Has RT upped the depth or difficulty much?

[wayneb64]

I played BE and enjoyed it, but I ramped up to Apollo really quickly and was not very challenged. The game felt very flat compared with all of the directions you could go in Civ V. The cost per play time was FAR worse for BE than Civ V and it's expansions, does the BE expansion make up for it's cost? Has it had meaningful updates that did more than fix bugs?

 

[CelJaded]

I played BE and enjoyed it, but I ramped up to Apollo really quickly and was not very challenged.

I'm afraid to say that the Rising Tide expansion only succeeds in making the game easier. The AI struggles to cope with aquatic gameplay and the wealth of new artefact bonuses and diplomatic traits will give knowledgeable human players a clear cut advantage.

I like Apollo difficulty compared to the previous build as the playing field feels a bit more level, but if you're after a Deity level of challenge then you're out of luck unless you play other humans.

The game felt very flat compared with all of the directions you could go in Civ V.

The only strategy you really had in vanilla Beyond Earth was to spam tile improvements in your cities, whether they were Academies or Biowells etc. Rising Tide is cool in that you have more paths towards victory now.

Al Falah, African Union and ARC have interesting playstyles for one and there are plenty of different diplomatic traits and agreements from which to draw crucial science and thus have a more unique game.

The cost per play time was FAR worse for BE than Civ V and it's expansions, does the BE expansion make up for it's cost?

I have to be honest: not really. Games were way too short before the expansion and they've only gotten even shorter now because of the new gameplay mechanics thus making the entire outer tier of technologies and their related buildings etc. even more unnecessary than they were before.

Has it had meaningful updates that did more than fix bugs?

Firaxis were pretty quick to adjust the war score system and a few crucial quest bugs, but things have since gone disappointingly quiet and several major problems remain unaddressed.

Several players' hall of fame database became corrupted somewhere down the line, multiple tile improvements can still be built anywhere without restriction and omniclast's exhaustive bug list was all but ignored and he eventually stopped updating it.

Making matters worse is Firaxis' newfound tendency to try and fix things that aren't broken and thus screw them up completely.

In terms of tile improvements, arrays were made even worse by their move to Orbital Networks, Magrails now come later at Civil Support for some reason, and most of the advanced tile improvements take an absolute age to build now so you might as well just stick to farms.

Likewise, the Mind Flower and Beacon wonders have had extra turns bolted onto their activation thus making those victory conditions a lot more tedious than they were before.

They've also neutered Marvel quests completely by increasing the number of discoveries needed to finish them. With the play time being as short as it is already, I imagine many players like myself are simply ignoring Marvels altogether, which is a massive shame as they were intended to be a key new feature that added a bit of flavour to exploration.

Hope that helps.

 

[wayneb64]

Thanks for the info. I have been tempted a few times when it went on sale, but I can see Firaxis has forgotten how to make a compelling game or is maybe spread to thin. I sure hope if they put out Civ VI they do a much better job than BE.

 

[legalizefreedom]

BERT is a dramatic improvement in general over vanilla, except if you are looking for a bigger challenge.

 

[DutchJob]

It has become far easier.

And it still is about trade route management.

 

[Ryika]

I think 'spam' describes the gameplay from a more efficiency-oriented perspective best.

Spam explorers.
Spam cities.
Spam trade routes.
Wait until you win the game.

...is basically how the game turns out. The "recent" patch has made things a bit better though, the AI will now actually declare war on you when you're close to winning (sometimes at least!). Of course it is usually already extremely behind in affinity at that point so it doesn't really manage to put you into any danger...

 

[Callonia]

Rising tides did improve the game but honestly, It wasn't just interesting enough after playing few games to warrant BERT's space on my Hardrive so I unstalled them. If I wasn't forced to buy the game on steam, I would've sold my game at some kind of secondhand store long time ago. So it's sitting in terrible games folder on steam instead.

Civ5 is just much better.

 

[wayneb64]

I guess I will wait for a half price sale (or better) to pickup a copy as maybe that will justify being bored with it after a few games. I have spent all my free time playing GW2 HoT and was a little tired of that so I tried a CIV V scenario as I was craving some CIV. Turns out Fall of Rome is exactly the opposite of what I love about CIV so that got an ALT-F4 a few turns in. (I like empire building, not watching a pre-built empire get torn down with nothing I can do about it.)

 

[Callonia]

I guess I will wait for a half price sale (or better) to pickup a copy as maybe that will justify being bored with it after a few games. I have spent all my free time playing GW2 HoT and was a little tired of that so I tried a CIV V scenario as I was craving some CIV. Turns out Fall of Rome is exactly the opposite of what I love about CIV so that got an ALT-F4 a few turns in. (I like empire building, not watching a pre-built empire get torn down with nothing I can do about it.)

Actually, Fall of Rome was only DLC Scenario I liked in Civ5 lol. Was fun to be barbarians or romans or Sassanids.

And with luck you actually can survive and defeat all the barbarians as romans. It just rely completely on you being able to knock at least one barbarian faction out before it's too late. Then Defeating franks only can happen if you can knock out all the barbarians in spain and western africa + Britannia. After they're subdued, prepare yourself for painful war as you slowly chop all that forest for your siege weapon to fire so you can take cities!

After all the powerful barbarian tribes is brought to heel, defeating the remaining factions is easy, like sassanids cuz they're not a barbarian.