Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

[KoolNoodles]

Everything in this video sucks. Stupid ID verification, stupid launch control cheering right after the launch, when there is still tons of shit that can go wrong, stupid amount of empty fucking space on the ship, stupid colonists in their filthy earth clothes travelling to another planet, stupidly gigantic WINDOW on a spaceship.

Are you an idiot? ID verification along those lines will probably happen(and in the context of wanting the "best" along a set parameter it makes sense), look at microchips in pets. Have you ever seen mission control after a shuttle launch(obviously not)? The "empty" space consists of walkways, apparently. It looks slightly more spacious than parts of a navy aircraft carrier, and about what one might expect from a ship with gravity control(the ISS would allow for more space if it fit in the budget, humans like space). Clothes....whatever, can be explained away with "last minute" colonists. And windows....are you kidding? There are windows on the ISS for no other reason than to have windows to the outside. They serve no practical purpose. As a group of people sacrificing everything to move to another planet, why not throw a giant window into a viewing port so they could psychologically grasp the situation when they arrive. These aren't all trained "Astronauts", so that might be important.

And lastly, artistic license. Last I checked this wasn't an Alfonso Cuaron movie(which didn't even get everything right).

 

[Knut]

trailer is tehnically satisfactory and that's about it.

this heroic, optimistic,"full of hope while the choir is screaming from the top of their lungs" bullshit totally kills any suspension of disbelief for me. kind of wished the shuttle malfunctioned and they all crashed on their planet.

and just to note, that father guy that watched the launch- i think he would be obliterated by the intensity of launching sound at such proximity.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Can't wait for the "Civilization: Beyond Earth - Obama Edition".

#Hoewp

 

[J_C]

and just to note, that father guy that watched the launch- i think he would be obliterated by the intensity of launching sound at such proximity.

No.

 

[J_C]

Everything in this video sucks. Stupid ID verification, stupid launch control cheering right after the launch, when there is still tons of shit that can go wrong, stupid amount of empty fucking space on the ship, stupid colonists in their filthy earth clothes travelling to another planet, stupidly gigantic WINDOW on a spaceship.

Nice try gathering some Cool Codex Credit. But you are trying too hard.

 

[AngryEddy]

Everything in this video sucks. Stupid ID verification, stupid launch control cheering right after the launch, when there is still tons of shit that can go wrong, stupid amount of empty fucking space on the ship, stupid colonists in their filthy earth clothes travelling to another planet, stupidly gigantic WINDOW on a spaceship.

Nice try gathering some Cool Codex Credit. But you are trying too hard.

It's a lot funnier than everybody blowing the trailer. I'd much rather see a guy wrestle control out of the general direction the thread is going, then drag it in to the side of a mountain, than listen to mundane drivel like "Wow, that is a really good trailer, it seems they put a lot of good work and effort in to it: Good for them!"

Yeah, it's a nice trailer, but how much money that could've gone in to game assets, went in to that fuckin trailer?

 

[Dickie]

Got this preordered (Technically wouldn't have except I got it for free via pig trickery so what the hell) and am looking forward to it a bit more after watching some LPs of it over at https://www.youtube.com/user/SBFMadDjinn/playlists

Get the feeling it'll be a hair faster paced and more combat focused than Civ 5 which may make me like it more than 5. The tech web also seems like it could be alright since you've got more options for what to be researching at any given time. Biggest obvious complaint I've got after watching a pile of gameplay is I'm not sold on affinity buildings/units being tied to specific affinity resources. Xenomass/harmony floatstone/purity firaxite/supremacy seems kind of annoying. Instead of thinking "Oh I'll go supremacy this time" you may end up going something else if you're knee deep in quivering alien meats. Sure, you can sell it to the AI players, but gold won't help you as much as being able to build good shit.

I have been worried about the same thing. I was thinking I'd go purity for my first game and treat the aliens like barbarians from previous Civ games, but then I realized you seem to pick based on which of the three resources is near your capital. I guess you don't have to do that, but it seems like you'll be hampering yourself if you don't. Once you've picked your affinity, it also appears that you've basically decided what choices to make in quest-lines as well, so it's like two choices have been removed from the game. I could be wrong, though. Maybe dual-affinity is a valid option. I'm still ready to play it now.

 

[J_C]

Everything in this video sucks. Stupid ID verification, stupid launch control cheering right after the launch, when there is still tons of shit that can go wrong, stupid amount of empty fucking space on the ship, stupid colonists in their filthy earth clothes travelling to another planet, stupidly gigantic WINDOW on a spaceship.

Nice try gathering some Cool Codex Credit. But you are trying too hard.

It's a lot funnier than everybody blowing the trailer. I'd much rather see a guy wrestle control out of the general direction the thread is going, then drag it in to the side of a mountain, than listen to mundane drivel like "Wow, that is a really good trailer, it seems they put a lot of good work and effort in to it: Good for them!"

Yeah, it's a nice trailer, but how much money that could've gone in to game assets, went in to that fuckin trailer?

That's the opening cinematic. Every game has an intro, even the oldschool classics. And do you really think that if they don't do this video, than they would spend more time on the game? When probably the intro was not even made by Firaxis (like in CiV).

 

[Gozma]

Also humans will never colonize another planet either

 

[Jaedar]

Everything in this video sucks. Stupid ID verification, stupid launch control cheering right after the launch, when there is still tons of shit that can go wrong, stupid amount of empty fucking space on the ship, stupid colonists in their filthy earth clothes travelling to another planet, stupidly gigantic WINDOW on a spaceship.

Nice try gathering some Cool Codex Credit. But you are trying too hard.

It's a lot funnier than everybody blowing the trailer. I'd much rather see a guy wrestle control out of the general direction the thread is going, then drag it in to the side of a mountain, than listen to mundane drivel like "Wow, that is a really good trailer, it seems they put a lot of good work and effort in to it: Good for them!"

Yeah, it's a nice trailer, but how much money that could've gone in to game assets, went in to that fuckin trailer?

That's the opening cinematic. Every game has an intro, even the oldschool classics. And do you really think that if they don't do this video, than they would spend more time on the game? When probably the intro was not even made by Firaxis (like in CiV).

Firaxis doesn't even make cinematics for wonders any more. It's decline all over.

Also humans will never colonize another planet either

I would honestly expect us to at least colonize some planets in our own solar system at some point.

 

[J_C]

Also humans will never colonize another planet either

Great, you just killed every sci-fi movie about space exploration ever made.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Logistics are a bitch.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Maybe dual-affinity is a valid option. I'm still ready to play it now.

Apparently it slightly is. There are upgrades for affinity units based on having enough affinity points in the other sides. Like purity spess mehrines needing, say, 5 purity to initially use, 12 purity to upgrade once, and then 16 purity or 14 purity 5 harmony/supremacy for the final tier of upgrade. You also apparently get some flat bonuses based on your affinity ratings which can and do stack. I think the main limiting factor for getting all affinities in one game is the majority of affinity points come from techs and you theoretically won't be able to research everything in one game.

 

[Drakron]

Welly Curry seems to try looking at the streams.

 

[Space Satan]

First impressions from streams on forums. Glorious, glorious Firaxis

1. Trade routes are really strong. You can get a dozen production and half-a-dozen food per route no problem - it looks like trade depots are the #1 thing to build in every city, and keeping your internal routes filled up is essential to playing at all well. Trouble is, I don't think the AI knows this.

2. The AI still can't move units and shoot with them, which is a massive disadvantage in stuff like naval warfare.

3. The AI still doesn't know that it can't take a city without melee units, so it'll just bombard them over and over.

4. Ships use their (horrible) melee strength to defend against ranged attacks. This means a ship shooting an identical ship will result in a dead ship every time. Stupid, hopefully a bug they'll fix though.

5. The covert op "coup" seems way better than anything an affinity gives you - the others are really cool and flavourful, but "halve the city's population", "destroy the city's tile improvements" and "attack the city with siege worms" are all mechanically weaker than "steal the city". Once you own the city you can do whatever you want with it - sell it to another Civ, burn it down, whatever. Maybe the affinity covert ops need to require less intrigue, maybe level 4 instead of level 5?

6. The AI is still horrible wherever water is involved.

 

[sser]

Out of curiosity, does anyone here know anything about the hiring rate of AI programmers? I'm genuinely curious why major companies like Firaxis or Creative Assembly routinely release games with horrid AI. Are they just keeping the same dude in that role through the years? Do they never replace him or add others to help? I swear I read once that CA had one guy doing their AI. For something so ridiculously important to the enjoyment of a game, I figured they would actually invest a sort of 'team' into developing some AI.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Who ever said Firaxis was aiming for good AI?



"shit maeks my brainz hurt gngh"

 

[Space Satan]

Out of curiosity, does anyone here know anything about the hiring rate of AI programmers? I'm genuinely curious why major companies like Firaxis or Creative Assembly routinely release games with horrid AI. Are they just keeping the same dude in that role through the years? Do they never replace him or add others to help? I swear I read once that CA had one guy doing their AI. For something so ridiculously important to the enjoyment of a game, I figured they would actually invest a sort of 'team' into developing some AI.

There were a funny story with CA - they never said they had one guy for entire AI developement, but one who either done most of the work or in charge of overall AI management...and then he quit some time before release. So their message was "Empire AI was shit but it's not our fault - blame that guy who quit his job befoer it was done"

 

[tuluse]

The main developer writes the AI for Civ games. Soren Johnson apologized for Civ4 I believe.

 

[Random Word]

Writing game AI is an extremely challenging and thankless task. They aren't allowed to use machine learning or any other cutting edge AI techniques for performance reasons - players wouldn't have the patience to sit still while it learned from its mistakes and used your GPU to build predictive models of your future actions. AI in games can't really be called AI at all, the programmers are only permitted to use decision trees and hard coded fitness functions with predetermined responses. These are techniques that were the cutting edge of AI in the 60s. Trying to exhaustively enumerate every 'common sense' action one can take in an even moderately complex game and hard code the exact conditions under which it should be executed is a nightmare. TD lambda could be applied, but becomes prohibitively expensive in huge state spaces. Chess can be played exhaustively 7-ply (7 moves in advance) to crush human players because there are so few possible moves.

In short, the difficulty of creating a good game 'AI' increases exponentially with the complexity of the game, the kinds of techniques amenable to solving those problems sensibly are at the forefront of computer science research, and you wouldn't put up with the maintenance required for a genuinely intelligent game.

 

[Jaedar]

In short, the difficulty of creating a good game 'AI' increases exponentially with the complexity of the game, the kinds of techniques amenable to solving those problems sensibly are at the forefront of computer science research, and you wouldn't put up with the maintenance required for a genuinely intelligent game.

Not really buying it. Game AI has strict performance requirements, this is true. But it doesn't explain the fact that there were good AI's for 1upt systems before(see, for example, Rites of War) or decent AI's for empire management(see pretty much every other Civ game I guess?). And these AI's were done in systems pretty much just as complex as CiV's but on much worse hardware.

CiV ai is just incredibly poorly made. It's really stupid and really slow. There is no excuse for these two things combined.


(It does strike me you may be talking about ai in a general sense and not in the defending CiV sense, but the above still applies)


And in the general sense, couldn't the machine learning part be done in house with testers, then just apply those learnings to every copy of the game?

 

[Spectacle]

Most players don't really want to be challenged too hard by a game, so investing in a clever AI will actually reduce your game's marketability while costing a lot of money. So it's hardly surprising why game companies don't prioritize AI.

 

[Renegen]

The Endless Legends devs had this post about how every 4x game ever has no AI on day 1 because the game has just been put together, none of the balancing has been done or told the AI what to prioritize. I thought Firaxis with their budgets and after Civ5 learned their lesson but I guess not.

 

[Space Satan]

It doesn't occured to them that there is something seriously fucked up with such approach?
Paradox have glitchy and twitching but at least somehow working AI in their games. CivV was completely unplayable on release.

 

[Jaedar]

It doesn't occured to them that there is something seriously fucked up with such approach?
Paradox have glitchy and twitching but at least somehow working AI in their games. CivV was completely unplayable on release.

And the AI is still shit 2 expansions later.