What's the fastest science rate you've managed?

[AlaskA]

That's pretty impressive. Can you post some further points about your strategy? Where does your science mainly come from? Which virtues did you choose?

Now im reach t90 and have 307/7*0,03+1 = 253 OCC science rating without putting my cities to science production or any specialists. Just academyes, TR and buildings.

Also i add screenshot with my Virtue Build. Order is:

1) Reach free colonist (3 virtues)
2) Reach 25% bonus to TR (5 virtues)
3) All points in Knowledge (right now it's 5 virtues)

For my build prosperity is totally useless.
Also i must say, that i luckely got 1 free Virtue from holosuite (firaxite affinity building).

 

[Acken]

Pretty good. I'd expect that to beat my current time.

How much external are you using and how soon did you went for academies ?

 

[AlaskA]

Pretty good. I'd expect that to beat my current time.

How much external are you using and how soon did you went for academies ?

Im use 1 internal to capital and 2 external on each city.
Going for academyes right after autoplants, i think i start build them on ~65 turn.

 

[alpaca]

I think we can conclude that the other most broken thing (apart from trade routes) is the deal AI. Same as Civ5, although they recently reduced this problem a lot by making flat sum payments require a DoF.

 

[Acken]

Which begs the question. Why didn't they learn from the other game ?

 

[Carl_Bar]

Which begs the question. Why didn't they learn from the other game ?

How recent was the Civ V change? This game will have been in development by a completely separate team than the Civ V patch team for at least a year, more likliy two, if the change happened in the last 2 years different teams will mean things will have been missed.

 

[Acken]

They don't play their own games ? No wonder balance is so bad. And it doesn't take a genius to understand that the trade system is broken.
But I guess that's what happens when terrible players start to make games or when the team doesn't put any importance on making it tested by good players.

By the way that change is 1.5 years old (bnw release). From which game they also took trade routes by the way, but also failed to realize how careful BNW approach to it was.

 

[metagross]

My new personal best - 431BpT on T103, 12 Cities. No specialists, no academies, all external trade routes. I build nothing but OEM and Trade Vessels, buying Colonists for AI money - boy does that get tedious after a while.

Spoiler :

 

[Carl_Bar]

You've really never listened to games developers talking about games development. Most of the time on a game ins't spent on balance. In fact the one's I've heard comment, have all said that outside of the initial design phase where they lay out the basic roadmap of how they want the game to play balancing generally isn't touched heavily until the back end of the design cycle. The majority of time and effort is spent implementing code, checking it works, and hunting the bugs when it doesn't.

Also, do you seriously see them sitting slaving away at work playing sections of Civ;BE on their PC's whilst checking code implementation only to go home and relax by playing Civ V?

This is all why patch teams are much better at balancing that initial design and build teams are. The initial team is more focused on implementing their design, both in terms of base code and the gameplay style they've decided on than they are on balancing the game and much of their game time isn't spent considered whats balanced or not, it's spent considering weather the code they just input is working. And if they're anything like most modders they can easily be tripped up on spotting issues because they'll tend to play the game the way they designed it to play, whilst most really broken exploits sit outside that.

 

[Acken]

Sorry to expect a Civilization game designer to actually play civilization games and have an idea where strategy is when designing a strategy game. Or to look at some important design decision taken in Civ5, a game you then copy 80% of it.

Also if not the designers, because you're right they probably don't have the time, then hire a guy that can do that job.
Or give the game a "beta" phase and make it tested by other people for free ! And be ready to change stuff. Because they apparently did this right ? Since Maddjinn played before release he must not be alone. But I doubt testers never raised any concerns right ?

There are options.

Meanwhile, we get a rushed product and the backlash you get for it is 100% deserved, no excuses (and leads to lost sale for this game and future products, suddenly spending a bit more money on testing doesn't sound so bad).
But to be fair: the publisher may be to blame regarding the rushed release. It's not like I want to blame one specific person at Firaxis and some of the ideas have merit.

Alright enough ranting

 

[Carl_Bar]

Sorry to expect a Civilization game designer to actually play civilization games and have an idea where strategy is when designing a strategy game. Or to look at some important design decision taken in Civ5, a game you then copy 80% of it.

Also if not the designers, because you're right they probably don't have the time, then hire a guy that can do that job.
Or give the game a "beta" phase and make it tested by other people for free ! And be ready to change stuff. Because they apparently did this right ? Since Maddjinn played before release he must not be alone. But I doubt testers never raised any concerns right ?

There are options.

You misunderstand how game design works.

You don't code a game and then see how it play's. You come up with a vision of how you want it to play and then attempt to implement that. They do have a clue how the game is played. Unfortunately they're rarely great at spotting the exploits that cause the way the game is actually played to differ from the way it's intended to play. Mostly because that requires experimentation outside the design parameters and that's something best achieved by someone with no preconceptions.

Likewise no one can realistically expect someone to play a single very similar line of games all the time all day every day. You wouldn't like it if you had to. No didn't think so. At the end of the day they only have so much time to work on the game and most of that wll be spent getting the game ready to actually properly play.

Finally they do test these things. What you don't seem to understand is that this requires time and money, lots of it. That means until the game is in your hands and they have profits to carve a chunk off of for the patching cycle they can only do so many QA cycles which means only so many sets of modifications before time and money runs out. Fact is only the most simplistic, mechanics wise), games release in a particularly balanced state, and even then usually need several patches. For something as complicated as a Civ style game good balance takes a lot of time and investment.

Simply put drop the entailment complex and shut your whining. What you got is exactly what's normal at game release and represents what's actually possible when you don't have pie in the sky budgets to pay the developers for a year while they run balance pass after balance pass. If you can;t accept that i suggest you find a new hobby.

 

[Anomandaris]

First of all, the word you were looking for is entitlement, not entailment

While I agree with a lot of the things you say above, I would not give Firaxis a free pass for all the problems the game has. Of course, the issues are not exclusive to Firaxis at all, they are a common theme across most new games. That doesn't mean it is OK for them to work like that and we should just shut the hell up and take it!

For me, it is inexcusable for a company to make a sequel that makes the same mistakes its predecessors did. I cannot speak from experience about this particular instance because BE is my first Civilization game (I think I played the third when I was a kid but I remember literally nothing of it except that I didn't like it). However, several other games I play have done the same with sequels and from what I have read on these forums a lot of the problems of the games were issues with previous installments as well.

So, don't the different teams, like, communicate from time to time? The exploits and the things that make the game imbalanced lie on several basic concepts that can easily be identified and quickly remedied if compared with their counterparts in previous games. The energy per turn into favors into energy exploit is a simple error, someone messed up and that is bound to happen in a game as complex - fine. They will correct it in due time, happens. However, the whole concept of trade routes is flawed, I think. Nobody who played that game for more than 12 hours (at the worst) could be oblivious to how powerful they are. I went wide on my second play entirely on my own, without having any prior experience with Civilization and without reading tips, strategies, etc. It was just so obvious it was what the developers intended and the game was just PUSHING you to do. Nothing I did going tall in my first game could even remotely compare to the power of city boosting that is a wide empire. This promotes one play style unless you purposely want to handicap yourself. That is just bad design. Since the same problem has happened before in previous games, there is no excuse for the same bad design twice. They should have known better. If people came up with exploits before under the same conditions, they will come up with similar exploits under similar conditions. That should be a surprise to no one.

The truth, for me, is this. Civilization is a game catering to more casual players and "city builders". The game was never really that big on the competitive scene and single player seems to be its focus (like the Total War series, which I thoroughly enjoy). With such a game, you can get away with not caring about balance and pushing out an unfinished product. The vast majority will play it for a couple of dozen hours and move on. They won't have time to discover some of the completely broken exploits and even if they do, they wouldn't complain all that hard about the game being too easy. The complainers in single player games are always the hardcore fans and by definition they are a pretty small minority. They are an afterthought - after the money comes in, Firaxis can do patches funded by that profit and try to prolong the life and sales of the game. However, by that point the most important stage of the game's life-cycle will already be completed because it would sale on the force of the name alone.

So this was pretty long and not very well structured.

TL;DR - Balance is an afterthought because by the time customers worry about balance, the initial sales are already in. What matters in the initial development is that the game looks well at first glance and does not have visible technical issues (or at least has as little as possible). This is not primarily a multiplayer game, is not a popular E-sport game, and is not intended to have a life of more than a couple of years (except for the really hardcore fans, who don't matter all that much with regards to sales due to their relatively small number).

Almost all non-indie games have this same approach and it is to be expected. However, it is not something to shut the hell up about - quite the opposite. If we want this approach to change, we have to whine and complain and vote with our wallets. This is only the method of operation of game companies because they can get away with it!

 

[Carl_Bar]

It comes down to about three point again there. Though a good well thought out post you've missed a few points.

1. The basic design document will have been laid out at or possibly even before primary development began behind the scene's. What that means in simple terms is that quite a number of broad choices where locked in long before the Civ V team ever got round to seeing the issue. They can adjust the detail's after the fact, but the broad choices are very hard to change.

2. In line with that, if they make any changes from the prior formula mechanics or design goals, (and my understanding is they have), you can't actually predict all the effects of doing that until they get to put it all together. They can and will make educated guesses, but there's always devils in the details on that kind of thing.

3. The fact that you can go super broad is a deliberate design decision, they laid that out early on in an interview. They have IMO over-compensated for Civ V favoring super tall to the exclusion of super wide. But that's a common human flaw in any endevour.

4. Game design is bloody expensive, time costs, lots, and the QA cycles for each round of changes takes time, it's going to be less in house than post release but it still isn't going to be super quick, given that there's a very limited amount of time and thus a very limited number of cycles possible on the time allotted without taking the game way over budget and killing the profit margin limiting post launch support and if it over-runs enough, killing the company because it can't afford to develop another title of similar quality.

5. In line with the limited cycles the whole devil in the details ends to bite developers who make too many changes at the same time. You kill one set of issues but create a new set via the unintended interactions. Seen it in beta's a few times from developers who hadn't yet learnt this.

6. Okay that was more than three i know. Broke it down a bit more.

TDLR: Saying you shouldn't have to put up with it is a fine sentiment. But in reality it doesn't work like that. If hypothetically you could force developers to do more QA for balance they'd just stop developing games that where going to cost as much to develop or they'd charge more, (read a lot more), for a similar game to ensure they can actually stay out of the red on the game they develop. Given too high a price locks a lot of the market potential out they'd probably go with the former.

 

[Acken]

Simply put drop the entailment complex and shut your whining. What you got is exactly what's normal at game release and represents what's actually possible when you don't have pie in the sky budgets to pay the developers for a year while they run balance pass after balance pass. If you can;t accept that i suggest you find a new hobby.

WTH ?

Someone's angry that I think this is a lazy game that should have had more testing and thoughts into it I guess.

I do understand how that game was designed and that's what annoys me. It's not only the balance by the way.

That game doesn't get a free-pass, the excuses are irrelevant (and, unless you worked on the project, out of your own ass), it's disappointing and just average.
Edit: And that has nothing to do with entitlement by the way. You should seriously look up that word. I don't feel I'm owed something by Firaxis. I paid, it disappoints, I'll move on quickly. I just think they did a poor job and should have paid more care if they didn't want poor user reviews/feedback.

 

[metagross]

Step 1: Search the CivV community for a good player who's somewhat local to the area where the developers are.
Step 2: Tell this player he can come play CivBE anytime they want provided they sign a NDA and provide feedback on balance.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!

I am willing to bet there are a lot of players that would happily test CivBE before release for free (or next to nothing). You only need to play a few games to spot the fundamental mistakes we are all "whining" about.

 

[AlaskA]

Have no time to continue my current game, but im think a lot about some interesting things.

Im my current game i have next things at t91

1) Workers building academyes
2) +2 academy bonus virtue
3) 8 cityes

Im really try go tall right now, not WIDE coz new citizen give me 6,25 science. It's like about 1 land TR. And tech dont growth in cost.
And i can improve this 6,25 with % from synergy, buildings and from satellite (15% science). All this things doesnt improve science from TR.

When i finish my game, i post results.
What do u think about it?

 

[alpaca]

Have no time to continue my current game, but im think a lot about some interesting things.

Im my current game i have next things at t91

1) Workers building academyes
2) +2 academy bonus virtue
3) 8 cityes

Im really try go tall right now, not WIDE coz new citizen give me 6,25 science. It's like about 1 land TR. And tech dont growth in cost.
And i can improve this 6,25 with % from synergy, buildings and from satellite (15% science). All this things doesnt improve science from TR.

When i finish my game, i post results.
What do u think about it?

I think you will soon find that the large food basket will slow your city growth down to snail pace unless you keep adding new cities with internal TR

 

[AlaskA]

I think you will soon find that the large food basket will slow your city growth down to snail pace unless you keep adding new cities with internal TR

Fair enough, but im plan win before this happens. I think my science rate with 8 cityes and going tall pretty well and i reach lvl13 affinity and start build mindflower on the turn 115-120. Im just find going wide too costly if my outposts become cityes in same time (t100).. better i start keep all my gold for buying steams and xeno sanctuaries...

anyway im test it and post here my progress.

 

[rtfischbeck]

So, here's a 1k science per turn around turn 200. Had about 500 SPT at turn 170 and won on turn 222. Probably could have won ten or so turns earlier but was going for emancipation for the first time and built my institute too early and had to take a non-relevant tech.

Upshot: Go wide, rush autoplants for the extra trade route, run two international trade routes and one to the capital...profit?

I will note that this was on a dwarf, atlantean map since I'm trying to clear achievements.

Edit: Apollo difficulty, standard speed. 12 cities (2 were puppets).

 

[joncnunn]

Moderator Action: Thread closed in light of the new patch changing so many mechanics (and therefore science speed), but feel free to start a post patch thread on this topic if you wish.