Civilization: Beyond Earth fall update is now live!

[Manannan]

I think that that was kind of intended in CiV. As KrikkitTwo mentioned, the prevailing mentality is that at least with some UUs, you're supposed to beeline them and then dominate your era or win the game with them. I certainly think that that kind of mentality carried over to CivBE. It was probably unintentional, though. It's a bad fit for the new military setup.

I think UUs in CiV were supposed to be produced in mass when they became available, sure, but things like the old longswordsman rush from vanilla got hit by the nerf bat fast, which makes me think combined arms was their intention. Either way, I think we agree the current balance is a mess regardless of intention.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

After playing a few games I think the late game is still problematic, mostly because health is still a bit borked and the "Affinity from Tech" system can't be fixed with a single patch.

On the good side TR scale much better. Early on it is actually viable to keep stations around and if you nourish them to tier 3 they can be useful throughout the game. Late game TR are still a bit strong (worth like 3 pop a piece), but since you now only have 2 per city it isn't *that* bad.

As for units: I think Affinity units could use a 3rd upgrade level for the late mid game.

 

[Onylra]

the problem here, is that someone isn't bringing missile rovers to attack cities

which just shows why exactly Battlesuits were OP. Both better than the soldiers they 'replace' AND there wasn't a need for anti-city ranged units.

so yeah. Bring anti-city ranged units when you take on a 40 defense city.

Missile Rovers are still utterly worthless outside of their unique ability to blow-up an opponent's sats... the only reason I'll make any prior to them hovering (and getting good perks that make them not awful) is to clear a path for Orbital Lasers. That's it, and the only reason I'll build them after that is because of the broken Vindicator perk that allows them to carry around an Ambassador for utterly unstoppable firepower and mobility (balance!).

Why are they possibly the worst choice for besieging a city?

Their setup ensures that they must spend a turn inside the city defence-radius without being able to fire a shot - it's not optional, chances are they'll be one-shot by defensive fire before they can contribute anything to the attack.

They're prohibitively expensive, before the patch. And now even more so!

Rangers are better, no setup, cheaper, +30% defence against ranged attacks. The difference in base damage is marginal, and if you consider they can get an extra attack in while artillery would still be setting up, their 'DPS' is, in practical terms, probably greater.

I would literally use anything other than the artillery in this game to hit cities. Aff4 UUs are dead, and Missile Rovers are still full of suck - and, my cheesy strategy of building like 6 Soldiers and 6 Rangers immediately over every other thing, upgrading to affinity 2 and paying my neighbours a visit, has gotten much much better, since people are probably going to still be building a TD in 2nd city by turn ~50.

If you're the kind of player to get caught-out by something like the so-called 'Battlesuit rush', I've got at least half a dozen bush-whacking military strats that would body you by turn 150 at latest, and the aff4 rush wasn't even the best, since everyone does it after their first game, and if everyone's doing it, then it's back to stalemate.

I would have:

- increased starting STR of vanilla units

- reduced STR bonuses for promotions by at least 50%, maybe more

- Mildly nerfed affinity 4 UUs

- put a modest defensive structure in Pioneering, since apparently researching defensive techs early to defend one's self is just too much for most people too handle (not as though they are miles out of the way). "Why should I dedicate ~20 turns prior to turn 100 to making my empire defensible against basic military units?! Just nerf them into irrelevance instead".

 

[TLHeart]

I like the nerf to battle suits... no more build 3 or 4 battlesuits, walk up to the ai city, and take it... may loose one. Now that does not work on a city with a strength of 23 without more units, and will fail on a strength 40 city... Needs some supporting units, rangers, missle rovers.

Still getting a handle on the terrible trade routes now, but it is easy to abuse.... build that useless city in the tundra, snow, send your trade routes to it, and get massive production in all your cities... do not every build anything, or improve anything in your trade route city depot, it is there to boost the production in all of your cities... keep it as small as possible.

There is a point between two larger cities, that you can start to get food for one or both cities... sending the second trade route to equal size cities helps with food.

Health becomes a non issue mid game.

Energy does become a slight issue, but easy to overcome.

 

[Manannan]

Still getting a handle on the terrible trade routes now, but it is easy to abuse.... build that useless city in the tundra, snow, send your trade routes to it, and get massive production in all your cities... do not every build anything, or improve anything in your trade route city depot, it is there to boost the production in all of your cities... keep it as small as possible.

Oh wow, just trying this out; if there was ever proof that Firaxis failed miserably at balancing trade routes this patch this is it. Settle 2 garbage cities somewhere (I've got 2 next to a couple gold resources on hills in otherwise awful desert, seems to do the trick), keep them as small and terrible (I'm building almost nothing in them, just a clinic and working on a thorium reactor thus far) as possible and send all the internal trade routes from your real cities to them. Big yields to reward the player for settling trash cities, yea I don't think that was intentional.

So, how long until the next patch to try to fix trade routes AGAIN? The never-ending beta saga continues.

 

[Ryoga]

Oh wow, just trying this out; if there was ever proof that Firaxis failed miserably at balancing trade routes this patch this is it. Settle 2 garbage cities somewhere (I've got 2 next to a couple gold resources on hills in otherwise awful desert, seems to do the trick), keep them as small and terrible (I'm building almost nothing in them, just a clinic and working on a thorium reactor thus far) as possible and send all the internal trade routes from your real cities to them. Big yields to reward the player for settling trash cities, yea I don't think that was intentional.

So, how long until the next patch to try to fix trade routes AGAIN? The never-ending beta saga continues.

that sounds pretty terrible...

 

[Bkeela]

So, how long until the next patch to try to fix trade routes AGAIN? The never-ending beta saga continues.

I actually think the regular Firaxis staff are on Christmas holidays, and they got the junior office boys and janitors to implement this patch. When Sid gets back from his tropical island getaway, he'll put everything into rights. But that probably won't be until early February I reckon.

 

[Acken]

Oh wow, just trying this out; if there was ever proof that Firaxis failed miserably at balancing trade routes this patch this is it. Settle 2 garbage cities somewhere (I've got 2 next to a couple gold resources on hills in otherwise awful desert, seems to do the trick), keep them as small and terrible (I'm building almost nothing in them, just a clinic and working on a thorium reactor thus far) as possible and send all the internal trade routes from your real cities to them. Big yields to reward the player for settling trash cities, yea I don't think that was intentional.

So, how long until the next patch to try to fix trade routes AGAIN? The never-ending beta saga continues.

I'll question, again, if someone actually play their games in their team or has any talent as a player. And if not, why not beta test stuff.

Same things as initial release

 

[Roxlimn]

The yields don't change much. I think you're not seeing a good picture by doing that Manannan. Unlike prepatch, the value of the route doesn't change if you develop the city or leave it fallow. If anything, internal routes between developed cities are marginally better. The main difference is the split. Mature cities seem to have equal attractive power, so the yield is split between them, but the net overall value of the route is the same.

You're not gaining anything by intentionally gimping your cities other than crap cities.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The yields don't change much. I think you're not seeing a good picture by doing that Manannan. Unlike prepatch, the value of the route doesn't change if you develop the city or leave it fallow. If anything, internal routes between developed cities are marginally better. The main difference is the split. Mature cities seem to have equal attractive power, so the yield is split between them, but the net overall value of the route is the same.

You're not gaining anything by intentionally gimping your cities other than crap cities.

I wonder if that is the new calculation (at least for production)

City 1 receives

[(City1 output + City2 output)]* City1 output/(City1 output + City2 output)

where [] is a wierd semilogarithmic type transformation

That would make some degree of sense.

It doesn't seem to fit what they are doing for food though.

 

[Roxlimn]

Food appears to follow a similar process, but only the surplus is counted not the base food. This can result in seemingly contradictory results wherein a big city with lots of Biowells has little attractive or productive power, if the excess food is being used for Specialists or nonfood tiles. AgriDev'd cities reliably attract a lot of food, so it can be useful to AgriDev a city - its routes will almost always reverse (if it wasn't before) and create strong growth in the city, even at relatively large populations, so long as the production is strong.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

- reduced STR bonuses for promotions by at least 50%, maybe more

Promotions are 10% increase. You're saying they should be 5% or less???

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Promotions are 10% increase. You're saying they should be 5% or less???

he was probably talking about upgrades

instead of
10
14
24
48

more like
10
14
20
30

 

[Strickl3r]

I'll question, again, if someone actually play their games in their team or has any talent as a player. And if not, why not beta test stuff.

Same things as initial release

Very questionable, since one might doubt the ability of an actual gamer to take things like the vast majority of customers(casual just play for 20-60 hours, go on buy a new game) in consideration.

I mean deity/apollo difficulty is nice, but you cannot honestly expect that the game gets balanced around the highest difficulty, there is no existing thing like pro gaming or esport with this kind of games.
If you want to play a game for competition you really have to play starcraft, LoL or CS imo.

 

[Onylra]

he was probably talking about upgrades

instead of
10
14
24
48

more like
10
14
20
30

Yes! Thankyou, upgrades! That is what I intended. It might even be nice if these spasmodic raw power increases were abolished completely in favour of greater variety/selection of perks. I prefer interesting tactical abilities coming into play progressively than constantly smashing bigger and bigger numbers into each other all game.

Something I was already bored of by V to be honest, but I think it makes more sense there than it does here with smaller timescales and no particularly obvious reason why man with gun fires bullets and man with gun that fires colourful goo should be so glaringly disparate in strength.

 

[simcoast]

Ever since buying the game I get this terrible graphical issue where combat animation projectiles, etc. disappear after about 4-10 turns after either starting a new game or loading a saved game.
Nothing seems to resolve this besides reloading the game however the projectiles disappear again after a few turns.

I was hoping this patch would fix this but I can see now that the exact same issue is happening even after the patch.
Is anyone else seeing this?
It basically makes combat terrible as it looks so crap..

 

[stormtrooper412]

I kind of forgot this game existed because Brave New World

some of these fixes seem like a direct consequence of what people said here while others seem a bit forced and not good enough. Oh well, playing it will definitely show if that estimation holds. Thanks anyways

 

[Varelse]

I tried to continue a game I had started before the patch but now I am not able to gain any affinity levels anymore and neither are the AI players. Anyone else experiencing this?

 

[Acken]

Very questionable, since one might doubt the ability of an actual gamer to take things like the vast majority of customers(casual just play for 20-60 hours, go on buy a new game) in consideration.

I mean deity/apollo difficulty is nice, but you cannot honestly expect that the game gets balanced around the highest difficulty, there is no existing thing like pro gaming or esport with this kind of games.
If you want to play a game for competition you really have to play starcraft, LoL or CS imo.

So if they cant/dont want to do it themselves make the game tested by others and listen to them.
If they did it for CivBE (which seems to be the case with Maddjinn) either the testers have to be better/more numerous or they have to be listened to. I just cannot understand how the TR craziness of prepatch CivBE went under the radar (as other glaring issues like specialists, wonders, UI etc) unless they just dont care and value the backlash for crap design as being inferior to the cost of more testers or releasing beta versions. Questionable indeed.

 

[GhostSalsa]

TR patch:
There were so many good suggestions for TRs (yes, for nerfing them which they needed)... I don't think anyone asked for them to simply "become more confusing."

And prohibiting Trade Depot rushes? I agree, it's revoltingly crude. Another logic-breaking snag on a city growth progression that is completely divorced from sensible holistic in-game metaphor already. The devs could have just blindly put a pop scale TR count limit in and let it play out weeks ago. By the way I was first to suggest scaling city TR count to city pop in this forum, yes I'm great thanks.

Embedding the TR nerf into confusing math is terrible because:

-confusing math is terrible.

-everything about outpost-city development is nuts at this point (except that at least health actually slows growth per point now, thank god). namely, how are 1-pop cities still able to generate and send more hammers (with no inefficiency or loss!) than that same literal 1 citizen can actually get from working in a mine. There's a deep deep problem with the game metaphors when the "trade" system never actually represents trading anything. In CiV, hammers/food from thin-air was fine because you were eating opportunity cost thanks to the global TR limit. In BE, there's no real opportunity cost to internal TRs, you get them just for making new benefit targets - so when am I, the player, "trading" anything with this feature?

-streamlined city development is all jacked up now. Streamlined city development was good. A great step forward from CiV's turtle-favoritism. But streamlined city development should have been disentangled from obscure BE 1.0 mega-TR-yields before release and achieved instead through more stable and understandable game tweaks (like giving all building production a scaled boost based on how old a tech is, etc), precisely for the reason this patch brings to the fore: now city development is all jacked up because it's tied to nerfed TRs, and it will be all jacked up again when they re-nerf or un-nerf TRs later, and it will literally never be tuned in a decent matter until internal TRs are not the defining determinant of development for every new city. Since speed-of-returns on city development /empire expansion are probably the biggest single feature affecting game pacing and balance, city development needs to be disentangled from TRs. We'll be at release day forever with this game until that occurs.

-the devs haven't made any probable progress with defining for themselves and for us what their vision for TRs even is. I don't think anyone there has asked themselves, "Why did we make internal TR yields go both ways in the first place?" I mean why did they. It complicates the TR choices without adding anything to them; it is almost entirely the reason why internal TRs in 1.0 were so ubiquitously beneficial as to have been superfluous (just tank the whole system and replace with blanket +hammer +food base to every city). And why do they keep addressing every TR problem by hacking away at clearly understandable benefits (sending to Adept was good, sending to new cities was good) and just not simplify how TRs work and make internal yields one-way (no need for a restriction on mirroring). What was their goal for the complex system? What did they want to do different from CiV that prompted making trade routes so excruciating and inscrutable? Why are we in this strange purgatory. WHat are you doing to us Firaxis.

- - - - -

Health patch:
-Per-point production and growth penalties for unhealth were vital to making the whole system relevant and the metaphor meaningful: but easier access to early health was vital with it, to prevent making virtues irrelevant by turning the whole Virtue table into a default beeline fest - i.e. ignore everything except Prosperity left-side to reenable mindless expansion. Namely, every tree's level one bonus should be changed right now to a health bonus. All other health bonuses on the tree more or less fine as-is at that point.