Where Are the Wide Empires in BE?

DarkestOnion

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Has anyone else noticed that none of the Firaxis Livestreams have shown Wide Empires? We see only 2-3 Cities, and it makes me wonder if they are just playing on Small Maps or if Wide isn't as feasible in BE as it is in Civ 5. What do you folks think?
 
It's certainly feasible considering all the virtues geared towards wide, I'd assume it's just the Livestreamer's choice to have so few cities.
 
Demos for the public is always played on small maps. It has been that way for years for firaxis.

Well in my own experience from what I have managed to see! xD
 
I doubt demo games are real games, they're probably just crafted to show a specific feature. It means nothing.

Definitely true, although the Livestream demos do appear to have been "played" to a certain extent. Pete has tweeted comments about the turns leading up to the things we've seen in the Livestream ahead of time. But they are only "played" with the objective of making it to a good situation to show off a feature, not to maintain a sustainable empire or achieve a victory. So the situations we see are only semi-plausible.
 
With only 8 civs, maps will probably be tiny, so no need for more than 4 or 5 cities.
 
Small maps, lower difficulty settings, and games set up to show off certain features aren't exactly conducive to wide empires, or runaway AIs. For how many virtues we've seen that just scream "go wide and pick me stupid" I'm sure it's still viable.

With only 8 civs, maps will probably be tiny, so no need for more than 4 or 5 cities.

Sounds like a challenge to me. 20 cities on a duel map, here I come. :p
 
Wide depends on sufficient health to make a small city worthwhile.

With Civ5 BNW, you could get ~10-12 happiness per city (which had 3 unhappiness).. which meant a city could support a pop of 10-12 once you solved the global unhappiness problem

Affinities don't seem to provide any health, and there is no clue if there is the same local v. global division (which encouraged wide once you had enough local happy..but capped it based on global happy)

So far we can see 5-6 health per city available (just about the same as the 4 unhealth per city)

This means that each new city only adds ~2 to your total population cap.
Once you start getting significant amounts of per city happiness (from buildings/virtues/wonders) above 4 (the amount of unhappiness caused by the city) then wide becomes viable.
 
Once you start getting significant amounts of per city happiness (from buildings/virtues/wonders) above 4 (the amount of unhappiness caused by the city) then wide becomes viable.

You forgot tile improvements. We've already seen that Biowells give health and only require a tier 2 leaf tech to start building. Sure they cost a lot to maintain, but to me that says wide relatively early with plentiful health from tile improvements and a handful of virtues probably won't be much of an issue as long as you can keep a functioning economy rolling.

Edit: Actually lets take this a little bit further. If it's viable to rush to biowells at Alien Ecology (which it very well might not be, we'll see) by way of Genetics, assuming you started with artists or aristocrats, you could be looking at +1 health from your artists/arisocrats, +1 health from a clinic, +1 health from a cytonursery, and +2 health from a pharmalab if you have the hammers available to build said buildings (assuming no terrain requirements or whatever for the cytonursery and pharmalab). After that you just need to keep your trade routes rolling to pay for however many biowells you need to keep your population growing, and perhaps to invest appropriately in the prosperity tree. Yea you're probably sacrificing a lot to get all that health to make REXing an option, but it seems to me it should be possible to keep your health positive in the process if nothing else.
 
The problem is biowell gives 1 health, and needs a pop to work - nets 0 health.
Will an extra pop working biowell worth it? We shall see.
 
You forgot tile improvements. We've already seen that Biowells give health and only require a tier 2 leaf tech to start building. Sure they cost a lot to maintain, but to me that says wide relatively early with plentiful health from tile improvements and a handful of virtues probably won't be much of an issue as long as you can keep a functioning economy rolling.

Except biowells are per pop not per city.
They provide no wide benefit.
They barely provide the health for the pop that works them.
They are useful, but not as a benefit for additional cities.
 
No, they don't benefit additional cities but they're still health to grow your pop, which is all I'm getting at. Saying they provide no wide benefit isn't accurate, unless your definition of wide includes nothing but 1 pop cities.
 
actually, it seems that the costs of cities are the same as in CivV, -3 per city and -1 for population, but it's now harder to get health, among other things. Biowells are Harmony thing, which appears to favor large number of cities, whereas Supremacy, according to devs, requires a lot of energy, so it might not be a good option for them.
 
Biowells are Harmony thing

Uh, no they aren't? Don't they specifically say when they show them off in the one livestream "anyone can build these, they give health but they're expensive"? Or am I losing my marbles? :crazyeye:

Edit: My marbles are still present and accounted for, they specifically say any affinity can build them.
 
actually, it seems that the costs of cities are the same as in CivV, -3 per city and -1 for population, but it's now harder to get health, among other things.
Actually the one time we saw data it was 4/city 0.8/pop
I think the 0.8 was due to difficulty though.
 
Sure, Biowells are all-affinity imp, but they are surrounded by Harmony themed ones, that's why I said they are more Harmony, because Harmony will be more likely to research it (they need Xenomass anyway), for others it is less critical. Now, a Purity player will also get benefit from it to help grow their cities( Purity seems to favor tall). A Supremacy player would pick it up if he decides going tall, so to have money to maintain them. But we will see more on Thursday, I don't want to make hasty conclusions, this is what I see from the tech web at the moment.
To KrikkitTwo: Then the actual cost of expansion is -5 health on normal difficulty?
 
Yeah it seems like -5 (although not sure if -1 is normal difficulty)
However, the Biowell is surrounded by Purity stuff
Bionics has
1 Purity leaf
1 Harmony leaf...
Purity leafs in most of the techs around it
And Purity tech has the 1 culture from biowells
 
I'm pretty sure they said something quite early about harmony being the affinity that's supposed to be the best for spreading out and taking lots of land and that has the most mobile units.
 
In the future, happiness (growth) subsidies from luxury resources and city state quests have been eliminated. Expansion will be different than in Civ V.
 
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