First impressions from one game

[gamemaster3000]

Updated 11/14 after a few more games. Biggest thing now is that I want more boats! If you play an archipelago map pretty much you just build gunboats and destroyers the whole game because they're so good! It's a water-themed expansion where you basically build 2 boats! (Plus some carriers, I don't think subs are all that wonderful.)

Big Likes:
--I feel I can finally see under the hood of the diplomacy system, something that I wish had existed since Civ 1. Although it takes some of the mystery out of the game, the gains in understanding overwhelm the loss. Seeing my fear level at 1 (even when I think my army is decent) makes the AI's war declarations way more sensible.

--Diplomatic Capital. So much better than worthless "favors" and some Very powerful bonuses to being buddies with someone. Again, the fact that I can see What the AI's want and Why they are happy/angry with me is so nice after a lifetime of just having them declare on me for apparently no reason.

--The changes to aliens. I haven't seen all the biomes, but a few weaker aliens in the beginning seems more fitting.

--I can move the AI's poorly-placed cities

--With so much more room stations don't always land in the worst possible locations

Like:
--Exploring has never been more fun or profitable. Artifacts give a big boost to wanting to get out there and explore the world, on top of adding depth to what to build for your first few units.

--The way the affinities are more spread out

--The new hybrid affinity units

--The new support abilities

--The fact that trade route spam is no longer 99% of research

--Geothermal has a point in being a resource for wonders

--Artifacts seem all right, definitely make exploration more important and interesting

What I wanted to see more of:
--Cool affinity naval units. Really surprised there aren't more boats in an ocean-themed game.

--Cool affinity air units (the flying alien aircraft carrier is pretty good, but new planes would've been cool too)

--Another ground to orbital strike unit

--Better wonders, although there has been improvements from vanilla

--Games lasting longer! All the cool stuff in the outer rings I never get to before someone wins.

--More things I can spend political capital on I didn't realize you could purchase things with political capital like you can with energy.

What I don't like:
--Still a lot of bugs, I got hit with the science overflow one where my beakers went negative

--Can't negotiate terms of peace

--Can't be allies without having a defensive pact. There are lots of examples IRL of governments that get along well and trade a lot, but wouldn't necessarily go to war immediately for

--I can't use my political capital to negotiate AIs declaring war

--Phasal Teleporters and Orbital Lasers IMO should have to be in orbit for a turn before use

--I think you should only be able to rush buy one building per turn, and maybe not defensive buildings at all


Not sure yet:
--Resource trading from trade routes. Seems like they're too easy to get now. Don't think it's intended that I can build the special buildings from resources a city is getting through trade, either.

Haven't seen:
--All the new biomes

Overall I give it an 8 of 10, definitely a solid upgrade, definitely worth $30, but missing a few things completely and needs more polish on bug fixes. If they fix all the bugs it'll be a 9.

 

[Dargov]

I agree with all your likes- just as Gods and Kings before it, it really takes the game up to the next level, changing a solid, but not brilliant game into a work of Art.

It still doesn't compare well to Civ 5:BNW, but BNW is just a masterpiece, 10/10 game. I don't really feel its a fair comparison.

The bugs are a shame, thankfully I haven't run into any.

I think with taking the "making AI's declare war" out of the equation is actually a good decision. It's just been part of the higher end of civ strategy for so long, it seems odd without it.

Possibly I wonder if they considered making deals such as this possible only at Allied level.

I was a little surprised when I discovered that the intent was that you could "drag" an ally into a war with you. The "Defensive Pact" seemed logical- you must come to an allies aid if they are attacked, it seems logical that you would be pushed to sanctioned level against an AI if your Ally declared war on them, but not outright war.

Rushing buildings, one per city per turn, makes sense. But not being able to rush defensive building doesn't. Rush buying defensive structure is realistic-it makes sense in game and in RL. Remember, to make it a really effective defensive city, you would need multiple defensive buildings. So a limit of once per turn deals with the issue of preventing the "instant militarisation" of a city.

And not being allies without having a defensive pact- that is what Cooperating level is. Ok, you can't maximise the bonuses without being allies, but being forced to go to war if they are attacked is exactly what an alliance is about, and it makes total sense in gamist terms simply because it a cost/benefit analysis. Which is what Civ is all about.

 

[Lord Tirian]

It reminds me a lot of G+K, too - just as back then, it turned it into the game it should've been on launch.

Let's hope that CivBE gets the same patching support and BNW-equivalent to turn it into a classic.

BNW brought people in that never played 4X games, I'd like to see this happening with CivBE, too, pulling in people that just didn't care for Civ5's historical flavour.

Sent from my phone, please excuse terseness and typos.

 

[EpicWestern]

I have mixed feelings about rising tide. I like a lot of the ideas but for many of them the execution is poor.

Examples:

Awesome idea: Hybrid affinity units
Poor Execution: Mostly slow land based units that don't get used in water heavy maps

Awesome idea: New diplomacy system
Poor Execution: Still hard to tell what proposals will be agreed upon. There are also too many "traits" to follow and its unclear to what extent and in what timeframe you need to follow them.

Awesome idea: Artifacts
Poor Execution: Its annoying to have to try different combinations to get the best bonus.

So I guess the good news is that these seem to be mainly balance and interface issues as opposed to design issues, so hopefully they can get it patched up. As far as actually bugs go I can at least say that BERT seems OK. Regular BE was much worse at different stages of patches (thinking of the spy bug that blacked everything out).

 

[legalizefreedom]

What I wanted to see more of:

--Cool affinity air units (the flying alien aircraft carrier is pretty good, but new planes would've been cool too)

--Another orbital strike unit

--Better wonders, although there has been improvements from vanilla

--Games lasting longer! All the cool stuff in the outer rings I never get to before someone wins.

I think you will see more of this next expansion. Definitely air units.
A mobile orbital nuke platform is on my wishlist.

The game totally needs to last twice as long. I either have to dumb down the difficulty or disable victory conditions to play a decent game without someone rushing to the finish line.

What I don't like:

--Can't negotiate terms of peace

--Can't be allies without having a defensive pact. There are lots of examples IRL of governments that get along well and trade a lot, but wouldn't necessarily go to war immediately for

--I can't use my political capital to negotiate AIs declaring war

--Phasal Teleporters and Orbital Lasers IMO should have to be in orbit for a turn before use

--I think you should only be able to rush buy one building per turn, and maybe not defensive buildings at all.

Agree with all of these. I love the idea of teleporters and attack sats having to be launched before using. The buying building limit is also a good idea.

Personally I think buying tiles with gold breaks the purpose of culture. I could live with a game that didn't allow buying tiles or buildings.

Not sure yet:
--Resource trading from trade routes. Seems like they're too easy to get now. Don't think it's intended that I can build the special buildings from resources a city is getting through trade, either.


Overall I give it an 8 of 10, definitely a solid upgrade, definitely worth $30, but missing a few things completely and needs more polish on bug fixes. If they fix all the bugs it'll be a 9.

Yes, trade routes give too many resources, but hopefully they balance this.

 

[PhilBowles]

Just got BERT as a present and am partway through my first game - a duel map as it happened, so I don't get to comment on how diplomacy affects actual relations between leaders.

Likes

Much improved world-building; marvels are a nice touch, and the music and graphical touches on notifications are good - I do like the whalesong sound of the sea aliens. Exploration was always the one area where Civ BE scored points, so this was a good area to emphasise. Some of the new marine resource graphics (such as 'Chelonia') add a nice incidental touch that gives the impression of a deeper ecosystem beyond the few - but now expanded - suite of alien monsters.

I like the artifact system as an idea, especially the different artifact classes, but they seem a bit too deterministic in how they spawn and rather too common to be interesting after a while. Obviously Old Earth Relics can only come from pods and Earth-related expedition sites, and the rarity of Progenitor Ruins is part of what keeps those artifacts interesting, but I think getting alien artifacts from nests should be much rarer, and there should perhaps be new types of alien expedition site (geological features, perhaps) that can give alien artifact rewards.

Dislikes

The diplomacy system. As I say, I can't speak to how it affects actual diplomacy, but it feels much too gamey than Civ V diplomacy, which to me is still the pinnacle of the series - despite sometimes erratic AI behaviour it succeeded in portraying relations between different powers in a much more fleshed-out way than the older games' trade screens. Now we get the trade screen back with a vengeance, only even more gamey than before.

Which is a shame because the suite of agreements available has potential to be interesting, diplomatic capital as a resource is a good idea, and the fear/respect meter - while functionally presumably no different from the +1/-1 relationship modifiers (respect) and army size (fear) that influenced diplomacy in older games - is welcome (though would be moreso without constant spamming of the same respect increase/decrease notifications - how admiring can you be of 'advanced orbital technology'?)

Personality traits seem an unnecessary tacked-on addition that's basically another set of virtues, and at least in my limited experience so far suffers from the same flaw as the diplomatic agreements: they're just straight buffs for a resource you rapidly accumulate (and indeed the diplo agreements add bonuses and boost capital to spend on extra bonuses).

Of course people have made the same argument against policies and religious choices in Civ V, and the same counterargument can be made: spending capital on X is a trade off that prevents you spending it on Y. This is true (except for diplo agreements, as those do provide a net boost in capital, and I imagine games with larger numbers of factions will let you accumulate capital faster still due to the greater number of agreements). But as with BE virtues vs. Civ V social policies, the BE versions always seem to be straight buffs that are just peripheral "choose the advantage of your choice" and slot into any strategy equally well, while Civ V's generally differ in value depending on your strategy and fit more naturally into the game's framework.

Overall, gameplay doesn't seem to have changed very much; it's still all about +X +Y bonuses to resource generation or stats and the main form of interaction is warfare. Aliens are still pests that again only interact violently (I actually like the addition of hydrocorals as barriers to navigate or remove, as a slightly different approach) - I think it's fine that their power level is low relative to Civ barbarians, as after all these are only animals and you're an advanced civilization, but if the game isn't going to offer ways to take advantage of them (leashing doesn't count, since by the time you can do that most aliens you can leash are weaker than your military units) they should simply be less common.

 

[BenitoChavez]

--I can move the AI's poorly-placed cities

You can move AI controlled cities? I can't believe I didn't know this. How do you accomplish this black magic?

 

[CelJaded]

--Geothermal has a point

What point is that then?

 

[Callonia]

You can move AI controlled cities? I can't believe I didn't know this. How do you accomplish this black magic?

Declare war, Conquer horribly placed AI Aquatic cities, Move them once the populace bow down to your rightful rule.

 

[PhilBowles]

I started a new game with a standard-sized map, and as it's the first BE (not just RT) game I've played to completion I think these still count as first impressions:

Diplomacy

I've got a better handle on how the capital system works with 8 factions - not surprisingly.

I like some of the ideas here with the agreements, but the implementation takes the worst excesses of Civ V's erratic AI and makes them both worse and more impenetrable.

AIs seem forced to declare war when their fear or respect hits a certain threshold, regardless of context, as a result of which I was repeatedly declared against by Vadim, who had only a navy and I had only inland cities on another continent. Twice weak civs adjacent to me with a couple of surviving cities declared war citing fear as their motivation, when I was so far ahead of the rest of the civs that I could wipe them out in half a dozen turns or less. Because respect is affected mainly by personality traits - and in this game only one faction had a trait that made it care about military strength - there's no guarantee at all that a faction declaring war on you due to a lack of respect will have a more powerful military; they might declare war because you aren't cultured enough, aren't developing your land enough, or something equally inane and counterimmersive. While there don't seem to be very major penalties for the typical things that lead to war in other Civ games - settling too close, attacking their friends etc.

And because attacking and capturing cities causes huge respect penalties with the victim, if and when you eventually make peace the chances are high that that civ will be on the verge of war with you forever more, when the very thing that caused the respect penalty means the civ is likely to be weaker than you. So the game forces the problematic situation that a faction that won a war is less likely to go to war against you again than a faction that lost the war.

Beyond that, replacing the Civ V/BE modifier list with only the aggregate fear and respect ratings achieves the opposite of the stated intent of the system: it can be very opaque, much harder to understand than the ally/enemy-driven motives of Civ V AIs. While AI war behaviour rarely makes logical sense you can understand why the civ is going to war (okay, Fielding, I understand you're unhappy I didn't build more satellites. You're a moron for attacking me over it, but whatever). However, the situations in which AIs turn down or approve agreements are not at all clear, and don't seem linked to the levels of fear or respect.

Quite often I'll get the advisor notification that agreement X would be a good idea, only to request it and be turned down. And of course there's no way to do anything about that since terms are fixed. Past one point in the game people stopped allowing me to make agreements with them altogether (though still came to me for agreements), including allies and civs with respect level 9. I'm not sure if this was because of broken agreements due to a personality trait change, or whether I was just so far ahead that the AIs refused to give me essentially free bonuses. This is a problem with the diplomatic capital system in the late game, as it leaves you accumulating a resource you can't actually use, as by that point you'll have the full suite of personality traits.

Overall, compared with Civ V (it's hard to compare with BE as I played it so rarely) diplomacy in practice is a giant step back - it even makes AI behaviour towards the Congress in BNW seem polished and logical. It's gamey and not very immersive. On the plus side the personality traits system and the associated differences in available agreements do make the characters seem a little more distinct than in base BE (as I presume certain leaders are primed to favour different traits), and some of the communiques can be fun, but even there the binary fear/respect system counts against the game since it means personalities are free to vary on far fewer axes than in Civ V (you can't really have a warmonger personality, for instance, only a character who's predisposed to dislike powers with a smaller military).

Exploration

This is the expansion's big win, and I still feel much as I did in my first post on the thread. The main difference is that on the standard maps artifacts are much scarcer - a positive feature in my view - presumably due to a combination of map size and incidental competition (the AI doesn't seem to hunt down sites actively, and may not even be capable of establishing expeditions at aquatic sites; it also doesn't seem to try and achieve Marvel quest objectives. But it does clear nests and grab resource pods and I did lose at least one Progenitor Ruin to an AI explorer, possibly the reason I only ever got one part of the signal).

The main thing in need of improvement here is simply that - AI behaviour. Possibly more marvels; it may just be random variance but on one partial and one full playthrough, both spawned on frigid maps, the alien structure marvel was present.

Affinities

Affinities were meant as a selling point in BE. Hybrid affinities were meant as a setting point in RT. Neither really does anything with the idea, and RT doesn't do anything to make affinities - hybrid or otherwise - of any particular practical relevance to gameplay; if anything basic affinity bonuses have been toned down (though hybrid bonuses are strong - getting bonuses to health from X-Harmony are certainly relevant). For the most part they're still just cosmetic skin differences on military units.

There are a few extra units, none of which seem of any particular utility over the standard or single-affinity units other than for variety; affinity buildings are still mostly single-affinity, and in all cases are just +X amount of a resource you most likely don't need any more of by the time you've unlocked that building, since you'll already have 2-3 basic buildings providing the same yield. Without a tech tree structure in which buildings are prerequisites for later ones, percentile-based bonuses, or many unique effects, and with maintenance rarely a limiting factor, building decisions still feel extremely simplified and there's no particular incentive to specialise - I just went with a plan of building everything everywhere, prioritising health buildings to allow quick expansion and science buildings because it's a Civ game, and otherwise selecting things more or less at random. Plainly that was good enough not only to win but to completely dominate on Soyuz, so why specialise?

Aquatic Cities

These were an annoying gimmick in Alpha Centauri's expansion. Probably in part because AIs seem reluctant to expand, they don't seem to have the same issues here, but they end up feeling rather pointless beyond turning the entire map into exploitable real estate (which, when you can already embark units at will and fight at sea, makes you wonder why we even bother having water as a terrain type - it has a negative effect on land units' combat ability and is slower for them to traverse, but that basically means any water tile on the map may as well be forest). Moving cities rarely seems to have much point, especially when you can just buy extra tiles. There are a couple of things you can only build in them, but overall they feel less distinct than coastal cities in Civ V - of which the same was true, but which are also meaningfully distinct in terms of trade advantages.

Difficulty

As my first full BE game I was disturbed how easy this game was - I checked the settings at one point to see if Soyuz was an easier level than I'd intended, but no it proves to be the second-hardest. I didn't operate to any particular strategy, and it wasn't until I happened to hit 5 Supremacy from nowhere (not really having registered that the tech icon colour bars corresponded to ideology points, and so not having aimed at any given ideology) that I focused specifically on that one.

By the end of the game at around turn 285 I had level 17 in Supremacy and 6-7 in each other affinity, while all but one of the other factions had no more than level 6 in their dominant affinity. Aside from a single trade route early to keep a station alive, I didn't focus on trade - which I've read is or was notoriously abusable - until late in the game and so didn't even have that extra income as an exploit. None of the AIs seemed to trade much either. I never needed to declare war but had much less trouble than at even fairly low difficulties (say, King) in Civ V in both taking cities and keeping units alive when civs declared against me. Aside from a single Al Falah jet, I saw no AI aircraft, nor did the AI adapt with countermeasures against mine or make any effort to attack my carriers. The only orbital lasers deployed were mine. And this game appears to have none of Civ V's disincentives from capturing cities, with every one taken offering enough real estate for biowells or orbital coverage for Paeans that it's pretty much guaranteed to give net positive health.

By the end of the game I'd won an emancipation victory (being the only civ with an affinity level sufficient to build the warp gate), had explored most of the tech tree including unlocking the ultimates for both Supremacy and Supremacy-Purity, controlled three original capitals, and had half a Progenitor signal as well as deep-space telescopes being manufactured and mind stems in several cities. I was ranked first in progress towards every single victory condition; only Al Falah was even on the list for any of the others, and joint first only in domination. For a first attempt, without any effort to optimise strategies, this really shouldn't happen in a strategy game. I randomly rolled a civ and got the African Union, which plainly has a strong sponsor ability, but that shouldn't make the game quite that easy.

Overall, the game experience was enjoyable enough to keep me playing, which BE in base form evidently didn't achieve, but it remains a very long step below Civ V even prior to its expansions (and yes, I do mean that - vanilla Civ V, which I liked a lot more than many people), and some nice concepts are there that at least in part help world-building despite AI behaviour and the diplomatic system in practice being among the worst a Civ game has seen for years. And I'll naturally attempt a run on Apollo to see if that ups the difficulty enough.

But by Civ game standards this is still a thoroughly disposable product, playable really only for being sufficiently similar to Civ V rather than for anything new it brings (except in exploration), and the core oversimplification of its strategies, resource accumulation, and city development hasn't been addressed in the expansion, nor has the fact that affinities still appear to be largely incidental parts of gameplay that just give you minor free bonuses for playing the way you'd play the game anyway, without much need to focus on them.

And no, I saw no point to geothermal - but then I didn't have any use for titanium either.

 

[Callonia]

If this were civ4, those weak just barely hanging in there one step into the grave nearly dead AIs who declare war on you citing fear as their reason would be requesting you to become your vassals in exchange for you protecting them. I recognize the common correlation. I just accept the inevitability that since they can't become my personal pets they would rather rest in peace and without fear.

 

[PhilBowles]

If this were civ4, those weak just barely hanging in there one step into the grave nearly dead AIs who declare war on you citing fear as their reason would be requesting you to become your vassals in exchange for you protecting them. I recognize the common correlation. I just accept the inevitability that since they can't become my personal pets they would rather rest in peace and without fear.

"If I can't be a vassal, I'll go down fighting" doesn't seem a very plausible approach to me - in Civ V you can also have nearly-dead civs, but they'll go out of their way to keep out of trouble and if possible will offer friendship with more powerful civs, they won't declare war on them.

 

[Callonia]

"If I can't be a vassal, I'll go down fighting" doesn't seem a very plausible approach to me - in Civ V you can also have nearly-dead civs, but they'll go out of their way to keep out of trouble and if possible will offer friendship with more powerful civs, they won't declare war on them.

Those civs also went out of their way to die to me as well. And did everything possible to hurt me in united nations so I wiped them out for that. They likely will vote to support the embargo on you and such etc. instead of abstaining.

 

[PhilBowles]

Those civs also went out of their way to die to me as well. And did everything possible to hurt me in united nations so I wiped them out for that. They likely will vote to support the embargo on you and such etc. instead of abstaining.

There is that, but the Civ V AI is atrocious at handling the UN/Congress in any case - it's one of BNW's biggest missteps. But even if they prompt you to wipe them out, they don't actually declare war against you.