First Impressions

[Acken]

Civ5 was a lot closer to a balance between the 2 than BE is. Make happiness only a little more easy to manage for wide (but not as easy as BE health), don't make national wonders cost scale on number of cities (but keep the national wonder idea) and make trade routes numbers scale with empire size (but not as crazily as now).

 

[Lucius_]

The UI is a much bigger problem than the balance, precisely because it's hard to fix. As someone else said already, I think it's unrealistic to expect the game to come out fully balanced. Even CiV BNW still has plenty of balance issues (ranged units, sea trade routes), those games are just very, very hard to balance. When they nerf trade routes (which they will), something else will be busted and that's just the cycle of life of a strategy game. Arguably trade routes are a little above the norm of "busted" here, but I'll enjoy them while they are.

@Eji1700 : I'm surprised by your comment at being annoyed that wide play is forced upon you. I agree that it is, but to me it is a nice change of pace since CiV favors tall so heavily.

True about the UI being harder to fix, but it's something that can be gotten use to, if you can get use to some of the tedious aspects (trade routes.) Balance is flat out broken. Parts of the game just aren't much fun because of it. I think we agree though that balance will definitely be fixed. I'll cross my fingers on the UI.

 

[Teproc]

I guess I'm just not that bothered by the imbalance. It's fun to do broken stuff, it only becomes problematic if you have to do it over and over again. Which is why they do need to fix it relatively soon (a month or so), but it's not a huge deal to me.

 

[Pyramid Head]

Huge success

 

[PhilBowles]

So far I am still enjoying the game but I am afraid it won't last long.
This is poorer version of civ5 and i was already tired by civ5 (1k hours).

In civ5 you have 43 nations, each with very distinctive atmosphere, unique building, unit and trait - often these features are quite active or unique. Each AI leader has a different personality and this is so awesome it sweetens stupidities of AI diplomacy.

In BE you have eight factions, every is the same. No atmosphere. In civ5 I am Chinese and I feel Chinese, in BE I am PAC and I could be whatever as well, each faction is identical except some little, weak, passive and boring bonuses. +25% worker speed as faction identity?

That's definitely a shame - I looked at the Civilopedia entries for the factions, and if the effort that went into those doomed-never-to-be-read summaries had made it into the presentation of the factions (even as a Civ V-style intro blurb), they might seem less anonymous in game. The Alpha Centauri-style faction leader quotes in techs only go so far. Having only a single sentence for their voice acting and nothing in the way of background certainly doesn't help.

While civ5 had Mayan Calendar, Korean Tall Play, Polynesian Ocean, Polish Hussars, Swedish Diplomacy, Incan Farms or ultra unique factions as Venice/Huns/Mongolia??? In BE each faction could be named 'player 1... 2... etc' and there would be no difference.

It's a little early to conclude that the factions don't differ in personality - though I have seen almost all of them aim for Harmony (as I did).

Furthermore, civ5 had - often very good - scenarios! Add to this 9 policy trees, 3 ideologies, radical strategies, huge maps, city states, mods and you have infinite replayability.

Civ V had no scenarios at release, aside from the Mongol 'free-LC', and while well-executed there were still ultimately too few (many fewer than in Civ IV). They may be something added to BE in future.

And what BE offers after you get one victory for harmony, supremacy and purity? Presumably each one with one full virtue tree out of shocking number of... four? Okay, you will maybe get one more game with domination - might virtues. Or try setup with a lot of land and fewer nations. What more you can invent? Nothing, you will change combinations of little numbers (cargo, crew, ship) and again go for the same victory and again spam countless +3 yield buildings.

Civ BE, despite its marketing and price, is intended as a spin-off, not a main Civ game. I don't think it was designed with the same level of replayability in mind. The 'yes, this option is always better than that one' building quests are bound to get repetitive fast, as will the 'you need this for affinity X' quests.

I played another game today, upping the difficulty (and was ultimately wiped out by a Kavithan surprise attack when I hadn't invested in military and had moved what I had to the other side of the map for a planned attack against the ARC). It was a lot more fun, partly because of the difficulty, partly because without a free solar collector I did actually struggle for funds at times, partly because I rolled a very nice map.

Also, early on I got an alien skeleton that gave me a reaper bug. Exploration instantly became much more engaging, now that I had a miasma-immune. fast-moving unit that could explore the landscape and grab survey pods despite being unable to undertake expeditions. This convinces me that Firaxis really needs to add a scout rover to either the starting options or Planetary Survey (an otherwise essentially useless tech outside coastal environments). This would have +1 move over the explorer (but no expedition module) and ideally could be made either immune to or take -5 damage from miasma with the simple explanation that it's a contained environment explicitly designed to operate in exoplanetary environments with unknown hostile conditions.

Ultimately, I've found the game so far much more engaging than I'd expected from my preliminary play yesterday, and also being somewhat burned out on Civ V by this time it is refreshing, but I don't imagine it's going to be a game I'll come back to that often. It can't wholly be blamed for that - the sci-fi setting is fundamentally less engaging for a game of this nature than recreating history with real civs, known characters and moderately realistic past-to-present tech progression. I quite liked Alpha Centauri, but at the same time not enough to play it to completion more than a few times. Despite buying it at release, it wasn't until 2013 that I picked up the expansion. I probably didn't play it enough for the personality and atmosphere people rave about to shine through, since much of the presentation was as desperately characterless as that in BE, with similarly undefined, anonymous caricatures for its factions and a complete absence of detail on the tech descriptions.

I'm not yet sold on the game's core selling point, the affinity system. I like the idea, but the progression seems too forced (take techs specifically for affinity, do affinity quests) and what's the point of having 'affinity points' when most affinity-related actions jump you up a whole level? And, once I have a dominant affinity, what precisely am I doing with it? I got to level 4 purity, so could build a couple of buildings people with a lower purity level can't. Those buildings are more or less duplicates of things I can build anyway, giving say a health plus energy bonus. I haven't played through enough yet, but it's not clear that the affinities significantly impact the way I play the game at this stage.

 

[PhilBowles]

Aliens, even as they are, are infinitely more interesting than barbs ever were. As is it's a little shallow, but again, i see great potential with a few fixes.

I'd like aliens to play more with both the exploration and the affinity game. There's no sense of progressive discovery with aliens - if you have the right starting conditions you can have a kraken float past you on turn 2. Alien-related quests are limited, and this is probably an area the game could borrow from XCOM: different quests related to different aliens, with the results having different effects (perhaps one alien type, when examined, is found to respond to certain pheremones and incorporating these into your units prevents that alien type from attacking you. Perhaps dissecting another will give an idea of weaknesses that improve combat performance against it; yet another may have a compound that can be used to improve the effect of your pharmalabs. That kind of thing).

Harmony points should be depleted/not accumulated for harming aliens or destroying nests; Purity points gained in the same way or by creating terrascapes, that sort of thing.

I don't mind the 'aliens don't get more aggressive' thing per se - who says they're a hive mind or this is some sort of Gaian planet? They're just animals, reacting as animals do and without much memory of or interest in what happened to other alien animals. What I do take more issue with is the lack of consequences of any kind based on the particular way in which you interact with aliens or the landscape.

 

[QuoVadisNation]

It's sorta like a good civ v fan mod. Good, but by no means great. Not worth 50 dollars at all.

 

[Manannan]

I won't harp on about the trade routes too much as that's going to get beaten to death here, but I do have a couple points I want to hammer home in case anyone from firaxis reads this. One, holy hell guys, plz nerf, did no one during the beta complain about these? First game just trying to figure out what I'm doing and I get all the achievements for having 100+ yields of everything in my capital, and that was just with 4 cities. Maybe the knowledge and industry trees helped quite a bit, but still. Two, please give us more options to sort trade routes. Previous route to the top, sort by yields, sort by delta, blahblahblah. Seriously.

Balance is a bit of a mess right now. To be fair having played CiV enough that diety didn't feel particularly challenging anymore I wasn't expecting apollo to stomp me, but I was hoping for a bit more of a challenge than this. First game first victory had to fight all of one mid-game war against a neighbour who had zip for affinity and thus vastly underpowered units even against my relatively small army. I took a city from him after a handful of turns, and that was it. The AIs who were actually scary ignored me, even while I was popping down earthling settlers for an easy win. I was way out in front as far as I could tell (highest affinity through the entire game, the AIs were all commenting on my military strength from all of 2 lev destroyers, 3 lev tanks, and a horde of purity solider dudes), so maybe I'm just that damn good or Franco-Iberia + knowledge and industry are OP, I dunno, but I was hoping for a bit more urgency.

The UI needs a lot of work. Again, who beta tested this? From little things like not telling me what I just finished building in a city, to the aforementioned unsortable trade route list, to big things like clunky ugly city management screens I'm not sure what happened between CiV and now. I've managed to buy tiles I didn't want/need more times than I'd like to admit as a result of the clunky city management screen. I've given up on trying to micro my cities because navigating around those giant intrusive icons that manage to block tile yields all too often (seriously, WTH guys) is a headache. This would have me very annoyed if not for the broken trade-routes that mean microing cities isn't really needed anyway, so I'm more just disappointed there. Gonna be downloading a mod to fix this ASAP, and that's never a good sign.

RIP specialization. There's no more winning because you played a flawless cultural or diplomatic/economic game, those are just things you can invest in to get more bonuses for your civ. I don't mind that too much truth be told, as I didn't expect a victory from overwhelming the aliens and new planet with the power of my culture/all my UN votes, but it's still disappointing to see it more tacked on because it's a civ game than because it's a core gameplay mechanic. The bigger loss is that cities don't need any specialization or thought any more. The idea of production city, science city, culture city, money city are all long gone; every city can build every building and have enough production to crank out military no problem with only minimal investment (damn you trade routes!) regardless of where you placed it. I don't mind that if I'm playing small and tall (which I generally do because I'm boring like that) but when it's possible to ICS and have super cities anywhere and everywhere? Now I'm getting concerned. Again, who beta tested this?

I freaking love being able to use satellites to produce extra resources. Big ugly lake that in CiV would have had me bemoaning 6 lost tiles for my capital? Now it's 6 tiles of algae and coral. Big flat desert with nothing on it is the only way to expand? Now it's a big flat desert covered in resources to expand on to. I haven't had a good supremacy game yet to try rushing for those satellites (stupid 18 floatstone starts) but I really want to give that a try with franco-iberia or the slavic federation. It feels way better than it should to get a quest to build a biofuel plant in your capital when your capital is on a lake with no algae, build a couple weather controllers, and 20 turns later have algae in your capital for your biofuel plant.

Quests are nice, although I have two gripes: first I keep getting a quest early to seek out some mysterious radio signal nearby that I never end up finding. Organic exploration is nice so I won't ask for a locate button but at the very least giving me some little hint of what exactly I'm supposed to do. My explorers comb the nearby area digging up everything in sight and still the quest won't progress. You win guys, where'd you hide the radio signal? Two some of the building quest options are hilariously one sided. The trade route one is the most obvious, but there are others. Please fix.

I'm liking that the AI is gobbling up all the good city locations a bit slower than in CiV. Instead of the diety rush to spam out cities I'm getting to turns 100-150 and still finding awesome places to put down cities. Part of this is that those ugly tundra/desert/small island city locations are now more viable with various buildings, improvements and satellites, but I feel like the AI doesn't expand like it did in CiV. Dunno if this is a change to the AI programming, a result of aliens eating colonists/outposts, or a mix of the two, but I like it. Even after getting forward settled by some jerk it feels good to wander down the coastline 100 turns later and see a spot with plenty of strategic resources to fuel my petty vengeance attacks against those ugly cities settled up against my capital.

This is turning into a wall of text I didn't plan to write, so I'll just wrap it up by saying for all it's flaws (and boy does it have a bunch of 'em) I'm still having a lot of fun with it. Classic Civ game, lots of bugs and balance issues on release, who woulda thunk? A couple balance patches (or expansions, who knows) and a mod or two to fix the ugly UI and I'll be pretty happy with it.

 

[59saintdane]

I like it. Don't love it, but I like it. It's got some pretty cool ideas and great potential. Although the UI is horrible, there are only 8 factions, and diplomacy and the AI haven't improved, the gameplay is interesting. It's a nice refresher to play wide after BNW's 4-city tradition every game. Affinities, quests, virtues and the tech web all open up a lot of options and choices for the player. When you get over the way the game looks and some of BNW's issues that haven't been fixed like diplomacy and the AI (but come on--it's really not easy to code a computer to play such a complex game as civ) it's actually a pretty good game. Not as good as BNW maybe, but miles ahead of vanilla Civ V. Which means that when the inevitable patches and expansion packs come out, BE could potentially become the best game in the Civ franchise.

 

[SnowKomodo]

Haven't bought the game but these responses have been very interesting to read and enlightening.

As a somewhat casual gamer and someone who has always valued immersion/flavor/"fluff" over strategic gameplay, it looks like I won't be picking up a copy of BE anytime soon unless they add patches, DLCs, and expansions which improve these aspects.

 

[Jimbo30]

I had my best (fun-wise) game on Apollo tonight, lasted about 175 turns before I was resoundingly beat. I reckon Soyuz might be beatable without going all out crazy on trade route spam, so gonna give that a go.

There's a lot to like about the game, the units, upgrades, tech tree (though it's confusing and a bit broken). I have faith they'll make a great game out of it eventually.

 

[fils]

Mayan Calendar, Korean Tall Play, Polynesian Ocean, Polish Hussars, Swedish Diplomacy, Incan Farms or ultra unique factions as Venice/Huns/Mongolia??? In BE each faction could be named 'player 1... 2... etc' and there would be no difference.

I find it a little funny that literally every single "unique" civ you named was either xpac or their own DLC

This is the same problem with every civ release - not enough features compared to the predecessor, and not as well balanced. I am sure this will get better over time.

 

[Tabarnak]

I am not whining. I, like everyone on here, want a quality Civ VI. We are all in the same boat.

I do like the 1up approach of civ5 but it's a shame that they only made an alien version of civ 5. It looks like a big mod of civ5 at first glance(yes, i didn't play the game yet, but i saw some videos on youtube). Civ 6 needs to be different than civ5 or i will not call this an evolution of the serie.

Sorry if i didn't use the right word(whine) my english is far from perfect. More like "complaining" maybe?(did a google search this time )

 

[ddd123]

I do like the 1up approach of civ5 but it's a shame that they only made an alien version of civ 5. It looks like a big mod of civ5 at first glance(yes, i didn't play the game yet, but i saw some videos on youtube). Civ 6 needs to be different than civ5 or i will not call this an evolution of the serie.

Sorry if i didn't use the right word(whine) my english is far from perfect. More like "complaining" maybe?(did a google search this time )

yeah but there are some of the critical problems of the civ series nearly fixed

first of all the victory is not a oneshot, this is pretty huge, ok in single player you can reload etc but in general is good to have a sense of progression and a feel when you can push the win and when you have to go all in to war etc

second the resources, the system is not there yet but it solve the big civ problem of having useless resources, here strategic counts much more than in any previous and its clearly on the right path to add a depth to the resources that its needed since years

last but not least the reserach tree, i know its gonna be hard to make it in civ but i really like the idea of more freedom and most of all more choices, we all know in civ the choices are very few, and most of the times is like "do i build a granary or a library" and whatever the answer you build the other next, its a switch not really a choice, while with the web tech its reallya choice!
finally we pick techs and they do change what we do( even thohg ofc for balance problems soon all the games are gonna be pretty standard but this is just a balance issue)

 

[spider1]

I love this game, even if it's a reskinned version of Civ5. I just finished my first game on the easy level and lost. LOL. Of course being stoned and just building stuff willy nilly and looking at the pretty graphics not paying attention didn't help. But that's OK. It took me most of the day and I was in the mid 400s on turns when the screen popped up that I lost. Not that I care actually. I'm just playing to play and have fun, and this game is a lot of fun.

And after running through a full game I still don't know what the hell I'm doing.

 

[Tabarnak]

yeah but there are some of the critical problems of the civ series nearly fixed

first of all the victory is not a oneshot, this is pretty huge, ok in single player you can reload etc but in general is good to have a sense of progression and a feel when you can push the win and when you have to go all in to war etc

second the resources, the system is not there yet but it solve the big civ problem of having useless resources, here strategic counts much more than in any previous and its clearly on the right path to add a depth to the resources that its needed since years

last but not least the reserach tree, i know its gonna be hard to make it in civ but i really like the idea of more freedom and most of all more choices, we all know in civ the choices are very few, and most of the times is like "do i build a granary or a library" and whatever the answer you build the other next, its a switch not really a choice, while with the web tech its reallya choice!
finally we pick techs and they do change what we do( even thohg ofc for balance problems soon all the games are gonna be pretty standard but this is just a balance issue)

Dunno about the research thing. The format isn't really important because usually the difficulty resides into keeping a distance large enough between the military techs to other peaceful stuffs.

The tech web looks a bit like Master of Orion 2(only into a different representation), which is good, but i may be wrong.

I'm more a mp player than sp so the AI interaction is less important for me.

I'm just playing to play and have fun, and this game is a lot of fun.

Great for you, if only it was the case from the majority...i would already have a copy in my computer.

 

[Vohbo]

I have quite a few things to say, and very few of them are positive.

- The color scheme is hurting my eyes and therefore gives me a headache after a few hours. It's not just depressing to look at but also not very clear.
- A tech web looks more complex at first, but it might as well be linear since you need certain techs before others anyway, either because it's too early or because you need affinity bonuses or because you need a prerequisite material.
- Trade routes... This is just horrendous if you get any sort of sizeable empire. My first game had just a few cities and with 3 trade routes each it's already a lot of clicking and tiresome.
- Specialists ! Removing great people sucks an entire layer of depth from the game that can't be replaced by second rate mechanics. Specialists (even when improved) are pretty weak because their relative yield is just very small compared to a lot of tiles.
- Many victory conditions aren't interactive to the point where I was just clicking next turn for my last 60 turns.
- Civs are completely boring and flavourless. Affinities don't really fix this. The fact that you'll always have all 8 existing civs in game doesn't help either, though since they're all the same it doesn't really matter.
- Other than specialists, two very key mechanics that made gameplay interesting in Civ were National wonders and city states. Both very strong mechanics that are somehow absent. Aliens don't/can't fill the role of the latter.
- So far it seems like it's just bad to go for some specialized approach other than just: build up an empire that's good at everything since that just makes you better at everything.
- The quest "decisions" are so... what's the word... boring ! Either the bonus you get is boring or it's insignificant.

I'm sure I'll play more of it but my expectations were crushed pretty badly

 

[PhilBowles]

I have quite a few things to say, and very few of them are positive.

- The color scheme is hurting my eyes and therefore gives me a headache after a few hours. It's not just depressing to look at but also not very clear.

I think that the three planet types have their own colour schemes - I rolled a pleasingly green one at one point.

- Specialists ! Removing great people sucks an entire layer of depth from the game that can't be replaced by second rate mechanics. Specialists (even when improved) are pretty weak because their relative yield is just very small compared to a lot of tiles.

Until you mentioned it, it hadn't even registered with me that they were gone. I never liked the addition of GPs in Civ IV; Civ V, particularly BNW, did some necessary band-aiding to partially fix the concept, but they're still something I see as very much an optional feature of Civ games.

- The quest "decisions" are so... what's the word... boring ! Either the bonus you get is boring or it's insignificant.

I think they're mainly intended as flavour. I liked the Augmented narrative, but would have preferred it if this quest interacted more with the other factions (you decide to exterminate them and they don't turn to anyone else for help?), or if they could emerge as a new faction of their own.

 

[Manannan]

I think that the three planet types have their own colour schemes - I rolled a pleasingly green one at one point.

This. The desert and lush biomes are nice enough to look at, it's the fungal biome that's kinda hard on the eyes. Dark and gloomy, hard to tell grasslands from plains from deserts from tundra, and just generally not very nice to look at for a few hours.

 

[darkskies]

Now that a way to increase the font size has been found, I look forward to all the other problems mentioned here.

One thing that surprised me when I put this on my tablet which has HD4000 graphics, all the settings were put on low yet it looked better than on my fancy SLI desktop. The blur and related settings really are bad and should be off by default.