Rising Tide Contact Victory WTF

[fotonut]

Well finally got around to trying a contact victory built the beacon 45 turn wait no way to reduce the time it takes. I did not think their would be a victory worst than the purity one but 45 turns? Most game I have the victory wonder built by around turn 190 now I have to spend 1/4 of my game time doing nothing. My score is already double that of the 2nd AI. I will get a conquest victory before my contact beacon finishes.

Just got my first contact victory, and yes, 45 turns is too much. It's especially unfortunate that the next guy 2 turns behind you also has 45 turns, with no hope to catch up.

Seems like the speed should be dependent on the amount of energy being consumed, but doesn't have to be linear. Something like:

- no energy, 45 turns
- 10 energy, 40 turns
- 100 energy, 35 turns
- 1000 energy, 30 turns
...

This way all that consumed energy makes some difference, and you at least have a chance at influencing how long it takes, and can even try to catch up.

 

[Callonia]

In last game I just played.. I played as hybrid purity/supremacy and built beacon + Emancipation gate in same turn.

Emancipation... I got the Emancipation victory after twelve turns of pumping True Angels into the gate. Combined with few Eidolon infantry + one artypiece. There was just 33 turns left on the beacon.. and to make the matters worse, I forgot to put in a unit for one turn. lol. So it should've finished by turn 11 or 10th. XD

I have similar turn times with Exodus gate for purity.

Biggest disappointment of Emancipation gate was.... I didn't get to fight with the old earth. Pah! Boring just to send the units in. And I assembled an army of 50+ units around the Emancipation gate for nothing!

 

[SupremacyKing2]

yeah, 45 turns is way too long. I would love to see the following changes to the contact victory:
- remove progenitor ruins as a means of getting a piece of the signal. (this would remove the chance factor of getting the signal super early through lucky exploration)
- complete transcendental equations to get 1st piece of signal.
- Must launch 5 deep space telescopes to get final final piece. (this way the player would have to research this deep tech for the contact victory)
- decode signal (same as before)
- build beacon (same as before)
- activate beacon. It would consume all your energy reserves on the first turn and all your net per turn surplus each turn afterwards until it reaches 10,000 energy. As soon your beacon reaches 10,000 energy, you win.

 

[hevans900]

yeah, 45 turns is way too long. I would love to see the following changes to the contact victory:
- remove progenitor ruins as a means of getting a piece of the signal. (this would remove the chance factor of getting the signal super early through lucky exploration)
- complete transcendental equations to get 1st piece of signal.
- Must launch 5 deep space telescopes to get final final piece. (this way the player would have to research this deep tech for the contact victory)
- decode signal (same as before)
- build beacon (same as before)
- activate beacon. It would consume all your energy reserves on the first turn and all your net per turn surplus each turn afterwards until it reaches 10,000 energy. As soon your beacon reaches 10,000 energy, you win.

Yeah and when you activate the beacon have it spawn super siege worm overlords that open up dialogs with you and spam you with unintelligible text while they lay waste to your perimeter with their 300 combat strength.

Or literally anything to make this more interesting.

 

[stormtrooper412]

I really don't know why they simply didn't include the option of feeding your beacon the energy reserves. I mean, the original complaint (I guess) was that through luck you can get Contact victory super early compared to others but rather than fixing that, they simply extended the wait time so as not to be super early in comparison. That feels really really lazy

 

[poom3619]

They aren't really lazy. They just horribly miss the point of complaint. Like, going 90 degree away from "how to fix it"

 

[SupremacyKing2]

They aren't really lazy. They just horribly miss the point of complaint. Like, going 90 degree away from "how to fix it"

Well, one of the main complaints was that the victory came too early since players often got lucky with getting the signal from early exploration of progenitor ruins. So from that perspective, it is logical to make the victory take longer. But the implementation was very poor. Making the player wait 45 turns at the end is the worst way of making the victory take longer. The better solution would have been to remove the signal from the progenitor ruins so that the player cannot jump start the victory early and actually make the player research some end techs. That way you remove the randomness aspect and make the early part of the victory longer.

 

[Callonia]

yeah, 45 turns is way too long. I would love to see the following changes to the contact victory:
- remove progenitor ruins as a means of getting a piece of the signal. (this would remove the chance factor of getting the signal super early through lucky exploration)
- complete transcendental equations to get 1st piece of signal.
- Must launch 5 deep space telescopes to get final final piece. (this way the player would have to research this deep tech for the contact victory)
- decode signal (same as before)
- build beacon (same as before)
- activate beacon. It would consume all your energy reserves on the first turn and all your net per turn surplus each turn afterwards until it reaches 10,000 energy. As soon your beacon reaches 10,000 energy, you win.

One problem with your suggestion is that I would easily win the contact victory in one turn.

I had over 12k energy sitting around by the time my city finished building the beacon.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

One problem with your suggestion is that I would easily win the contact victory in one turn.

I had over 12k energy sitting around by the time my city finished building the beacon.

I don't see that as a problem. If a player is able to accumulate 12k of energy, they should be rewarded. I see the contact victory as a sort of economic victory that rewards the player with a big economy. Plus, other players still get lots of chanced to stop you from winning since they get notified when you get another piece of the signal and it undoubtedly took you a couple dozen turns to decode the signal and again to build the beacon before activating.

 

[fotonut]

I don't see that as a problem. If a player is able to accumulate 12k of energy, they should be rewarded. I see the contact victory as a sort of economic victory that rewards the player with a big economy. Plus, other players still get lots of chanced to stop you from winning since they get notified when you get another piece of the signal and it undoubtedly took you a couple dozen turns to decode the signal and again to build the beacon before activating.

That's why I was suggesting a nonlinear energy use; if you have none, you can still win in many turns (45-50), but if you have a lot, it could be a lot faster (10 turns faster for every 10x energy say). But in practice most folks would still need at least 20 turns.

 

[stormtrooper412]

One problem with your suggestion is that I would easily win the contact victory in one turn.

I had over 12k energy sitting around by the time my city finished building the beacon.

which stops being an issue if you can only pour a fixed amount of energy during one turn. So, the base waiting time is X turns, and you can at most get it down to Y turns where X and Y should be reasonably scaled

 

[WiseGreen]

You can make the progression logarithmic instead of linear; standard 45 turns +10e/turn reduces to 30, further +10 reduces to 22, further +10 reduces to 19 etc., until a minimum waiting time of 15 turns. Numbers may vary and be fine-tuned, of course.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

simplest method is

Accumulate X 'points'
once beacon is activated all Extra energy (not accumulated) is converted to points
you also get a certain # of points free.

So, say you need 75,000 points, each turn the Beacon is active you get 1,000 points free.

0 e/t=75 turns
500 e/t=50 turns
1500 e/t=30 turns
4,000 e/t=15 turns

(assuming the broken energy agreement is fixed)