New Developer Interview SA-Games

[Ryika]

Really depends on the game though, doesn't it? ^^ In an RTS where Replays are commonly used as training to become better? Totally understand the importance. In an RPG where you may lose 50+ hours of character development on the odd chance that the developers didn't manage to guarantee compatibility? Yeah, reasonable.

In BE, where even a marathon-game is usually over in not more than a few days of playing a bit after working? With no real replay-functionality? That sets the importance rather low for me. But of course, some people will care and the "shortage" of actual information is due to the devs not giving out too many in-depth information, not because of interviewers not asking interesting questions.

Or maybe they even did and got a lot of "Can't talk about that yet." as answers, so they were like: ". Need to think about some filler-questions quickly to get some filler-content for my article! Uhm... savegames!"

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

As a Marathon player, I've had to abort games due to patches or expansions. It really doesn't bother me. It's hard to play an old save knowing there's new features or balancing that I can't use until I start a new game.

 

[Westwall]

Or maybe they even did and got a lot of "Can't talk about that yet." as answers, so they were like: ". Need to think about some filler-questions quickly to get some filler-content for my article! Uhm... savegames!"

I hope so. Stations in their current form are a waste of space so I really want to believe there's work going into making them more like the city-states of Civ 5. Better if at all possible with benefits that extend far beyond gaining +resource with an established trade route.

And it's probably time to bring back luxury resources, or whatever the health-based equivalent would be.

 

[Ryika]

Luxury Resources are nothing but an artificial limitation to where you can settle and where you can't. Bleh, keep them away from this game! The Health-System can certainly be improved and advanced with more depth, but a luxury-like system is not the way to go.

 

[Westwall]

I disagree. Many of my interactions with other civs involved trading for such resources, so that provided an extra incentive to open a dialogue with them and try to acquire as many resources as possible. As it stands, I almost never trade resources with other factions.

It would also provide a way to manage health in the early game, which is just a headache. And just from a lore perspective it makes sense - you'll want to settle wherever there are things that would boost the health of your population (which makes me wonder a bit why growth and health are two separate things but whatever).

 

[Minor Annoyance]

The luxury system did at least give you a reason to value one location over another, but tying it to happiness isn't the only way to make something valuable.

The nuts and bolts trading of resources or yields are in the trade route system now

Wonder how that works with the strategic resources that are available in specific numbers? Are excess resources automatically on the market and accessible via trade routes? That would make it easy for your resources to 'escape' but if you got priority so the trade would be cut off as soon as you decided to use it, it would make siphoning resources a risky option as they could disappear at any time. The shot of the diplomacy menu did have an option for changing the relationship with another faction. Could be that an open borders agreement is how one handles if your resources are available via trade routes.

 

[Galgus]

Luxury Resources are nothing but an artificial limitation to where you can settle and where you can't. Bleh, keep them away from this game! The Health-System can certainly be improved and advanced with more depth, but a luxury-like system is not the way to go.

While I agree that the settling limitations were annoying, I kind of liked how it standardized empire happiness for a time.

Being able to beeline health buildings seems to make wide play extremely dominant when it stabilized after a low health expansion phase.

 

[Ryika]

I disagree. Many of my interactions with other civs involved trading for such resources, so that provided an extra incentive to open a dialogue with them and try to acquire as many resources as possible. As it stands, I almost never trade resources with other factions.

That's a whole different issue you're talking about though. You can make Resources valuable without completely letting it dominate where you can and cannot settle. For example by making many buildings require them. Or by making some strong buildings have local resource requirements. Or just by improving their output.

The way Luxuries work in Civ 5 is something like:
"Mhh. Only 3 unique luxuries around. Guess I can't go wide then."

Imho ideally it would be something like:
"Mhh. Not many Resources in that area. I guess if I still want to go wide I'll have to buy some/have to accept that these cities don't run at full capacity."
and
"Oh, there's a high-resource area! Guess I'll settle there first even if it means I have to deal with the aliens."

It would also provide a way to manage health in the early game, which is just a headache. And just from a lore perspective it makes sense - you'll want to settle wherever there are things that would boost the health of your population (which makes me wonder a bit why growth and health are two separate things but whatever).

There are tons of ways to fix the health if you dislike the "Drop and get up later"-system. It's a design choice, but if they wanted to change it then they could do it in many different ways - this is not tied to luxury resources, nor does it needs a system like luxury resources to be in place.

 

[Westwall]

Sure. I'm just saying that as a player, I care a whole lot less about the resources on the map in BE than I do when playing Civ 5 and I'm pretty sure lack of some luxury equivalent is the reason why.

If there could be some way to make BE resources more valuable and varied, I'd be all for that. As it stands, I don't build many satellites so all that petrol and titanium is just kind of sitting there.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

I disagree. Many of my interactions with other civs involved trading for such resources, so that provided an extra incentive to open a dialogue with them and try to acquire as many resources as possible. As it stands, I almost never trade resources with other factions.

To be fair, even with "Trade Luxury for Luxury" or "Trade Luxury for 7/8 GPT" it is still a pretty one dimensional approach to diplomacy when compared to all other possibilities should have in such a game.

 

[Westwall]

No argument there. But one-dimensional diplomacy is still preferable to nonexistent diplomacy, which is what currently characterizes the overall BE foreign relations experience.

 

[Mustakrakish]

Dat super important safe file compatibility question, man. What would we do without those brave people asking these? How would we possibly know?!

 

[Gilleous]

Some else did ask about Stations. The Twitter account for civ just posted it. It's a video interview. Yeah, as guessed, the answer was, "we can't give more details on that but we considered them."

Which can mean anything, but I don't expect a lot of changes with stations or they would have teased them more. Hopefully, we will still see some.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Which can mean anything, but I don't expect a lot of changes with stations or they would have teased them more. Hopefully, we will still see some.

It sounds like they are not the target of a major overhaul (like diplomacy/ocean gameplay), meaning they are probably more in the territory of tweaks and are hence much more in flux as there is no "grand design" they can reveal without giving away details that are changing as they develop the game (like with ocean cities).

On the other hand, even a decent revision of stations without a new from-scratch system and some good ties to diplomacy could turn them from nuisance to a "neat if not spectacular" part of the game.

In the grand scheme of things, as long as they make them less annoying, I don't care that much about what they do with them. They don't feel like an integral part of the game.

 

[Ryika]

I think if stations got changed a bit to be more effective and reliable at giving you good yields (instead of having 2-3 somewhat good stations and a lot of crap), then that's really all you need for stations per se.

The interesting part stations could take is actually in diplomacy imho. A system that is somewhat like:
- Spend Diplomatic Currency to claim to Protect a station
- You get bonus yields from trading with them and AIs will then no longer auto-attack them just because they in their way (could even add other bonuses, like giving vision within 2 tiles, etc.)
- But IF they attack them, then you have the choice of going to war without any diplomatic penalty with other Civs (and, to take it further, they may even get a diplomatic penalty with other Leaders that like you more than them)

While that would still not make Stations as "Entities" too relevant it would be one way to make them objects to fight over. I don't think we necessarily need them to be like Civ 5 City States to be interesting.

 

[Lord Tirian]

While that would still not make Stations as "Entities" too relevant it would be one way to make them objects to fight over. I don't think we necessarily need them to be like Civ 5 City States to be interesting.

Yeah, I also could see them tie into the artefact system - some of the stations could offer an artefact as reward for sticking with them all the way to level 3. Add in some way to actually "claim" a station via diplomacy (instead of that weird mess we have now) and I'd be quite happy with their role.

The two big problems with stations at the moment are the very silly way diplomacy handles them and that they eat up land without a way to get rid of them (because of silly diplomacy) without angering everybody on the planet, which feels unfair, because you can't protect them the same way in reverse.

 

[Westwall]

The easiest way to get rid of them if they're at a far corner of your empire without any other factions establishing routes is just to let them die out, which I find myself doing quite a bit.

They're just so useless, the aliens don't even attack them. Compare this to city-states that would often be raided by barbarians and request the destruction of their camps. Stations actually break the immersion and take me out of the game.

They're fast food restaurants on an alien planet.

 

[Ryika]

How exactly would Aliens attack a self-contained station? Eat the walls? ô.o

 

[Westwall]

That's why I'm hoping they'll get borders again with workers, combat units and improvements to pillage, bringing them closer to city states but maybe occupying no more than a set number of tiles.

Maybe I'm wrong but it seems like aliens just don't pillage, which seems bizarre since they're supposed to be ravenous predators.

 

[Galgus]

How exactly would Aliens attack a self-contained station? Eat the walls? ô.o

Aside killing anyone who leaves and cutting off all supply, I'd guess they could tear into it or climb on it somehow.