Rising Tide - First Impressions

[SupremacyKing2]

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.

Maybe I am just bad at laying siege to cities but a city with 200 HP and 100 strength is not easy to take, especially if the terrain is not favorable. If you can't get at least 3-4 artillery units in range, you have little chance of taking the city in my experience.

 

[Gorbles]

Of note, I can now easily hit 200 strength with Aquatic Cities. With Duncan, of course. Kinda hilarious.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

The sad part is that it will not help against a decent sized fleet. A few submarines bomb the city down and a single Melee boat goes in to take the prize.

 

[Furycrab]

The sad part is that it will not help against a decent sized fleet. A few submarines bomb the city down and a single Melee boat goes in to take the prize.

Not sure what I would change is the problem. The AI is terrible against subs. The AI has always been sorta bad against 3 range units and units that can position themselves in such a way to not get any retaliation, but I think this is the first time said unit is available after your first tech.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Well, on top of mind I have two possible fixes:
(1) Balance the combat strength of naval units. As is, they remind me a lot of the old Battlesuits: Way too powerful for their tech and affinity levels.
(2) Take city strength into consideration when calculating damage taken from ranged attacks. Would obviously require some defence building adjustments or we really get impenetrable cities.

 

[Gorbles]

Am I just slow, or has anyone else noticed you can buy buildings with Capital?

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Am I just slow, or has anyone else noticed you can buy buildings with Capital?

Slow.

 

[Evgenij]

I have played 2 games with my friend. My impressions:

+ Lot's of new stuff. Especially those naval units and even naval cities. That's great.
- Diplomacy was somewhat simplified - there is no trade. Yes, you can trade resourses with your allies with trade routes, but you have no control over amount or type of resource being traded.
- I could not find any menu that showed me relationship of leaders with each other. I could only see my own relationship with them.

* Hutama seems extremely powerful. Those extra 1-2 trade routes per city allowed me to outproduce AI on Apollo difficulty which I set for myself in multilayer game (not sure how player difficulty affects AI difficulty). With other bonuses to trade routes I had trade routes like +15 food, +15 production near endgame (and you have 3 per city).

 

[Furycrab]

Well, on top of mind I have two possible fixes:
(1) Balance the combat strength of naval units. As is, they remind me a lot of the old Battlesuits: Way too powerful for their tech and affinity levels.
(2) Take city strength into consideration when calculating damage taken from ranged attacks. Would obviously require some defence building adjustments or we really get impenetrable cities.

I was thinking more along the lines of:

1) Make subs visible for 1 turn if they attack a City or Land unit. (The animation is already there which is funny)
2) Give a bonus or upgrade path for cruisers when attacking cities.
3) Tweak the combat strengths a little.

You could still use subs to dominate the seas, and take poorly defended cities by surprise, hunt aliens, but if you wanted to hit a well defended city, you would want a few cruisers instead.

 

[Gorbles]

Slow.

Makes me wonder why people were claiming it was useless after maxing out Traits, then.

 

[ptoss1]

Makes me wonder why people were claiming it was useless after maxing out Traits, then.

It's an honest overlook. Nowhere in the "explanations" does it say you can buy units with capital. The focus is on your traits and agreements, so that's where the idea that that's all DP is useful for comes from. Plus you never expect to be able to buy things with "diplomatic" capital. It's quite unintuitive.

 

[Alkaid]

* Hutama seems extremely powerful. Those extra 1-2 trade routes per city allowed me to outproduce AI on Apollo difficulty which I set for myself in multilayer game (not sure how player difficulty affects AI difficulty). With other bonuses to trade routes I had trade routes like +15 food, +15 production near endgame (and you have 3 per city).

Honestly, they need to almost completely change his abilities and agreements. If he had 2 extra routes in the capital + something completely new like +1 diplo capital for every trade route you control (just making something up) he'd be fine. I'm not sure what his new agreement could be, but I think the trade route threshold one definitely needs to go and the extra TR's from capital one can stay.

Trade routes are just too prone to getting crazy in this game to have a sponsor's abilities do what his do. They need to nerf the internal trade route boosting agreement and that warp spire artifact building as well, but as far as Hutama alone is concerned I think the above would make him a good but not OP civ, as he should be.

 

[Gorbles]

Additionally I do seem to be getting Affinity Quests post turn-100.

Admittedly, post-game end and post-turn 500.

 

[Alkaid]

Just want to state that I think the AI doesn't make much use of PAC's ability. (No surprise really but just saying)

Finished my first game as Chungsu and she made only 1 wonder. (Faraday Gyre) There were other AIs that made more wonders than her, which was sad to see. I was expecting her to be annoying eating some of the early wonders I like to get such as Panopticon or Master Control, but nope, not that game at least.

Also about Chungsu, holy crap. I had ARC in the game and people weren't lying. Maxed his trait, maxed the covert ops speed trait, got ARC's agreement while at cooperative level, and got the "spies die less often" agreement from the NSA. I was a science-stealing, tech-jacking madman. Also despite it feeling slow at the start, once I got some bonuses stacked on I maxed out intrigue in any city I wanted VERY fast. I flipped NSA's capital just to see what would happen with the new diplomacy and he insta-DOW'd me and took it back in 2 turns. (it was across the map from me) Do AI's not build the intrigue-reducing building anymore? No enemy cap ever fell below below max intrigue once I got it up, even by the end of the game. It used to be almost impossible since they'd usually get the intrigue building somewhat early, but now it seemed totally ignored.

While I was waiting for the mind flower to build and finish the timer I switched to tech steal and just watched the hilarity as every 5 turns I got 3+ techs. (had 6 spies but steal tech failed semi-often) I completely forgot about the Might intrigue virtue and the bonus spy virtue from knowledge, but even without those the science and tech income became insane once I hit mid-game.

I should try Brasilia soon to see if having a bad ability makes things much slower or if there's enough OP things in general that it doesn't matter too much.

 

[ptoss1]

Brasilia's ability is crap and 1 DC per unit is also crap but if you stack Might and other kill unit bonuses it's pretty powerful just killing aliens and looting nests for artifacts.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

First game as PAC on Apollo because I thought they'd be overpowered but I didn't get much of a chance to get wonders because Brasilia was too close and everyone got affinity too fast so I was in too many wars. I quit.
Second game I started as space Korea but quit because I just didn't like the feeling of my start.
Third I was back as PAC but one below Apollo. I was pretty isolated so it was too easy. Never got into one war and I got some crazy artifact bonuses, including double air unit strength and double virtue growth. I was going for purity but I picked up plenty of the other two along the way. I won promised land but another activated the beacon. The 40+ turn wait left me plenty of time though.
The game feels more alive now, and the planet more alien, but some of the same problems remain. I won around turn 240 but I know others have done much better. It's still too short. I ignored industry virtues and did power and knowledge so it wouldn't get too easy. Also I had so much health from agreements the bonus from terrascapes didn't matter. I had over 50 so I build the Resurrection device to get the most of that. I didn't get vertical farming because it's not purity anymore and when I got the food from domes bonus I didn't need farms anymore. The culture bonus for water cities works well with domes because themactically they do seem like an underwater improvement.
Had lots of resources I didn't need from trade routes. One problem with that is it seems to go by the civilization's resources and not the city's. It wouldn't get so ridiculous if you had to connect to specific cities for resources.
Fun stuff in this game but still needs much more work. Strategy games work best when there are things that counter other things so you have to plan and adapt. It still feels like there is one strategy for the top level and below that you can do anything and win.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Makes me wonder why people were claiming it was useless after maxing out Traits, then.

I knew about it before release but maybe it wasn't talked about. I think it was mentioned in a video shortly before release, maybe word didn't get out passed that.

 

[Doviello]

The sad part is that it will not help against a decent sized fleet. A few submarines bomb the city down and a single Melee boat goes in to take the prize.

That wasn't my experience at all with ridiculously high city defenses!

In my last game, deepcastle had a defense of 250. Gunboats and artillery would deal about 3 damage per shot, and planes would get instakilled, but then the city healed about 50 hp every turn; and duncan defenses would sink 2 to 3 ships of mine. Duncan must have had that agreement that make cities heal faster or something. Anyway, after an hour of frustration, i set up my industry to pump out 3 or so ships a turn, all beelining to the frontlines, then surrounded the city and bombarded it with everything for 10 or so turns, doing 70 points of dmg/turn while it healed 50, until i managed to take the prize. Totally wasn't' a walk i the parklike you're suggesting!

Spoiler :

 

[Polycrates]

That wasn't my experience at all with ridiculously high city defenses!

In my last game, deepcastle had a defense of 250. Gunboats and artillery would deal about 3 damage per shot, and planes would get instakilled, but then the city healed about 50 hp every turn; and duncan defenses would sink 2 to 3 ships of mine. Duncan must have had that agreement that make cities heal faster or something. Anyway, after an hour of frustration, i set up my industry to pump out 3 or so ships a turn, all beelining to the frontlines, then surrounded the city and bombarded it with everything for 10 or so turns, doing 70 points of dmg/turn while it healed 50, until i managed to take the prize. Totally wasn't' a walk i the parklike you're suggesting!

Spoiler :

Yep, with NSA bonuses, the Defensive trait (that gives extra city strength based on population), and a few defensive buildings that aren't terribly far into the tech tree, I had 300+ strength for most of my cities. For a laugh, I took Castle Doctrine as well and got Deepcastle to 500 strength. Definitely possible to make water cities super tough!

 

[Galgus]

Scenarios like that are what mods lowering ridiculous city self-defense are for.

Factions should have an army, or get run over.