PhilBowles
Deity
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2011
- Messages
- 5,333
1. Yeah, and you missed mine. To focus on this imaginary point you completely ignored the fact that it doesn't matter whether or not I agree with your premise. That's irrelevant. I disagree with it, but that's an unresolvable tangent for another time.
I was pointing out the issues in your proposed resolution and how you define a workable end product.
The claimed issue you raised was an assumption that I was specifying a 'workable end product' based on a given source novel. That was not the case - as I've now said several times the workable end product I had in view was one in which affinity choice defines gameplay. The particular choice could be based on a particular source or not, and could be as crudely-linked to existing play archetypes as 'Supremacy = wide, Purity = tall improvement-focused, Harmony = tall specialist-focused', but it's not the specific implementation that's at issue - in fact a system that binary (well, tertiary) would likely be too static (all wide play ends up as Supremacy for instance).
But this is the general approach it makes sense to take with affinities to make them more than cosmetic add-ons - something that influences the core of a 4x game's playstyle and strategic focus to a greater or lesser degree. "One affinity gets extra science from science buildings, one affinity gets extra science from supporting more population, one affinity gets extra science from virtues, all play exactly the same strategy exactly the same way" is no difference at all.
To hark back to the point about science-fiction and what setting to be inspired by, you favour hard science-fiction. I don't, personally, though it can be a riveting read. And the argument of which "flavour" of sci-fi Beyond Earth is based on could go on forever; the existence of Civilopaedia points towards it being more hard sci-fi, but the wishy-washy contents and idealistic theme of the contents of said encyclopaedia could argue the opposite. In reality it probably incorporates elements of both (matching the spectrum of ideas from the design team, no doubt) while also being required to follow established Civilisation trends (like the existence of a Civilopaedia).
I'd say there's less room for subjectivity on this point than you imagine. The endpoint Beyond Earth's affinities end up with, much like Alpha Centauri's transcendence, are as close to pure fantasy that it makes no difference, but our premise is that we start from a near-future base, with essentially our own technology (minus, apparently, computers, satellites or aircraft) save for the ability to settle another planet. We rule out any space operatics, as there are no sentient aliens involved. We are intrinsically starting from something close to hard sci-fi.
3. Affinities already reward play styles. Unit perks, while often one-sided, also offer real choices that mean a lot more than "unit skins". A significant issue with this at the moment is the power level / Affinity access of Hybrid units, but that's a balance issue, and not much else (delay Hybrid upgrades to 7/7 or even 8/8, something that's been proposed the forum over).
Unit perks are the same for levelling in an affinity regardless of which affinity you level up in, from what I've seen. Balance issues in a single-player game are essentially irrelevant, and in any case are a moot point while the AI is in a state where you never need affinity-specific, or even hybrid, units to win the game through combat. And whatever their specific bonuses, each affinity has its units at basically the same point on their tech path, with basically the same combat stats. Affinities should make a detectably distinct enough difference to play style that you should be able to tell what they're doing for you without checking the tooltips. Right now whatever impact they have is less detectable than BNW's ideologies, and those only show up late in the game mainly as a way of boosting your progress towards an already-chosen victory condition.
4. Lastly, SMAC was not a Civilisation game by name and is not associated with the series, and Firaxis / 2K do not hold the rights to it.
Colonization was not a Civilization game by name, but was nevertheless one in playstyle (albeit one arguably more distinct from contemporary Civ than Alpha Centauri); it's not clear why who owns the rights is relevant.
With regards to the terraforming game, you couldn't perform every single terraforming operation straightaway, but you could still do a great deal from the word go. Sure it had more options available, but other than that it played out very similarly. Found City, make improvements, go to war. Mostly go to war.
Which is why I say it didn't do an especially good job of portraying the world as a genuinely new environment to colonise, but it was nevertheless closer than BE. If all you want the game to be is a retread of Civilization, all you'll ever get is a reskinned map, but that squanders the entire premise of setting the game on another planet. Even systems like affinity could be implemented in a typical Civ game, as the same sorts of questions about how to adapt a society to future developments exist (albeit not with a specific focus on adapting to an alien world; nevertheless Purity and Supremacy are both viable options in a future-Earth setting).