How do you think BERT is doing?

[Roxlimn]

PhilBowles:

My issue there is not that you can't specialise in BE, but that there is no good reason to. You can win the game perfectly happily on the highest levels just building biowells and academies everywhere. Again a percentile-based series of buildings that reward you for having cumulative yields of the same type is necessary to promote this.

This has always struck me as a very strange sort of nonsensical reasoning. There are any number of ways to win in Civ IV, V, and III. Most of the game for all of those games is centered around a choice of win condition that you don't even have to commit for most of the game time. In fact, having the ability to switch between wincons readily is cited as a bonus for the game, not a minus.

You can almost always win using just the one strategy over and over and over again using the same Civ over and over and over again. This has always been true. The option to use alternative strategies has never been founded on their being required or necessarily better than other options.

In essence, Civ play has always been founded on voluntary player restrictions (such as playing a 'nonoptimal' Civ) followed with otherwise optimized play.

 

[Idleray]

While BERT has a fair number of issues with game design and balancing, those are probably not the biggest reasons for its sales paling in comparison to CiV.

I mean sure on forums like these we might like to imagine that game-play design and higher difficulty balancing trumps all, but the vast majority of gamers probably tried out Beyond Earth on a casual difficulty setting, saw that every game kind of went the same way with no interesting new developments after trying out all 3 affinities, and shelved it.

And this is what I think is the biggest shortcoming of Beyond Earth - in its narrative design (an aspect in which SMAC was a triumph and a model to be emulated).

Put simply there was just no context to it all. No sense of having carved out your own path on an Alien planet and created a society that was uniquely your own.

The faction leaders were extremely bland on release (and I still argue that having them speak their own languages CiV-style was a misstep that missed out on lots of story-telling opportunities).
The diary entries during the loading screen as well as the flavor text in general are poorly written and it seems quite obvious that whatever writing department they have isn't up to the task of fleshing out a new Sci-fi world, even though the 3 affinities hold lots of promise in terms of the stories that could be told.

The quests are uninspired and are basically "complete this task, choose a benefit'. The building quests in particular feel forced.

There was no way to truly customize your society. There was basically only one way to succeed at Apollo: spam academies, go down Prosperity, spam health, spam science etc etc. There wasn't much in terms of a vision of uniting gameplay with narrative:

What if I wanted to create a Purity-based futuristic dystopian slave society that thrives on unhealth and huge mega-cities?

What if I wanted to created a Harmony-based alien-hybrid society where I can utilize completely different kinds of buildings and social values/virtues?

There was a lot of missed opportunity to have both gameplay and narrative to be something new and exciting, and something that continually presents you with new ways to play and have a fantasy narrative.

In this respect I'm citing two games that did this better than anything else I've played: SMAC and FFH2(which is a mod for Civ4)

In SMAC I could play as a bunch of tree-hugging hippies that planted xenofungus everywhere and utilized alien units AND have a narrative design that makes it work. In BE you can plant miasma everywhere but I've never found a reason to. I can use alien units but all they are are a bunch of numbers and a model of dudes riding raptor bugs.... not very immersive.

I could be a totalitarian despot that used heinous nerve gas weapons to give me an edge in battle and then be expelled from the alien equivalent of UN for doing so.

I could be an amoral economic mogul that ruthlessly drained the planet of resources by planting boreholes everywhere and bribing units and cities alike with my endless reserves of energy, earning the ire of those earlier Gaians.

In FFH2 I can play a vampire society that eats its own population to power up vampiric super-units. On top of that I could have that vampire society either be a devil-worshipping cult OR an aristocracy with a veneer of believing in a benevolent lawful religion. All of these things had in-game ramifications. It's gameplay and narrative design tied together beautifully.

I could be a society of Mages that trains up an elite force of wizards while professing my belief in a Cthulu-like deity, or maybe a bunch of shadowy wraith-like beings that hid themselves away from the world and built magnificent secret cities.

In BE these things are SORELY lacking, and I think the number one reason behind it lacking in mass appeal.

 

[ShaggyCan]

The quests are uninspired and are basically "complete this task, choose a benefit'. The building quests in particular feel forced.

In FFH2 I can play a vampire society that eats its own population to power up vampiric super-units. On top of that I could have that vampire society either be a devil-worshipping cult OR an aristocracy with a veneer of believing in a benevolent lawful religion. All of these things had in-game ramifications. It's gameplay and narrative design tied together beautifully.

What disturbed me the most, during livestreams, the DEVS would get a building quest and just click the same choice as we all do and go "I'll take X of course", those quests should actually be a hard choice, that help shape your CiV, instead of 1) optimal choice 2)choice no one ever takes

And I miss FFH2 more than anything, best mod ever in the history of Civ. I wish firaxis would find good mods and fund them and release them as DLC. CiV, for me, is very mod dependant, I never play CiV without mods.

 

[Roxlimn]

Idleray:

I'm not sure by what you mean in "succeed." The game is easy enough that you can play pretty however the hell you want on Standard setting on Apollo and still win. I know I'm not optimizing anything and I don't lose (100% win rate) on Soyuz.

So yeah, I have created huge Purity megacities flooded with negative health Manufactories. I don't need no stinking Academies for science! Not sure if it's a slave society. There aren't any mechanics expressing slavery.

I've built Harmony-based societies with a bunch of different buildings.

I've even built a Supremacy-type Civ where the land was covered in Generators and Nodes.

You could build a variety of society types in CivBE, but they're all very high-concept scifi stuff. It's not really the sort of thing many casuals would really understand, even if they read the Civilopedia, which many even here do not.

ShaggyCan:

The building quests have been reworked. More of them offer a more competitive choice. I have actually chosen, for instance, energy instead of more health for Gene Gardens. I needed the Energy more.

 

[PhilBowles]

PhilBowles:



This has always struck me as a very strange sort of nonsensical reasoning. There are any number of ways to win in Civ IV, V, and III. Most of the game for all of those games is centered around a choice of win condition that you don't even have to commit for most of the game time. In fact, having the ability to switch between wincons readily is cited as a bonus for the game, not a minus.

You can almost always win using just the one strategy over and over and over again using the same Civ over and over and over again. This has always been true. The option to use alternative strategies has never been founded on their being required or necessarily better than other options.

In essence, Civ play has always been founded on voluntary player restrictions (such as playing a 'nonoptimal' Civ) followed with otherwise optimized play.

This isn't a question of choosing a non-optimal strategy for a challenge, quite aside from the simple issue that in BE you pretty much have to take a non-optimal strategy just to avoid completely steamrolling. It's a question of not having any incentive - either thematic or gameplay-wise - to specialise.

In Civ IV, say, while you could happily win without specialising on most difficulty levels, if you did specialise you would get specific rewards such as Great People that made the gameplay substantially different from a game where you just spammed everything everywhere - and, indeed, it could be more of a challenge not to specialise because those yield multipliers didn't kick in. As for playing non-optimal civs, choosing to play the Danes in Civ V isn't just non-optimal, it's thematically very different from playing the Inca

This simply isn't the case in BE. Every building and tile improvement gives a flat bonus that is exactly the same wherever you place it in your civ. There isn't any gameplay benefit from specialising that changes the effective difficulty, and nor does specialising your cities lead to any difference in the way the game plays.

Yes, you can always do it just to sandbox, but both Civ V and BE are especially poorly-built for sandboxing compared with their predecessors.

 

[Roxlimn]

Your assertions are quite simply untrue. Given the AI capability in Civ BE (comparable to about King/Emperor), it's absolutely on par with previous Civs in that you have to NOT optimize if you want anything like an entertaining game. Basically, it's primarily a sandbox or role-play game and always has been.

Your recollection of Civ IV appears rose-colored. There are only a very few ways to specialize your economy in Civ IV, and they're very circumscribed. You can Specialist, you can Cottage, or you can Wonder. That's pretty much it.

You CAN do Specialists in CivBERT. Barre is especially suited to this. Your path through the tech tree going for Specialists is markedly different because you'll be sniping for the buildings rather than going for improvements. By and large, this will determine your peripheral city improvements. You'll want farms on the non-food tiles of your Breadbasket Cities, but in your peripheral cities, they won't do anything other than degrade the quality of your Trade Routes. Instead, you go for Domes, Nodes, or Biowells, as your Affinity suggests.

You won't need Academies for a Specialist game. Barre's Specialists produce 5 science per slot, Academies base for 2 and max at 4 with a hefty build time.

Because Barre's Specialists mainly occupy Specialist Slots, you'll largely be working the land for the Strategic Resources. You won't need a large footprint for each city - most of the citizens will be indoors, so you can pack it as tight as you please. You can also just site a city in snow for the Strategics and just work the slots.

For Fielding's ARC, you won't need Academies either. Fielding's Agents do such a bang up job, they're arguably broken, so you just take all the stuff that gives you more spies. Your science will be pretty good, and the play is unlike an Academy game. Very different.

Agreements and bonus tile outputs can create a very distinctive game, as well. Gunning for the Xenomass output bonuses and Strategic Resource agreements can create monster tiles from Xenomass, allowing you to basically snipe out just those sites and work mainly just those tiles. Who cares about farms or Academies? Not this bloke.

The fact that you can build Academies anywhere doesn't mean you should build them in every game. And that farm in your peripheral city is a total waste that's making your overall Civ worse, not better. Conversely, any Academy in your central Breadbaskets makes their food output worse, which impacts a lot of your other cities.

A Dome game plays very differently - lots and lots more Virtues. You could conceivably get them all! Your science will suffer some, but if you pare down your acquisitions, you can easily make the required Affinity for victory in comparable time.

All of these constitute obvious and significant gameplay differences that are in the game but which apparently escaped notice.

 

[WiseGreen]

@Roxlimn

In previous Civ titles, you could use the same strategy over and over again, but that strategy, no matter how rote it might appear, would involve various important decision points throughout the game, keeping the player actively involved well into the later parts of it. Speaking of Civ V, the one I've played the most: you have decisions about optimal city locations to make; then you optimize your research and building queues to hit National College ASAP, keeping an eye on neighboring AIs to deviate towards Construction if needed; then you do the same towards Universities; then, if you have a nice observatory city and/or you'll be needing frigates because of the map, you go towards astronomy/navigation; then you go towards factories, and depending on where the coal to settle new cities, conquer some, or fight over some city-states you didn't really care about until now; then you go towards labs, and you'll need to make the same decisions regarding new cities if you don't have aluminium; then you go towards your end-game tech path of choice (spaceship parts or national visitors center), and the game is truly in hit-next-turn mode. And throwing in religion and ideology for good measure.

Now take BERT: it's much less important where you settle those first cities; your main early game worry is setting an optimal trade network; beeline Cognition, spam academies, convert science, bam! Late game has started. The hit-next-turn phase starts too soon, is too easy to achieve with minimal decision-making, and lasts too long.

Granted, Barre and Fielding (and maybe other less-explored sponsors as well) offer different ways of winning the game, but the same is true of Civ V (early/midgame domination rushes with specialized warmonger civs, religion tourism victory with Byzantium or the Mayans, forced/improved-OCC with Venice, ICS with India before BNW), and neither Barre nor Fielding avoid the repetitive, too early late game.

 

[Gorbles]

None of that is absolutely required, however. That's the difference between "necessary" and "non-optimal". Lategame in CiV is repetitive too - (one of) the problem(s) as you rightly noted is how fast games can be won, in BE.

Everything else is mirrored in earlier games, and excused for <reasons>, though from what I've read basically boiling down to nostalgia or "I like it there but not here".

 

[Gort]

It is a shame that the mid-game is so short. I always feel like I've just gotten settled and then I'm already in the run-up to the endgame.

It means a lot of elements that could have been cool (EG: Satellites that spawn resources) aren't really worth bothering with because their effects come so late in the game that there aren't enough turns left for them to change much.

 

[BroOfTheSun]

@Roxlimn

In previous Civ titles, you could use the same strategy over and over again, but that strategy, no matter how rote it might appear, would involve various important decision points throughout the game, keeping the player actively involved well into the later parts of it. Speaking of Civ V, the one I've played the most: you have decisions about optimal city locations to make; then you optimize your research and building queues to hit National College ASAP, keeping an eye on neighboring AIs to deviate towards Construction if needed; then you do the same towards Universities; then, if you have a nice observatory city and/or you'll be needing frigates because of the map, you go towards astronomy/navigation; then you go towards factories, and depending on where the coal to settle new cities, conquer some, or fight over some city-states you didn't really care about until now; then you go towards labs, and you'll need to make the same decisions regarding new cities if you don't have aluminium; then you go towards your end-game tech path of choice (spaceship parts or national visitors center), and the game is truly in hit-next-turn mode. And throwing in religion and ideology for good measure.

From your description of CiV strategy, it sounds like there isn't a lot of decisions to be made. You pretty much just described the one optimal path towards winning the game, which is placing your cities, getting NC up as fast as possible, continuing the science snowball, and making sure you get coal to get a ideology first. I've played +1000 hours of CiV, and that is pretty much every game.

I'm not sure how much CivBERT you've played, but there are a lot of different strategies, some of which Roxlimn pointed out. There are more strategies that you can use in CivBERT to achieve a peaceful victory (this really means there are multiple ways to get science to get all the techs for victory) than there are in CiV (rush NC, get uni's up, etc.).

Now take BERT: it's much less important where you settle those first cities; your main early game worry is setting an optimal trade network; beeline Cognition, spam academies, convert science, bam! Late game has started. The hit-next-turn phase starts too soon, is too easy to achieve with minimal decision-making, and lasts too long.

I think you should try some different strategies and see how they work. I think academy spam is not the most optimal strategy anymore. Especially if you have aggressive neighbors, all that science won't build you an army to stop their rover carpets. Late game is boring, but I think CiV late game is the same. Click next turn till you get enough science, gold, tourism, or whatever to win. Domination is always the most fun VC (for me at least). That applies to both CiV and BERT.

City placement does matter in CivBERT, just as it does in CiV. You want to place your cities to get the best workable tiles, or a good defensive position if forward settling an aggressive neighbor. Also, you still get buildings based on tiles around your city. If you have firaxite, you get observatory. That's much better than forcing city placement next to a mountain for observatory.

 

[WiseGreen]

How does running specialits compare to academies when you're not Barre? And can you do spies if you're not Suzanne and she's not on the map?

From what I've played in CiV and BERT, it's harder to follow the science plan to the letter there than here. That, and not the plan per se, is what generates the decision points. Is it safe enough to delay Construction until after Civil Service? Until after Education? Are my sea cities safe, or do I need to go out of my way to get Navigation? Is it better to settle that suboptimal city, or to risk a delay going after that AI's good city? Can I deal with the extra unhappiness a new/conquered city now?

In BERT, the fact that the best improvements (Academies, VFs and Biowells) are terrain-agnostic releases a lot of weight from deciding where you should place your cities; there are still strategic considerations to be made (resources and/or defensiveness), but mostly terrain won't matter much to city development; it's more important to have 5-6 cities ASAP than place them in "good" tiles, as long as you have at least one city with good food to be a trade hub. Also, from what (little, I'll concede) I've played trying VFs/Biowells with specialists, more often than not you're changing your mid-game focus from Cognition to Bionics and spamming different improvements. Haven't tried domes yet, tho.

I might have phrased the issue wrong: it's not that there are too few strategies, but that the strategies that are there lead to a similar, semi-automatic end game too soon. In CiV, the same strategy done over and over again leads to more diverse playthroughs that keep you involved further into the game (IMHO).

 

[PhilBowles]

Your assertions are quite simply untrue. Given the AI capability in Civ BE (comparable to about King/Emperor), it's absolutely on par with previous Civs in that you have to NOT optimize if you want anything like an entertaining game.

I said precisely this, so I'm not quite sure how my "assertions are quite simply untrue". And given that you say yourself that its difficulty is lower than in previous Civs, how is it 'on par' with those in that "you have to NOT optimise". You don't have to avoid optimising to have a challenging game at higher difficulties in previous Civ games, even Civ V.

Basically, it's primarily a sandbox or role-play game and always has been.

You can see it as a roleplaying game - that's not necessarily the same as being a sandbox, and isn't in these cases. The design in Civ V and BE is very strongly built around progressing through and winning the game in timely fashion; you aren't creating a world that encourages you to play One More Turn afterwards - indeed in Civ V this most sandboxy component of past Civ games is so marginalised that half of the late-game options (such as spaceship pasts) simply can no longer be built after you win.

Your recollection of Civ IV appears rose-colored. There are only a very few ways to specialize your economy in Civ IV, and they're very circumscribed. You can Specialist, you can Cottage, or you can Wonder. That's pretty much it.

My recollection isn't rose-coloured at all - I've repeatedly pointed out to Civ IV's more enthusiastic fanboys just how limited the strategies are. But taking those three options, they provide you with rather different rewards and game directions - such as one producing Great People and another not. The equivalent you describe in BE does nothing of the sort - going specialists just means you're producing the same yields you would by going tiles by clicking different boxes in the city screen. That is not any functional difference in gameplay.

Going through different routes in the tech tree or for different affinities is barely relevant when every approach basically provides the same kind of bonuses, and affinities don't amount to much more than differences in unit skins.

You won't need Academies for a Specialist game. Barre's Specialists produce 5 science per slot, Academies base for 2 and max at 4 with a hefty build time.

Which boils down to my characterisation above - the only difference between the two is whether you stick citizens to work tiles or in building specialist slots. That is no difference in gameplay - it's hardly comparable to tall vs. wide in Civ V, or Danes vs. Inca, for varying the play experience, or indeed the Wonder-based culture spam vs. aggressive expansion of Civ IV strategies. And the same applies to the other tile improvement vs. specialist play you characterise below. At best, this is akin to the difference between playing Babylon and Korea in Civ V - two of the most similar civs.

 

[PhilBowles]

From your description of CiV strategy, it sounds like there isn't a lot of decisions to be made. You pretty much just described the one optimal path towards winning the game, which is placing your cities, getting NC up as fast as possible, continuing the science snowball, and making sure you get coal to get a ideology first. I've played +1000 hours of CiV, and that is pretty much every game.

I'm not sure how much CivBERT you've played, but there are a lot of different strategies, some of which Roxlimn pointed out. There are more strategies that you can use in CivBERT to achieve a peaceful victory (this really means there are multiple ways to get science to get all the techs for victory) than there are in CiV (rush NC, get uni's up, etc.).

As you observe, this is what's commonly taken to be the optimal way to play Civ V - by definition the optimal way is not the only way to play.

 

[Roxlimn]

PhilBowles:

My recollection isn't rose-coloured at all - I've repeatedly pointed out to Civ IV's more enthusiastic fanboys just how limited the strategies are. But taking those three options, they provide you with rather different rewards and game directions - such as one producing Great People and another not. The equivalent you describe in BE does nothing of the sort - going specialists just means you're producing the same yields you would by going tiles by clicking different boxes in the city screen. That is not any functional difference in gameplay.

Going through different routes in the tech tree or for different affinities is barely relevant when every approach basically provides the same kind of bonuses, and affinities don't amount to much more than differences in unit skins.

Which boils down to my characterisation above - the only difference between the two is whether you stick citizens to work tiles or in building specialist slots. That is no difference in gameplay - it's hardly comparable to tall vs. wide in Civ V, or Danes vs. Inca, for varying the play experience, or indeed the Wonder-based culture spam vs. aggressive expansion of Civ IV strategies. And the same applies to the other tile improvement vs. specialist play you characterise below. At best, this is akin to the difference between playing Babylon and Korea in Civ V - two of the most similar civs.

Well, let's examine that, shall we?

The "only difference" between Specialist and Academy play is that you stick one on tiles, and the other on slots. Except not.

In order to get those tiles in the first place, you have to go down Knowledge, and/or research two key technologies and have the workers in place to spam the Academies, all of which requires playing a specific way. You have to produce lots of workers. You have to get worker bonuses. You have to get good farming going on (Biowells, usually). You have to secure the tiles, which means you do culture or tile-buy.

You don't ANY of that in a Specialist game.

I'll point out that between a Cottage play and a Specialist game, you spam Cottages in one and Farms in the other, but you do still create a GP Farm even in Cottage play, so you're still getting Great People - just not as often or as fast.

You don't NOT create Great People in Civ IV. That's a pointless restriction that's difficult to get around because it would necessarily involve never getting Wonders and avoiding Specialist use. One involves more, one involves less, but they're both still using the same mechanics. Specialist play can still use Cottages (usually the Capital). The GP Farm still uses, er, Farms.

A Dome game is completely unlike a Specialist or an Academy game. You don't use the same improvements, you don't get the same outputs, you don't even progress through the tech tree or the Virtue tree the same way. Your primary output is culture, not science.

Between Specialist and Academy, you focus on claiming and creating tiles in one, and in acquiring key buildings in the other. Nothing like the same game. Even the cities look different - Specialist terrain doesn't require as much improvement.

With affinities, you get different units, but you can also emphasize different things. Purity gets easier Health but can hurt for growth. Harmony can easily get Health and Growth, but often poaches Academies for science as a cheat (Academies are a Supremacy thing). If you make a point NOT to get Supremacy tech, the game looks and feels very different.

If you like, I can present you a bunch of presets during the loadout as your Civ and restrictions on tech you can't get as your "playstyle." Play them and you'll see.

PS: By the by, I compared the science outputs between Academy and Specialist to counter the wrong idea that you need Academies to win in anything like a reasonable time frame in BERT. You do not. Lots of sources of science. Heck, you can spy for your science, and that's absolutely nothing like anything Civ's ever seen, so it's probably broken. But a Specialist Economy in BERT doesn't have to be beholden to Science, and you're going to need to get Food Buildings to max your TR yields anyway, since relying on just farms will give you anemic routes.

 

[Roxlimn]

How does running specialists compare to academies when you're not Barre? And can you do spies if you're not Suzanne and she's not on the map?

From what I've played in CiV and BERT, it's harder to follow the science plan to the letter there than here. That, and not the plan per se, is what generates the decision points. Is it safe enough to delay Construction until after Civil Service? Until after Education? Are my sea cities safe, or do I need to go out of my way to get Navigation? Is it better to settle that suboptimal city, or to risk a delay going after that AI's good city? Can I deal with the extra unhappiness a new/conquered city now?

In BERT, the fact that the best improvements (Academies, VFs and Biowells) are terrain-agnostic releases a lot of weight from deciding where you should place your cities; there are still strategic considerations to be made (resources and/or defensiveness), but mostly terrain won't matter much to city development; it's more important to have 5-6 cities ASAP than place them in "good" tiles, as long as you have at least one city with good food to be a trade hub. Also, from what (little, I'll concede) I've played trying VFs/Biowells with specialists, more often than not you're changing your mid-game focus from Cognition to Bionics and spamming different improvements. Haven't tried domes yet, tho.

I might have phrased the issue wrong: it's not that there are too few strategies, but that the strategies that are there lead to a similar, semi-automatic end game too soon. In CiV, the same strategy done over and over again leads to more diverse playthroughs that keep you involved further into the game (IMHO).

Running Specialists is comparable to 3-science Academies (the basic tech-only output of Academies now) if you're not Barre so long as you can snag Student Aid. If the Agreement is not on the table, that puts a pretty hard kibosh on non-Barre Specialisting.

Most of the game in CiV (and CIV) is just following the same trajectories with the same endpoints and ways of play. You're still slingshotting to Civil Service - just a matter of fitting more under the hood.

Farms aren't terrain agnostic. They require flat terrain on land. They're kind of bad in Aquatic Cities - they don't provide as much food to the Routes as land cities, and that's really the payoff for why you're doing VFs in the first place.

Biowells are okay if you're not VFing, but they take a while to replace the Farms and it's sometimes not clear that you're really seeing an improvement since they suck up Energy as well and the Health now isn't as important.

You don't use VFs or Biowells at all with Barre's Specialists. That's CIV thinking. You gun for Biology and go for Mass Digesters. If you can also swing Student Aid, the Mass Digesters give you functionally 6 food tiles - nearly the best you can get.

Bionics for the Institute, and then slingshot to Nanotech for more science slots in the Nanopastures.

Since you're more or less tile-free in a Specialist game, you can snipe yourself some Strategics even in snow or work a bunch of Manufactories together with your slots, depending. The Agreements very much flavor the sort of game you can get right now.

If your terrain has a bunch of Xenomass, it could be worth your while to get all the things that make them monster tiles, including early-game Conservation Areas and National Parks. I found that I accidentally did that with Oil in one game, and during my second expansion phase, all the clusters of oil tiles started looking mighty good. So while you CAN set up a city nice with any terrain, planning for something makes a difference.

 

[PhilBowles]

PhilBowles:



Well, let's examine that, shall we?

The "only difference" between Specialist and Academy play is that you stick one on tiles, and the other on slots. Except not.

In order to get those tiles in the first place, you have to go down Knowledge, and/or research two key technologies and have the workers in place to spam the Academies, all of which requires playing a specific way. You have to produce lots of workers. You have to get worker bonuses. You have to get good farming going on (Biowells, usually). You have to secure the tiles, which means you do culture or tile-buy.

This still seems to be trying to find distinctions too fine for me to really consider distinct strategies - building several extra of unit X, or using tile improvements that provide a blue resource rather than a purple one. And the functional results, as I've already said, aren't really very distinct. The game doesn't necessarily need to be as strongly binary as the tall vs. wide Civ V pushes, but something on the level of the differences in victory strategies as the policy trees or ideologies would be welcome.

You don't ANY of that in a Specialist game.

I'll point out that between a Cottage play and a Specialist game, you spam Cottages in one and Farms in the other, but you do still create a GP Farm even in Cottage play, so you're still getting Great People - just not as often or as fast.

In terms of the way Civ IV plays, the frequency of GPs is extremely significant, as the effect they have on the game is so large.

You don't NOT create Great People in Civ IV. That's a pointless restriction that's difficult to get around because it would necessarily involve never getting Wonders and avoiding Specialist use. One involves more, one involves less, but they're both still using the same mechanics. Specialist play can still use Cottages (usually the Capital). The GP Farm still uses, er, Farms.

Frankly, all of the specialisations of strategies you list for BE are 'pointless restrictions', since you can win at least on Soyuz with no discernible strategic focus at all. For example, I snowballed with an essentially random tech selection, building both biowells and academies, buying tiles, and playing Barre without any particular focus on specialists - I ended up as a health-and-science focused supremacy civ. All of these belong to a suite of different strategies as you're describing it, but even with that mix and match - and without actively warring on other societies - the game was simply too easy.

Between Specialist and Academy, you focus on claiming and creating tiles in one, and in acquiring key buildings in the other. Nothing like the same game. Even the cities look different - Specialist terrain doesn't require as much improvement.

Back to the difference between Babylon and Korea.

PS: By the by, I compared the science outputs between Academy and Specialist to counter the wrong idea that you need Academies to win in anything like a reasonable time frame in BERT. You do not. Lots of sources of science. Heck, you can spy for your science, and that's absolutely nothing like anything Civ's ever seen, so it's probably broken. But a Specialist Economy in BERT doesn't have to be beholden to Science, and you're going to need to get Food Buildings to max your TR yields anyway, since relying on just farms will give you anemic routes.

Didn't we already establish that we wanted to play non-optimally to even have anything resembling a challenge? So optimal yields seem of little relevance.

I think the point about science from spying - and energy - is telling. You need no strategic focus to get covert agents and they don't seem to be particularly affected by your strategy, and yet they're regularly providing you with flat bonuses irrespective of whatever else you're focusing on.

 

[ZTZaorish]

Anyone know how well BERT sold? It seems to have really stalled here, the stats on steams to indicate this, CiV still going REALLY strong.

I think if one of the top modders from the community did one of the balance patches that they are so famous for it would go a long way to resurrecting the game. (I believe there is work being done in this direction) Or even as a longer shot an awesome totally conversion. I realize these things take time, but I think the fix that makes this game a classic isn't going to come from Firaxis.

Also is it 'legal' for people to discuss and point people towards mods for BERT in this forum? I realize there is a BERT mod forum, but a very small % of people actually go there, so it really could use some redirects from this one, which many more people see. This game really needs all the help it can get. I'm just talking maybe one thread where people can go, 'hey this is a great mod, go here to learn more about it'.

At this point all I would like to see from Firaxis is all the modder support they can give. Its time for them to go on vacation, let the community fix it, and then do their usual; steal the most popular mods and put it in vanilla.


PS Just to illustrate my concern, at this time there are 4 times as many users looking at the community balance patch sub/sub/sub forum than there is in this BE: General discussion forum.

All I know is that it really isn't doing to well in terms of how much people are playing it. Especially compared to civ v. People say the historical draw is why people play civ V over BE. I disagree, people play games because the game play is good for the most part, and civ BERT remains an overcomplicated messy product, a lot of the design choices don't make sense, and are too complicated. It is kind of like a boat patched up with tape,yes it floats, but not for long.

In the end this game definitely has the potential to be better than civ V it just need to fix the many issues it has, and improve on what Civ V has done. Civ BE tried to go it's own path but in most cases tripped over itself when it tried, and just wasn't bold enough with other choices.

 

[Roxlimn]

I don't know where to go, PhilBowles because you've obviously not been playing the game and everything you've said is just flat wrong.

First, the most wrong:

I think the point about science from spying - and energy - is telling. You need no strategic focus to get covert agents and they don't seem to be particularly affected by your strategy, and yet they're regularly providing you with flat bonuses irrespective of whatever else you're focusing on.

You might as well say the same thing between Cottage and Specialist Economies. At the end of the day, they're providing you with output. Even Great People bombs give you specific amounts of output. At that level of distinction, everything in every Civ game is the same.

You do need strategic focus on the tech web to get the agents early and fast. You will also need to make Building Quest choice that prioritize agents. You don't always wants to do that. If you're going for vertical growth, you'll want food rather than an Agent from CEL Cradles.

Didn't we already establish that we wanted to play non-optimally to even have anything resembling a challenge? So optimal yields seem of little relevance.

Once again, if you're going to apply that in such a blanket manner, then everything and every distinction is pointless in every Civ game ever made.

Back to the difference between Babylon and Korea.

Play it before you say that.

Frankly, all of the specialisations of strategies you list for BE are 'pointless restrictions', since you can win at least on Soyuz with no discernible strategic focus at all. For example, I snowballed with an essentially random tech selection, building both biowells and academies, buying tiles, and playing Barre without any particular focus on specialists - I ended up as a health-and-science focused supremacy civ. All of these belong to a suite of different strategies as you're describing it, but even with that mix and match - and without actively warring on other societies - the game was simply too easy.

It maxes at King. So yeah. You can basically win with whatever. Most of Civ has always been like this. It's only Deity and Immortal where you're forced into anything, really, and a lot of those are awful gamey crap that really takes you out of the setting.

This still seems to be trying to find distinctions too fine for me to really consider distinct strategies - building several extra of unit X, or using tile improvements that provide a blue resource rather than a purple one. And the functional results, as I've already said, aren't really very distinct. The game doesn't necessarily need to be as strongly binary as the tall vs. wide Civ V pushes, but something on the level of the differences in victory strategies as the policy trees or ideologies would be welcome.

Those exist but you continually deny them without playing the game. I don't know what else to say. If you won't play the game and insist on things that patently aren't true, there's nothing more to be said.

 

[PhilBowles]

I don't know where to go, PhilBowles because you've obviously not been playing the game and everything you've said is just flat wrong.

Strange, looking at your comments you've conceded every one except the last, your defence being a handwaving "Well, that's true in other Civ games as well" ignoring the clear difference in scale - yes, you can win with a suite of non-optimal strategies in most other Civ games. You still have to actually have a strategy, in most of them even on King, you can't just coast through clicking random buttons every so often. In BE, it appears you basically just win whatever you do. I'm not even at the level of many of the people commenting regularly in the Civ V forum; I've yet to win Civ V on Deity and probably win a little less than 50% of the time on Immortal.

You do need strategic focus on the tech web to get the agents early and fast.

No, you need to take computing - an early tech - when the quest pops up telling you to take computing, if you haven't already done it. That's it. By that point it shouldn't take more than 10 turns based on my playthroughs (and I've played through the early game multiple times) and doesn't interfere with any other tech path as it's a branch from your starting tech.

You will also need to make Building Quest choice that prioritize agents.

No you won't. You can do, to get extra agents and so extra covert ops, but you automatically get three which are fully sufficient for your covert ops needs, especially since despite the tooltips tending the indicate an X% chance of agent death either I was incredibly lucky at repeatedly beating the odds and having agents survive at a 10% or so chance, or agents simply never die save for enemy ones. Possibly this is either a bug or is reliant on the AI stationing agents in their cities, and so an AI behaviour in need of improvement. Either way, at this stage you certainly don't need to prioritise agents in any way.

Play it before you say that.

Don't worry, your description was clear enough - and since the specialist mechanic is the same across several generations of Civ games by this point, it seems highly unlikely that BE - which has an identical mechanic to Civ V - does anything atypical with it.

It maxes at King. So yeah. You can basically win with whatever. Most of Civ has always been like this.

Not to this degree, and where it was the case those games had higher difficulty settings where you had to employ deliberate strategies. You can't easily argue that the lack of higher difficulties is not a flaw in this game compared with its predecessors.

 

[Roxlimn]

Eh. At the higher levels, the key to winning the game is exploiting the AI's deficiencies, not really a focused strategic approach. The fact that that's absent here is sort of a flaw in that nothing is taken away by adding awful game modes, but it's not much of a loss, IMO.

No, you need to take computing - an early tech - when the quest pops up telling you to take computing, if you haven't already done it. That's it. By that point it shouldn't take more than 10 turns based on my playthroughs (and I've played through the early game multiple times) and doesn't interfere with any other tech path as it's a branch from your starting tech.

No you won't. You can do, to get extra agents and so extra covert ops, but you automatically get three which are fully sufficient for your covert ops needs, especially since despite the tooltips tending the indicate an X% chance of agent death either I was incredibly lucky at repeatedly beating the odds and having agents survive at a 10% or so chance, or agents simply never die save for enemy ones. Possibly this is either a bug or is reliant on the AI stationing agents in their cities, and so an AI behaviour in need of improvement. Either way, at this stage you certainly don't need to prioritise agents in any way.

That's a mistake. You don't need more agents in order to succeed at any one mission. You want them so you can gather three or more times the usual amount. Basically, you abandon all normal science output acquisition and focus on spy output. That's how that works. Since the spy output is dependent on the tech you're researching, you're incentivized to go up the tech web and tech as hard as you can for the most expensive and beneficial techs you can grab. It's entirely different from normal science.

Don't worry, your description was clear enough - and since the specialist mechanic is the same across several generations of Civ games by this point, it seems highly unlikely that BE - which has an identical mechanic to Civ V - does anything atypical with it.

My description was that it's different, and yes, it's different because Specialists in CivBE can give you food, which wasn't possible before, and the output is something like double the normal for Barre's Scientists. Don't theorycraft. That behavior is exactly the same thing that made many people think that you can't even WonderEconomy in Civ IV - without trying the game. Play the game.