Anyone else dislike knowing where other AIs are at start?

[darkskies]

I find it takes away some of the fun of exploration, unfortunately turning off staggered starts just reveals the AI locations right from turn 1.

 

[CaptainUnknown]

That's a good point, what I dislike is the camera movement and the fact I have to see the leader screen when they land. I'm more fine with the ship landing if they kept the civ unknown.

 

[darkskies]

Yeah I hit ignore as soon as I can, it gets tiresome very fast, reminds me of the AI's in civ5--"I've just become friends too" type screens, be nice if we could turn these off.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I find it takes away some of the fun of exploration, unfortunately turning off staggered starts just reveals the AI locations right from turn 1.

I missed that, turning off staggered starts. How do I turn it off on the next game?

Thanks

JosEPh

 

[Ryika]

Click on "Advanced Options" in the upper right corner of the screen, when creating a new game. There's an "Don't stagger starts"-Option.

 

[darkskies]

It's in the advanced options. When you set up a game look in the upper right and click on advanced options and you get a screen like in Civ5.

 

[bkwrm79]

"Other" AIs? I must conclude Terminators are among us and have been distracted from the killing John Connor thing by CivBE.

So far I'm ok with knowing where the others land... it makes sense that I'd know that much in the context of the game. Landing on a planet is going to be visible and noisy. In general though, I like to have things as customizable as possible. And having to greet everyone when nobody has anything to trade will probably get old quickly.

 

[markusbeutel]

I find it takes away some of the fun of exploration, unfortunately turning off staggered starts just reveals the AI locations right from turn 1.

Actually took me awhile to figure out what was going when that happened - at first was like, "but I haven't explored over there yet, wtf"

Would prefer not to know as well, the camera movement is jarring and takes me out of the game.

 

[darkskies]

"Other" AIs? I must conclude Terminators are among us and have been distracted from the killing John Connor thing by CivBE.

So far I'm ok with knowing where the others land... it makes sense that I'd know that much in the context of the game. Landing on a planet is going to be visible and noisy. In general though, I like to have things as customizable as possible. And having to greet everyone when nobody has anything to trade will probably get old quickly.

I saw that after I'd posted, I wondered if someone would mention it, yes I'm an AI run for your life...or maybe a person who can't type .

Well not everything makes, sense. For example we travel light years in space, but have to develop a tech before we can travel in deep water?
As to knowing where people land, we start with only one explorer and one city and NO satellites so unless they land very close by and someone happens to be looking it's unlikely we'd notice them, we might know someone comes down from the sonic booms and maybe even a general direction (but that could be hard to guess depending on their trajectory...a planet is pretty big), but a specific location probably not with tech we have brough with us. And really I'd rather have better game play. And it should be an option so people can play which ever way they want, it should be pretty easy to code: if no_location_reveal=0 then show_location_on_map that is just add the if statement to whatever code now cause the location to be displayed and put the option in one of the .ini files.

 

[CaptainPatch]

I have mixed feelings on the subject. On the one hand, I rather like the hide-and-go-seek of the earlier Civs. On the other hand, I have to suspect that with such advanced tech at their disposal, a grounded Colony would be able to note the arrival of a Colony-sized interstellar space ship and be able to track the trajectory to approximate where it set down. Add any kind of radio traffic generated by the new arrivals and it would be easy to identify just which expedition just arrived.

 

[Bezurn]

I agree with you captainpatch. With the higher starting tech level it makes sense to be able to see the incoming colony ship of other factions, know where they are, and be able to communicate with them from turn one. Its not like you explore every tile around them, you just know where their capital is. You still have to send some explorers over to their land to see if there are resources they have that you might want in trade or battle.

Having an option on game start called something like "radio silence" which disabled the meeting of other civs until you met them on land would be nice as well.

 

[CaptainPatch]

Having an option on game start called something like "radio silence" which disabled the meeting of other civs until you met them on land would be nice as well.

I suspect that some factions would just automatically be secretive just as a matter of course. So make the arrival notification somewhat randomized. Some sociable factions would be blasting fanfare of "We have arrived!", but some others would try to arrive in stealth mode. Those latter ones you won't learn about until you actually have a face-to-face encounter. (Which may be in the form of an ambush, all things considered.)

 

[kingsbury]

I think that the leaders spawning at various times is in part to distinguish Beyond Earth from Civ. Civ was about building an empire usually starting at the dawn of civilization, you shouldn't know what is on the other side of the world until later. Beyond Earth takes place in the year 2600 so it would be ridiculous to assume that humanity doesn't have satellites or something.

 

[Banners]

An annoying side-effect of this is that when the new Civs arrive and are spread out all over the planet, the scale in the mini-map in the top-right becomes tiny and unusable (whereas in Civ5 it would gradually scale as you explored) – unless there's a way of zooming it?

 

[Mustakrakish]

Yeah I have mixed feelings about this too.

I also think that continental surveyor should be by default for obvious reasons, while you choose other stuff in that list instead. I mean come on, we see others arriving, we just arrived on another planet ourselves, we beam up satellites right away if we find one in a pod. Of course it's a gameplay vs realism decision, and I think that continental surveyor is a nice compromise, but it should be there by default.

 

[Windscion]

Having started a game with three continents, covering 54%, 27% and 19% of the land, four of six teams start on the big, and one on each of the smaller. Not surprisingly, the AI with the 27% land continent got up a head of steam and I said, screw this. Since then, I prefer coastlines + no deferred starts so I can get a feel for whether or not there is any point in trying to play the current map before I spend 20-40 turns on it.

 

[darkskies]

Seems to me the colonists are there on a shoe string, not a Star Trek, budget. The only satellite that can be launched at first is for power not comm and it was found. They (or we) didn't even have enough of a budget to leave even one satellite in orbit. Things like tech to find radio signals-- are they really going to bring that instead of extra seeds, or personal or survival gear. But the game has lots of things where game play trumps "realism" and as it wouldn't be hard to implement having it both ways would be best.

I think CaptainPatch is right some would be secretive others not, but my view is still that this damages one of the nice things about having fog of war.

And to go one step further, if they have brought the equipment to immediately pinpoint other civs why didn't they bring a small micro imaging satellite that provides an immediate detailed view of the entire planet before they landed? Really if you get right down to it the fog of war thing makes no sense, they were in orbit before they came down why would there not be detailed terrain info already available? The answer is it's a sacrifice for game play.

 

[CaptainPatch]

Things like tech to find radio signals-- are they really going to bring that instead of extra seeds, or personal or survival gear.

I'm inclined to believe that most/all of the Colony expeditions were thinking they would be the ONLY human settlement on their chosen planet. Really. Just look at the many, many, many different destination choices that were available during setup. That _all 8_ factions sent their Colonies to this ONE planet is kind of freaky when you stop to think of it. Why would a Colony Director willingly choose to share a planet with any other Colony? I'm sure that they would have tried to be secretive about their destination, trying to avoid turning the journey into a 400 year race to see who has first dibs on what passes for prime real estate. Which turns out to have worked against them, because I'm sure the Directors would have chosen a different destination. "They're going there? Then it would be best if we went to this other place."

 

[Mustakrakish]

I'm inclined to believe they would indeed more likely choose to share a destination with other colonies, as it would increase their chances of survival... but since this is a game, that logic doesn't apply here.

 

[darkskies]

@CaptainPatch...I like the way you think. I was going to say something like that but it just wouldn't go from brain to fingers, I hope 200 years from now they have figured out how to stop this getting old thing . I was wondering why everybody settled on the same planet (well, of course this is a single planet at a time game-- actually when I first heard about BE I thought maybe that's what they would do, instead of only having to hunt for opponents on islands/other continents you'd have to go explore a bit of space--within a limited number of nearby systems--and use space ships to move your units there to defeat them, sort of adding a step up to ocean based games...then I saw this was based on Civ5 engine and figured that was a dream for Civ6/BE2).

I also want to say that while having the other colonies visible from the start is annoying to me, it's not devastating it would just be more fun for me if I didn't know where they were. Maybe once mods get going this will be possible.

Some of the things in this game are strange, we can have a "continent surveyor" that can only detect the edges of continents? Umm, come-on we've had satellites since the early 80's that could read a license plate or see a person picking their nose, we can send balloons with cell phone cameras on them quite cheaply to get high altitude photos, so again another game play over reality choice which is fine because if I want total realism well I wouldn't be playing a SciFi game I'd play a SciFact game .