An update from Firaxis Games regarding Beyond Earth feedback

[m15a]

Hence the penalty

I guess if the penalty is destroying the trade convoy, that'd be pretty safe. But I don't know how many people would actually use that feature.

 

[Tiedote]

I'm really hoping they'd release a patch that lets people to disable to DoF effect as soon as possible. I have a feeling that this might be causing a lot of the crashes. Even if it wasn't it would let them eliminate that as a possible cause.

 

[Pietato]

There are some basic grammar and spelling errors. I'm not surprised that QA missed major things like production notification.

I noticed those. Actually made me sadder than the constant intro crashes...

 

[Pietato]

Sounds like you won't be playing at all then.

Trade route management is far from the most urgent thing that needs to be addressed in this game. When they do address it, I expect they'll add a couple more sorting options, and that's it. It was the same way for the entirety of Civ V.

Trade routes might actually be the biggest issue that they can patch, other than crashes. And I have no idea what game you were playing, but it certainly was not Civ V. 8 trades routes end game Civ V does not even begin to compare to the horror of BE.

 

[Cyon]

So Fireaxis when will you release the new patch? When? When? When?

 

[LordBaal]

I guess if the penalty is destroying the trade convoy, that'd be pretty safe. But I don't know how many people would actually use that feature.

Why destroying the convoy? Relationships going sour with other players relative to the size of the commercial route, lost of progress of the commercial route with stations and unhappiness or unhealthy for your internal ones should suffice. Add perhaps a little energy penalty and the requirement of go back to their home cities to start a new trade route and you'll have something balanced.

 

[forty2j]

Trade routes might actually be the biggest issue that they can patch, other than crashes. And I have no idea what game you were playing, but it certainly was not Civ V. 8 trades routes end game Civ V does not even begin to compare to the horror of BE.

I just wasn't playing the "exactly 4 cities" game.

Given the way the trade route yields seem to fluctuate wildly in BE -- I've had routes go from +6 & +10 to 0 & +4 -- it's rather necessary to check them every x turns anyway. Putting the most recent at the top of the list and adding sort options for energy & science is the only gameplay-inducive way to approach this. Fire & forget will cause you to get far below-optimal yields without even knowing why - leading you to micromanage the darn things more frequently and without prompting. Automatic "most energy" or "most science" options are asking the game to play for you. Allowing to be changed as will is exploitive. Allowing to be changed whenever the vessel / caravan hits the origin city is 4x more messages, "The trade unit has returned to Central and may be reassigned" - you can pair that with something like the diplomacy interface, with a # showing how many trade routes are available to be reassigned, but ultimately I don't think you'd spend less work managing it. And I highly doubt they're going to reduce the # of routes per city.


Note to mods: Can we get the BE currencies into the "Smilies" list?

 

[Quineloe]

The trade route should be stopped at will when it's in your starting city. If it's not, you can tell it to stop when it gets home the next time. This will solve all your "exploit" worries and honestly, it was always really dumb to see your cargo vessel in your port, unable to stop it from getting killed the next turn by the barbarian galley you have no idea where that one suddenly came from.

As for the trade routes going sour, would be nice if the mechanics were explained for a change. I had a trade route today that yielded nothing at all both ways. Bug?

"Playing the game for you", well it is a remarkably boring concept right now, as already explained. It's just mindless clicks and you go for the best looking one anyways with no additional thought behind it.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

I think a lot of the problem is just that there are too many trade routes. If it was reduced to one then that's 1/3 the pop ups. Also with so many each one is less important. You're not voting to look through the list of routes looking for a one or two point difference when you are already getting +300 a turn from trade, the same way you carefully protect your one soldier early in the game but not your twelfth later on.
Also the fluctuations make it necessary to reevaluate. I've had internals drop to measure zero, and when new cities are build it makes for very good new trade destinations. Resources should have more of an influence again. That would stabilize it somewhat and also give us some idea of what is actually being traded.

 

[Ayeshteni]

The trade route should be stopped at will when it's in your starting city. If it's not, you can tell it to stop when it gets home the next time. This will solve all your "exploit" worries.

So instead of going through this process every 30 turns with a TR, you would do it every (depending on distance) 2-10 turns? You would have to know when it was in your city (manually keeping track of them all would be a knightmare) and all the notifications at the side of screen (if not manual) would drive you insane.

On a different note, would love to find out who is at war with who (has to be somewhere surely?) tired of playing Russian Roulette with Alliances.

Aye.

 

[Lunchmoney]

Can the trade route converstion be moved to it's own thread? Then delete this post.

 

[Fr33lanc3r]

As for the trade routes going sour, would be nice if the mechanics were explained for a change. I had a trade route today that yielded nothing at all both ways. Bug?

That's not a bug, it's a "feature." Actually, it is a feature, since the route yields are based off of a differential on stats between the two cities, if the two cities are nearly identical on the stats that you're "trading" the route will yield nothing.

 

[Pietato]

I just wasn't playing the "exactly 4 cities" game.

Given the way the trade route yields seem to fluctuate wildly in BE -- I've had routes go from +6 & +10 to 0 & +4 -- it's rather necessary to check them every x turns anyway. Putting the most recent at the top of the list and adding sort options for energy & science is the only gameplay-inducive way to approach this. Fire & forget will cause you to get far below-optimal yields without even knowing why - leading you to micromanage the darn things more frequently and without prompting. Automatic "most energy" or "most science" options are asking the game to play for you. Allowing to be changed as will is exploitive. Allowing to be changed whenever the vessel / caravan hits the origin city is 4x more messages, "The trade unit has returned to Central and may be reassigned" - you can pair that with something like the diplomacy interface, with a # showing how many trade routes are available to be reassigned, but ultimately I don't think you'd spend less work managing it. And I highly doubt they're going to reduce the # of routes per city.


Note to mods: Can we get the BE currencies into the "Smilies" list?

It does not matter how many cities you had in Civ 5, you still had the same number of trade routes to assign. They were also only added in the last expansion (before that trade routes referred to city connections), so no, they were not the same throughtout all of Civ 5, nor were they like what we have in BE. I beginning to doubt you actually played Civ 5...

The problem in BE is the sheer number and power of trade routes. They dwarf everything, and are very cumbersome. It needs to change.

 

[ohmydayum]

DIPLOMACY plzz.
- Global politics/relationships so we can see who's at war with who.
- Yell at AI for spreading miasma or attacking stations or launching sats.
- Might be just me but when I get them to declare war on others they just move their troops around and never attack.

 

[forty2j]

It does not matter how many cities you had in Civ 5, you still had the same number of trade routes to assign.

Venice.

 

[Karmah]

Fireaxis has to learn nowadays gaming standart

Patch small , patch often , patch regularily.

 

[Agent_TBC]

I have to admit I'm a little shocked that there hasn't been a patch yet. Not necessarily a balance patch as they need to make sure they don't make things worse, but at least a small hotfix for a few of the major bugs? I'm still unable to play fullscreen.

 

[Cyon]

Yeah and they haven't even said when it will come!

 

[Serenum]

Venice.

Venice didn't get more trade routes by expanding, it just got double the trade routes. But expanding had nothing to do with it.

 

[Mozzington]

Yeah and they haven't even said when it will come!

Tomorrow.