Rising Tide - First Impressions

I can confirm after playing a full cooperative team game today that AIs do indeed make contact to offer agreements etc. just as they would in a single player game.

That's pretty cool - this was fairly deal-breaking for me. Might have to look into picking Rising Tide up once it's on discount and has a few patches under its belt.
 
I was playing on Soyuz, although I was under the impression higher AI levels simply increased the bonuses they received, not their ability to actually play the game.

Arid, Frigid, and Primordial are all pretty cool. They give me more of a "space" feeling than than the other two.
 
I had an island start and the kraken just circled my city destroying every improvement. Should have taken a pic. Was ridiculous.

I had a very similar game on my third play. Two krakens would wander up in alternating swathes and wreck every improvement near the city--they weren't even orange or red! Talk about an early game hindrance! Eventually, the city shot one to death and then the sonic fence slowed the other one down enough for me to get enough boats out to stabilize the situation.
 
Gratz? My first game was purity too and with no roads it took awhile to move all of the earthlings. my supremacy game was the fastest game I had so far. Harmony even with 10 cities with mindstems/xeno sanctuary 25turn victory :P, Purity 30 turns moving people around and supremacy 15turns after the wonder was build. Still all of my game were faster than the original BE.
 
Just finished up with my first game. INTEGR on Terran Primordial.

Good

- Game has a ton more flavour now. From the main menu background through to the introductory screens and fluff for leaders, the game feels a lot more alive now.
- Leaders feel like people now. I even like the twitter spam from them (although ones that are at war with you should probably shut up about my food and production).
- Artifact system is brilliant. Really incentivizes exploration, and the rewards feel very impactful.
- Sea resources and the new biomes are gorgeous. The game looks visually more appealing.
- Agreements are a great addition to Civ diplomacy.
- Early game feels AMAZING. You feel alone and isolated on a hostile world with no idea who else is out there, and tons of interesting things to discover.

Neutral

- Aliens remain a joke aside from early game. With the addition of artifacts, nerfing of Ultrasonic fences, addition of naval melee forces/submarines and persistence of trade units being immune to attack, there's no reason not to go full extermination mode on the aliens.
- Balance remains wonky. I went Prosperity/Industry and if anything these felt stronger. Still not enough reason to go Might/Knowledge. Some quests have had updated rewards too, which better represent the balance between Food and Energy, but not enough I feel to make them more balanced choices. I'm still going for Production every time.
- Marvels are a great idea in theory but the balance between them seems way off. The Primordial one games me a 50 turn 25% production boost, then nothing. I could pop more sites for 15 more turns each time, but overall this left me majorly underwhelmed. The quest itself too was pretty pathetic for something that big; find 3 sites, get reward. Meh.
- Hybrid units are there. They're strong (I was using Autosleds which are crazy good, basically better Armour). Did they change what I was doing? No, not really. They look good though.

Bad

- Artifact system falls off majorly late game. Artifacts simply stop spawning from Alien nests after a certain period, or once they've all been plundered once; I don't know which. This means that the sense of discovery in the early game doesn't last long; late game feels just as boring as it used to.
- Aquatic cities are too weak. Buildings wise they're sort of ok, and with a Purity farm build they had plenty of production and resources, but their defense all through the game is just unnecessarily low.
- Agreement balance is non-existent. Hmm, will I choose +2 trade routes in my capital city and -50% population requirements for trade routes in my cities, or +to production of orbital units. Gee, I wonder.
- Trade routes are bonkers right now. I'm not sure whether to even put that as a negative, since I like powerful trade, but frankly it's ludicrous right now with the trade traits you can choose. I was getting +15 food/production per internal traderoute and this was WITHOUT the Artifact bonus that boosts them.
- Alliances are a gigantic clusterkitten. Time and time again the alliance network I'd built up suddenly became a liability when one alliance member would declare war on another alliance member which lead to every other alliance member declaring war on the first alliance member and the wars never ending because no-one will sign a peace deal.
- Lack of transparency. Why won't my new ally sign this agreement? Why won't this enemy sign a White Peace deal after 100 turns of non-combat? Why doesn't something pop up asking me if I want to go to war with my erstwhile ally when another ally decides they looked at him funny?

Overall, it is a improvement. Even with the broken diplomacy, I at least feel like I'm co-inhabiting a planet with fellow personalities instead of AS ADAM SMITH SAID, NO VILLAGE, FOR A PRICE. The game could still use a lot more work in making the middle to end game more interesting, and a bug pass will help a lot, but it is better than vanilla.
 
I have ~1000 hours in Civ V and about ~10 in BE prior to Rising Tide, because Civ BE was incredibly boring to me and a huge disappointment since SMAC was my favorite strategy game ever. With my wife and daughter out of town over the weekend, I thought, what the heck, let's give RT a try.

Good:

- The art is amazing. Whoever created the art / UI feel of this game deserves major props.

- I like the new diplomacy system since it is at least different from prior civ games. The idea of diplomatic capital is a good one that doubtless can be expanded further.

- artifacts / resource pods / aliens / miasma now creates a sensation of exploring an alien world in the early game.

- It's enough fun that I'm playing it and posting about it, a gigantic improvement over BE on release.

Bad:

- It's neat when a leader pops up to complement my orbital coverage or whatever. It's immersion-breaking when they pop up to say the same thing, in exactly the same words, for the 10th time. In that moment, you feel like you're talking to a machine, not a person, and not even a cleverly programmed machine. You should never see the exact same phrase from a leader twice in one game! I think if the developers just posted a thread here asking for contributions of things leaders could say, they'd be overwhelmed with responses.

- The feeling of wonder and exploration diminishes as you move into the middle and end game. It ought to be replaced more about the radical sci-fi changes to your society, but there's nothing amazing about that. I like having unit graphics change based on affinity, but it feels like just one step up a mountain. The best thing about SMAC was the slow-building story of something transcendent. I can tell the developers are trying for something similar, but it still isn't there in the late game. You're just building things to get bonuses, not to see what they are.

My two complaints are the same ones that made me stop playing BE originally, but there's been lots of improvement on both fronts. That makes me optimistic that CivBERT??, the third iteration, will deliver, as Arthur C. Clarke put it, "something wonderful."
 
My impression of a casual but really loyal player (i bought all civilizations since 3)

-What i Always loved about the game is music and graphic and they managed to surpass even the old version that i was really fond of.
I think the guys who did that job deserve a huge plause and a cookie.

-The new acquatic cities are nice and add a new layer of strategy.

-Hybrid units are still too few

-They added better ending scenes rather than the old lazy message :| but we still lack the history data to review the game like civilization :(

-new exploration system is nice, rewards sometimes are too low while artifact often OP.

-Balancing is totally silly.
I Always had to struggle to keep finances in check, now i end up with hundred thousands credits with no effort.
Spies are almost worthless you keep failing 80% missions 10 times in a row :|
Aliens are never a threat...just a nuisance at most.

-diplomacy is a fun but its clearly unfinished.....

-worst part of the game...bug everywhere, more than acceptable in a finished game...more than original Civ BE and we even got some old bug back...... that is really shameful.
Some gamebreaking bugs forced me to wait for fix before even playing it again.

-price/content is totally off.
At least they should have added new victories and more affinity upgrades

Still love the game but not really happy with the expansion
 
Played two games, both on Soyuz difficulty. I usually randomize all settings besides speed and size (standard/standard), but I wanted to see the new biomes.

Game One- ARC

Land on a peninsula with a bunch of bugs to the north -- hey, I'll just go into the ocean! Because it's the expansion and I can do that!

Clearly, ocean cities are the solution to the future of humanity, because I never needed to go to war with anyone to get the resources I need. My last CiV game was Ethiopia/Cultural victory, so I relished the fact that CivBE actually allows wide play by building a whole TEN cities (! TEN ! That's as many cities, as I have fingers on my hands!)

I had a lot of fun doing silly things driving my ocean cities around the map -- I had a city "filling in" tiles for other ocean cities that were already in good locations but needed more tiles. (Yeah, buying tiles would've been more efficient, but what's the fun in that?)

I enjoyed shopping for deals. I think it helps a lot that not all of the deals are guaranteed to appear in every game. ("It'd be nice if I could get a deal to help my cultural output...nope, no one took anything that helps with that!") I ended up cooperating with almost everyone, but didn't ally with anyone.

The AI seemed awfully amicable -- the tweets were full of attaboys and likes about how awesome I was doing. I thought about doing a war to mess around with new units, but the other factions were so fawning in their admiration, I couldn't bring myself to dow all my fangirls. Besides, if I needed more resources, I could just build more cities, because there was plenty of room.

Perhaps, in this possible future, Suzanne Fielding's incredible managerial ability, charisma, and omnipresent network of spies led to a time of cooperation on a new world, where all the factions cooperated and united behind her plan to bring the enlightened supremacy way of life back to the home planet. (Except Barre, poor guy never makes it in any of my games.)

I'll admit it was kind of fun to do things like establish orbital coverage over almost the whole world so I could be ready with Phasal Transporter on the off chance someone did something stupid like build a Mindflower. (ARC: They see all!)

Emancipation victory by turn 260-ish or so.

I was kinda disappointed at the end of this, and getting ready to cave in to the forum-fueled sadface train.

Game Two
This was actually much more interesting, and more fun game. Since I enjoyed the ocean cities I decided to play NSA. I had a slower start this game. I had a big inland sea to grow into, with my capital on the only entrance, I felt pretty safe. I don't want aliens wrecking my fragile sea colonies, so I farm them for science/culture. ("We're whalers on the moon, we carry a harpoon...") I try Might because health is so easy to come by, I don't feel quite as locked into Prosperity early game.

Kozlov is close to me, and he's actually pretty aggressive, and he also doesn't like that my growth rate is low. He has no navy (and one coastal city), so he can't really do anything to me, but since all his cities are inland and well-fortified it's not like I can do much to him. He is smart enough to keep his ground troops back for defense rather than embark them to be slaughtered.

I ally with Hutama. It seemed like a good idea to get the extra bonuses from the trade route deals, but I end up getting dragged into a bunch of wars. Plus, he decides to be a jerk and build the contact beacon, right around the same time I'm finally cracking Kozlov.

So I sneak a fleet into the back of his territory to try take it out, but he has a ton of patrol boats and hovertanks and he swarms it easily. So I have to go through the front way, and I use lots of orbital stuff like TacNet hubs because my cities can MOVE to give me coverage and I slowly dismantle his navy, cut through his outer sea colonies, and then trade a coastal base with him for a few turns before I get enough LEV Tanks up to establish a foothold.

Hutama gets Kavitha into the war, so I destroy Hutama's beacon and have to haul my fleet across the ocean to deal with her. Meanwhile I'm using an orbital laser to clear out the native wildlife in preparation for Earthling Settlers.

This is one of the more fun wars I've had in Civ, and I've always felt BE does war really well with different affinities having different bonuses. Hybrids offer an opportunity to mix and match. It's also an interesting choice, because if you shoot for a hybrid you unlock certain high level upgrades like infantry very early, at the cost of delaying upgrades that need a lot of a single affinity (like aircraft, and the victory condition.) And they look great! I love my immaculately crafted, porcelain navy of Purity/Supremacy.

As others have remarked, it is quite strange that they continue to send their positive messages even while you're at war. "You have sacked my capital, razed my cities, and destroyed my chance at victory...but I cannot help but admire your internal trade routes! Perhaps if I had internal trade routes such as these, we would not be losing this horrible war right now!"

Duncan's purity appearance looks pretty cool, befitting a pirate king of a frozen alien world. (I'm a little horrified that I ended up having to exterminate three major factions, and all I really wanted to do was mess around with a bunch of floating cities, but such is civ.)

Promised Land victory by turn 280 or so. (Fun fact: Earthling Settlers can settle on Coast now. Also, I could move my cities to make room for them.)

For me the biggest gamebreaker is the peace deal thing. Why do I have to wait for the AI to offer me White Peace? Why do I have to demand a bunch of crappy cities I don't really want because my warscore is high? There's some other stuff that needs tweaking, but this most impacted my fun.

TLDR: the game is still flawed-but-fun, in need of some polish.


Further: Soundtrack continues to deliver, making me feel like planting a farm is FORGING HUMANITY'S FUTURE.

Further x 2: Is it just me or something with my settings, or is the minimap really hard to read?
 
Really hard to read
The two main issues are, at the moment: water is really hard to read on it and it is still too tiny by default (yes, yes, there's a mod for that).

At least they made the transparency toggleable.
 
One question: I recall comments made when they were announced that the two new biomes would affect gameplay. Has this been implemented, and if so how, or are these just cosmetic?
 
One question: I recall comments made when they were announced that the two new biomes would affect gameplay. Has this been implemented, and if so how, or are these just cosmetic?

Yes, it was implemented. The biomes each have a unique marvel quest which give unique bonuses and also different alien behavior:

Primordial - Aliens will turn hostile much faster, and become friendly much faster than other biomes.
Frigid - Aliens also stay closer to their nest and don't wander around as much.
Lush - More Aliens but weaker
Arid - Less Aliens but stronger
Fungal - Aliens heal faster in Miasma
 
my 5 ctnts here.
Although i love the game, but still lots of work to be done in the future.
1. cities are too, too weak! They are even weaker now than they were before ( now battle unit stationed in the city doesn't defend the city. may be its a bug, i dont know. Example: strong unit (ANGEL) in a city. If the city is at the verge of captue, that unit wont help to hold the city, and in order not to loose a unit in vain you have to abandon the city).
2. AI doesn't calculate well and doesn't take into its consideration overall geopolitical situation.
3. the game is too, too buggy now. gameplay mechanics is a complete crap.
4. although now UPT rule is now only corresponding to the monotype units, still UPT is a piece of !
5. landscape is still ugly
 
my 5 ctnts here.
Although i love the game, but still lots of work to be done in the future.
1. cities are too, too weak! They are even weaker now than they were before ( now battle unit stationed in the city doesn't defend the city. may be its a bug, i dont know. Example: strong unit (ANGEL) in a city. If the city is at the verge of captue, that unit wont help to hold the city, and in order not to loose a unit in vain you have to abandon the city).

Water cities are a bit weak by design. Land cities are definitely not weak. If you build the rocket battery and defense perimeter, they are near impregnable until you get mid level units.

The unit not defending a city is leftover from civ5, I believe. It is an effect of the 1upt model.
 
2. AI doesn't calculate well and doesn't take into its consideration overall geopolitical situation.
After playing some more, I am not sure if the AI still makes any strategic decisions when it comes to diplomacy.
It seems that most wars are simply started by dropping relation levels below a certain threshold - and in that case the AI doesn't have any wargoals. It just marches off towards the enemy (if in range) and randomly attacks things.

In my last few games I ended up in constant cylces of ["WAR"...some turns..."WHITE PEACE"...some turns..."WAR"] with several AIs. Most of them didn't even bother to send units to me. I didn't see a single soldier from Brazilia or KP in my last game, despite being at war with them for more than 100 turns. Guess the major factor might have been that they were on the other side of the planet. :lol:
 
I played a standard game on Vostok (one of the lower difficulties?) on the 2nd largest map size.

Was making +400 energy per turn when I completed the Beacon for contact at turn 202. I had to wait 45 turns to win. It was insane. The civolopedia says that the time for the Beacon to work depends on your energy per turn, so I did everything I could to maximise it (including getting +12% city energy from traits) but the needle didn't budge at all.

It seems their response to "its too easy to win the game early" was just to artificially drag the times on everything out. Boo.

Same here, my difficulty was Gemini? I think? One of the higher ones. I was making +865 per turn and the Beacon still took 50 turns to activate. I honestly couldn't believe it. During that time, the AI actually managed to build a Mind Flower of its own and I got so paranoid I would lose that I started a world war to stop them. Wish I'd have known they were on a longer timer than even I was.
 
If you build the rocket battery and defense perimeter, they are near impregnable until you get mid level units.

Exactly, mid level units. Arty in game makes all city defence mechanisms almost useless. It doesn,t matter whether a city a 150 or 20. It only takes several turns more to capture the city.
 
My ideal for city defense would be for higher health but lower healing per turn, no damage to melee units on attack, and lower bombardment strength.

I prefer wars to be focused on armies clashing rather than uninteresting sieges, but city health should be high enough than an army can be re-positioned to defend it.
 
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