Rising Tide - First Impressions

[mighty gandhi]

Played 3 games so far,nice feelings at the beginning,but after a 100 turns the game resubmit a lot of the old issues in BE.
Main and new one,IMO,the map's too big,too much space to colonize with the possibility to make sea cities,really difficult to get into war with opponents.
Victories...well...after first game I insta-disabled everything but domination,but again I had to quit cause the game's too long and takes tons of micro-managing to be played that way(I set up small map,with 8 Plyers to try fill it)
Once again half work done,nice ideas and potentially a really good expansion,let's hope in patches,for now I think the valutation it's barely sufficient.

 

[Natura]

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

If you're not playing Space-Merkal it's not that useful, since it takes a fair while to max out all your trait slots. However in INTEGR's hands it's massively powerful due to the whopping 75% reduction in DC purchases.

Played my second game as Hutama. Whoo boy. This guy is insane. His trait would be good enough by itself, but when you combine it with

+50% on internal trade routes (Artifacts)
+25% on internal trade routes (Virtues)
+45% on internal trade routes (Trait)

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

That city is getting +NINETY SIX production from those trade routes. I dropped it something like 20 turns ago; now it's size 24 with 245 food and still going strong.

On the subject of aquatic cities, quite often I found that settling on a 1-tile island was preferable to founding on the water, since I could gain all the advantages of the sea resources whilst not having to worry about managing tile expansion. Moving aquatic cities just feels like a pointless gimmick; I moved one city twice in the game I just played and just bought the rest of the tiles. Players are used to setting down their cities in the ideal location and then letting the borders expand to their desired level; doing otherwise feels counter-productive. Frankly I couldn't be bothered devoting production to moving my city when I was swimming in cash thanks to stations and international trade.

 

[Olodune]

Like others here my initial thoughts were along the lines of:

1) The ambiance is great. The maps, art, and music are really well done.

2) Exploring is fun. I've avoided continental surveyor just for the added thrill of discovery.

3) My goodness does this need a tuning pass (Internal Trade / Artifact Combos / Diplomatic Capital).

4) The last 20 turns of any peaceful game are still awful.

5) The only diplomatic system is a non-interactive passive points system? Weird. At least I don't have to sell resources for GPT anymore.

6) The mid-game scaling is out of whack. My third game (standard/standard/apollo) ended with a t167 Emancipation Victory despite a relatively poor start (no growth tiles, no titanium) and subpar sponsor.

Spoiler :

Overall Impression: A solid effort with a ton of room for potential improvement in game mechanics.

 

[aguliondew]

Yea some balancing issues their is no limit to how wide you can make your empire health is not an issue, energy is abundant, and trade route spam is better than any wonder you can build. Even when the Ai declares war on you I like Meh. Let me build so units now to deal with it and after I lose a city they lose their empire. Everything is easier in RT and BE was already easy enough.

 

[Olodune]

- I could not find any menu that showed me relationship of leaders with each other. I could only see my own relationship with them.

Maybe someone else already mentioned how to see AI/AI relationships, but:

1) Open the diplo screen.
2) Click on the circular portrait of any AI.
3) There will be colored dots on the right of every other AI's portrait showing their joint relationship (the left side semicircle is reserved for you/AI). You can hover over to see the difference between Sanctioned and War, both of which are reddish dots.

Not as convenient as CIV 4's coloured graph you say?

 

[severny]

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.

Thats exactly whats pissing me off most of all! Compare to the technique of capturing the cities in civ4 this is a really frustrating thing. I dint just understand what the hecK; naval units can take the city! WTH? the cities are always taken by invasion forces not by cruisers, etc....

 

[severny]

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.

The cities should be, SHOULD BE very hard, very HARD to take since it is in reality the most powerful natural defense mechanism of a nation with tons of tools to protect the city. There is no need to invent the wheel here. 1UPT should be abandoned once and for all and thats it. Game mechanics will return to normal in terms of city strength, because now the attacker at least have to defeat the garrison stationed in that city, than he must defeat the defense perimeter of a city, then it penetrates the city, go it to the city and after the capture he has to fight with the uprising in the already taken city. That kind of stuff was present in civ4 and it really makes the game cool. And what we have now? If you have 3-5 arty units and no enemy forces to destroy this arty (and if you play on massive maps the availability of your forces on right time, on right place to intercept invasion forces can be a problem) so any, ANY city is doomed.
And one more big problem caused by 1UPT...... The lack of turns to protect the city! You can have everything; orbital laser, counter arty units, and so on and so on.... But the 1UPT will limit your abilities to defend yourself. This is especially the case when you protect the city from naval units.

 

[Acken]

Yea some balancing issues their is no limit to how wide you can make your empire health is not an issue, energy is abundant, and trade route spam is better than any wonder you can build. Even when the Ai declares war on you I like Meh. Let me build so units now to deal with it and after I lose a city they lose their empire. Everything is easier in RT and BE was already easy enough.

And it's not like it's very hard to make units when your cities are so buffed by trade routes they make them in 1 to 2 turns

The cities should be, SHOULD BE very hard, very HARD to take since it is in reality the most powerful natural defense mechanism of a nation with tons of tools to protect the city. There is no need to invent the wheel here. 1UPT should be abandoned once and for all and thats it. Game mechanics will return to normal in terms of city strength, because now the attacker at least have to defeat the garrison stationed in that city, than he must defeat the defense perimeter of a city, then it penetrates the city, go it to the city and after the capture he has to fight with the uprising in the already taken city. That kind of stuff was present in civ4 and it really makes the game cool. And what we have now? If you have 3-5 arty units and no enemy forces to destroy this arty (and if you play on massive maps the availability of your forces on right time, on right place to intercept invasion forces can be a problem) so any, ANY city is doomed.
And one more big problem caused by 1UPT...... The lack of turns to protect the city! You can have everything; orbital laser, counter arty units, and so on and so on.... But the 1UPT will limit your abilities to defend yourself. This is especially the case when you protect the city from naval units.

If you don't have units to fight these 3-5 arties then I don't know why 1UPT would be the culprit. Any undefended cities should fall fast. That has always been the case in civ games. And I'm not sure why you can't defend because of 1UPT ? If your units are on the other side of your empire you also deserve to lose a city. That's like strategy games 101.
You can rant over 1UPT and AI inability to play with it but what I quoted doesn't seem to really be about that.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

1UPT makes it easier to defend cities, not harder. Boxing out attacking units with just a few ZoC dudes on defensive terrain can completely flatten an invading force. If you back that up with ranged to shred their front lines, you can hold out against much larger forces and even more advanced forces for a fraction of the hammer investment, especially vs AI.

Prior to 1UPT, the guy who had more siege and was able to attack with it first won due to collateral damage (Civ IV) or ability to do damage en masse and not take any (Civ III). Defense was more costly against the AI since high level AIs could stack up dozens (or hundreds on marathon ) of units and attack one city with all of them. That's not something you could build 5-6 guys and wall off pretty much indefinitely. If you have defensible terrain/chokes/planning in Civ V/BE, you can. It's one of the primary reasons these games carry less existential threat for the player than Civ IV...it's hard to brute-force stuff with 1UPT rule.

If you make cities too strong, then players who don't invest in defending themselves or get caught out aren't punished, and that's bad gameplay.

 

[Ryika]

I still think the system used in the Civil War Scenario - in an extended version of course - could work great for Civ 6. It basically allows you to invest an unproportional amount of resources to get more manpower onto selected tiles (by upgrading to stronger units), basically creating a system that has limited "stacking" without allowing Stacks of Doom or making the amount of micromanagement skyrocket.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Any kind of stacking + decent UI would have less micromanagement than Civ V/BE, not more. Giving orders to multiple units has that effect. One of the worst things about the 1UPT games is the constant prompts to move and out-ordering the UI's ability to keep up giving inconsistent effects.

 

[Ryika]

A think a good stacking system can have tons of micromangement - see Pandora: First Contact, especially the early game where you have to move units around, dynamically move units to other areas etc.

A stacking system like the one in Civ IV where you can keep armies together 90% of the time does of course have less, but is at the same time a lot less interesting.

 

[Acken]

It's one of the primary reasons these games carry less existential threat for the player than Civ IV...it's hard to brute-force stuff with 1UPT rule.

If you make cities too strong, then players who don't invest in defending themselves or get caught out aren't punished, and that's bad gameplay.

And that's why my mod for Civ5 nerfs city strength while buffing melee to make those DoWs threatening again. And it works

Here... another shameless mod plug

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm not familiar with Pandora. I guess if you have to micromanage more total sets of "single unit or unit grouping" than under the 1UPT rule you'd have theoretically more micromanagement though. I agree that Civ IV stacking wasn't ideal, though it gave more tactical consideration than most players gave it credit because of how limited the AI was on that front (I once wiped a player off the map in ~15-20 turns, when he first declared on me I had 2/3 his strength and same era units).

A lot of the 1UPT unit movement is of the bad kind when outside of war though unfortunately, where you're just trying to get stuff from A to B but have to constantly micro it or have things jamming up all over the place. You really start feeling this in BE when doing intercontinental attacks with gobs of ships + especially embarked units traversing oceans and making landings. Even before declaring you're doing hundreds of orders there. That's a pretty strong contrast with something like Civ IV, where you could for example waypoint your units to an African or Brazilian city, load up 50-100 onto transports all at once, then dump them on the other side that turn (turn after in pre-industrial). The following turn they're off on a stack + queued move order on either roads or rails. We're talking about something on the order of 5-10 orders at most...easily 10x fewer than trying to stage a big invasion in BE that way.

I'm not sure how you get around it, other than better pathing/order queues and/or having some degree of stacking. It's pretty fun in some of the co-op Civ V MP games where I've set a 90 second turn timer to watch people squirm late game though, the pressure is real . I just wish the player wasn't rate-capped by the game's inability to handle faster inputs when the movement is so mundane (embarked units on open water at peace).

And that's why my mod for Civ5 nerfs city strength while buffing melee to make those DoWs threatening again. And it works

If I were putting serious time into Civ V these days I'd check it out. I wanted relatively weaker cities in Civ V since the start (but then the core concept + implementation of necessitated "tall" play was really off-putting too, and partially related). I was never a fan of "cities match siege in range until late-game" either, since siege is specifically designed to counter cities and is frail it would have made far more sense to have 3 range siege that was solid vs cities, weak sauce vs units, and stupidly vulnerable to melee. Something just feels wrong when crossbows are markedly better at whaling on city walls than catapults or trebuchets, and if sufficiently experienced can outperform cannons against cities in some contexts .

 

[Minor Annoyance]

The two early city defense buildings make it pretty easy to make a city tough. I once saw an AI that looked like easy pickings so I declared war but by the time I crossed to their cities they went from strength 30 to 80. Every city.
I think they should increase the maintenance of defense buildings. Make them cost as much as a unit would cost. Maintenance seems to be a very underused balancing factor. I did make a mod that increased maintenance costs and it was a featured mod on the official Civilization website. I think it remains the least popular mod to ever be featured.

 

[Ryika]

I still think you shouldn't be able to rush-buy defensive buildings, that seems so obvious to me. Creates a decision between being save and saving production/maintenance + gives neighbors a clear picture of what they can expect when they declare war.

 

[Acken]

If I were putting serious time into Civ V these days I'd check it out. I wanted relatively weaker cities in Civ V since the start (but then the core concept + implementation of necessitated "tall" play was really off-putting too, and partially related). I was never a fan of "cities match siege in range until late-game" either, since siege is specifically designed to counter cities and is frail it would have made far more sense to have 3 range siege that was solid vs cities, weak sauce vs units, and stupidly vulnerable to melee. Something just feels wrong when crossbows are markedly better at whaling on city walls than catapults or trebuchets, and if sufficiently experienced can outperform cannons against cities in some contexts .

Who knows maybe checking it out will make you put serious time into Civ 5

I still think you shouldn't be able to rush-buy defensive buildings, that seems so obvious to me. Creates a decision between being save and saving production/maintenance + gives neighbors a clear picture of what they can expect when they declare war.

You'd rush units instead, don't think that would really change something.

 

[Ryika]

You'd rush units instead, don't think that would really change something.

I'm fine with rushed units, I can defeat those.
Cities however can literally become untakable if the AI rushed all the defensive building technologies.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm fine with rushed units, I can defeat those.
Cities however can literally become untakable if the AI rushed all the defensive building technologies.

Sure, partially because logical hard-counters to cities don't function in that role until end-game (siege). Instead siege is basically an inferior ranger for most of the game, a tendency from Civ V BE didn't really need .

 

[Ryika]

Sure, partially because logical hard-counters to cities don't function in that role until end-game (siege). Instead siege is basically an inferior ranger for most of the game, a tendency from Civ V BE didn't really need .

Yeah, and one that I still don't understand. Siege Units that can't outrange or at least easily withstand cities just don't make much sense to me.

Balancing 3-range units early on wouldn't be a problem either, just give them a low combat strength and an higher % modifier to cities. Or make it so that instead of starting with 2 range and the ability to attack anything they start with 3 range but can only attack cities but unlock the ability to attack anything later on. That would even make them specialized enough to justify being efficient against heavily fortified cities.

But of course, part of the problem is that 3 defensive Buildings are available in the midgame that together rival the total bonus a defensive CiV City gets.