matter either, because Affinity 4 units are all you need to wipe the map.

Make the VC's something you have to play well for 300+ turns to trigger (without just slowing down game speed ... more to do and actually having opposition), and domination something that will be a tough slog rather than a given, and the balance between internal/external would be better in more situations.

Trade Routes would still need to be balanced with the rest of the economy of course. Which will slow down the VCs in at least some cases, helping with the internal/external balance.