What are your thoughts on the game since the patch dropped?
I've not played the game for a while - since patch 1, in fact. I've been pleasantly surprised by the game I played yesterday.
I enjoyed it! Which I didn't expect. That's not to say I think the game is completely where it needs to be. But it's definitely moving in the right direction.
Probably, part of the reason I enjoyed myself was because I was exploring a rebalanced game and so having to think up new strategies. The game was a challenge and being challenged is better than being bored, after all. Maybe after playing a few more hours I will change my mind - too early to say. But my general impression after yesterday's game left me optimistic.
The nerfing of trade routes has had a huge impact. Just massive.
The game I played yesterday had various layers of depth I hadn't experienced before. I gave up playing back in December after the first patch because the game seemed about as subtle as a brick. Now I find it different. A crude example, but a simple step in the right direction: I actually built solar collectors for the first time - I never needed them in past. Orbital layer? Aah, that's why it's important.
I feel it's effected affinities, affinity levelling and the tech web too, in a good way too.
I read in a different thread how someone was comparing the web to the CiV tree. The comparison favoured the tree because it feels like a race - can I reach machinery before the AI, and rush some xbows? Can I get to Dynamite first and rush artillery. Or rush a wonder tech etc?
My post patch game (Soyuz, standard, standard) was fairly neck and neck with KP throughout and I started to feel some of that "race". As I watched her affinity levels climb higher than mine and had to make choices between digressing to catch a tech for a tile improvement or a sat I wanted, or keep pushing up the affinity ladder, I, dare I say it, got excited..
Militarily, it sort of worked - sort of. I was way ahead of my neighbours regards affinities - so its hard to tell. If KP had been my immediate neighbour, things might have been more tense. However, this does still seem like the weakest part of the way affinites and the tech tree runs - but maybe with a little more elaboration it will become stronger. I sort of felt like I was in a race - but as I purposefully wasn't playing warlike, I can't really tell how good it is.
I always liked the concepts behind affinities and the tech web. But I always felt they were implemented poorly. Now I'm starting to think, they were just obliterated and lost beneath the trade routes simplicity and OP nature. Bottom line I had a sense that my choices mattered- which I hadn't in the past. It was enjoyable.
I still have many grumbles -not least with the terrible UI.
I think my biggest grumble is with wonders. As many, many other players have written they still seem fairly meh to me. I didn't build a single one. And I didn't see a single one that I felt, hey, I really need to snag that, that will bump me up a few rungs of the development ladder. Also, as many others have written - they all come too late. Most of them are attached to outer leaf techs. There are zero "ancient" world techs - no "great library" or "stone henge" to try and snag in the first few turns. This is the biggest problem with the game in my view. If they placed more of the wonders in earlier techs, off the affinity routes (most importantly) and made them more meaningful - then the choice of digressing and snagging a wonder -weighed against the choice of moving up the affinity ladder would be more meaningful. Much more meaningful and the game would get more edge.
Regards the debate about AI "personality". I sort of fell into the camp that felt they were bland. But during yesterday's game, their "personalities" didn't seem important. I was too involved in making decisions and exploring choices. There's an old editing trick that dates back to Sergei Eisenstein and Russian silent cinema. He noticed that if you edited a shot of a silent woman's face immediately after a crying child -the audience thought the woman was sad. If you used the same shot and then a church - she was parying. Same shot and a happy family, she was full of joy. I'm wondering if my feeling of blandness about AI personalities was actually created by the blandness of the game as it was in that earlier state..
Anyway, I didn't see any other thread about thoughts regarding patch 2, so I thought I'd post mine here. feel free to merge it, if there's another one.
