Myth and Legend
Prince
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2014
- Messages
- 328
OK guys this will not be a suggeston thread. I'm surae Firaxis after sales support will be great, we will be getting patches and DLCs. Here are my long winded thoughts about the game in its current state. I will be making comparisons with SMAC and Civ 5.
I play on Trascend/Deity/Apollo only.
Story, immersion and atmosphere
The intro movie is great, it sets up the game nicely. The factions seem interesting at first (and don't be fooled, the bonuses do matter!) as do the starting options. The game makes an effort in expanding the narriative as we go through quests. However, we are left without the atomsphere garnered by SMAC. For those of you who have not played it, the game takes you in and never lets you go. There is text to read occasionally (planetfall, first encounter with the mindworms, first fungus pop and so on). But the atmosphere is really developed by a plethora of little things which are just missing from BE:
1. Very distinguished and thre dimensional leader personalities.
2. Voiceovers on technology discovered.
3. A tab with text explaining the tech you can read.
4. Consistent and very well drawn graphical elements for the techs. Seriously the person who made them could design logos for a living.
5. The HQ view (old schol civ Palace view).
6. Secret project movies.
When adding all of these we get a very well defined world to immerse ourselves in. It really feels awesome when you discover technologies that we can only dream of here on modern day earth, and you get glimpses of how that affects the futuristic society you live in. You gets little bits here and there, telling you of Morgan's greed and lust for eternal life, about Zach's unethical research methods, about Yang's tyranical autocratic society which develops into a dystpian nightmare of GENEJACKs and Thought Control.
CivBE really needs an improvement to the visual represetnation of the tech web, more flavour text for the technologies upon discovery and a stronger development of faction leader personaliteis. It also needs to make secret projects more interesting than the bland 2D schematics they are currently represented by. Even the Civ5 wonderful HD paintings would be a step up (though SP movies are IMO much better and if Firaxis has financial concerns they can charge for a SP Movie DLC)
I must say that the quests and the explorers doubling as archaelogists are very good additions. Finding dig sites early on really adds immersion.
However, the lack of natural wonders or even curiuos things like monolyths, borehole clusters, volcanoes, fertile valleys makes me sad.
Here is a quote that really captures the essence of what we are lacking. And by the way, having the same voice actress read all the tech quotes reeks of a rushed job.
Gameplay and balance
This is the area which is sorely lacking at the moment. You make planetfall with your chosen faction and you can blow through 250 turns doing nothing but resending internal trade routes and building improvements.
1. AI
My last game I was Polystralia and landed next to Brasilia, who are suppoed to be the most warmonger-y of the civs. They did not DoW me once the entire game. There is no challenge even on Apollo, the AI is IMO quite passive. It loves to fight other AIs, but doesn't bother the player too much.
In comparission, ending up next to Miriam as Zach on Trascend in SMAC, or next to Attilla as Portugal in Civ 5 would most proably mean you'll struggle so much in the early game you will fall behind. Or you could even get wiped out.
Diplomacy is dead. There is no need to ever open up the faction leader screen. You don't need to set up deals. You don't need to bribe the AIs to fight one another. You can't trade technologies, there are no research agreements. Trading resources is worthless.
The AIs usually beg energy for favours, pop up again to say how much they like you being allies with faction x or how much they can't stand you killing aliens. They are just annoyances. We are even missing little things from SMAC, like trading for communication frequencies or the choice to ignore communications from a faction. Here we just get "You like my friend, so I like you." or "You're wrong and you are bad and you should feel bad."
Denounciations mean nothing. In Civ 5 chain denouncments could ruin your day. Luxury deals would suddenly become impossible, you could plummet into negative happiness, you could get multuple DoWed etc. Here some faction denounces you, but your trucks and boats keep hauling energy, so it's all good.
2. City and tile development
In case you haven't heard: trade routes are ridiculous now. You can found a new colony and do nothing but rush buy a trade depot and have a few trade ships/convoys sitting for reassignment in other cities. Soon that new city you found gets 80 hammers per turn and can churn out buildings almost as quickly as your capital.
You get instant connections to your capital if you found coastal cities and your capital is on the coast. But that is actually a setback, because founding landlocked cities is so much better. Why? Because you can get free roads around turn 50 or so, and because by turn 100-120 you can have 5 food farms everywhere. Granted you could get that in SMAC too, but you had to build condensers/soil enricheners which came midgame and still required terraforming time.
Which brings me to tile development. SMAC is clearly superior with its plethora of terraforming options. Elevating/lowering terrain. That terrain influencing tile yield (rainfall accumulates on one side of a mountain, the summit of a plateau gets more sunlight etc.) Buildig bunkers, sensor arrays, mines, boreholes, echelon mirrors, condensers, soil enrichners, planting forests and so on and so on.
In BE you can follow these simple steps:
Can I build a farm on it? If yes then do.
If not: can I build a terrascape on it? Then do.
If not: then it's a bonus tile or resource tile and I build an improvement on it.
The forest tiles are simply a huge pain as they eat up worker time and provide no benefits at all. Comapred to the great way to play an eco friendly forest strat in SMAC it's a huge letdown.
In SMAC you got very little ground which wasn't workable. You could (if you were patient enough) shape your surroundings in any way you saw fit. You could fill in the ocean with enough patience. No such luck in BE. You get about 30% unworkable useless canyons, 15% mountains and 30% ocean tiles with sub par yuields compared to the uber farms you get. You do the process described above and you get your hammers from internal trade routes, that's it. Oh, and it no longer really matters what terrain you settle on. Eventually the improvements make them virutally the same.
3. Virtues, Tall/Wide and Health
There is one rule of thumb here. You either go Growth and live with positive health bonuses, or you completely forego it and play on at negative health. Both are valid ways to play.
Ignoring Growth would mean you are health starved for the entirety of your game. Even with all the special health buildings, you won't be able to compensate. If you do go Growth, you can found 10 cities and finish the game at 50 positive health (this was my latest game as polystralia)
Founding cities is good because internal trade routes delpete their food/hammer yields if the cities get too big. But fresh colonies still give you like 5 fod 10 hammers. So keep on founding, there is no reason not to!
The virtue system is definitely a step up from the social policies of Civ 5. They thought about it and distributed the bonuses around. No longer do we have Traditon which gives food, gold, hammers towards wonders and so on. There is also an incentive to dip into the lower policies of multiple trees. However, you can't do that if you want to play with positive health, because you are pretty much forced to beeline the 1 health per resource, 7 free health and -25% negative health virtues.
That being said, negative health isn't all that bad. It is more than offset if you go deep into the science/culture tree and found as many cities as you can. In Civ5 gonig into negative 20 happiness means barbarians spawning and cities rebelling. Here it's a slight malus on science and culture and a growth penalty.
Things like nerve stapling your drones and immersive specialists like Trascent are long gone sadly.
4. Secret Projects
The secret projects are generally unremarkable. Some give interesting things like 3 sight or +1 food from farms. But most are just flat bonuses to something (like 4 culutre per turn etc.) There are no game changing wonders. Compare that with things like the Space Elevator, Hunter-Seeker Algorithm, Citizen's Defence Force etc. Even the Civ 5 wonders urge you to beeline them and try to incorporate them into your strategy - Venice/Portugal with Colossus, England with Great Lighthouse, a warmonger going for Branderburg Gate etc.
Here you can completely forego the Secret Projects and you will be just fine. But you don't need to because the tech web seems to make it harder for the AI to steal wonders from you. If you decide you want a certain woner you will get it 100% of the time (which is to me, an improvement over Civ 5's "LOL turn 26 Great Library")
However secret projects should IMO contribute to certain victory types. Domination was much easier with Space Elevator And Command Nexus for example.
5. Independant bases
They are sort of an improvement and a downgrade from Civ 5 city state. The good thing is that they no longer have borders and don't steal your nice tiles. The bad things are that they still block you from settling within 3 hexes, their bonuses are very sub par compared to the broke internal trade routes and that the influence system, bribing, quests, coups and ellection rigging form Civ5 are gone. There is also little issue with attacking them, since the AI is so pasive. Best way to handle them is just keep them as a block to AI settlers until you get artilery to clear them out.
6. War, aliens and units
Oh boy. One of my biggest gripes. Let me just list the issues I have with this part of BE:
- The aliens are either complete wimps or siege worms/sea dragons. They are still very easy to ignore via explorers or to simply clear out completely with a few units. Making them use the conventional fighting system rather than the morale system of SMAC was a bad choice and impossible to balance for any stage of the game. They will either be a joke or they will occasionally eviscerate you early on when you get a bad roll with them (if they are made more powerful).
- Specialized affinity units are either broken bad or broken good. Battlesuits can crush face early on. In comparisson, the "ultimate" purity unit is a complete joke. I was expecting to get something akin to SMAC deathspheres - goes over all terrain, lots of hp and damage, lots of movement speed. Here we get a slightly bigger lev tank which fires at 2 range (and the only range upgrade gives it 3 range if it's full health, which is a just sad) but requries to be set up like a catapult so it can fire. It moves as slowly as infantry over water, and it deals very poor damage. Oh, and it can't capture cities. And it costs way too much floatstone. I had 5 floatstone quarries and could field just 4 of these pathetic units. Sigh.
- One type of air unit: a fighter
- Two types of sea units: a battleship and a carier. Battleships lategame are overpowered. They can three shot a capital city from full health. But guess what: YOU CAN'T CAPTURE THE CITY BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE MELEE SHIPS.
- The land units are bland, and you get indirect fire at the time when most games would be over or close to over. This makes land wars basically just a zerg rush or abusing the tier 4 specialized affinity units.
- The upgrades are even worse than Civ 5. Just a bland attack upgrade. You can't pre-train your units via base improvements. Compare this to the morale system and upgrade system of SMAC. Morale gave combat bonuses but also made your units better against aliens. You could slap on better and better reactors to give your units more movement. You could add cool special abilities like blink dispencer, nerve gas pods, paradrop and so on. The aliens are no threat compared to the deadly mindworm boils in SMAC which could chew through your shiny new units because that's how morale and mind worms used to work.
- No nukes/planet busters. Really?
Warfare in BE can be summed up into: Either rush battlesuits or don't bother with it and just turtle and win via any other method.
7. Victory types
Most are boring in the sense that you don't really do anything. You beeline to the required techs, launch the thing, build the other thing. Move some units around and you win. You are either sufficiently ahead production/science wise from the AIs and win, or you lag behind and you don't . It seems to me that the victory types which require you to settle units or pump units into the gate are also inferior to the ones which just make you sit like a hen on her egges and wait (signal, flower etc.)
There is also little or no use for lategame energy surplus. No corner the energy market option. No buying votes for diplo victory. Nothing. You can rush buy buildings in new bases, but why do tha twhen you got 100+ hammers everywhere? You can rush buy units but then again, which unit is good enough to rush buy? The boring aeroplanes? The battleships which can't capture the cities they wreck? The rangers/artilery which don't get indirect fire until turn 220? The tanks and rovers which do absolutely nothing?
8. Engine, UI, sound and graphics.
The Civ 5 engine. But with an added depth of field which strains the eyes and can't be turned off unless you dabble with the config files. Really now, how hard was it to add the option to the menu? Graphical settings require restart to take effect (really bloody annoying). Turning water reflection on also requires file editing.
The UI design basically went "let's take Civ 5's layout everyone is familiar with and completely switch it around and/or make it worse"
You now have buildings on your left and options to purchase/train on your riht. WHY? WHY? For those of us used to civ 5 this is an unnecessary switch that only makes us look and click in the wrong place.
You get much less information overall about your faction. Yo can't even see what exactly you are spending your special resources on. God forbid you get a building which uses up floatstone or firaxite and then later on you decide you want the resources for special units. You have to manually click through 10 cities to see which have built buildings which use up floatstone, firaxite and so on.
The graphics are so-so. The unit animatons are hit and miss. A fully upgraded battleship just plinks at stuff. However marines an rangers attacks are great. I hear praise about supremacy units too.
One major gripe is the blue grass and miasma. If you end up with the washed up colour palette you can't tell which tile is what. And no, it is not a tribute to SMAC. SMAC had red fungus, ochre rock, green grass and blue water.
Overall: the game needs much more work to be as good as Civ 5 and radical changes to be as good as SMAC.
I play on Trascend/Deity/Apollo only.
Story, immersion and atmosphere
The intro movie is great, it sets up the game nicely. The factions seem interesting at first (and don't be fooled, the bonuses do matter!) as do the starting options. The game makes an effort in expanding the narriative as we go through quests. However, we are left without the atomsphere garnered by SMAC. For those of you who have not played it, the game takes you in and never lets you go. There is text to read occasionally (planetfall, first encounter with the mindworms, first fungus pop and so on). But the atmosphere is really developed by a plethora of little things which are just missing from BE:
1. Very distinguished and thre dimensional leader personalities.
2. Voiceovers on technology discovered.
3. A tab with text explaining the tech you can read.
4. Consistent and very well drawn graphical elements for the techs. Seriously the person who made them could design logos for a living.
5. The HQ view (old schol civ Palace view).
6. Secret project movies.
When adding all of these we get a very well defined world to immerse ourselves in. It really feels awesome when you discover technologies that we can only dream of here on modern day earth, and you get glimpses of how that affects the futuristic society you live in. You gets little bits here and there, telling you of Morgan's greed and lust for eternal life, about Zach's unethical research methods, about Yang's tyranical autocratic society which develops into a dystpian nightmare of GENEJACKs and Thought Control.
CivBE really needs an improvement to the visual represetnation of the tech web, more flavour text for the technologies upon discovery and a stronger development of faction leader personaliteis. It also needs to make secret projects more interesting than the bland 2D schematics they are currently represented by. Even the Civ5 wonderful HD paintings would be a step up (though SP movies are IMO much better and if Firaxis has financial concerns they can charge for a SP Movie DLC)
I must say that the quests and the explorers doubling as archaelogists are very good additions. Finding dig sites early on really adds immersion.
However, the lack of natural wonders or even curiuos things like monolyths, borehole clusters, volcanoes, fertile valleys makes me sad.
Here is a quote that really captures the essence of what we are lacking. And by the way, having the same voice actress read all the tech quotes reeks of a rushed job.
Spoiler :
Gameplay and balance
This is the area which is sorely lacking at the moment. You make planetfall with your chosen faction and you can blow through 250 turns doing nothing but resending internal trade routes and building improvements.
1. AI
My last game I was Polystralia and landed next to Brasilia, who are suppoed to be the most warmonger-y of the civs. They did not DoW me once the entire game. There is no challenge even on Apollo, the AI is IMO quite passive. It loves to fight other AIs, but doesn't bother the player too much.
In comparission, ending up next to Miriam as Zach on Trascend in SMAC, or next to Attilla as Portugal in Civ 5 would most proably mean you'll struggle so much in the early game you will fall behind. Or you could even get wiped out.
Diplomacy is dead. There is no need to ever open up the faction leader screen. You don't need to set up deals. You don't need to bribe the AIs to fight one another. You can't trade technologies, there are no research agreements. Trading resources is worthless.
The AIs usually beg energy for favours, pop up again to say how much they like you being allies with faction x or how much they can't stand you killing aliens. They are just annoyances. We are even missing little things from SMAC, like trading for communication frequencies or the choice to ignore communications from a faction. Here we just get "You like my friend, so I like you." or "You're wrong and you are bad and you should feel bad."
Denounciations mean nothing. In Civ 5 chain denouncments could ruin your day. Luxury deals would suddenly become impossible, you could plummet into negative happiness, you could get multuple DoWed etc. Here some faction denounces you, but your trucks and boats keep hauling energy, so it's all good.
2. City and tile development
In case you haven't heard: trade routes are ridiculous now. You can found a new colony and do nothing but rush buy a trade depot and have a few trade ships/convoys sitting for reassignment in other cities. Soon that new city you found gets 80 hammers per turn and can churn out buildings almost as quickly as your capital.
You get instant connections to your capital if you found coastal cities and your capital is on the coast. But that is actually a setback, because founding landlocked cities is so much better. Why? Because you can get free roads around turn 50 or so, and because by turn 100-120 you can have 5 food farms everywhere. Granted you could get that in SMAC too, but you had to build condensers/soil enricheners which came midgame and still required terraforming time.
Which brings me to tile development. SMAC is clearly superior with its plethora of terraforming options. Elevating/lowering terrain. That terrain influencing tile yield (rainfall accumulates on one side of a mountain, the summit of a plateau gets more sunlight etc.) Buildig bunkers, sensor arrays, mines, boreholes, echelon mirrors, condensers, soil enrichners, planting forests and so on and so on.
In BE you can follow these simple steps:
Can I build a farm on it? If yes then do.
If not: can I build a terrascape on it? Then do.
If not: then it's a bonus tile or resource tile and I build an improvement on it.
The forest tiles are simply a huge pain as they eat up worker time and provide no benefits at all. Comapred to the great way to play an eco friendly forest strat in SMAC it's a huge letdown.
In SMAC you got very little ground which wasn't workable. You could (if you were patient enough) shape your surroundings in any way you saw fit. You could fill in the ocean with enough patience. No such luck in BE. You get about 30% unworkable useless canyons, 15% mountains and 30% ocean tiles with sub par yuields compared to the uber farms you get. You do the process described above and you get your hammers from internal trade routes, that's it. Oh, and it no longer really matters what terrain you settle on. Eventually the improvements make them virutally the same.
3. Virtues, Tall/Wide and Health
There is one rule of thumb here. You either go Growth and live with positive health bonuses, or you completely forego it and play on at negative health. Both are valid ways to play.
Ignoring Growth would mean you are health starved for the entirety of your game. Even with all the special health buildings, you won't be able to compensate. If you do go Growth, you can found 10 cities and finish the game at 50 positive health (this was my latest game as polystralia)
Founding cities is good because internal trade routes delpete their food/hammer yields if the cities get too big. But fresh colonies still give you like 5 fod 10 hammers. So keep on founding, there is no reason not to!
The virtue system is definitely a step up from the social policies of Civ 5. They thought about it and distributed the bonuses around. No longer do we have Traditon which gives food, gold, hammers towards wonders and so on. There is also an incentive to dip into the lower policies of multiple trees. However, you can't do that if you want to play with positive health, because you are pretty much forced to beeline the 1 health per resource, 7 free health and -25% negative health virtues.
That being said, negative health isn't all that bad. It is more than offset if you go deep into the science/culture tree and found as many cities as you can. In Civ5 gonig into negative 20 happiness means barbarians spawning and cities rebelling. Here it's a slight malus on science and culture and a growth penalty.
Things like nerve stapling your drones and immersive specialists like Trascent are long gone sadly.
4. Secret Projects
The secret projects are generally unremarkable. Some give interesting things like 3 sight or +1 food from farms. But most are just flat bonuses to something (like 4 culutre per turn etc.) There are no game changing wonders. Compare that with things like the Space Elevator, Hunter-Seeker Algorithm, Citizen's Defence Force etc. Even the Civ 5 wonders urge you to beeline them and try to incorporate them into your strategy - Venice/Portugal with Colossus, England with Great Lighthouse, a warmonger going for Branderburg Gate etc.
Here you can completely forego the Secret Projects and you will be just fine. But you don't need to because the tech web seems to make it harder for the AI to steal wonders from you. If you decide you want a certain woner you will get it 100% of the time (which is to me, an improvement over Civ 5's "LOL turn 26 Great Library")
However secret projects should IMO contribute to certain victory types. Domination was much easier with Space Elevator And Command Nexus for example.
5. Independant bases
They are sort of an improvement and a downgrade from Civ 5 city state. The good thing is that they no longer have borders and don't steal your nice tiles. The bad things are that they still block you from settling within 3 hexes, their bonuses are very sub par compared to the broke internal trade routes and that the influence system, bribing, quests, coups and ellection rigging form Civ5 are gone. There is also little issue with attacking them, since the AI is so pasive. Best way to handle them is just keep them as a block to AI settlers until you get artilery to clear them out.
6. War, aliens and units
Oh boy. One of my biggest gripes. Let me just list the issues I have with this part of BE:
- The aliens are either complete wimps or siege worms/sea dragons. They are still very easy to ignore via explorers or to simply clear out completely with a few units. Making them use the conventional fighting system rather than the morale system of SMAC was a bad choice and impossible to balance for any stage of the game. They will either be a joke or they will occasionally eviscerate you early on when you get a bad roll with them (if they are made more powerful).
- Specialized affinity units are either broken bad or broken good. Battlesuits can crush face early on. In comparisson, the "ultimate" purity unit is a complete joke. I was expecting to get something akin to SMAC deathspheres - goes over all terrain, lots of hp and damage, lots of movement speed. Here we get a slightly bigger lev tank which fires at 2 range (and the only range upgrade gives it 3 range if it's full health, which is a just sad) but requries to be set up like a catapult so it can fire. It moves as slowly as infantry over water, and it deals very poor damage. Oh, and it can't capture cities. And it costs way too much floatstone. I had 5 floatstone quarries and could field just 4 of these pathetic units. Sigh.
- One type of air unit: a fighter
- Two types of sea units: a battleship and a carier. Battleships lategame are overpowered. They can three shot a capital city from full health. But guess what: YOU CAN'T CAPTURE THE CITY BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE MELEE SHIPS.
- The land units are bland, and you get indirect fire at the time when most games would be over or close to over. This makes land wars basically just a zerg rush or abusing the tier 4 specialized affinity units.
- The upgrades are even worse than Civ 5. Just a bland attack upgrade. You can't pre-train your units via base improvements. Compare this to the morale system and upgrade system of SMAC. Morale gave combat bonuses but also made your units better against aliens. You could slap on better and better reactors to give your units more movement. You could add cool special abilities like blink dispencer, nerve gas pods, paradrop and so on. The aliens are no threat compared to the deadly mindworm boils in SMAC which could chew through your shiny new units because that's how morale and mind worms used to work.
- No nukes/planet busters. Really?
Warfare in BE can be summed up into: Either rush battlesuits or don't bother with it and just turtle and win via any other method.
7. Victory types
Most are boring in the sense that you don't really do anything. You beeline to the required techs, launch the thing, build the other thing. Move some units around and you win. You are either sufficiently ahead production/science wise from the AIs and win, or you lag behind and you don't . It seems to me that the victory types which require you to settle units or pump units into the gate are also inferior to the ones which just make you sit like a hen on her egges and wait (signal, flower etc.)
There is also little or no use for lategame energy surplus. No corner the energy market option. No buying votes for diplo victory. Nothing. You can rush buy buildings in new bases, but why do tha twhen you got 100+ hammers everywhere? You can rush buy units but then again, which unit is good enough to rush buy? The boring aeroplanes? The battleships which can't capture the cities they wreck? The rangers/artilery which don't get indirect fire until turn 220? The tanks and rovers which do absolutely nothing?
8. Engine, UI, sound and graphics.
The Civ 5 engine. But with an added depth of field which strains the eyes and can't be turned off unless you dabble with the config files. Really now, how hard was it to add the option to the menu? Graphical settings require restart to take effect (really bloody annoying). Turning water reflection on also requires file editing.
The UI design basically went "let's take Civ 5's layout everyone is familiar with and completely switch it around and/or make it worse"
You now have buildings on your left and options to purchase/train on your riht. WHY? WHY? For those of us used to civ 5 this is an unnecessary switch that only makes us look and click in the wrong place.
You get much less information overall about your faction. Yo can't even see what exactly you are spending your special resources on. God forbid you get a building which uses up floatstone or firaxite and then later on you decide you want the resources for special units. You have to manually click through 10 cities to see which have built buildings which use up floatstone, firaxite and so on.
The graphics are so-so. The unit animatons are hit and miss. A fully upgraded battleship just plinks at stuff. However marines an rangers attacks are great. I hear praise about supremacy units too.
One major gripe is the blue grass and miasma. If you end up with the washed up colour palette you can't tell which tile is what. And no, it is not a tribute to SMAC. SMAC had red fungus, ochre rock, green grass and blue water.
Overall: the game needs much more work to be as good as Civ 5 and radical changes to be as good as SMAC.
