First Impressions

[Tavenier]

I agree with most posts above, as far as I read them.

What I haven't read is this:
I can't see what I have build when selecting a new building to produce in a city. Maybe I am overlooking it, but I don't think so. In other Civs you see something like this: Paris finished building a ... . What do you like to build next? Something like that.
And I can't see what cities have what trade routes. Maybe overlooking this as well?

 

[AriochIV]

I can't see what I have build when selecting a new building to produce in a city. Maybe I am overlooking it, but I don't think so. In other Civs you see something like this: Paris finished building a ... . What do you like to build next? Something like that.

This information appears to be missing, and it's one of a number of important little things that got lost somehow. Especially when you have a lot of cities, it's very helpful to be reminded of what this city just finished building.

And I can't see what cities have what trade routes. Maybe overlooking this as well?

There is a Trade Routes report (click the plus sign at the left of the row of icons at the bottom of the main screen) that gives an overview of all your routes. To see the routes that a single city has, go into the city screen and at the top it will say 0/2 or 3/3 (or whatever), and if you hover your mouse over this, the tooltip will tell you what routes that city has.

 

[bruntfca]

OK,

I've actually spent a lot of time just reading the civlopedia and breaking down the tech tree. My massively anal-retentive nature has made me unable to play a game past the 50th turn. I'm certain this is a personal flaw on my part but here are my first impressions of the game from a purely theoretical perspective, as I'm too overwhelmed by the mechanics to put it into practice for some reason:

<snip>

5. Maybe this is because everything in this game exists in a futurist's mind, but I'm generally overwhelmed by this game. It's gonna take some serious memorization to optimize build orders and tech beelines, there are so many layers to every decision. I think this can be rewarding to some extent but BE pushes it to absurdity. I'm finding it impossible to decide what paths to choose in a game where paths are so divergent that early choices handcuff you to specific strategies. How much value is there to simply deciding to go harmony if you start next to 2-3 xenomass? And vice versa for other strategic resource starts?

Great point about memorization and obfuscation. For example, I was getting annoyed that my trade caravans were getting eaten by aliens. IF you happen to create an "alien repulsor fence" or whatever it's called, you will get a quest option that makes your trade routes immune. *Nowhere* is this documented on the tech or building; it seems you need to memorize which buildings give which reward features! The game is so easy in any event that you are really only playing against yourself to win by turn xxx.

These "quests" are absurd as well, a binary choice, where most of the time one choice is massively better than the other does not constitute a "quest". I feel that this misleading by Firaxis, I was expecting something along the lines of the quests in Legendary Heroes.

I doubt unit pathing, or combat AI will ever be fixed either, as long as their sales figures hold up. If your looking for a more hardcore 4x game I guess its time to look elsewhere these days; thankfully a lot of companies are stepping up to the plate now, I will be checking out the Endless Legend that people keep recommending. It's a real shame, since after XCOM I was hoping that Firaxis were going to make more challenging games.

 

[Tavenier]

Thanks, Arioch. I so far was only aware of the visible trade routes on the map. Like the resource icons. Very helpful!

There is plenty of room for improvement overall. Most can be done by simple patches and others will be done in expansions.
The best things so far are the quests and the alien lifeforms and the options you have to deal with them.

My biggest dissapointment is that the factions are based on earth geography, which in real life makes sense, but in SMAC I loved the factions based on ideologies. Like the religious nutters, the communists, the corporate faction, the military Spartans, etc. Gave so much flavour to the game and unique character.
This is my biggest dissapointment, because they won't/can't change this anymore. Bad AI, UI, lack of UU's, etc can be patched ot added. But they won't change the fluff into ideologic factions. And they covered so much already that it will be hard to add new factions. Most countries are represented. Or perhaps other aliens.

 

[beyondmiasma]

I agree with most posts above, as far as I read them.

What I haven't read is this:
I can't see what I have build when selecting a new building to produce in a city. Maybe I am overlooking it, but I don't think so. In other Civs you see something like this: Paris finished building a ... . What do you like to build next? Something like that.
And I can't see what cities have what trade routes. Maybe overlooking this as well?

The turn button changes to something, and a pop up appears "freeland has finished building......"also if you have the in game ADVSR running, he will tell you.Its 2600 AD robots tell us what we need even while playing a civ game!

 

[Big J Money]

OOC, does anyone know why they didn't make AC2? Was it a rights issue?

I wasn't a huge SMAC fan (although I did like it and logged probably 200ish hours, I would guess). But I do remember being more inspired to try the different leaders in that game. In this one, I'll probably play ARC every time since I just like their 1 bonus better than the others. No point in calling them ARC either, really. I could just say I like picking the covert ops bonus at the beginning of the game.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

OOC, does anyone know why they didn't make AC2? Was it a rights issue?

Yes, it was an intellectual property rights issue. Firaxis does not own the IP for SMAC so legally they do not have the right to make a sequel to the game. The devs said it many times in interviews. That is also why they picked their words so carefully and would say things like "BE is not a SMAC sequel but we loved SMAC so there are some neat homages to the game in BE."

 

[CubuS]

The game is nice as such and I enjoy the time I've spent on it so far, good music, the alien part is fun and I like what they have done with miasmic and such getting the feeling that you are on a rather unfriendly planet and you will have to fight your way to settle it in the beginning until you adapt, but there are just some really obvious flaws.

Trade routes are ridiculous. In civ5 you could have serious advantages of going for a tall type gameplay with few large cities. This is no longer an option, due to the insane amounts of mfg+food or sci+energy you get from trade routes you just need as many cities as possible. It is not hard to keep up health, which just has to be below 20, even above for a while is fine.
I managed to get a size 1 useless tundra city at 60 base mfg, in size 1! I don't see the point to removing the global limit of trade routes and even so, the issue is that the output should be lowered to 1/4th of what it is now.

The ais are more useless than ever. It may be partly because they don't know how to abuse the trade routes, but it seems silly that even with all the cheats they get in apollo they are still super easy. They have always been quite bad at the civ5 combat system and you have always been able to win over a large force with a few ranged units luring them out, but now you can easily totally overpower them in everything from science to amount of units or whatever you like at the same time.

Since civ1 there has been a linear tech tree that gave you somewhere between 1-8 tech options, usually a lot less than 8. Now you can easily end up having 20+ techs to choose from at one time. I guess this is something you could easily get used to in time and strategies will come up, but what is the point of making it such a grid of messiness? It's just a bit larger than my screen too so I have to move around it on the "minimap" to try and get an overview, and I am not really wiser on it after 4 games.

 

[Memoryjar]

About purchase question or its price, I spend 25 hours last three days on Civ:BE. So, it's not expensive 2 € per hour for an entertainment. And I'll spend many times on it.
It's a good video game, maybe not a wonderful civ, but I'll recommend it.

 

[PhilBowles]

Civilization Beyond Earth is broken game ( ... just like the last two from Firaxis )
Civ 5 and Civ BNW are not competitive games. They are builder games, like SimCity.

if you don't play Civ V as a wargame, and don't use gold-buying exploits, the AI is actually more capable than that in the older releases, which relied very heavily on stack-of-doom combat to beat the player and couldn't compete in a peaceful 'build/tech race' (I have fond memories of space races in the first two games, but that probably reflects my play more than the AI's capabilities. In Civ III and Civ IV I lost to stacks of doom or not at all).

 

[teqofc]

I had a lot of fun this weekend playing it but I don't see it holding me long term like Civ5. You need to go wide in this game to maximize your science and culture which means a ton of micromanagement of city buildings, workers(and you need a lot of them) and especially trade routes. It's pretty easy to go wide too since the AI is not very aggressive expanding in the beginning and doesn't start with an extra colonist and Stations(sort of a CS equivalent) take up only 1 hex.

With improvements and expansions it has potential. I actually do like the tech web, affinities and virtue trees but overall I find the game pretty exhausting and there needs to be a reward for going tall vs wide. The Promised Land VC is just horrible vs something like Transendence VC and one I'll never try again. Trade routes definitely need to be fixed because they are way too powerful.

 

[PhilBowles]

I felt so stupid when I found out miasma repulsers clear it for good! I was so damn sure it does it for as long as it's in orbit, then when it de-orbits, miasma comes back! And when I saw it's only 10 turns in orbit, I thought to hell with it and spend all that time clearing all that miasma with my workers...

Good catch. I'd noticed it was gone when the satellite 'de-orbited', but assumed it would slowly come back. It's a bit disappointing that it's more static than that.

I have never met in my life a game that transpires genericness so much as this one,

You're fortunate never to have encountered Endless Space.

Yes, a videogame is about making interestingt decisions. But if they are meaningless and one-sided, they are not decisions, they are mindless nuisances, like picking if I am going to drink my cup of morning coffee in a red or blue cup. Life's already filled with meaningless decisions like these, if I want to feel as if I am shaping the future of the human race on an alien planet instead, my decisions should carry, you know, weight. Quests, promotions, affinities, ship cargo... in the end they don't matter. At all. Hell, virtues are the only things remotely game-changing. This is not good sign for the game's replayability.

I agree with most of this, but while it lacks flavour in the sense you describe, I can't fault the game for lacking atmosphere - even just for new maps, new palettes and interesting-looking aliens, it gives enough sense of place to keep me engaged for now rather than feeling like the extended Civ V scenario it actually is in a gameplay sense.

The happiness mechanic was a failure in Civ V, and is still a failure in BE. I know that it's hard to let it go off concepts that you loved at first, but seriously, do like Elsa and let it go already. We are suppoused to go beyond earth, yet you keep obsolete concepts like these going and going....

Civ V evolved beyond the global happiness mechanic; it seems obsolete because BNW's economy was a better constraint on expansion early and because the religion system and mercantile city-states made managing happiness a non-issue. None of these features made it into BE (which particularly misjudged economy, not only adding trade routes while not only keeping but increasing the availability of gold from both tiles and buildings, but then allowing many more trade routes to boot; money will never meaningfully constrain expansion in this game pending a change to its gold-generating mechanics as thorough as BNW).

It works for BE as a system, and the addition of negative health effects from oil wells and from buildings like factories is a nice addition/nod to Civ IV. But both the lack of meaningful detrimental effects from low health and the very limited suite of options for either increasing it or curtailing population growth are serious failings. A perennial problem with Civ IV's health system was that it was almost wholly non-strategic: just a series of fixed penalties that always accrued and had only a limited number of ways to deal with them that you repeated in identikit form across every city in your empire.

Aside from doing away with the pointless need to use exactly the same micromanagement at exactly the same city size for every city in your empire, BE falls into the same trap, only with even fewer tools to deal with ill-health since the game lacks either slavery to keep population down or health resources to boost health. Instead you have to tech to and build the same health buildings everywhere, and/or specialist buildings that you can put excess citizens into to reduce the rate of settlement growth. Those really are the only two options.

Horrible graphic optimization too. The game runs slow and clutttered whilst CivV: BNW runs smoothly and peachy.

I find BE runs quite smoothly, and with shorter turn times than BNW.

The planet has character indeed and the game mechanics regarding aliens helps it to become alive in a way that aestethics alone can't. I love how the planet itself limits your expansion actively and with "on board" elements (miasma, roarming alien lifeforms, etc) rather than any kind of arbitrary mechanic a la health.

Except that it has the arbitrary mechanic too, it just doesn't do anything...

Exploring the planet is a delicious activity. The reimagined Civ V's archeology system works like a a charm in this new scenario.

Yes, that's definitely a keeper. If, as I hope, archaeology is retained in Civ VI I hope it becomes more contextual in the rewards it provides based on the type of dig, as in BE, rather than giving bland identikit artifacts. Aside from quest-related artifacts, though, there do seem to be a bit too few reward types for each artifact type, which will again hit replayability (crashed satellites are production or one quest; ruins are tech points, one quest or a signal; settlements are survivors or culture; and skeletons are a free Reaper Bug or, if memory serves, a science boost).

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Small thing, but thank you for "fixing" improvements on water tiles by getting rid of the uber-expensive one-time work boats of CivV.

 

[Zorro 695]

"My God! It's full of bugs!"

Just finished 300 turns - as a passive observer rather than a proactive player. I just wanted to get a feel for what's good and what's not.

I found it fun and, in many ways, reminiscent of SMAC - similar learning curve. (I hasten to add that I'm a great fan of SMAC and SMAX.)

I'm tootling along buying stuff and building stuff. I have no idea what the hell it is but it sounds good, so I'll build another one.

I love the whacky, yet 'science-sounding' quotes. I just got the Transcendental Equation! Is that like Quadrilateral Meditation?

As others have rightly pointed out, however, the game could use some improvement. Monochrome graphics tell you nothing about the value of an entity. Should be able to see at a glance 'Oh, this is good for an Affinity,' or 'This is good for Energy,' or whatever.

For heaven's sake, inform us of what a Colony just built/completed! Not doing so is so frustrating !

The AI is bland as well as dumb. The Leaders so lack the personality and charisma of leaders in previous incarnations of Civ.

The text font! Hard to read! Browsing through the Civilopedia gives me a headache instead of enlightening me!

 

[misterchief]

One positive change about trade routes: I think I've observed that if you trade with someone and war is declared, your trade caravan/vessels survive and you can reassign them. In Civ 5 they would automatically die.

 

[Inhalaattori]

Potential game that has a lot of balance problems. Most of the things should be easy to fix. Some critique:

- Too many trade routes and they are too strong. Needs big changes IMO. Now its just mindless spamming. Trade routes also slow down the pace of the game.
- Lots of totally useless wonders. Some useful wonders. Needs balancing.
- Stations dont really add much to the game. They need improvement IMO.
- Specialists are pretty useless if you dont get Prosperity bonus for them. It also seems you cant lock specialists and specialization doesnt seem to work in capital city.
- The last part of Contact victory should be improved/changed.
- Building quests usually have option that you will take every time. Some building quests are bugged, because they are impossible to finish.
- Bugs in general. Most of them are just irritating.

 

[Sprenk]

To see the routes that a single city has, go into the city screen and at the top it will say 0/2 or 3/3 (or whatever), and if you hover your mouse over this, the tooltip will tell you what routes that city has.

Aha! Glad to learn this! Thanks!

 

[NyQuil]

You can also go to the Trade Route overview which is available at the bottom right when you click on the little plus next to the toolbar.

 

[Sprenk]

You can also go to the Trade Route overview which is available at the bottom right when you click on the little plus next to the toolbar.

Yes, but that doesn't tell you if your total # of trade routes are maxed out or not (I can't always remember where I have autoplants built). That's what is frustrating--there really needed to be a way to tell whether I need to make any more conveys without keeping count in my head

 

[NyQuil]

Yes, but that doesn't tell you if your total # of trade routes are maxed out or not (I can't always remember where I have autoplants built). That's what is frustrating--there really needed to be a way to tell whether I need to make any more conveys without keeping count in my head

Ah, makes sense.