'Rising Tide' expansion announced!

Hopefully this will make the game better.

I don't think I'm the only one that thought that sea bases on SMAC for example detracted from the game, instead of improving it.
 
The thing that seems most interesting to me about all this is the hybrid affinity units.
 
After the first wave of great colony ships departed Earth, the jubilation of humanity was short-lived. Those left behind fell into a violent struggle over the quickly-diminishing resources on their barren home world. From this tumultuous time, four new factions arose. These newcomers were grounded not in the idealism of their predecessors, but on opportunism, resilience, ruthlessness, and above all a commitment to their own survival.
Now, many decades after their first landfall on a new planet, the proud survivors of the first expeditions beyond Earth look up to see the skies darkened by a new breed of pioneers.

From the official site. Hopefully the expansion will really leverage its sci-fi setting to inject some interesting themes and commentary.
 
I don't think I'm the only one that thought that sea bases on SMAC for example detracted from the game, instead of improving it.

Yes, sea bases did detract from the game in SMAC. The main reason for that is that SMAC still had ICS so sea bases just meant spamming cities on sea as well as on land. The map became less relevant as there would be cities spammed everywhere regardless of whether there was land or sea. And sea bases functioned the same way as land bases, so there was little differences between having land cities or sea cities.

BE on the other hand, has a health mechanic that limits city spamming. So hopefully, this will avoid the SMAC issue of just having cities everywhere. Also, the devs have hinted that sea cities in BE will work differently than land cities in BE. So hopefully, this will add some uniqueness to sea based gameplay so that the player is not just spamming more of the same cities.
 
Yes, sea bases did detract from the game in SMAC. The main reason for that is that SMAC still had ICS so sea bases just meant spamming cities on sea as well as on land. The map became less relevant as there would be cities spammed everywhere regardless of whether there was land or sea. And sea bases functioned the same way as land bases, so there was little differences between having land cities or sea cities.

BE on the other hand, has a health mechanic that limits city spamming. So hopefully, this will avoid the SMAC issue of just having cities everywhere. Also, the devs have hinted that sea cities in BE will work differently than land cities in BE. So hopefully, this will add some uniqueness to sea based gameplay so that the player is not just spamming more of the same cities.


Yeah, I'm hopeful that it's really interesting. I've been meaning to come back to BE but just haven't managed lately . . .
 
The expansion sounds great, but does it address the biggest issues with vanilla. Diplomacy is a huge one, so I'm glad it's being totally revamped. What about the overall blandness of some parts of the game? I still feel trade routes are wonky in their implementation. Wonders still feel not worth it. Will hybrid affinities address the issue of affinity choice tying to tech path, limiting the freedom of the tech tree? Is victory still at 13 affinity?
 
Spoiler :

...is that Ocean-Miasma in the bottom right corner or is it just one of these squirly new sea resources from that other screenshot? ^^
 
This is very encouraging. It appears the devs really understand why civ5 diplomacy did not work in BE. Hopefully this translates to a great diplo system:

RPS: How has the Diplomacy system changed, then?

David: We can’t tell you too many details, but I can speak to it from a philosophical level. One of the takeaways from the base game is that the diplomacy system from Civ V, which we just brought over wholesale, didn’t really work, because it relied on these characters from history. Players understood intuitively how Montezuma might behave or how Ghandi might behave. You could make strategic decisions based on prior knowledge of those characters. Because we have invented characters we wanted to provide more transparency in terms of how they behave and why they do the things they do. We wanted to make a game out of that. We also wanted the player to do more meaningful things through diplomacy. In Civ V and in Beyond Earth the outputs of diplomacy are trade and you can declare war or peace. There’s actually very little that you do in diplomacy; they’re important things, but there’s not a lot of high frequency interaction that you have. You didn’t have a lot of opportunity to interact with the leaders that we put in, their personalities didn’t really get an opportunity to shine. We wanted to build a game around this idea of diplomacy, that would allow our characters to take centre stage and give the player the chance to introspect into their personalities and to give them more things to do, more benefits to be gained.

So just as an example, if I’m playing a military game but I need help researching new technologies, I can solve that problem now through the diplomacy system. I can make an agreement with another leader and in exchange for other things can now have mututal benefits, but it’s a strategic choice because they get something from me too. So I have to be very careful about who’s getting what.

We’ve also built in some new vectors about how leaders communicate with you. The system as a whole is broader, I would say. There’s a lot more meat to it, there’s a game to it, there’s a progression to it, and it’s more transparent.
 
Excited to hear the news!! This should be a step in the right direction. I wonder if sea cities have a larger tile distance between them than land cities in order to prevent gridlock in the ocean?
 
I'm also part of that minority. Hopefully this expansion will replicate the history of civ 5, where vanilla gets trashed, GnK is welcomed and BNW gets a thunderous applause.

Also the price for the expansion better not be the same as the initial price for vanilla when it was first released...:rolleyes:

Sooo many people don't remember (or weren't around) when Civ 5 was being called the death knell of the Civ series... (anyone remember how hard it was to get a stable multiplayer game going?). And look at it now haha.

Super excited for the expansion, I think it will add a lot of much-needed content to the game. Firaxis has a history of adding both breadth and depth in its expansions.
 
I'll wait until you guys review it. Since Civ 4 my policy is to wait for real reviews (this forum) instead of getting hyped by "professional" ones.
 
I remember a prerelease interview where Ed Beach hinted that ocean cities could be a thing, but refused to comment further on an expansion.
Interesting, but until I am satisfied with the state of the game I already bought I can easily contain my excitement.

My feelings are much the same. If diplomacy is made relevant, and factions distinct, it will be a boost, and while I didn't like aquatic city spawn in Alpha Centauri that was because those cities were just terrestrial cities transposed onto the sea (and made city spam worse than ever when all of the map could be colonised). If aquatic settlement is genuinely handled differently this time around it could be worth investigating.

I haven't tried BE with the last patch but might give it a try again to see whether I'm interested enough to keep an eye on this expansion, but I'll still wait on reviews of the finished product.

Hybrid affinities might be strategically more interesting than the current affinity-rush system, but I think the way affinities 'level up' with specific technologies and quests needs looking at, as does their fundamental impact on gameplay. And this is going to be hard to fix without doing something about the simplistic nature of the game's buildings and units; as long as everything is just a power buff or +X to the production of resource Y, unlocking slightly different bonuses hardly carries the feel of imprinting a particular ideology on the world.
 
I'm so glad I took the Autumn semester off from school. I'll definitely be sinking some time into this, hoping its improved on BE. I haven't actually been playing much BE lately, been playing lots of V instead but I always had high hopes for BE and I'm really hoping this adds some depth to the play experience that was missing in vanilla.
 
I'm also part of that minority. Hopefully this expansion will replicate the history of civ 5, where vanilla gets trashed, GnK is welcomed and BNW gets a thunderous applause.

Also the price for the expansion better not be the same as the initial price for vanilla when it was first released...:rolleyes:

I'd still be hesitant. At least after the first couple of major patches (when I started with Civ V), vanilla Civ V was probably superior to vanilla BE.
 
For once, I hope the new sponsors don't include Japan. That would imply a dystopian Honshu, among other things.

With the heavy emphasis on water in the expansion, and two new factions having advantages in it, I'd say it's quite likely that Japan will be revealed as one of them given their culture.

Excited to hear the news!! This should be a step in the right direction. I wonder if sea cities have a larger tile distance between them than land cities in order to prevent gridlock in the ocean?

Yeah, that's a concern of mine too. Though, if there was a larger distance enforced between ocean cities, it would make a lot of ocean resources go to waste and be unworkable -- unless workable distances are greater in the ocean as well. We'll just have to wait and see.

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Love the screenshots, especially of the new coastal graphics, they look absolutely amazing; it really adds depth to the ocean (along with the transparency, of course)! Gorgeous!

The diplomacy sounds great -- I can't wait until more is revealed about it and screenshots.

The strong hybrid affinity units sounds really cool too and are a great idea. That, and their changes to victories, could really discourage beelining through the tech web in one way and may present more flexibility.
 
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