Another part of the 'soulessness' is how the victories are handled.
I've played two games to completion, with Purity and Harmony victories. In either case it just field like "build this building, wait a while and then win". In the Purity one there was the busybody work of settling the humans, but really that just meant clicking a button each turn and then moving them around on maglevs.
Weirdly I didn't know a single thing about the mindflower until I read the civilopedia entry on it. There was no feeling of urgency or build-up, or that this was 'the solution' to all the problems that humanity faces. In Civ 1, 3 and 4 (the ones I played the most of, didn't touch 5 and only a little on 2) building the spaceship took a long time, was something you had to dedicate pretty much your whole civ to and you got to see the progress as all of the modules got added 1 by 1. You had to unlock technologies to build the different parts of it. I didn't get any of that feeling with the victories in BE. Another part of it is that the AIs in those games would start building spaceship parts fairly early, like even if they just got the first tech they'd start building those parts, and you'd get notifications about it saying "Rome has just built SS Structural Support!", which also lead to a sense of urgency and competition. In BE all you get is a notification when someone has built the gate itself, and not for any of the prior steps.
The mindflower and the gate don't even pop up with wonder dialogs when they're built; they just suddenly appear on the map. Clicking on them doesn't give any sort of acknowledgement sound either, they're just silent objects.
Someone else suggested somewhere in the forums that all the AI should immediately go to war with you when you've built one of the wonders. That's a possibility although also a little lame. An alternative would be for the AIs with the same affinity to form alliances with you, and the other AIs to declare war on you; but that would be a little awkward if you were in the middle of a war with an AI and they suddenly declared peace, and visa versa.
Also my 2c on some of the other things in the thread about AIs needing their own personalities: BE only having 7 other factions somewhat reduces the scope for this. If you know that ARC always goes for affinity X and always behaves in way Y it's not as interesting, because ARC will always be in the game with a large enough map. I think you need to get up to 16 factions, or at least different leaders for the 8 factions we have, before having distinct personalities would be interesting rather than boring.
Finally, the game cost US $89.99 in NZ. There's no way I'd pay that, after spending 20 minutes with CiV vanilla and abandoning it. I watched quite a few youtube let's plays for BE so knew what I was getting in to, and I'm largely happy with it. Anyway, I bought it from Green Man Games with a 20% discount coupon, so it only cost me $40US -> $50 NZ.
I've played two games to completion, with Purity and Harmony victories. In either case it just field like "build this building, wait a while and then win". In the Purity one there was the busybody work of settling the humans, but really that just meant clicking a button each turn and then moving them around on maglevs.
Weirdly I didn't know a single thing about the mindflower until I read the civilopedia entry on it. There was no feeling of urgency or build-up, or that this was 'the solution' to all the problems that humanity faces. In Civ 1, 3 and 4 (the ones I played the most of, didn't touch 5 and only a little on 2) building the spaceship took a long time, was something you had to dedicate pretty much your whole civ to and you got to see the progress as all of the modules got added 1 by 1. You had to unlock technologies to build the different parts of it. I didn't get any of that feeling with the victories in BE. Another part of it is that the AIs in those games would start building spaceship parts fairly early, like even if they just got the first tech they'd start building those parts, and you'd get notifications about it saying "Rome has just built SS Structural Support!", which also lead to a sense of urgency and competition. In BE all you get is a notification when someone has built the gate itself, and not for any of the prior steps.
The mindflower and the gate don't even pop up with wonder dialogs when they're built; they just suddenly appear on the map. Clicking on them doesn't give any sort of acknowledgement sound either, they're just silent objects.
Someone else suggested somewhere in the forums that all the AI should immediately go to war with you when you've built one of the wonders. That's a possibility although also a little lame. An alternative would be for the AIs with the same affinity to form alliances with you, and the other AIs to declare war on you; but that would be a little awkward if you were in the middle of a war with an AI and they suddenly declared peace, and visa versa.
Also my 2c on some of the other things in the thread about AIs needing their own personalities: BE only having 7 other factions somewhat reduces the scope for this. If you know that ARC always goes for affinity X and always behaves in way Y it's not as interesting, because ARC will always be in the game with a large enough map. I think you need to get up to 16 factions, or at least different leaders for the 8 factions we have, before having distinct personalities would be interesting rather than boring.
Finally, the game cost US $89.99 in NZ. There's no way I'd pay that, after spending 20 minutes with CiV vanilla and abandoning it. I watched quite a few youtube let's plays for BE so knew what I was getting in to, and I'm largely happy with it. Anyway, I bought it from Green Man Games with a 20% discount coupon, so it only cost me $40US -> $50 NZ.
