An update from Firaxis Games regarding Beyond Earth feedback

[tombakerwho]

Thinking about it a bit more, and playing through another game, I really want to see some other possible sources of affinity, such as capturing the first AI capital gives you supremacy. Or, building a wonder, such as an irrigation system, gives you purity. Or, domesticating a particular alien unit gives your Harmony (perhaps you need to build a special unit, or a wonder to do this, such as an nature preserve).

When going the peaceful route, and there is no more land available to settle, I just set my cities to build science mid-game, because there is nothing else to do. The current tech-based affinity design is too simple, there need to be some player decisions that force tradeoffs. The player needs to be asking, what route is the fastest way to Affinity 13? It needs to be a more complex answer, right now there is only one answer to that question, maximize your tech.

 

[Acken]

Thinking about it a bit more, and playing through another game, I really want to see some other possible sources of affinity, such as capturing the first AI capital gives you supremacy. Or, building a wonder, such as an irrigation system, gives you purity. Or, domesticating a particular alien unit gives your Harmony (perhaps you need to build a special unit, or a wonder to do this, such as an nature preserve).

When going the peaceful route, and there is no more land available to settle, I just set my cities to build science mid-game, because there is nothing else to do. The current tech-based affinity design is too simple, there need to be some player decisions that force tradeoffs. The player needs to be asking, what route is the fastest way to Affinity 13? It needs to be a more complex answer, right now there is only one answer to that question, maximize your tech.

That's actually a design point that I dislike in CivBE as expressed in my LP thread. I do not like having affinity points scattered in the tech tree. So I totally agree with you.

Sadly I doubt that's the kind of change you could expect in a patch.

 

[SnowFire]

Going to ramble a bit more here. It's not too surprising that the first patch appears to mostly be addressing quality of life / balance type updates, as they can be knocked out quickly, but I just want to say again: Firaxis, please make the affinities distinct.

I think the best way to go about this is by analogy to another game. Let's look at StarCraft II (and StarCraft). There's obviously a lot of mechanics there that don't really translate to talking about Beyond Earth. However, I want to focus on how SC2 manages to differentiate the races *even in domains that every race must have.* In other words, a core requirement of the game is that everybody can do it, yet each race does it differently.

Movement: Every race needs to be able to have speed / mobility.
Terran: Their units get short-term, activated speed boosts (Stimpack, Emergency Thrusters).
Zerg: Their units are just naturally the fastest, and they get even faster on "creep" they can place on the map.
Protoss: They teleport. Most of their units teleport in, and lots of them can just plain zap somewhere else at short range, and no other race can.

Cloaking: Every race can play with an invisibility mechanic.
Terran: Their stealth units must pay an energy cost to cloak; when their energy (=MP) runs out, they drop out of cloak, and they're at least somewhat deep in the tech tree.
Zerg: Every single Zerg ground unit can "burrow" which makes them invisible, but they (usually) can't move or attack, unlike the other two races. Burrowing is free and can be done whenever, even for the 1 unit that can take actions while burrowed (Infestors).
Protoss: Their cloaked units are always perma-cloaked. No energy cost, they can just move & attack normally. 1 unit can extend cloaking to allies. (Protoss cloaking is also rare and far up the tech tree.)

Workers: Every race has a worker unit for their economy.
Terran: SCVs can repair each other at the cost of minerals, are slightly more durable than other workers, and are required to build buildings.
Zerg: Drones *turn into* buildings on creep, including enemy creep.
Protoss: Probes aren't required to hang around when warping in new buildings, unlike SCVs / morphing drones.

Okay, this is a BE forum, why am I rambling about SC2. Well let's take the same comparisons of core concepts in Beyond Earth for Affinities.

Beyond Earth Production: Every affinity needs a way to build stuff.
Purity - Boreholes are +5 Production, +5% prod rate (or +5% energy). LEV Plants suck but are theoretically +6 production if you can spare 2 Floatstone (protip: no); Skycranes are +15% production rate if you can spare 4 Floatstone and offer a Floatstone boost.
Supremacy - Bioglass Furances are +2 Production, +15% prod rate w/ a Firaxite boost that costs Firaxite.
Harmony - Biofactories are +3 production w/ tiny random other boosts, but require Petroleum. Microbal Mines are +3 Production & +10% production rate. Costs Xenomass.

...except EVERY AFFINITY IS BASICALLY THE SAME. Okay, the one part Firaxis got right was tying maintenance to the "affinity-specific" resources (even if these buildings are a fairly bad investment of such resources at their current power level, even assuming a trade route nerf), but it turns out that every affinity can get a small flat boost and a percentage boost off a building, with the non-Borehole ones requiring stuff. Let's see some identity!

Example fix:
Purity gets an identity as the "industry" affinity. They will dig up this planet with Boreholes and use human voracity to grab everything. They keep their current set, but buff it so you feel a noticeable advantage - especially the buildings that require Floatstone. ("Awesome, everything builds so much faster, Purity is great!")

Supremacy is okay with Industry, although such physical concerns are a tad beneath it. Maybe flavor it such that Supremacy gets big flat bonuses, but no percentage bonuses, and their buildings are energy-expensive to maintain? Supercomputers who aren't "creative" but are consistent or some such excuse. I'd also argue elsewhere that Supremacy could gain an identity as the "orbital" Affinity that likes to launch lots of satellites, so maybe make Geoscaping / Orbital Fabricators earlier in the tech tree and require some amount of Supremacy to build them, and use that for production boosts.

Harmony gets zilch. (Sorry, but with there being non-affinity specific buildings that grant production, this isn't TOO bad.) Better take +production boosts off other building quests. MAYBE keep the +Chitin boost Biofactory, but make it more well-rounded - +3 Production, +2 Food, +1 production / +1 Energy from Chitin say. Cut Microbal Mine. If production is so core to the game that Harmony needs to keep something, make it give production in a way unique to it - not a copy of how Purity & Supremacy do it. A building that grants +Production if at least 3 tiles within a city's borders have Miasma, perhaps? A building that offers a big boost for constructing Harmony-affinity only units/buildings, and nothing for anything else?

The same comparison could be run for many other parts of the game - Food, Espionage, Military, Workers/Terraforming, Affinity-specific Wonders, etc. The parts of the game that *are* different often aren't different in meaningful ways - is there really that big of a difference between Call Worm & Dirty Bomb? Oh, at least there's flavor here, but they're both just "mess up an enemy city". If you can have flavor AND distinctive gameplay, that's even better.

Lastly, distinctive gameplay also inherently adds to the *conflict* inherent between the affinities. Purity is pro-terraforming, Harmony is anti-terraforming. Let's see some sparks! Give Purity special bonuses with Terrascapes (move it out of Prosperity?), give Harmony special bonuses for tearing Terrascapes down or sabotaging them. Supremacy is all about robots & AIs. Give them a special weakness to enemy intrigue that allows Purity spies to subvert or corrupt their systems, and Harmony spies to crash them. But let Supremacy have something neat from it - perhaps thanks to their buildings all being rebalanced to offer big flat bonuses, Supremacy can settle in harsh environments that'd scare off Purity or Harmony like Tundra and still get something from it, who cares about such piddling concerns as temperature. This is already in BE very minorly, but play up Supremacy gets Satellites, Harmony shoots them down with a Rocktopus or the like. Harmony... just give them SOMETHING cool with the aliens, and have Supremacy & Purity hate & fear them for it. They can also be part of revamping what Health means for each Affinity - Harmony is healthy because they adapt to the environment, Purity is healthy when they adapt the environment to humans, Supremacy doesn't care about health but shrugs off the downsides better 'cuz robots. Mechanically, give Purity cities big health penalties if they don't clear Miasma out once you adapt Purity, but bonuses for Terrascapes? Then do the same in reverse for Harmony, they get Health off Miasma and can now troll Purity by launching Miasmic Condensers? Supremacy, yeah, just shift the scale such that they hit low health / high health tiers at higher numbers then everyone else - say -40/-20/0/20/40 rather than -20/-10/0/10/20. Encourage you not to care as much about such trifling matters. (If you're worried this is broken, well, fix that elsewhere.)

Another option to add replay value: Make Affinity combinations something real. Domination & Contact don't require exclusively beelining one Affinity, so consider tempting people to build 2 Affinities at once. The different upgrades - Evolved Battlesuit, True Battlesuit, etc. - just plain don't matter enough. Create a building that requires 4 Affinity in each of *two* different affinities, and make it very powerful (and flavorful!). Get people tempted by it to maybe not beeline as hard as they do now, or at least offer something interesting for the Dom/Contact player. Maybe create a 5/5/5 building too, for the truly crazy player. You've just gone from 3 basic ways to play to 6 or 7.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Going to ramble a bit more here. It's not too surprising that the first patch appears to mostly be addressing quality of life / balance type updates, as they can be knocked out quickly, but I just want to say again: Firaxis, please make the affinities distinct.

<snip>

That's a long ramble. It's also a good ramble. I'd really like to see a more asymmetric version of affinity down the line, especially seeing how the game seems to try to do that in places... and than backs out of it by going for the "safe" design route.

While it's probably not exactly patchable, this would be amazing for an expansion-style DLC. Doing that could be Civ:BE's G+K.

 

[sprang]

Going to ramble a bit more here.

[snip]

I would play the $#!+ out of that mod.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

That's a long ramble. It's also a good ramble. I'd really like to see a more asymmetric version of affinity down the line, especially seeing how the game seems to try to do that in places... and than backs out of it by going for the "safe" design route.

While it's probably not exactly patchable, this would be amazing for an expansion-style DLC. Doing that could be Civ:BE's G+K.

I don't see why it wouldn't be patchable. It's just changing numbers. There are mods that do as much as that so why couldn't an official patch do it?

 

[Lord Tirian]

I don't see why it wouldn't be patchable. It's just changing numbers. There are mods that do as much as that so why couldn't an official patch do it?

In the end, everything's patchable.

I more mean that it might be outside the scope of patches alone as it's a rather big overhaul design-wise. In other words: expansions come with budgets, patches have smaller budgets.

Certainly, it'd be awesome if they did patches that size but looking at previous Civ games, design overhauls almost always came in conjunction with full expansions.

 

[Bandobras Took]

Thinking about it a bit more, and playing through another game, I really want to see some other possible sources of affinity, such as capturing the first AI capital gives you supremacy. Or, building a wonder, such as an irrigation system, gives you purity. Or, domesticating a particular alien unit gives your Harmony (perhaps you need to build a special unit, or a wonder to do this, such as an nature preserve).

The basic idea is good, but I do not think it to be a good idea to tie any one affinity to warmongering (Supremacy for capturing a capital). All affinities should have equal ties to war or peace. There's nothing about a cybernetic society that strikes me as the one most likely to go kill somebody else.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Thinking about it a bit more, and playing through another game, I really want to see some other possible sources of affinity, such as capturing the first AI capital gives you supremacy. Or, building a wonder, such as an irrigation system, gives you purity. Or, domesticating a particular alien unit gives your Harmony (perhaps you need to build a special unit, or a wonder to do this, such as an nature preserve).

I disagree with the first example of capturing a capital gives you supremacy points but I love your other examples. I do think that affinity points should be separated from researching techs and instead should be received from specific buildings, units, wonders, and tile improvements. This way, tech would still matter but in a more indirect way and the players' choices of what they build would directly affect their affinity. I think this would be way more logical since your affinity would be a representation of how you are playing the game. If you build a wonder like the bytegeist which is a futuristic AI controlled facebook, then it makes sense that you would get supremacy points. Or if you build terrascapes which are supposed to be a terran ecosystem transplanted to the new world, it makes sense that you would gain purity points. The points are a representation of your society.

 

[tombakerwho]

Agreed, the capital capture gives supremacy is probably a bad idea. I have played through an entire domination game, and it is distinctly different goal from Supremacy.

But, the thing that I started wondering was, why doesn't building a Mind Stem give you Harmony affinity? If necessary, crank up the production cost, so it is harder to do. Probably a decent choice for Supremacy would be building a specific robotic unit, maybe something like a great general/overlord unit, that can boost nearby CNDR units, if you choose to use it that way. The main point though, is that you need to spend production to gain affinity, not just race through the tech tree.

 

[liv]

I would also like to see the game going in the direction that snowfire is speculating about - where the affinities mean something more than they do now. If supremacy gets affinities from war, purity from terraforming and harmony from spreading miasma - or something like that - that would help with their distinctiveness maybe. Right now they all play the same.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Supremacy should not be conquest themed! They want supremacy over themselves, and their ability to survive. People are taking the names too literally. Harmony is not pacifist either. Their living in harmony with the planet not the other colonies. Also the harmony they strive for is sustainable civilization on this new planet. They're not trying to keep every animal alive until it dies of old age. They are more like high tech native Americans. No one can claim they don't stand for harmony with nature. They also ate animals and wore their skins.
Harmony is not space PETA!

 

[Bandobras Took]

I would also like to see the game going in the direction that snowfire is speculating about - where the affinities mean something more than they do now. If supremacy gets affinities from war, purity from terraforming and harmony from spreading miasma - or something like that - that would help with their distinctiveness maybe. Right now they all play the same.

I'm again failing to see why Supremacy should be the war affinity. Breeding an alien capable of crushing a city in its mandibles seems far more warlike to me.

 

[Sal]

[snip]

I would play the $#!+ out of that mod.

I agree, this is the most important thing the game needs apart from balancing - actual flavour for the affinities beyond graphics.

It would be so easy to tie purity points into terrascaping, beyond the one quest and I do think harmony should find it easiest to grow. Supremacy is more complicated - and interesting.

I would be inclined to tie each affinity to one of the main stats - so purity gets more hammers, harmony more food and supremacy more energy.

Also I think it would be cool if the different affinities had a general tech area in the web, so supremacy stuff is all bunched together around computing area, purity around industry and harmony around adaptation and biology. At the moment the affinity points seem to be just randomly slapped around the place, so the only difference in what I research is a few leaf techs but my basic path is the same.

 

[Breezin]

I must say without hyperbole, today is a day of infamy. Much like the shock and disappointment that the hippie followers in the Star Trek episode The Way to Eden must have felt after they found "Eden" to be a poisonous death trap, I too feel pain after my prediction for the BE patch to be released today failed to come true.

So here I sit drowning my sorrows in an rather unfulfilling can of Pepsi Max listening to the clickity-clack of the keyboard when I would rather be playing a patched version of BE.

Woe it is to be me.

 

[Manannan]

While I agree some actual differences in gameplay style between affinities would be nice I would suggest everyone be careful what they wish for. Even with every sponsor and affinity playing exactly the same the balance in the game is horrid, think how out of whack it would have been if there were more than one style of gameplay to account for.

 

[Roxlimn]

I would also like to see the game going in the direction that snowfire is speculating about - where the affinities mean something more than they do now. If supremacy gets affinities from war, purity from terraforming and harmony from spreading miasma - or something like that - that would help with their distinctiveness maybe. Right now they all play the same.

Also I think it would be cool if the different affinities had a general tech area in the web, so supremacy stuff is all bunched together around computing area, purity around industry and harmony around adaptation and biology. At the moment the affinity points seem to be just randomly slapped around the place, so the only difference in what I research is a few leaf techs but my basic path is the same.

The reason so many people find that the game plays the same way is because you guys do it yourself - your starting options, choices, and style of play is identical from playthrough to playthrough, so nothing changes.

If you change your tech path according to Affinity, the game plays differently.

How differently?

Well - think about not teching Bionics. I know, sacrilege. Just try it for one game. Bionics is a Harmony/Purity technology. You have no business going there for Supremacy unless you were just mechanically going for Biowell (which is a Harmony-theme tile) or Institute (Purity-theme building).

Don't pick up the easy adds, either. No picking up Alien Biology for Worker Immunity to Miasma. Yes, you're going to lose Workers all game long. That's different, right?

With neither Farms nor Biowells to spike food, a Supremacy playthrough is radically different from a Purity or Harmony one.

Lastly, distinctive gameplay also inherently adds to the *conflict* inherent between the affinities. Purity is pro-terraforming, Harmony is anti-terraforming. Let's see some sparks! Give Purity special bonuses with Terrascapes (move it out of Prosperity?), give Harmony special bonuses for tearing Terrascapes down or sabotaging them. Supremacy is all about robots & AIs. Give them a special weakness to enemy intrigue that allows Purity spies to subvert or corrupt their systems, and Harmony spies to crash them. But let Supremacy have something neat from it - perhaps thanks to their buildings all being rebalanced to offer big flat bonuses, Supremacy can settle in harsh environments that'd scare off Purity or Harmony like Tundra and still get something from it, who cares about such piddling concerns as temperature.

All the affinites Terraform. Harmony does it one way, Purity another, Supremacy yet another. Terrascapes is actually a pretty bad deal for anyone other than a hardcore Purity-Prosperity player.

How?

If you're playing hard Supremacy with all the techs and boosts, you don't care whether it's Tundra or Desert. You're going to Generator the hell out of it anyway, so the base tile yield doesn't matter that much. They all defaut to 1 food 1 other or 2 food anyway. It doesn't matter that much. If you're Purity, you want flatlands for your Vertical Farms. Harmony ideally wants flatlands for farming, but they can go with the flow. They kind of care what the underlying tile is like, though.

Beyond Earth Production: Every affinity needs a way to build stuff.
Purity - Boreholes are +5 Production, +5% prod rate (or +5% energy). LEV Plants suck but are theoretically +6 production if you can spare 2 Floatstone (protip: no); Skycranes are +15% production rate if you can spare 4 Floatstone and offer a Floatstone boost.
Supremacy - Bioglass Furances are +2 Production, +15% prod rate w/ a Firaxite boost that costs Firaxite.
Harmony - Biofactories are +3 production w/ tiny random other boosts, but require Petroleum. Microbal Mines are +3 Production & +10% production rate. Costs Xenomass.

...except EVERY AFFINITY IS BASICALLY THE SAME. Okay, the one part Firaxis got right was tying maintenance to the "affinity-specific" resources (even if these buildings are a fairly bad investment of such resources at their current power level, even assuming a trade route nerf), but it turns out that every affinity can get a small flat boost and a percentage boost off a building, with the non-Borehole ones requiring stuff. Let's see some identity!

This is wrong.

Boreholes not requiring Strategic Resources is huge. It means you can basically spam it everywhere and get all your cities producing a fair bit of hammers. LEV Plants are for your core production facilities - you're not supposed to spam them but use them to generate hammer differentials to spike your TR outputs. Skycranes boost core production facilities more, but require a hard choice between production and UUs. You actually don't need Floatstone that much for units as Purity. You can just rely on your Battlesuits and Aegis.

Supremacy is VERY Firaxite hungry. Everything requires Firaxite and there's never enough of it around, even when going with Might. This is hard enough that you really don't want Bioglass Furnaces except in your Firaxite-heavy sites, which should also ideally double as your production facilities. In cases where they don't coincide, it's probably better to just take the extra +4 Firaxite resources. This means that Supremacy is generally really hard up for hammers.

Biofactories are a die roll. It's not a given that you'll end up with Petroleum at all, and those sites aren't necessarily production-strong. Microbial Mines are late game which conflicts them with the Resource-heavy Xenotitans. Like Supremacy, Harmony only has the one strategic resource, and there's also usually not that much of it, but it's not as hard to find as Firaxite. By far, my Harmony production in games depends on finding a lot of Xenomass sites. Those are 3 hammers apiece, at least, plus food and energy. If you can get three of those in a city and get some Manufactories going, that's where you're getting hammers.

It's not enough to just look at the files and say they're the same. They're kind of the same, but not really.

 

[tombakerwho]

The reason Supremacy gets linked to militancy is that you literally send military units through the emancipation gate back to earth, which does not sound very friendly. I think the idea is that you are going back to earth to fix it, but it is a bit unclear. If you sent back a non-military unit, such as an AI, or some sort of perfected human hybrid, then it would not seem so aggressive.

That would actually be pretty cool, IMO, gaining supremacy points through constructing special AI units, particularly if you could use those units to benefit your Civ in some way, before the emancipation gate is constructed. For example, you could place it in a city, and then boost science or production capacity for that city. Or, you put it next to military units, where it could boost combat ability, for either defense or offense, similar to a great general, but not have any fighting ability itself.

 

[Roxlimn]

You mean like a Node and a TacNet satellite, both of which are easy gets for Supremacy?

 

[tombakerwho]

Similar, but I meant a mobile, non-combat unit that you send through the gate, not a tile improvement or satellite. It just seems odd to send military units through the gate, unless the intent is aggressive. It is not clear to me whether you are sending back units to conquer earth, or to help it.

You could also gain supremacy points from building nodes, but I would prefer something other than tile improvements, preferably something associated with hammers. Or, something similar to the Civ5 archaeologist. As long there is a non-tech based way to gain affinity, so that the player is forced to juggle a lot of different decisions to gain victory, it would improve the game, IMO.

The affinity/tech issue may be a very deliberate decision. I can see how it would be easier to code the AI to be more competitive with the player, given such a simple system. I just don't think it is a "fun" decision.