The late game feels distressingly tedious

[GAGA Extrem]

What a ridiculous sentiment.

No, he is actually right. This game does indeed suffer from the same problem as Endless Space!

In Endless space the planet types became pointless past the early game because improvements gave much bigger yields. Same is true for BE: Once you have overcome the early game the trade routes and improvements like Academies, Manufactories, Biowells and Terrascapes render the terrain utterly pointless. In my games I always ended up with 50% Terrascapes, 30% Academies, 20% ressource improvements.

And late game is indeed just about queueing techs to boost your affinity and unlock the Exodus gate. Most of the outer techs are actually pointless because affinities unlock the important stuff like victory conditions and unit upgrades.

 

[Matthew.]

What a ridiculous sentiment.

Civ 5 has never been about just winning. Even on deity you can sometimes win playing very suboptimally. That's not the point. You want to do it either a) - faster, or b) - more consistently. When the difficulty is high enough, or when other circumstances dictate it (circumstances like horrible land, or playing against competent humans), you most definitely have to make choices. You can't build everything everywhere in whatever order and be "just fine".

Umm. Just one question: Have you played Beyond Earth yet?

I'd like to respond, but I cannot find any words to do so. I mean when players literally are building everything everywhere on the hardest difficulty and are "just fine", what do you expect for a counter-argument?

 

[Matthew.]

As for the bucket comment, it results in washing everything out. You are given a "quest" to add +1 energy or +1 production to a building. Since your energy and production buckets already have significantly more than +1, it doesn't matter what you choose. At all. You can blindly click through, because a +1 isn't big enough to matter.

"But wait", you may say, "You can stack a bunch of those +1's to get a significantly different result!" Well, no, not really. With buckets, they all get filled regardless. If you spam a bunch of generators, you are still going to have plenty of everything else through trade routes, buildings, and regular land yields.

Civ 5 had buckets too, but it was hidden significantly better. It was difficult and generally not practical to excel in faith, gold, production, science, culture, and military. Or at least right away. You generally made sacrifices. Yes, science overshadowed everything else, but still the system was better in that if you had a high faith empire, it showed. If you had a high gold puppet empire, it showed. If you want all out culture, it showed.

In BE, you just get a ton of everything, much of it coming from trade routes, so every empire is the same. You get large amounts of everything, no sacrifices needed.

 

[fils]

"But wait", you may say, "You can stack a bunch of those +1's to get a significantly different result!" Well, no, not really. With buckets, they all get filled regardless. If you spam a bunch of generators, you are still going to have plenty of everything else through trade routes, buildings, and regular land yields.

I disagree. You can stack and specialize. Techs and affinities make certain types of improvements more attractive than others, and they are often on opposite sides of the tree. There is also clearly a better choice with most of the quest decisions depending on your strat.

I guess the problem is that the AI is so bad (they are not abusing trade routes like players can) that this does not appear to matter. That's why it feels like you can do anything. I guarantee if you played MP with other players who knew the game then you would not feel like your decisions were meaningless.

Also, at this point we don't know what a "good" victory speed is. Like on Civ5 where simply surviving anyone can achieve a SV around T350, whereas it takes skill and a lot of good micromanagement/decision making to do it around T200. I'm sure the same is true here, but we just don't have a baseline to compare to.

 

[Khaim]

Bad design IMO.

That's the game in a nutshell. I'm honestly not sure what the developers spent all their time on. It wasn't game balance, it wasn't story, and it definitely wasn't UI. They had a few good mechanical ideas and then called it a day.

 

[CreepyD]

I agree with trade routes being stupid to manage.
1. Need to be able to set one as permanent.
2. The 'previous route' needs to be obvious without scrolling through the list to find it.
3. Need the best trade routes at the top.

Mostly option 1 will fix the micromanagement of it all, really simple fix imo.

The rest of the game I don't think so much.
To me I feel like they have nicely condensed the late game to be quite short.

It was also a little annoying micromanaging units going through the gate back to Earth one at a time too.
Units should go through automatically if I set the gate as a destination.

 

[fils]

That's the game in a nutshell. I'm honestly not sure what the developers spent all their time on. It wasn't game balance, it wasn't story, and it definitely wasn't UI. They had a few good mechanical ideas and then called it a day.

It makes me wonder how much beta testing they really did here. Was there ever a closed beta with the community involved? I know they had the press build, but that was turn limited for a long time and who knows how much feedback they got or wanted from that.

For a game with such a massive scope like civ you'd think that there'd be a bit more focus on large scale testing for balance. Stylistic issues aside, it's pretty obvious that a lot of mid-endgame things haven't been thoroughly vetted. If they had a decent beta program they could gather a lot of useful data from people's games that would very quickly show what needs tweaking. But... I guess early buyers are good for that too

 

[TwistedEdge]

This Promised Land VC is extraordinarily tedious. I finally gave up completing it knowing I beat the game a long, long time ago and can't be bothered to queue up all these settlers and find room around the map for them. I really hope this gets fixed in a patch pretty soon. Maybe if the goal was to settle 5 people it wouldn't be so bad, but 20? Ugh.