Why quests are bad

[VDZ]

The idea of the tech web is a good one, but that choise you mention is mostly an illusion.

Once you have figured out the tree you will focus on a handful of key techs from the early game and then just rush all techs associated with your affinity of choise, skipping everything but a handful of really powerful ones (e.g. Vertical Farming if you have the Ectogensis Pod).

I am already at a point where I have a fixed tech path for every game, only marginally adjusted by the stuff on the map (e.g. Biochemistry if I have lots of Coastal cities) or an early DOW from the AI.

Even so, you only research the techs you want and the few techs required for the techs you want. In Civ V, you could specialize your research to a limited degree, but you would still have to research a lot of techs you don't want, and then halfway through the tech tree you have to go back and research almost every single tech you didn't research up until that point just to get ahead in the tech tree and go back to researching techs you actually use.

 

[mnf]

Imagine this situation: All strategic resource visibility techs are hidden a bit further into the tech tree so you don't unlock them until later. At the start of the game, one hidden strategic resource is completely removed from the game and cannot be obtained in any way. Sounds fun?

Removing one strategic resource from the game is actually one of the advanced setup options in Civ V or IV, I think. I can't remember which. So yes, it can be fun.

But that's getting to derail the thread. So how would you implement the system?

Perhaps people who find it fine at the moment will see that it is indeed very bad implementation, after seeing your much better implementation.

I'm not trying to argue what is fun or what is not, as obviously it's a personal feeling. But I'm sure interested in different implementations that may turn out to be more fun.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Even so, you only research the techs you want and the few techs required for the techs you want. In Civ V, you could specialize your research to a limited degree, but you would still have to research a lot of techs you don't want, and then halfway through the tech tree you have to go back and research almost every single tech you didn't research up until that point just to get ahead in the tech tree and go back to researching techs you actually use.

Yes. CIV5 was about the decision *when* to get a tech. BE is about the decision *if* and *when* you want to get a tech. But only to a certain degree.

BECAUSE: The game still forces you to research all the Affinity techs (if you want to win an affinity victory) - even if you don't want or need them. Heck, in the late game I just SHIFT click on everything that has the right affinity icon on it, I don't even care what the tech does apart from Affinity XP.

Or to look at it in another way: In CIV:BE the tech dogma is reversed: The basic premise is to NOT research a tech, to research as few techs as possible and then to find a reason why you should do so.

I understand why you like that. What I am saying is that it I find it questionable from a design/balance standpoint in regards to affinities. Best examples: Ballistic Lev or Human Idealism. Nobody will EVER get these two techs since they just slow down your victory. They might as well be removed from the game.

edit: To get back to topic, the quest system is interconnected to that whole issue because the hidden benefits skew the actual value of tech on the board. Most noteworthy the Institute, which is basicially a cheap Oxford University - but the game doesn't tell you (and yes, exploring is fun for the first few games, but I don't want to have to *remember* every bonus or use spreadsheets to look them up while playing). A simple toggle "show quest reward" option would make everyone happy.

 

[NoobEmperor]

Who thought that this system would make the game more 'interesting'? There's nothing here but a lucky dip, or a serious of tedious actions for experienced players that likely involve no decision making at all:

a) You either have no idea about the quest when you choose your building, and thus it contributes nothing to you decision at all, and it is a forced decision that you have to react to, not plan for

or

b) you know about it already and it informs your decision making at the building stage, and has no need to be further distinguished in to a later discrete query.

The supposed intention of these quests, if I can speculate, is to add narrative elements to the game, and give players more points to distinguish their different games.

don't you know. games these days are about 'telling a story' and having a 'narrative'.

and you do this by forcing people to make 'meaningful decisions'

obviously the devs are bad at this so they made simple popups that gives your building bonus at random time throughout the game. Also the wrote a bunch of text about why you are making these decisions but nobody reads that. they just choose whatever bonus is better.

and yes, +2culture is better than +2gold. lol

 

[Mustakrakish]

It's such a repetitive boring mechanic of so called quests. You basically choose a yield every time you build a building. Why? Just lame.

 

[Bezurn]

Consider this change to the Ultrasonic Fence:

What if it potentially can have 4 choices, and in any game it will randomly present 2:

• Repel distance +1
• Trade convoys and vessels immune to alien attack
• Explorers and workers immune to alien attack
• Discover new orbital unit that repels aliens for 40 turns and has 3 tile radius effect

and obviously the Purity 1 bonus needs to be changed to something else.

In this example, the quest choices are actually interesting because each option is good in a certain way (one may argue trade convoy immunity is too good and should be taken out, say moved to become the Purity 1 bonus).

Hell no.

Imagine this situation: All strategic resource visibility techs are hidden a bit further into the tech tree so you don't unlock them until later. At the start of the game, one hidden strategic resource is completely removed from the game and cannot be obtained in any way. Sounds fun?

No, it wouldn't be fun at all. Because you make certain choices expecting to get certain opportunities (and likely make investments beforehand to capitalize on that opportunity), and suddenly finding out that after all of your effort you can't do X because random chance ****ed you over and there's nothing you can do about it is not what I call 'fun'.

I don't see where he said anything about a quest removing a strategic resource. But some people prefer to play the game with all random options at start up and play the map, and others like to hand pick their load outs, their sponsor and play the game for maximum efficiency. Some people like random events in Civ 4, and others hated them.

But what I really would have liked to have seen with building quests was in addition to the small yields that a choice gives, was to give small points towards a certain affinity as well. This would be a challenge to do for some buildings, but then you could remove a lot of the affinity points in the tech tree and instead tie them into buildings. This would give these 'insignificant quests' more meaning so as to become worth your attention again without having to increase yields and effects to unbalancing proportions.

This of course would upset people who wanted to see what path to take in the tech tree to maximize efficient ways to maximize their affiinity goals, but for Roleplayers like me it would be much more fun. That is what I thought these choices meant when I loaded up the game for the first time last week.

The main quest line for affinity points cannot be changed sadly it seems. The only way to shift gears are whichleaf techs you pick, which is expensive. You are railroaded into the affinity choice within the first 50 turns. It is very hard to change course early to mid game and get big affinity boosts from the main quest, as there are no exit points in which you can choose to focus on a different affinity. That I think is one of the failings of the current system.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Gentlemen, if you have a minute: The quest tooltip mod is done.

I think it actually gives *a lot* of insight into how they designed the tech web and that some techs are much better than expected. For example now it is obvious that the techs next to Computing all have buildings with spy related quests.

Download: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=334376779

 

[kirbdog]

The reason to play is to try and beat the puzzle as quickly and reliably as possible by making the best decisions.

This is

- not the only possible reason to play
- not the only reason actual people actually play
- not the only way to define the objective and 'best decisions'
- not in any way suggested by the developers or the game itself

You will find that the game suggests three objectives:

- Win the game
- Get the achievements
- Get a high score

And you will find that the developers emphasize the experience of play (the Civ game in your head - those "roleplay" type things) and how that can be stimulated by the gameplay elements. Because that's how and why a lot of people actually play.

Not that people can't find any reason to play, or any objective to optimize over. And, sure, there is a definite tendency around here (fostered by the objectives designed in some of the competitions on this site) to codify what you just stated as the objective in playing Civ.

 

[alpaca]

I agree with the OP for the most part. I like the idea of customizing your buildings - although I would wish for some of the decisions to be more balanced, and others more powerful - but hiding them away is a very bad idea in my opinion.

Being a board-game fan, I have an avid dislike for building a barrier between new players and experienced players through knowledge of the game content. The main problem is, that, if hidden bonuses are powerful, they make the building (and its tech) much stronger than it appears. On the other hand, if the hidden bonus is weak, it just becomes boring and annoying to be forced to make another decision that is largely meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

The best example are the buildings that provide a free tech and a free social virtue. These can be huge assets because you can more or less decide when to pop it, but as nothing is shown in the building tooltip, or even the civilopedia, you might only research the associated tech pretty late, or not build the building at all.

Sure, there's some element of discovery, but for me that mostly was building a single copy of the building in some backwater city as a probe and see what I got. It's not fun exploration like exploring the map is, because after a few playthroughs I know all the bonuses, or look them up in a wiki. So all it does is keeping new players from making informed decisions, while giving an extra advantage to experienced players that has little to do with skill and much with lack of information. If the building bonuses were randomized, this exploration thing might be more interesting, perhaps even interesting enough to warrant hiding the bonuses.

This is also one of my main issues with games like Europa Universalis (national ideas being most notorious in this regard): hidden events strongly modify what a game element does, so it's impossible to make a meaningful decision without either knowing the ins and outs of the game perfectly, or looking things up in a wiki.

Generally, designing systems that provide an incentive for a player to look up knowledge on the internet, rather than look up strategies and discussions, disrupts the flow of the game and, therefore, is an undesirable path to follow.

 

[Ryika]

Gentlemen, if you have a minute: The quest tooltip mod is done.

I think it actually gives *a lot* of insight into how they designed the tech web and that some techs are much better than expected. For example now it is obvious that the techs next to Computing all have buildings with spy related quests.

Download: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=334376779

I cannot endorse this.
It makes the game way too easy.
People should just memorize the rewards.
This is for noobs.
Lazy people should not be supported.




...are some of the comments that you'll soon get on steam. Good job though, will probably use!

 

[VDZ]

I don't see where he said anything about a quest removing a strategic resource.

It was an example of how terrible removing hidden options is. Imagine you've spent a lot of production and tech to get buildings to boost your orbital range and orbital unit production, and then later you find out that there is no petrol in the game. Due to a random factor removing a possibility and your inability to find out, you've wasted a lot of resources on something mostly useless.

The same could happen if, for example, you suddenly don't get the option to protect your trade routes from aliens. Or you've set up things so you can create an awesome internal trade network that's awesome even after the inevitable upcoming nerf, but suddenly the option to gain an extra trade route from Autoplants isn't there. For the more competitive players, not getting the free tech/virtue from the building that gives it. A run getting the right bonuses (the ones most fitting for their current strategy) would inevitably be more successful than a run where all the fitting bonuses are removed at random. When success is more dependent on luck than on skill, that's no fun.

BECAUSE: The game still forces you to research all the Affinity techs (if you want to win an affinity victory) - even if you don't want or need them. Heck, in the late game I just SHIFT click on everything that has the right affinity icon on it, I don't even care what the tech does apart from Affinity XP.

Best examples: Ballistic Lev or Human Idealism. Nobody will EVER get these two techs since they just slow down your victory. They might as well be removed from the game.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. In Civ V, did you get Archery to build the Temple of Artemis? Did you get Physics for the Notre Dame? Gunpowder for Himeji Castle? Most of the time, no, you don't care about those. You got them for the Archer, for the Trebuchet and for the Musketman. The fact that it also allowed you to build those wonders was a nice extra, and maybe you sometimes play a strategy where you actually go for those techs for the wonders rather than the units.

In the same way, the things the techs allow are the bonus; the main benefit is their amount of affinity experience (which varies per affinity tech, so yes, I've gone for "useless" techs instead of "useful" techs before because they gave a more desirable amount of affinity experience), similar to techs in Civ V which upgrade your units. The experience is the main result of the tech, the rest is the bonus.

And unlike Civ V...you don't actually need to research them. You only need some of the affinity techs for the affinity victory, and there's two affinity-unrelated victory conditions. But you probably want to, because they're the unit upgrade techs.

EDIT: Never mind about the second quote, I thought that those were affinity techs. The problem with those techs is just that they're not good enough; a balance issue. I do research techs that don't fit my affinity tech path often enough, though.

 

[forty2j]

I HATE THAT IDEA.

If you want to do that just don't look at the civilopedia
Perhaps they could have an option called 'Blind Play' where the only information the game gives you is the names.

You can research Genetics, You don't know when it will be done or what it will give you.

Hiding info like that is TERRIBLE LAZY game making. (For any game that is expected to be replayable)

I think I might do a better job at containing my rage.. but I would tend to agree that the replayability of a game shouldn't be based on the fact that you're constantly learning new mechanics.

 

[kirbdog]

In Civ V, did you get Archery to build the Temple of Artemis? Did you get Physics for the Notre Dame? Gunpowder for Himeji Castle? Most of the time, no, you don't care about those. You got them for the Archer, for the Trebuchet and for the Musketman. The fact that it also allowed you to build those wonders was a nice extra, and maybe you sometimes play a strategy where you actually go for those techs for the wonders rather than the units.

While you have a nice point, Physics for Notre Dame (on a difficulty level where you can actually build it) did make plenty of sense. Composite -> Crossbow was the cheap&effective medieval rush, and the Notre Dame supported conquest with all the happiness.

 

[Tomice]

Gentlemen, if you have a minute: The quest tooltip mod is done.

I think it actually gives *a lot* of insight into how they designed the tech web and that some techs are much better than expected. For example now it is obvious that the techs next to Computing all have buildings with spy related quests.

Download: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=334376779

That's awesome! Thank you so much!

I totally agree with the guy who suggested a toggle. While I personally strongly prefer to be able to plan my choices without Alt-Tabbing, I can understand others who would like to leave quests "secret". I'm pretty sure that everyone would use the toggle after a few games, however.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. In Civ V, did you get Archery to build the Temple of Artemis? Did you get Physics for the Notre Dame? Gunpowder for Himeji Castle? Most of the time, no, you don't care about those. You got them for the Archer, for the Trebuchet and for the Musketman. The fact that it also allowed you to build those wonders was a nice extra, and maybe you sometimes play a strategy where you actually go for those techs for the wonders rather than the units.

I think you can't compare the techs from CIV5 and BE in that way. Yes, in CIV5 you had a lot of techs that you did not strictly want or need, but they were part of a natural progression. The CIV5 tech tree made sense because it mimiced historical tech development. And in that regard the CIV:BE tech web makes sense, because it is a decent solution to model the probably branching development of future technolgy.

HOWEVER: The connection to gameplay is the problem. In CIV5 the fact that you have to research useless techs is less dramatic because EVERYONE is forced to grab them and the impact of a useless tech is quite small considering that you need most of the tech tree for a science victory. The gameplay is supposed to revolve around following the tech path.

The only problem arises in the late game, were CIV suffers the same problem as BE: You skip the last few techs at the bottom of the tree because they are useless for you. And that is my point: In BE everything past the early game techs suffers from this - not just the last few ones.

My gripe is not about the fact that many techs unlock sub-par stuff per se, but rather that the end game comes so quickly and unlocked stuff is so weak that you skip way too many techs and just rush to the end. The tech web is supposed to give the player choise - but as it is, due to trade routes and endgame design - like the fact that Affinity victories are purely driven by 2 techs and X affinity levels - the whole idea of the tech web is diminshed.

...and, yes, I often prioritized Physics to get Notre Dame. I sometimes even skipped Education to go Machinery and Physics first even though I never had use for Trebuchets, since I am a peaceful tall player. Neither did I care for Gunpowder - in fact most of the bottom mid tech tree remained unresearched until the Modern age, after I slingshotted to Radio via Electricity + Oxford and THEN wanted to grab Fertilizer.

 

[Ravellion]

I disagree with the premise that it is not transparent enough. Most of the time the building quest gives an option that is simply "what you chose to build this building for anyway, but on steroids". Most health buildings and culture buildings can be simply improved this way. The other option is more situational, such as extra production, no upkeep etc. This isn't full transparency, but full transparency would also chase away the players who play the game in more of a "story mode". That is to say, most players who wouldn't go to a forum of fanatics to discuss the game with

 

[Soffacet]

This is

- not the only possible reason to play
- not the only reason actual people actually play
- not the only way to define the objective and 'best decisions'
- not in any way suggested by the developers or the game itself

You will find that the game suggests three objectives:

- Win the game
- Get the achievements
- Get a high score

And you will find that the developers emphasize the experience of play (the Civ game in your head - those "roleplay" type things) and how that can be stimulated by the gameplay elements. Because that's how and why a lot of people actually play.

Not that people can't find any reason to play, or any objective to optimize over. And, sure, there is a definite tendency around here (fostered by the objectives designed in some of the competitions on this site) to codify what you just stated as the objective in playing Civ.

Lets strip away the optimization part and just focus on one idea:

1. In a strategy game, a player should strive to select the strategy that is best suited for present circumstances.
2. CivBE is a strategy game.
3. (From 1 and 2) When playing CivBE, a player should strive to select the strategy that is best suited for their circumstances.
4. Selecting a strategy is a decision.
5. Making an informed decision requires access to all relevant information.
6. (From 3, 4 and 5) Selecting a strategy that is best suited for present circumstances requires access to all relevant information.
7. A new player probably only has access to the information that the game UI presents.
8. (From 3, 6, 7) The UI should present all relevant information at all times.

Let us imagine an updated CiVBE where the UI actually does present all relevant information at all times. New players would fall into one of two populations:

A. Players treating a strategy game as a strategy game, i.e. interested in making informed decisions to optimize present circumstances. Complete UI information makes this possible.

B. Players treating a strategy game as some other type of game, i.e. not interested in making informed decisions to optimize present circumstances. Complete UI information presents no obstacle to their intention to sandbag.

 

[mehukatti]

Among all the issues facing this game at the moment, one that hasn't had enough scorn dropped upon it is the building quest system....

...the game is playing hide and seek with me.

I registered to the forum just to agree with you 100%. Thank you for the post.

 

[VDZ]

5. Making an informed decision requires access to all relevant information.

Disagree. Making an informed decision requires only access to some amount of information, no matter how little. When you choose the position for your first city, you haven't seen the entire map yet - certainly you're not just clicking a tile at random because you don't have access to all information? It's just that the more information you have, the better of a decision you can make. And in this case, the hidden information can be known in advance by having played the game before or consulting an external source, which makes it a poor, unfair form of hidden information that does not add anything to the game beyond the first playthrough.

 

[JokerJace]

Uncovering the hidden bonuses is a part of the fun/game for some of us. If you want to know all the bonuses beforehand, well there do appear to be a number of community-created sources where you can "spoil the fun" for yourself if that's what floats your boat and that's fine by me. Go ahead and knock yourself out. But I don't want to spoil my own fun. This happens to be a HUGE part of the fun for me I don't have to investigate the UI too thoroughly either so if it's built in to the UI at some point, fine by me too. But building quests are not a bad thing.

This whole post sounds like you think that Beyond Earth is a game meant to be played once. I can't follow you at all.

Disagree. Making an informed decision requires only access to some amount of information, no matter how little. When you choose the position for your first city, you haven't seen the entire map yet - certainly you're not just clicking a tile at random because you don't have access to all information? It's just that the more information you have, the better of a decision you can make. And in this case, the hidden information can be known in advance by having played the game before or consulting an external source, which makes it a poor, unfair form of hidden information that does not add anything to the game beyond the first playthrough.

This.