Okay, one last AAR from me, as close to a final verdict as I'll ever be. I decided to trudge through one game just to see some endgame tech. Even managed to fight a proper war this time.
It was a bit of a slog, because I pretty much won the game in the medieval era, the rest of the game I spent sprawling over two continents, then switched everything to tech and industrial production in anticipation of unleashing modern firepower
on hapless cunts two tiers beneath me. However, this plan was cut short, because the game ended sorta prematurely, even by going pretty much 100% tech (and researching modern tech every 2-3 turns), I barely completed the Manhattan Project three turns before the game ended.
I wasn't even close to launching mission to mars. I could theoretically push past this limit, bud fuck that. For some reason, the ending date was 1800 AD. Not sure how the fuck it's calculated, but it feels wrong.
I caught the endless turn bug once, thought the game is FUBAR, but it went away after restarting and saves don't seem to be corrupted.
Afterwards, the game gives you some ending slides briefly summarizing what you did, citing a bunch of achievements, like for example my participating in the longest war in the game.
Still, it was a bit funny hearing that I supposedly left the planet relatively unpolluted, when nobody really had any chance to do any because the AIs were sorta sitting there, back in the medieval age
and I was clicking through a whole bunch of events without paying much attention, and didn't bother to build a whole lot of things like merchant districts (and I was still swimming in cash regardless).
I think it is clear that while the later eras are content complete, but the balancing simply isn't there. I think this shows in research speed but also minor things like strategic resources. For example, despite my global hegemony, I was unable to build one type of upgraded artillery, because there simply wasn't enough Saltpeter on the two continents I occupied. Perhaps some AI had access to the third and maybe fourth, but I couldn't be bothered to go through the hassle just to get it.
IMO, no unit or improvement should ever require more than two of a given strategic resource and most should just need one.
AI: I think it's safe to assume the AI is cheating regardless of difficulty. Whenever I inspect what they're up to, I keep seeing shit I could never pull, like building a bazillion districts seemingly without any concern about stability.
When it comes to behavior in combat, the AI does weird shit when traversing the map, but from what I've seen, it performs ok in battles. I guess it was easier to make it work in a constrained theater.
I never saw AI using any sort of ships whatsoever. This is of course a typical weak spot of many 4X, but this was in the course of an entire game and felt especially jarring, there wasn't a single scout vessel or coastal patrols, I don't think it even built any harbors.
Civics: While I like this mechanic in general - letting you manipulate ideologic axes and get some bonuses which can be situationally useful, it became more of a let down the further it went. The most annoying thing is that the game keeps the civics hidden,
and they sorta pop out of nowhere once you meet the requirements. As a result, I never saw almost half of the civics tree and had to look shit up on the wiki to even see what's there.
Also, while the effects can be significant in the early game, a lot of the time a civic does nothing or getting +1 stability on one district type isn't something you'll be losing sleep over.
Tech: like I said earlier, tech progress in the later eras feels weird. My pet peeve is how useless are some of the bonuses you get from research. A 20% discount on building a district is meaningless if it comes at the stage of the game.
Can't believe I'm saying this, because I always considered this feature to be game-breaking in the early Civ games, but tech trading should be a thing in this game. There are some mechanics like "cultural osmosis" which let you "steal" tech from a civ that has cultural influence over you, but it's more of a catch-up mechanic. The game seems to have a bunch of those, so I'm not sure to what degree the devs were aware of the problem of one or two civs just running off with the game early on.
Wonders: It's interesting that you need to first buy the "right" to build it with influence. Kinda solves the frustration when someone beats you to building a wonder by one turn.
For some reason, they all feel so boring. It's mostly some flat bonus to stability and FIMS, so you tend to gravitate to a bunch that actually look like they do something unique,
and there could be more of those. I think I've gotten the most mileage out of the Lighthouse and its +2 ship movement.
Wars: So yeah, I fought some wars, and it was frankly terrible. You need to jump through some hoops to start it all legit, or use the surprise attack option which gives you a Traitor perk. I didn't use this option, might be less of an issue
than it's cut out to be, but I like to keep a good name in my strategy games. You can bypass it of sorts by using the special ability of Expansionist civs, this also lets you initiate skirmishes, which should be enough to escalate to an actual war.
The war itself was a bit of a slog cause the AI kept sending waves after waves of riders at me. Cities also automatically generate a bunch of defenders, so it was quite a bit of meat to grind through. the end result is that sieges behave a bit like
in Total War, you can even spend extra turns building siege engines, but I think the system is missing some mechanic to starve the defenders out (or is it a thing I missed in the meanders of the interface? I can never tell).
The worst part, however was being rudely interrupted as I was just about to take their capital. The game decided we need to discuss terms now, and fuck me, it doesn't take no for an answer.
Most infuriating thing was, I didn't have enough "war points" to even keep the two cities I took. I was short a few points, so I would gladly whoop their ass for one turn more.
There doesn't seem to be an option to raze cities, which is a bummer. Also, the way the AI seems to run things, the city is one big blob of walled districts, making it difficult to raid and pillage any improvements,
unless the intention was to go all out pillaging once you won the siege, which felt a bit counter intuitive at some point. The game could use some lootable farms and cottages at the very least.
I was also rather let down by veterancy. Turns out you get through all the bother keeping units alive and earning expt, but the result is a measly +1 strength increase per star. Like many things in this game,
it can make a difference early on, but is meaningless once the numbers are in the 50-60 range.
A verdict, of sorts: I don't dislike the game, it does a surprising number of things right, even manages to fix some stuff from Civ. For example, battlefields look like an interesting answer to the 1UPT problem
and I think I like how it ended up, as a sort of hybrid system with armies comprising of 4-8 units. It's not perfect, but I think it can work with some tweaking.
There are more than a few decent ideas, for example, later in the game you can build settlers which immediately found the city and let you install a whole bunch of improvements.
I genuinely enjoyed the exploration aspects, the expansion as well as the early game. Unfortunately, it's rather clear the game falls apart in its later stages.
The culture patchwork ended up being a disaster. Mechanically speaking, I think it could be salvageable. Pick your culture at the very beginning to set your unique units (give everyone unique shit for each era if you must),
then choose a specialization and legacy bonus at the start of each era without fucking with the appearance. It doesn't make a shred of sense that I can't play militaristic this time, because the relevant picks were already taken for this era.
So, what am I looking towards? The game doesn't seem to be lacking features, if anything, Amplitude should take a long hard look at what worked and what not. Not sure if its realistic to expect
a big patch or DLC to unfuck it, and I'd hate to be the "mods'll fix this" guy, especially if we don't know what's going to be actually moddable. At least 50% of the game is in need a major overhaul as far as I'm concerned.
The game does a rather poor job at explaining its own mechanics. One feature that I especially miss is some kind of a preview, or an estimation what will I gain from building an improvement. It's sometimes hard to gauge if it's worth it and it would be nice to have the number spelt out. As said earlier, the interface is really bad, so I'm not 100% positive. Pehaps there's some convoluted way of seeing this.
From what I've seen absolutely nothing justifies the asking price, I'm not giving them any money and neither should you, but it's worth demoing to make up your own mind.
