New Patch for Rising Tide: Wonder War and Chungsu new colors

[klail]

I'm glad the leash one was increased. Being able to leash the colossals was pretty op, especially early on -- which this prevents.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

What I mean is if/when an AI achieves a victory condition, we see the normal pop ups and their accomplishment is subtly celebrated, but the player doesn't "lose". Once the player achieves a victory condition, the game acts as it does now when the player wins.

Role playing, there's not a whole lot that would cause you to turn on the other civs for accomplishing great things. Why would you? You would say, that's great, not what I'm going for, but to each his own.

Balance of power. these aren't just "great things" these are things that promise the possibility of significant power for the achiever.
The game models the significant power by saying "you won the game now"

However, to make it more 'realistic', (when you play 'one more turn') and provide a reason to get that victory

Contact- 1 free tech per turn
Emancipation-6 free military units appear around gate each turn
Promised Land-all cities gain +1 pop and 1 free building per turn
Transcendance-you gain direct control of All native units, colossal units randomly spawn in your territory and that of your enemies.
Conquest-enemy units have a 50% chance of coming under your control every time they attack or are attacked by you.



The idea is to unify the "Play to win" and "Play a role" models so you (or an AI) do the same thing whichever way... ie the best way to win is to roleplay.

for that,
1. you need a roleplay reason to want the win (balance of power works fine conceptually, moreso if the "implications" above are given as mechanics)
2. if diplomacy is going to be useful at all, you need a way to share the win. (that way its not everyone declare war on the winner near the end, instead it divides into teams at the end...either join the winner, or stop the winner and join the team that will pick up the slack)

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Contact- 1 free tech per turn
Emancipation-6 free military units appear around gate each turn
Promised Land-all cities gain +1 pop and 1 free building per turn
Transcendance-you gain direct control of All native units, colossal units randomly spawn in your territory and that of your enemies.
Conquest-enemy units have a 50% chance of coming under your control every time they attack or are attacked by you.

I like this.

 

[Callonia]

I'm glad the leash one was increased. Being able to leash the colossals was pretty op, especially early on -- which this prevents.

Being able to leash the colossals made the early wars pretty interesting. Even the AI could do it. I had three makaras fighting one kraken once.

 

[Westwall]

I think a more reasonable explanation is simply that the devs lack experience (not the same as incompetence) and have a very different vision for the game than many players on this forum.

You mean lack of vision. You can chalk it up to inexperience of you like, but the result is the same and at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how we got to this point because the fact remains that we're here and the game design is full of very obvious design flaws that should've been sorted out long before release.

I think it is obvious that the devs have a very different vision for the game than many players here, since most of the criticism deals with design philosophy like "affinities should not be tied to tech." or "we care more about a tough AI rather than role-playing".

Except the game breaks immersion at every turn and as Aldor points out makes even roleplay extremely difficult, in part because it can't even provide players with the kind of random events, personalized interactions and diplomacy options that were present in SMAC.

 

[Gorbles]

* the game breaks your perception of immersion which is unique to you and won't match up with any other ideal of immersion for the subset of players that actually cares about immersion.

 

[Galgus]

Immersion is and always will be a huge factor in Civ games, even if it is just the silly attachment one feels for their little empire growing up.

BE has some good immersion going, but it could still be far better: chiefly with Affinities and diplomacy.

And, of course, better AI: an issue BE inherited from Civ 5.

 

[Westwall]

And made worse as a point of fact.

As many have pointed out, the AI factions in BE rarely even expand past 4 cities.

Compare that to Civ 5 where the AI would quickly try to occupy all available space.

 

[Gorbles]

That could be because the games themselves play a bit differently, and because your copy of the game seems odd for some reason (see: Kraken behaviour in the other thread).

I regularly get AIs expanding beyond several Cities.

 

[hevans900]

Every single game I play (Gemini/Soyuz/Apollo), I get AIs expanding waaaaaaay past 4 cities - are you playing on a very low difficulty?

 

[PhilBowles]

And made worse as a point of fact.

As many have pointed out, the AI factions in BE rarely even expand past 4 cities.

Compare that to Civ 5 where the AI would quickly try to occupy all available space.

It was a persistent complaint in Civ V that the AI would often leave large expanses of uncolonised territory, and not just on separate landmasses. This is behaviour I've certainly seen; I suspect reports of it were exaggerated, but it is a genuine consequence of the fact that city placement in Civ V is so focused around resource access (and the AI uses the same decision-making for city placement that the 'suggested city spots' icons that show up on settlers) - the AI will correctly target more desirable sites, but it will often leave large areas uncolonised because the coding doesn't have a specific rule telling it to colonise other areas (save for those with a lot of food). And even when it does expand, and correctly select a site, it can be unreasonably slow to do so, or will colonise a slightly less optimal site first because its algorithms can't distinguish between 'good recommended site' and 'great recommended site'.

 

[PhilBowles]

Every single game I play (Gemini/Soyuz/Apollo), I get AIs expanding waaaaaaay past 4 cities - are you playing on a very low difficulty?

Apollo is a very low difficulty...

 

[Minor Annoyance]

It doesn't really even need to be a shared victory. We can subtly celebrate someone else's "victory" and the game continues until the player reaches a victory condition. The victories don't have to be exclusive. Even the two that appear to clash at first glance, Supremacy and Purity, could be explained by some wanting to stay on earth and some wanting to go to the new world.

Granted this mode isn't for everyone. Many enjoy the danger of losing. But some enjoy the empire building more than just winning.

I want empire building to be necessary for winning.
Having been playing Crusader Kings 2 I've gotten used to playing for points rather than a set goal, although I usually have set goal. However that game has hundreds of independent realms and internal strife so there's no way to rush the whole world. I've considered playing BE with all victories but time turned off but I don't know if the scoring system works well for that. If you have the highest score you probably will push that advantage to total domination and why wait to run out the clock?

 

[Westwall]

It was a persistent complaint in Civ V that the AI would often leave large expanses of uncolonised territory, and not just on separate landmasses. This is behaviour I've certainly seen; I suspect reports of it were exaggerated, but it is a genuine consequence of the fact that city placement in Civ V is so focused around resource access (and the AI uses the same decision-making for city placement that the 'suggested city spots' icons that show up on settlers) - the AI will correctly target more desirable sites, but it will often leave large areas uncolonised because the coding doesn't have a specific rule telling it to colonise other areas (save for those with a lot of food). And even when it does expand, and correctly select a site, it can be unreasonably slow to do so, or will colonise a slightly less optimal site first because its algorithms can't distinguish between 'good recommended site' and 'great recommended site'.

I've never seen the AI in Civ 5 limit itself to only 4 cities the way the AI in BE usually does.

 

[Skulbow]

Westwall you seem to have a real heavy axe grind against BERT but it isn't that bad compared to so many games. If you compare it to Civ V it is no where as polished or balanced but someone coming into it for the first time will have a lot of hours to discover its flaws and have a good time before that. There is a steepish learning curve for a new player and many challenges and I have found the game to be very immersive and enjoyable before I worked it all out.... so give it a chance please and stop knocking it every second of the day.

and as for the four city civs that is a ludicrous and misleading statement.

 

[Gorbles]

Apollo is a very low difficulty...

Not for the difficulties on offer within BE.

"it is not very difficult" != "it is lowly-placed in the order of difficulties available"

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I've never seen the AI in Civ 5 limit itself to only 4 cities the way the AI in BE usually does.

Actually, I have seen AI Hutama spam cities in BERT. But in civ5, the AI does tend not to build a lot of cities.

 

[PhilBowles]

Actually, I have seen AI Hutama spam cities in BERT. But in civ5, the AI does tend not to build a lot of cities.

Apparently Civ V has now been out long enough for nostalgia to set in. I love Civ V more than many Civ veterans, and dislike BE (I'm not sure why Westwall is still playing it; I'm not), but Westwall seems to be inventing a standard for Civ V that doesn't really exist; in many of these areas it fell as short as BE does. However Civ V's mechanics play much better with tall empires than BE's - in Civ V a small empire can be a genuine competitor, but that's not true in my experience of BE.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

However Civ V's mechanics play much better with tall empires than BE's - in Civ V a small empire can be a genuine competitor, but that's not true in my experience of BE.

Personally, I feel like civ5 favors "tall" a bit too much. I prefer "wide" in my personal play style which might one reason why I like BE. As you said, BE definitely tends to favor "wide" over "tall".

 

[PhilBowles]

Personally, I feel like civ5 favors "tall" a bit too much. I prefer "wide" in my personal play style which might one reason why I like BE. As you said, BE definitely tends to favor "wide" over "tall".

Yes, Civ V certainly has balance issues in that regard - wide vs. tall was a nice effort to vary the Civ formula and add alternative strategies, but not only was tall pushed a little hard, the game showed once and for all that playing tall just isn't very interesting - there's not a lot of scope to do very much.

At the same time wide play is certainly viable in Civ V, just risky because it relies on committing early to Liberty when you don't usually have enough information to tell whether your map situation will support a wide empire - near neighbours (as expansionist war early is difficult) or simply a bad location will make wide play impossible, and then you'll be struggling to catch up because you wasted two or three policies that aren't really going to pay off.