Upcoming Patch Info

[ehroifcf]

OP and broken are two different things. broken needs to be overhauled whereas OP needs to be fixed slightly. i agree with angry hutama/Roxlimn that it is a different way of running an empire but if you really think about it, even though it is op in a game, in real life if you were an immortal godking or an immortal space godking funneling your resources as quickly as possible to a place to make that place viable. that is definitely what you would do and what anyone would do. i think that perhaps the return on investment is a little too high for trade routes which is why they are probably being nerfed. firaxis games have probably taken over 600 hours of my life in the best possible way so im just going to trust that they know we want and they know how to make a game even better

 

[Anomandaris]

That is just the thing, though. You are not funneling your resources, you are creating them out of thin air. It's like Microsoft getting a billion per year from trading with an African village. Not gonna happen. Right now the trading system is both tedious and illogical, as well as overpowered. Permit me an analogy: Imagine a shooter game, say Counter Strike, that has a weapon with the damage output per shot and accuracy of a sniper rifle and the rate of fire and magazine capacity of a machine gun. Also, the cost of a handgun. The weapon system stops being a choice and becomes simply "Buy the OP weapon or die horribly". Of course, even then you would at least be competing on even ground, which is quite untrue in the single player of BE.

 

[Roxlimn]

Acken has already pointed out that it's pointless to get hung up about all the abstractions. That's probably a good way to go.

In Civ4, abstracted Trade was even more powerful. Trade was abstracted as a tile output, and you increased it with Cottages which turn into Villages and Towns. Nearly the entire worth and your entire Civ output (not just part) was tied up with the abstraction of Trade.

Comparatively speaking, trade in CivBE is less central to the economy. However, it is still an abstraction of that economy. When you're making Trade Depots and Trade Convoys and Trade Vessels, you're not simply literally making those literal things, anymore than your not making houses means that all Civ people live on the street. They're abstractions of economy. The Trade Convoy and the Trade Vessels are an abstraction of the economic role and power of a new city, just as its 1 population score is similarly also an abstraction of another aspect of its economic power.

Just because its population-economy abstraction is scored as 1 doesn't necessarily mean that it's got literally nothing and is nothing more than 1 igloo in an unproductive wilderness. Imagining that this is necessarily so is a failure of imagination, and slavish to the old abstractions for how that might make sense.

 

[Browd]

I also think that not having some way to automate trade routes is another obvious and basic missing feature. Every previous civ game has always given players ways to automate things if they so choose. Surely, someone should have said "by turn 150, I'm spending most of the turn manually renewing like 30+ trade routes, players might find this a bit tedious", especially when all it took was a mod adding a simple "previous route" action button?

Civ V BNW has never had any way to automate trade routes, and the trade route mechanic in BE is, for the most part, just a port of the BNW mechanic.

 

[Sequitor]

That is just the thing, though. You are not funneling your resources, you are creating them out of thin air. It's like Microsoft getting a billion per year from trading with an African village. Not gonna happen. Right now the trading system is both tedious and illogical, as well as overpowered. Permit me an analogy: Imagine a shooter game, say Counter Strike, that has a weapon with the damage output per shot and accuracy of a sniper rifle and the rate of fire and magazine capacity of a machine gun. Also, the cost of a handgun. The weapon system stops being a choice and becomes simply "Buy the OP weapon or die horribly". Of course, even then you would at least be competing on even ground, which is quite untrue in the single player of BE.

You've captured the essence of my concern. This is ostensibly a strategy game, but the primary path to victory seems obvious. Yes, I need to decide whether to make it an internal or external route and where, but I'm usually faced with very good or great choices.

SMAC gave me an alternative way of handling internal trade that at least had a tangible tradeoff. Should I focus my production on improving city A, or should I divert its productivity to help city B?

With Beyond Earth I get to do both, which seems too easy.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Civ V BNW has never had any way to automate trade routes, and the trade route mechanic in BE is, for the most part, just a port of the BNW mechanic.

Yes, but BNW's trade routes were per civ, not per city as in BE, so there were not that many to manage. in the early game, you might only have 2-3 trade routes to manage so it was not tedious and did not require an automation function. In BE, on the other hand, you can have dozens of trade routes early one. Things can get tedious by the midgame because the high number of trade routes.

I would also disagree that BE trade routes are essentially just a port of the BNW mechanic. In BNW, you needed to build specific buildings in order to trade certain resources (granary to trade food for example). So you needed to invest a little more before benefiting from trade. And if you set up an internal route for food, it only gave the receiving city more food. So internal trade was a good way to boost a receiving city. But in BE, all you need is a trade depot and in terms of internal routes, both the receiving and the sending cities get boosts in both food and production. So the effect on the game is much different.

 

[Dunkah]

Trade routes should not be ignored by Aliens. Aliens should actively seek out and destroy Trade Routes until such time as they are upgraded to being "Pure".
They should have more of a role in gameplay.
They should have the ability to defend themselves, and that ability should get better with buildings, tech and Afinity choices.
Units should stop and circle the wagons when encountering Aliens, shutting down the trade routes until such time as you can get miliatary units there to defend them.
Players should have the choice to push the trade units through perilous spots and suffer the potential loss or not.

Make them fun and vulnerable to the environment.

Also they should should be prized by other leaders and shunned by leaders whom dislike you. Or at least the yields returned from such leaders should be adjusted.

 

[Ryoga]

There is one unit that is more powerful than a Trade Convoy. That would be the Colonist. Colonists return far, far more than Trade Convoys would on their own. Compare: OCC with Trade Routes vs Colony without Trade Routes.

I think that this shows that we really aren't on the same page.

A way to define "overpowered" in gaming is "something so powerful that completely disrupts the balance of the game".

"Game" is in bold because I think it is important to stress that before you can determine whether something is overpowered or not you must first understand what kind of game is the contest.

Here we are talking about a turn based 4x.
4X stands for Expand, Explore, Exploit, Exterminate.

Expand is one of the main points of the game. To claim that colonists are overpowered in a 4X is the same as to claim that bats are overpowered in baseball.


However trade routes are really not something that is inherently part of a 4x. When they become a relevant part of the game, and they are dangerously there in Civ BE, then you know that the game balance has been disrupted.

To enrich the old formula with something new is good, but when the something new becomes too relevant then that's bad. This still must remain a turn based 4X not a trade route simulator.

Trade routes right now in Civ BE are comparable to what crawlers were in SMAC, an innovation at that time which everyone agrees was way too OP, and (guess what?) there's never been anything like crawlers again in any subsequent game from Firaxis.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I generally agree that tall vs. wide balance is not needed thing. Playing tall could be possible, but it shouldn't be equal to expansion (not to mention better than it - as in current state of Civ 5). Competition for land is important part of the game and refusing to do it shouldn't go without consequences.

Speaking about trade routes, they are limited resource. Even if you use all trade route slots, you still need to improce land and so on. Plus once you grow past 7 cities (5 without quest), number of trade routes per city starts dropping, reducing their average effectiveness. So, this part is not a balance problem itself.

Where I see the problem with trade routes is Internal vs. External. Internal trade routes give higher bonuses with lower risks, so players always fill internal trade routes first and use external if they have spare slots left. I believe this needs to be changed to put more importance for international trade.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Here we are talking about a turn based 4x.
4X stands for Expand, Explore, Exploit, Exterminate.


However trade routes are really not something that is inherently part of a 4x. When they become a relevant part of the game, and they are dangerously there in Civ BE, then you know that the game balance has been disrupted.

Well are you saying something has to be expressly mentioned in the four Xes to be valid? Because research ain't got no X in it nowhere. Unless you count eXpanding your knowledge, eXploiting technology etc. In which case eXpanding your network and eXploiting trade opportunities is in there too. I feel like we're discussing the constitution or the bible regarding how it should be interpreted.
As for if trade needs to be balanced against not trading, it's no different than workers. You may delay workers for your first city but it will always be not if but when I get one. By the time you get to your second or third city you're probably buying it right away because your tiles are a component of your city. Just because it doesn't say in the constitution/bible we can haz trade routes doesn't mean we shouldn't. That's why we have amendments/new testament.

 

[Roxlimn]

Trade Routes actually are an incredible incentive for Expansion and Exploration because you only get new ones by making new cities, and they make making new cities much more profitable than before, meaning you can meaningfully expand much further than was possible.

The only reason it's "Trade Route Simulator" now is because the UI keeps asking you about it every damn turn. Both CivIV and CivV actually also had internal routes, and in CivIV, the power of the Internal Routes in a Trade Economy was so strong that it completely broke down the Maintenance limiter, allowing you unlimited expansion really early. That's actually a whole lot stronger than TRs are right now, for much less investment.

The only difference was that all of that was automatic. The UI wasn't bugging you about the TRs every single turn.

 

[sprang]

That is something so basic, it is hard to understand how it got left out. Was it done on purpose? Did the devs see it as not being a necessary feature since players do get notifications when the build is empty and players can always see what buildings and wonders a city has from the city screen? Or did it honestly just slip through the cracks of QA testing? Did none of the QA testers notice it was missing?

I also think that not having some way to automate trade routes is another obvious and basic missing feature. Every previous civ game has always given players ways to automate things if they so choose. Surely, someone should have said "by turn 150, I'm spending most of the turn manually renewing like 30+ trade routes, players might find this a bit tedious", especially when all it took was a mod adding a simple "previous route" action button?

I'm just glad that a big patch is coming which will hopefully address all these issues and give us a better game.

They may have been trying to streamline the gameplay. Less pop-ups and notices. Sure, some notices scroll across the screen at turn-start, but they're not all important. So reduce that micro, etc. OF course, then there's trade routes....

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The problem with trade routes v. settlers/workers is they undermine the Other yield parts of the game.

Settlers open up every other part of the game (buildings, tiles, and trade routes.. and all the yield that comes with them)

Workers are limited to tiles, but there is a choice about how many workers you can get. (because there is no hard 1/city limit like trade routes)

Trade routes on the other hand Only need 1-3 cities with developed tiles/buildings to open up their max usefulness. (for external you don't need any developed tiles/buildings to open up their max usefulness)

And their usefulness is all out of proportion to the buildings/tiles (ie they are each potentially 2-3x as good as the best tile, and you can get 3 per city)

 

[Roxlimn]

With Trade Route Economy active, each new city in Civ4 was immediately profitable - without tiles, without anything, without even a need to develop the core city - the new cities were immediately profitable. This is a very big deal in a game where cost is the only limit to expansion.

TRs in Civ5 could return 11 food per route or more, worth 2-3 times the upgraded food tiles. TRs in 4 could return as much as 5 times the tile output of a fully developed Town. If this is out of proportion, then all the Civs have had "worthless" tiles since the 4th game in the series.

 

[Haggbart]

In Civ4 you at least needed to put in a long investment both in building and allocating workers + developing tiles + waiting for cottages to grow. Also you could bypass the CE by running a SE. I won the game on the same difficulty level with cottage spam and without building a single cottage.

In CiV the yield is only one way and you have a finite nr of TRs for the whole empire, so it's not really comparable.

 

[Manannan]

The only reason it's "Trade Route Simulator" now is because the UI keeps asking you about it every damn turn.

lolwut? Even with the UI being fixed (ie: mods) it's still a trade route simulator, as they're still the most powerful way in the game to amass energy (to the point of making production largely obsolete), and science (well, tied with spies on that one anyway), and still far too effective at boosting food and production yields. There's no "alright, new city, gosh darn, so many options of what to build first" in the game if you're playing even half seriously, just "alright, new city, get trade routes up and running and continue expanding". Sorry but blaming that extreme lack of balance on the UI is just plain dishonesty (or you're playing a different game than the rest of us). There is no point in comparing this incredibly broken mechanic to mechanics in previous games; nothing you can say diminishes the former's sheer mind blowing brokenness.

 

[GaelicWarrior]

Diversity is a powerful advantage. Literally a million people playing the game puts not only a lot of eyes and ears on it, but also a lot of different and fresh viewpoints on something that's probably been through a lot of revisions. When you're talking about entire worldwide populations, even a 0.01% return or result is still a whole lotta people.

I hope that makes it easier to imagine how something like a few thousand testers may not have noticed something that was obvious to "a lot of people."

Bear in mind, many players and testers also simply don't agree on how or if a given feature is an issue.

GaelicWarrior:

I still play a lot of SP games. Many of my friends prefer to do so as well. We remain devoted to the experience, and we have a lot more disposable cash these days. MP isn't everything. Insulting and denigrating designers and players of single player games is exactly the kind of toxic sludge that leads to "casual" and "hardcore" labels; gamers bashing gamers, and people getting death threats. I think it's better to just avoid that entire pitfall and just agree that we all prefer different things. Civ doesn't have to have your patronage. Lots of excellent MP games being developed.

You are missing the point. Firstly I wasn't sludging any developer, merely stating historical facts. I have been playing Civ since 1994 and have been an avid gamer since the 80s and had a previous career in the software industry so I am extremely familiar with how companies work successfully and unsuccessfully on developing a software product. Not that I need to justify my factual statements to you but I am happy to educate you on your ill-formed opinion. The reality is with Civ now being a well established title that takes hours to complete, MP or SP it lacks the depth of balance and continues to frustrate.

BE single player experience is extremely underwhelming. I am not alone in that analysis. If you don't believe me go look at the user ratings on metacritic and other sources. (I believe its 5.6/10 currently).

My point is that if a greater balanced and deeper Multiplayer game was the focus, the Single player game would be far richer as a result as the mechanics would have deeper thought invested in them. eg. (ICS/trade routes, wide vs tall reward, affinty balance, not being able to move settler at start and getting a rich coastal cap vs another without, tectonic scanner giving u a solomons mine of titanium from start, 10 cities with hutama and 40 trade routes vs 20 of another player etc etc... the list is almost endless..) The majority of modern games are developed this way. Civ on the other hand is still being developed as a SP title first and foremost with MP being an afterthought, add on , that rarely works etc. This has been a major issue for over a decade now since the Internet has become more pervasive and MP gaming more normalised. Firaxis have not adapted and their games are deteriorating, title by title, becoming progressively worse and less enjoyable as a result.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Just because its population-economy abstraction is scored as 1 doesn't necessarily mean that it's got literally nothing and is nothing more than 1 igloo in an unproductive wilderness. Imagining that this is necessarily so is a failure of imagination, and slavish to the old abstractions for how that might make sense.

Yeah, I do find it very difficult to imagine a 1 population snowbound city as Elsa's ice palace and not a frostbitten dust farm. Now I can imagine that this ice bucket town has something unique to offer like a local resource, but I shouldn't have to because resources are in the game and were a trade factor in the previous game. The game has yields and population to show us what a city has to offer which are somewhat abstractions, but abstractions of abstractions are a little too abstract.

Economics is rather hard to understand sometimes and can be abstracted and science is most certainly best when abstracted, but food is definitely a physical object and it's hard to imagine how the village of Wampa's Pass could supply food to The Land of Literal Milk and Honey.

 

[Roxlimn]

GaelicWarrior:

I'm not entirely sure that MP necessarily makes SP better. If that's your thesis, then you're not making a strong one, and saying that a lot of people agree with you isn't necessarily a convincing argument either.

MinorAnnoyance:

I think many players have forgotten that food in Civilization isn't literal food. City growth is an amalgamation of a lot of factors, birth rate, death rate, immigration, and emigration. Excess food directly leading to population growth in an area is fantastically ludicrous. Food is an abstraction of economic opportunities and other growth factors. It's not literally food.

 

[Pietato]

Civ V BNW has never had any way to automate trade routes, and the trade route mechanic in BE is, for the most part, just a port of the BNW mechanic.

It is fine when you have a handfull of trade routes. In BE, where they are basically limitless and you often have 60+, it is ridiculous.