Live stream "Masterclass: Faction Strategies" Friday, Sept 26 at 2pm EST

[Lancor]

Agreed. But it makes you wonder what the AI's stance is on all these options...will it make good choices for the AI factions? Hmm...we can only hope.

The strategic AI was always OK/good. Only the tactic one failed.

 

[Knut_Are_M]

Ones that had that same format for their tech tooltip

Array-1 launch radius
Academy-2 sci
Manufactury-2 prod
Terrascape-2 food,prod,culture
Node-healing
Dome-city hp
Biowell-health

All of that is in addition to their yield (what they give to the tile when worked)

That can not be true about terrascapes. it would give them 5 Production,5 Food,5 culture when worked. you can easily afford 2 per city by With a pop 4 city

for comparison a farm can yield, on grassland 5 Food 1 energy,1 Production, 1 science for a total yield of 8(but Costs 6 energy less then terrascape.

Looked at the video for terrascapes it is 3,3,3 for the cost of 6 energy. as in not great at all. but Nice for production and culture, i still think i would favor generators or mines over that, and try to afford as many hologram orbitals as possible, or get some supremacy artists and farms.

Also it looks like biowells have low yields when worked compared to high tech farms.it might be from me not knowing all the Techs.

overall looking at the current ingame settings of terrascapes the Balance is ok. sometimes you just want that culture and it goes very well when combineing knowlege and prosperity without breaking the game Balance.

I really wish I get alot of petroleum in my games because some of the better orbitals require them in huge quantities. 3 petroleum and 1 floatstone and 90 Production for 14 culture per turn for 60 turns, 90 turns if I get deep into industry.

 

[Seek]

I haven't been able to watch anything on Twitch for several months, because of something they changed in their coding that makes it pause and buffer about once or twice a minute. I've tried all the various "fixes" I could find with a Google search and none of them help. I'm on a 3 Meg DSL connection, because that's the fastest available in my area. Before they changed their coding, I was able to watch any video or live stream in Twitch with no problem.

Please tell me someone is going to put this on Youtube soon. I can at least watch that at 480p with only the occasional buffering issue, usually near the end of a video regardless of the length. it always seems to be the last 10% of the video that it craps out on me.

The most annoying thing with both the Twitch and Youtube buffering issues is I can watch movies on Netflix or Vudu at 720p without ever having it pause in the middle to buffer again.

I've had the same issues in the past and I agree, it can be incredibly frustrating. I have discovered some addons for Chrome that do wonders: for YT, Magic Actions for YouTube works wonders, it circumvents the idiotic "only download part of the video" thing YT does nowadays (plus it has some great options like always use flash/html5, auto set preferred resolution, adblock, etc.); and for Twitch, when it gets twitchy using a proxy can help sometimes, I use ZenMate, it's simple and can be turned off and on easily, but it doesn't always fix twitch (bear in mind that Twitch has seen enormous growth in the last months, so it's natural that their servers lag from time to time). Hope these help.

Anyway, back on topic..

The resource bubbles are there. But nobody has been using them. One of the first live streams, showed the option, but if was not turned on. On of the screenshots released yesterday, shows them turned on.

I agree. I asked in chat during the stream and got no response. My guess is that the devs think the maps look better with them off, so don't turn them on for marketing purposes.

Ones that had that same format for their tech tooltip

Array-1 launch radius
Academy-2 sci
Manufactury-2 prod
Terrascape-2 food,prod,culture
Node-healing
Dome-city hp
Biowell-health

All of that is in addition to their yield (what they give to the tile when worked)

These are just the positive modifiers; for completeness, it should be noted that many of these improvements cost energy to maintain and the Manufactury costs health as well (I believe also regardless of being worked).

 

[MadDjinn]

I really wish they would enable the resource bubbles, it would make reading the map a lot easier.

that was my bad. I always have it on, but didn't check to see if Pete's setup had it before we went live.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

Hi there MadDjinn, no problem it was still arguably the best video so far. Did you get the impression that the AI actually understands 1upt in BE? That seems to be the one point everyone agrees really dragged civ5 down.

 

[Alkyon]

Post stream question Mad Djinn: about how regularly were the Firaxis guys looking over your shoulder in shock mumbling something like "You can do that!?" or "we need to rebalance that..."? There were a couple of times during the stream where the host was just flabbergasted by your success.

I realize that some of the more broken and exploitable things being fixed won't affect me as a King/Hard player, but Civ Savants are an important market share to cater too as well.

 

[TheGrumpyBuddha]

One big question I have is how stable the Multiplayer is now, and whether you can use mods. MadDjinn, any ideas? You implied MP is a lot better now, but *how much* better?

 

[ense7en]

Yay, so good to see Firaxis is taking notes from MadDjinn

 

[TheGrumpyBuddha]

For what little it's worth (and boy, is it worth little), I also think the Purity 1 power is overpowered -- even worse, the flavor is all wrong. I can see it for Harmony, but IMO Purity is about pissing off the aliens, not strolling past them.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

That can not be true about terrascapes. it would give them 5 Production,5 Food,5 culture when worked. you can easily afford 2 per city by With a pop 4 city

for comparison a farm can yield, on grassland 5 Food 1 energy,1 Production, 1 science for a total yield of 8(but Costs 6 energy less then terrascape.

Looked at the video for terrascapes it is 3,3,3 for the cost of 6 energy. as in not great at all. but Nice for production and culture, i still think i would favor generators or mines over that, and try to afford as many hologram orbitals as possible, or get some supremacy artists and farms.

Also it looks like biowells have low yields when worked compared to high tech farms.it might be from me not knowing all the Techs.

overall looking at the current ingame settings of terrascapes the Balance is ok. sometimes you just want that culture and it goes very well when combineing knowlege and prosperity without breaking the game Balance.

I really wish I get alot of petroleum in my games because some of the better orbitals require them in huge quantities. 3 petroleum and 1 floatstone and 90 Production for 14 culture per turn for 60 turns, 90 turns if I get deep into industry.

Terrascapes also take 15?50? turns to produce on standard speed and require a virtue to get that output..

basically it is ~2x as good as a farm, but it has maintenance costs.... so
2.5 farms or 1 Terrascape and 1.5 Generator (generator only giving 4 energy so far..but gives some other output)

 

[GAGA Extrem]

that was my bad. I always have it on, but didn't check to see if Pete's setup had it before we went live.

Ah, I guess considering how well the rest went we can let this one slip.
Thanks a bunch! I hope you can get them to bust a few more exploits before release.

One thing I really wonder about is specialists. Considering we no longer have GPs, they really need some decent yield to become effective. Can you give any info on that? (Not sure if it was ever shown/pointed out in any live stream...)

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Agree on that.. Particularly thr Growers

Also any info on what determines the XP cost of Affinity levels?

 

[AriochIV]

The change to the Puppet and Annex city features appear to be intended to encourage players to Annex more cities on capture, but I suspect it will only encourage most players to leave cities as Puppets forever.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The change to the Puppet and Annex city features appear to be intended to encourage players to Annex more cities on capture, but I suspect it will only encourage most players to leave cities as Puppets forever.

Well it encourages them to do one or the other... Annex on Capture or leave as Puppet forever

 

[SupremacyKing]

Well it encourages them to do one or the other... Annex on Capture or leave as Puppet forever

Correct if I am wrong, but don't puppet cities still have the disadvantage that the player cannot control what it produces? So, there is still a clear choice between annex (full control over production but you have to wait until resistance is over) vs puppet forever (no control over production) but no unhealth from resistance.

 

[CrazyMage22]

Thank you MaDjinn for your work at showing us what to expect and what strategies would be useful in certain situations but I have a few comments/critique to add to what I saw:

1.- Diplomacy/Alliance:
The alliance system seems to be a bit wonky, the main reason people so rarely took defensive pacts is that it could cause a diplomatic catastrophe as you could declare war on someone you had a declaration of friendship with, a promise not to invade, etc.
Now that alliances could also bring you to war if an ally declares on someone, this has the potential to be worse than defensive pacts if you or the AI do not have the possibility of opting out of the conflict or, in the inverse, you could bring an enemy on an "ally" that has no chance if you do not help him or maybe even ruin his diplomatic standing if you make him/her go to war against someone he/she has a declaration of cooperation with. If an alliance brings no further benefits except military cooperation then these possible drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Better to simply stay as friends with someone you are trading with and convince them to help you out in a war by giving something that is useful to them. (Also in CiV you could make other leaders go to war by giving them things, but other leaders only asked you to go war with them against someone, who could have a declaration of friendship with you and would still give a backstabbing penalty even with the one that asked in the first place, and did not try to convince you with resources unless you asked them in the trade screen. Basically I am hoping that the diplomacy in Civ:BE be improved.)
For comparison I can bring other games where I believe the diplomacy to be good: Alpha Centauri Pact brother/sister system where you had the option to go or not go to war if someone declared on your ally (or your ally declared on someone) and if you chose to opt out you would lose the ally status (or your ally would ask you to honour the pact and declare war against its enemy) also being in a pact with someone meant your bases received extra energy than just having a treaty of friendship. Galactic Civilizations has a somewhat similar system except one of the races has a power specifically made to benefit from allies when declared upon. These comparisons are brought so that an improvement can be made on the system seen on the stream. Made it possible to refuse having to go to war against someone that declared upon an ally, in exchange you will lose the ally status (and thus any other benefit this could have) and maybe even have a diplomatic penalty with your now past ally so it would not be too easy to become allies once again. If you or your allies decide to go to war against someone allow an option to ask your allies go to war with you.

Now I realize that the alliance system has not been seen in its entirety and thus this post may not be all that useful. If that is the case I ask that this system be better explained so that we can analyze it better and thus give it an appropriate critique since it has been said that the developers do see our comments and I desire that Civ:BE be the best game it can be. (to justify the price since I intend to buy)

Will continue later (Unit balance shall be next)
PD: Quite the wordy first comment isn´t? I hope it has been well written.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Correct if I am wrong, but don't puppet cities still have the disadvantage that the player cannot control what it produces? So, there is still a clear choice between annex (full control over production but you have to wait until resistance is over) vs puppet forever (no control over production) but no unhealth from resistance.

True... but if you puppet Then annex, you get more resistance as opposed to annex immediately. So Annex immediately OR leave as puppet forever are the best choices.


As for the Alliance system, it could work if you can only ally with someone if you ally with all their allies.

 

[SupremacyKing]

So Annex immediately OR leave as puppet forever are the best choices.

I agree that those are the player's two best choices. I was actually trying to reply to Arioch's comment. I don't agree that players will always puppet now. I think annexing immediately is a viable choice contrary to civ5.

 

[AriochIV]

The problem is that the health penalty may make it impractical to Annex right away in the middle of a long war.

As for the Alliance system, it could work if you can only ally with someone if you ally with all their allies.

If you ally with someone, then you are functionally allied with all of that faction's allies, because if any of them go to war, you will too.

 

[SupremacyKing]

The alliance mechanic could create a WW1 situation where if you have 2 major blocs then all it takes is one declaration of war to draw everybody on both sides into a world war.