Beyond Earth wishlist

[Catalytic]

Terraforming

This was an idea that allowed SMAC to transcend traditional tile improvements:
- Raise and lower terrain to affect weather patterns
- Boreholes - highly efficient resource production, highly destructive ecology (allows meaningful choicemaking)
- Drill to Aquafer - create rivers
- Condensers - Make surrounding tiles better

Make all terrain valuable

A key frustration of mine is variation in terrain potential in Civ5. Desert and snow both have zero base output. Tundra produces only 1 food. This needs to be offset by late-game potential to reward you for acquiring/getting stuck with this land in the early game. Jungles, when improved give science and gold for example. You leave them in place for future returns.

If there's snow, make a mid- or late-game tech that gives access to something of strategic value, same with a desert-type. If it's good early, let that dominate the early game. If it's bad early, give us some incentive to fight over the scraps later in the game. Otherwise, we get players just chain re-rolling to find a decent map.

Embrace the Ocean

One of my favorite aspects of SMAC was the way the oceans could be harnessed. Civ5:BNW's trading scheme made coastal cities incredibly valuable. I would like to see a way to get more out of the oceans than a spot to stuff extra population. Kelp farming and tidal harnesses were a great idea. Fish farming could be an alternative food source idea. Off-shore drilling might be an idea for production resource improvement.

1UPT: Modified

Personally, I'm a fan. I'm a fan of everything but the AI's inability to move and attack well strategically. I suggest a compromise: A four-corner display per tile
- Bottom right: Ground military
- Bottom left: Ground civilian
- Top right: Atmospheric flier/planes/"floatships"
- Top left: Orbital flier/satellites
Each one of these would occupy its own believable space. Management by clicking on the unit icons to bring the desired unit to the fore.

Pros:
- Allows flexibility to include exiting design space: airships, levitating vehicles, helicopters, satellites as well as the standard army and naval fare
- Restrictions retain strategic element. Need specific abilities to attack cross-tier (AAA for ground to air, etc)
- Clean interface would allow easy strategic assessment and an intuitive UI. Player must be able to figure it out quickly and use it easily.

Cons:
- There's always the risk of too much firepower concentrated in one tile (stack of doom)
- One unit, one tile is preferable to having to "read" up to four icons per tile to assess the battlefield for simplicity

*An alternative would be to handle orbital units as a separate UI layer as in SMAC and use a triangle:
- Bottom right: Ground military
- Bottom left: Ground civilian
- Pinnacle: Atmospheric flier/planes/"floatships"

Military Upgrade Tree

This is essential. It is infuriating to navigate this tree in Civ5. Ranged units morph to melee and back. Upgrades become useless for some units. It's a mess. One a unit line is created to occupy a niche on the battlefield, it needs to be consistent. The concept of obsolescence needs to go away. Always offer an upgrade in the same path.

Ground melee core
Ground fast-mover melee
Ground range
Ground fast-mover range
Ground seige
Air versions of all of the above?
Counter units?

Costs should reflect additional abilities. Archers are much better than warriors and should cost a premium for range. Range + speed should incur additional build cost. Keshiks are dominant in Civ5 and entirely too cheap because of the multiplicative effects of the additional abilities. If you want to build in a scout line, or a skirmisher line, or whatever battlefield niche it is, the upgrade path needs to be clear and the costs appropriate to the ability.

Casus Belli System

Nothing ruined BNW for me more than the warmonger penalties. Cultural victory is easy. You build 4 tall cities. You rush to Renaissance, build key wonders, build enough military to hold off the AI and win in 300 or so turns. My last 5 games I never even reached Atomic Age. Why? Because warmongering only slows you down. You sacrifice production and for what? The moment you win you're penalized by crippling unhappiness and by having every other AI hate you. If you war, you get pounced on and you lose all your trade income. Penalties are too high, so I don't do it. So, I basically ignore half of the game because of the bad diplomacy implementation.

You must be able to have a non-self-crippling war. Casus belli is required. Key conditions:
-Attempt diplomatic resolution (ask to stop -> denounce) for stronger case
-Applies to: spying, terrain-altering (Civ5: citadel-bomb, SMAC: Terraform), religion
-Justified self-defense: enemy stacks their army on your border, enemy declares war (no penalty for first city captured)

 

[boghog]

What there shouldn't be:

Money
It's unrealistic on a space frontier to rushbuy anything. There are no mercenaries you can just hire. And what would you accept as currency in such a situation anyway? No, trading should just be commodity for commodity: this resource for that one, this piece of territory for your GDR blueprints etc.

Casus Belli
Isolated on an alien planet you wouldn't really give a rat's arse about public opinion. Let's ditch the idea of "being at war" and "not being at war". I steal your worker? You might find it adequate to destroy a couple of improvements, or to kill a few of my units, or to take me out completely to rid yourself of a threat. But you might also find that all that isn't a worthwhile use of your resources at the moment and ignore me. Call it permawar if you like, I think it should allow more differentiated and thus interesting gameplay.

Moderator Action: Please mind your language.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I'd agree with the money... It should be replaced with "culture"
... ie propaganda/social control... You could spend it to work your population harder without them getting unhappy.

 

[VSorceress]

Weather – As I recall, the AC development team once confessed in an interview that the weather model had not met the designers’ objectives and had been retained in the final release largely as a curiosity. Still, it added enormously to the sense that players were receiving radically new content and gameplay options.

If I could add to this, please at least have some sort of atmosphere. I'm disappointed at the screenshots because it seems so... dark. While it is indeed a sci-fi game, it doesn't mean that the planet has to look like the moon with no atmospheric layers/gasses. If you are going for plausible realistic scenario, any planet humans that would inhabit another planet would have similar qualities of earth, I don't think the sky would be forever night.

If we could choose the type of atmosphere into the load out, that would be interesting... We could have a blue sky like earth, or a red-haze one like on Mars, and for those who don't want any - have an option for that too.

 

[Lyoncet]

Casus Belli
<snip>

Seems to me like 4X games should be about encouraging multiple styles of play instead of actively artificially stymying them. Just my opinion though.

 

[manu-fan]

Be as close to Civ 5 in Space as possible.

That is, lots of mechanics the same, or similar to Civ 5. Tech Tree becomes Tech Web - fine. Maybe Religion becomes Conglomerate influence or something. But all the mechanics of building units, improving the land, and conquering our enemies should feel very familiar.

IMHO of course.

 

[KevinLancaster]

If I could add to this, please at least have some sort of atmosphere. I'm disappointed at the screenshots because it seems so... dark. While it is indeed a sci-fi game, it doesn't mean that the planet has to look like the moon with no atmospheric layers/gasses. If you are going for plausible realistic scenario, any planet humans that would inhabit another planet would have similar qualities of earth, I don't think the sky would be forever night.

If we could choose the type of atmosphere into the load out, that would be interesting... We could have a blue sky like earth, or a red-haze one like on Mars, and for those who don't want any - have an option for that too.

If you look at the higher-resolution shots in the announcement post sticky'd here, the game isn't as dark.

Seems to me like 4X games should be about encouraging multiple styles of play instead of actively artificially stymying them. Just my opinion though.

I don't think CBs will add much. The end goal is still war. Those moments in Europa Universalis where you don't have CBs on anyone that you could reasonably take on are amazingly boring at times. Civ 5's implementation of a badboy system in the warmonger penalty is hilariously poor though, I'll give you that in reference to your first post, but it was their first implementation of one as far as I know and it wasn't that much better in EU3.

 

[Catalytic]

Money
It's unrealistic on a space frontier to rushbuy anything. There are no mercenaries you can just hire. And what would you accept as currency in such a situation anyway? No, trading should just be commodity for commodity: this resource for that one, this piece of territory for your GDR blueprints etc.

SMAC took the step of defining energy as currency. Currency, fundamentally, is anything that's sufficiently rare to have value that people are willing to accept as a medium of trade. Energy is a valuable commodity, it's available in space, and could be traded as a commodity. I like the idea.

I disagree on the rush buying thing though. It's been a fundamental part of the game for years. It represents a choice: time for resources. SMAC offered you increasingly small charges the closer you got to completion. It was in your advantage to chop a few turns off of your build time. Civ5 requires you to pay the full price up front. Not a bad deal for units. A waste on buildings. Again, it makes an interesting strategic choice. After all, what's the point of having such a currency in the game if there's no way to spend it?

Casus Belli
Isolated on an alien planet you wouldn't really give a rat's arse about public opinion. Let's ditch the idea of "being at war" and "not being at war". I steal your worker? You might find it adequate to destroy a couple of improvements, or to kill a few of my units, or to take me out completely to rid yourself of a threat. But you might also find that all that isn't a worthwhile use of your resources at the moment and ignore me. Call it permawar if you like, I think it should allow more differentiated and thus interesting gameplay.

The issue here is how the AI reacts to that attitude. In Civ5 if you play like that, you become a pariah very quickly. No one will trade with you. If they do, the trades are awful. And they're very likely to ally up and attack you. You're penalized for aggressive play.

Having a Casus Belli system allows you to justify your war and mitigate the AI diplomatic penalties if the justification is strong enough. If you just declare out of the blue, sure, you get the penalties. But if your provocateur has stolen your tech, stolen your land with citadels, forward settled on you, converted your people and tries to intimidate you by parking their army on your borders, you should be justified in retaliating. Even moreso if you've let things slide, then asked them to stop, then denounced them. The AI should understand that the provocateur is the bad guy, not you. It's in the interests of the AI to properly assess it's opponents' aggression. Right now it doesn't consider provocation. It should.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The issue here is how the AI reacts to that attitude. In Civ5 if you play like that, you become a pariah very quickly. No one will trade with you. If they do, the trades are awful. And they're very likely to ally up and attack you. You're penalized for aggressive play.

Having a Casus Belli system allows you to justify your war and mitigate the AI diplomatic penalties if the justification is strong enough. If you just declare out of the blue, sure, you get the penalties. But if your provocateur has stolen your tech, stolen your land with citadels, forward settled on you, converted your people and tries to intimidate you by parking their army on your borders, you should be justified in retaliating. Even moreso if you've let things slide, then asked them to stop, then denounced them. The AI should understand that the provocateur is the bad guy, not you. It's in the interests of the AI to properly assess it's opponents' aggression. Right now it doesn't consider provocation. It should.

Regarding that...
I would like the only "Hard" diplomacy modifiers to work through things like Happiness.
ie if you do something "bad" other empires (including human empires) will get additional happiness for attacking you and additional unhappiness for making a treaty with you.

So all the diplomatic manipulation of the AI can be done to the human player as well.
(and the AIs 'decision factors' can be hidden just as well as a humans... but you would know how much unhappiness/happiness ANY empire human or AI stands to gain by attacking you/trading with you)


As for Currency... I REALLY hope they don't have energy as currency... that was bad.

I'd prefer
Food (from land)
Production (from land)
Culture (from buildings/pop)
Science (from buildings/pop)

and some Special Resources.

With a possibility to store some production for later use/transfer to another civ/city
and culture used to 'rush buy' (to a limited degree)

 

[Tremonti]

What there shouldn't be:

Money
It's unrealistic on a space frontier to rushbuy anything. There are no mercenaries you can just hire. And what would you accept as currency in such a situation anyway? No, trading should just be commodity for commodity: this resource for that one, this piece of territory for your GDR blueprints etc.

Not if the game spans over 2000 years. People would establish all sorts of currencies. Also, if a turn equals five-ish number of years, rushbuying makes a lot of sense. See it as speeding things up by spending more than the optimal amount of resources (gas or whatever).

 

[KevinLancaster]

Rush buy I feel should have some sort of penalty. I don't know about the gameplay balance effects (I never used it), but I remember how in Civ3 you could draft units with less health than actual built ("trained") units. Maybe this could be for buildings as well, half as effective until you upgrade them?

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I forgot to say in Civ3 you needed the right type of governments and it also lead to a happiness penalty.

 

[Catalytic]

Rush buy I feel should have some sort of penalty. I don't know about the gameplay effects (I never used it), but I remember how in Civ3 you could draft units with less health than actual built ("trained") units. Maybe this could be for buildings as well, half as effective until you upgrade them?

You could always have rush bought units take a small attack power penalty to represent them being green/inexperienced soldiers. Civ5 used 15% increments for it's upgrades, an equivalent 15% debuff could be applied til a certain number of battles were survived.

Another penalty option would be to have it cost a unit of population to do to simulate conscription's effects on the local economy. You'd get units quickly, but at the cost of population which would have to grow back. You'd do it in an emergency, but you might not wish to if you're building up for an opportunistic war.

 

[Axis Kast]

The terrain, I think, must be dynamic. Deserts should gradually intrude upon deforested flatlands. Extensive terraforming, especially the drilling of boreholes or similar activity, should destroy, or at least deform, local biomes. It would also be interesting to see periods of heavy seismic and volcanic activity shaping coastlines and the like.

What about damming or diverting rivers? Reducing sea levels through massive industrial projects?

One of the outstanding factors that I think hampered reception of Civilization V was the lack of a robust set of mods and scenarios. Civilization V grasped at a fix with the Africa scenario, but that didn&#8217;t go far enough. Civilization II set the bar very high with both Conflicts in Civilization and Fantastic Worlds. Would it be possible to include a scenario editor, akin to what we saw in both Civilization II and Alpha Centauri?

Some folks blame the lack of a good mod experience on the delayed release of the SDK. Personally, I think the difficulty of developing unit graphics was the chief limitation.

As a follow-on question, does anybody know for sure whether the game designers read these threads and incorporate community suggestions?

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The terrain, I think, must be dynamic. Deserts should gradually intrude upon deforested flatlands. Extensive terraforming, especially the drilling of boreholes or similar activity, should destroy, or at least deform, local biomes. It would also be interesting to see periods of heavy seismic and volcanic activity shaping coastlines and the like.

What about damming or diverting rivers? Reducing sea levels through massive industrial projects?

One of the outstanding factors that I think hampered reception of Civilization V was the lack of a robust set of mods and scenarios. Civilization V grasped at a fix with the Africa scenario, but that didn’t go far enough. Civilization II set the bar very high with both Conflicts in Civilization and Fantastic Worlds. Would it be possible to include a scenario editor, akin to what we saw in both Civilization II and Alpha Centauri?

Some folks blame the lack of a good mod experience on the delayed release of the SDK. Personally, I think the difficulty of developing unit graphics was the chief limitation.

As a follow-on question, does anybody know for sure whether the game designers read these threads and incorporate community suggestions?

Well I do think that some degree of dynamic terrain is probably in since terraforming is an issue.

(and it was in the original AC)

I would definitely like to see alien jungles competing with planted grasslands (and actions that other factions take affecting it the balance... ie the more Purist Terraforming there is the worse the aliens will do...and the more Harmonic alien hybridization is released the better the aliens will do.

 

[wenamon]

My biggest request would be the story elements that really drew alot of us AC fans in.
If anyone else recalls, Michael Ely, the multimedia producer, wrote a piece by piece story about the journey to Alpha Centauri. This story was released a chapter at a time on a weekly basis during the development of the game and kept many of us, that were desperate for information at that point, quite enthralled.
There was even a chance for forum members on the official firaxis website to have their names enshrined in the tale. This was a really neat feature that I was fortunate enough to be selected for.
Anyways, here is a link to the story. I doubt firaxis will do something like this for CBE, but here's hoping!
http://web.archive.org/web/20080519181832/http://www.firaxis.com/smac/assets/journey.txt

 

[Traejun]

Be as close to Civ 5 in Space as possible.

That is, lots of mechanics the same, or similar to Civ 5. Tech Tree becomes Tech Web - fine. Maybe Religion becomes Conglomerate influence or something. But all the mechanics of building units, improving the land, and conquering our enemies should feel very familiar.

IMHO of course.

Meh, Civ V would not be a good model for C:BE. The mechanics simply don't line up. Religion should be replaced with something like societal/governmental philosophy - i.e. socialism, collectivism, utopia, etc...

Culture doesn't seem to have any place here, but we shall see how its implemented.

As far as money - which is mentioned in this thread - I don't believe a "credits" system would be out of the question. It's too far fetched to believe that humanity taking its first major steps off Earth would do away with currency as a means of commerce and valuation of goods and services. Credits should be "currency," but could be described differently than the type of currency we're used to. This is both of realism and ease off understanding.

 

[dashwinner]

Meh, Civ V would not be a good model for C:BE. The mechanics simply don't line up. Religion should be replaced with something like societal/governmental philosophy - i.e. socialism, collectivism, utopia, etc...

Culture doesn't seem to have any place here, but we shall see how its implemented.

As far as money - which is mentioned in this thread - I don't believe a "credits" system would be out of the question. It's too far fetched to believe that humanity taking its first major steps off Earth would do away with currency as a means of commerce and valuation of goods and services. Credits should be "currency," but could be described differently than the type of currency we're used to. This is both of realism and ease off understanding.

To add to this, I think the fact that it will already be using the same engine makes it resemble CIV enough wether we like it or not. This is an opportunity for the devs to move away from some of the systems that restricted the game and explore new possibilities. The 1UPT, city, map, etc is all gonna stay the same. The rest should be different; they should learn from the failed points of CIV to make something unique in its own right.

 

[poom3619]

There should be no rushbuy of "Wonder", I consider it an exploit. I don't want money (or energy) become deciding factor of this. It's kind of unfair. (Mostly because I often rushbuy secret project when AI going to finish a secret project I want)

 

[Axis Kast]

Again, does anybody know for sure that Firaxis monitors this thread? They mentioned the major contributions of the fan base in helping to design concepts for Alpha Centauri. I've been wondering whether they still use "crowd-sourcing" and if there are confirmed cases of "wish list" items translating directly to gameplay elements.

 

[TravisFreeman]

How about a continue last game button on the main menu. Most common thing I do when loading Civ V Single Player> Load Game>sort by recent>load game. That's just bad UI.