Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

[sser]

I bought this for super cheap courtesy of a friend. I might do a video LP of it to give some impressions this weekend.

 

[Space Satan]

So after trying the, heh heh, demo:
1. UI is atrocious. Queuing is so bothersome and retarded that I don't use it - you have to click three times on different menus to put something on queue...only from city queue - no hotkeys, Ctrl or Alt modifiers from main map. In other words - you will waste more time on clicking than if you manually issue orders.
2. Diplomacy somehow managed to become even worse than in CivV, which is achievement on its own. With reduced unity types AI knows only ONE tactic - swarm of suicidal berserking human/tank waves.
3. Absolutely primitive execution of advertized features. Ie. Alien agressiveness is linked only to alien nest destruction it seems. You can shoot dozens upon dozens of aliens standing outside 2 tile radius from their nest without any fear of counterattack - Ai cannot into attack.
4. Absolute lack of any automation. If you have 10 cities then you have to manually isue each and every production order.
5. Leaders lack any personality - they are just animated talking heads.
6. Once again you are spammed with approvals, denouncations and gazillion other meaningless and useless notification via leader animation screen "we like that you like X", "We do not like that you like Y" etc every turn.
7. Trade routes - Firaxis showed phenomenal ability to make their own idea as terrible a possible - if with CivV you had to deal with 5 or so TR now you have 3 per city, you have to manually reassign EACH an EVERY of them.

Game miraculously managed to fall even below my lowest expectations. Beyond Eartyh serves only one purpose - to show how much Alpha Centauri surpasses it in every aspect except for graphics.

 

[Trash]

Installed it. Played through the whole early part of the game. Saw a siege worm near an AI settlement. Saw it get hit turn after turn by the base defenses without the worm reacting in any way. Uninstalled.

Anyway, setting that slight disappointment aside, what is the best 'out of the box' Civilization? With that I mean the best Civ with expansions if there are any but without mods. I'm interested in giving that old franchise another spin but want to try the best one. Personally I loved the original the best, but that's partly since it was so fresh back then.

 

[Drakron]

Well Siege Worms dont seem to react much ... until you injured them, then they will murder your units.

And besides what Space Saten said ...

It does seems more combat that SMAC, a lot because of map size since everyone is pretty much just next door and you cannot expand without bumping into them, it was ages ago but if I recall in SMAC we had room so we would have 3-4 cities up before the closest neighbor started to close in, there was room to build and ignore the other factions if we chosen ... in SMBE it seems we just have then next door and how buidlings and units need a lot of resources we are constant expanding and thus having to destroy other factions simply because they are in the way.

 

[Space Satan]

Not to say with 5 cities you have to manually assign 15 trade routes. At some point most will say "Fuck it!" and stick with Tall strategy, abandoning Wide due to micromanagement hell

 

[bonescraper]

2. Diplomacy somehow managed to become even worse than in CivV, which is achievement on its own. With reduced unity types AI knows only ONE tactic - swarm of suicidal berserking human/tank waves.

I don't think you know what diplomacy means.

 

[Xu Fugui]

Heh
Planet carver slingshot with slav fed

It's possible to get planet carvers on around turn 125 with the slavic federation.

You want to take scientists, tectonic scanner, laboratory.

Start out researching, in the order of your choice, ecology(can be skipped if you get a free solar collector), genetics, chemistry, engineering, and computing. Add in physics if you have firaxite nearby, and planetary survey if you need that.

Make sure, when settling, that you can get at least 4 petroleum and 1 titanium. Settling near firaxite helps, too.

Prioritize getting as much science as possible.

When you're finished with the mentioned techs, research robotics. Then hard tech mechatronics. That is going to take a really long time, however.

It is going to result in you lagging behind affinity-wise. On apollo, this is probably going to mean that, by the time the tech finishes, you are, at most, level 3, while the AI may be at an upwards of level 7. Though it is possible that some will be at an equal level if they got beat up a bit.

Due to this, get as friendly as possible with all your neighbors, to the point of allying them. If it looks like an AI is about to attack you, bribe someone else to attack them.

While you're teching mechatronics, get the +25% orbital unit production virtue.
Once you're finished with mechatronics, launch a satellite and take astrodynamics as your free tech.

It should now be around turn 125 and you have a orbital unit with strength 120. While most of the AI's don't have rocket batteries, so they can't shoot them down even if you put them directly above their cities.
It's going to be able to oneshot everything at that point in the game except for cities, because you can't do more than 100 damage in one shot.
With planet carvers, you can essentially roll through the AIs on your continent until they get rocket batteries.

Franco-Iberia can probably do all this too.

Installed it. Played through the whole early part of the game. Saw a siege worm near an AI settlement. Saw it get hit turn after turn by the base defenses without the worm reacting in any way. Uninstalled.

Anyway, setting that slight disappointment aside, what is the best 'out of the box' Civilization? With that I mean the best Civ with expansions if there are any but without mods. I'm interested in giving that old franchise another spin but want to try the best one. Personally I loved the original the best, but that's partly since it was so fresh back then.

Alpha Centauri > Civilization II > Civ III = Civ I > Civ VI > Civ V > Beyond Earth

Though many prefer Civ IV with expansions to the earlier games for reasons, it got some really good mods and things like that but I find it too sluggish compared earlier entries with all the systems the expansions bring. There was way too much micro for me, like having to pick upgrades for individual units when they gain experience and things like that. But if you do not at all share my tastes you might find it great if you give it a go. They are all decent games up until Civ V which was pretty broken and then haphazardly patched up with expansions and very tacked on systems.

Also, if you decide to give Civ II a try stay away from ToT and the Gold version, they are quite inferior to the original. The expansions only add more scenarios and provide tools for modders, so they aren't necessary.

 

[Zewp]

Does anyone else feel the setting is incredibly boring? Everything just looks the same and meh. It doesn't help that it looks exactly like Pandora: First Contact, which I also dropped because of the crappy setting.

 

[Space Satan]

I don't think you know what diplomacy means.

No, AI still declares war upon you after praising you for killing aliens for a long time. After long trade deals etc. Gets pised because you cleaned miasma on another side of the planets. Its a clusterfuck. Combat inability just supplements my statement.

 

[curry]

The soundtrack is pretty good though :D

 

[tuluse]

Installed it. Played through the whole early part of the game. Saw a siege worm near an AI settlement. Saw it get hit turn after turn by the base defenses without the worm reacting in any way. Uninstalled.

Anyway, setting that slight disappointment aside, what is the best 'out of the box' Civilization? With that I mean the best Civ with expansions if there are any but without mods. I'm interested in giving that old franchise another spin but want to try the best one. Personally I loved the original the best, but that's partly since it was so fresh back then.

Civ 4 after Beyond the Sword is my favorite. The number of legitimate options and strategies is unsurpassed.

SMAC has it's own charms of course, but it's not a main series Civ game.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Not to say with 5 cities you have to manually assign 15 trade routes. At some point most will say "Fuck it!" and stick with Tall strategy, abandoning Wide due to micromanagement hell

Wide iz bezt in BE though. Even getting the maximum penalty for unhealthiness isn't that big of a deal. And part of what makes wide best is being able to shuffle trade routes all over the goddamn place so every city is getting bonuses from trading with other friendly cities. By the end of my game basically all my cities had every building possible (Barring a few I ignored because they were useless) despite being lower than -20 health for most of it because of being wide. Technically could've won a lot faster if I went for domination too since I flipped 2 capitals with spies, crushed France completely, and massively outteched everyone else so I had baneblades and spess mehrines while they still had the non-affinity units.

 

[Torrasque01]

I really don't see how anyone could put 3 above 4 by any standard. The new mechanics in 3 really only came together in 4. Maybe performance since 4 kindof ran like a hog.

 

[Xu Fugui]

Civ 4 after Beyond the Sword is my favorite. The number of legitimate options and strategies is unsurpassed.

Felt too much like they just threw everything but the kitchen sink design wise and I found the combat mechanics pretty bad, but yeah, there sure is a ton of stuff to do and many ways to do them in Civ IV.

 

[Renegen]

I've played the game for a few hours, it is completely soulless. It's hard to care for a 4X game for more than a few hours when all you do is the exact same thing. 4X games need to have stages to them, the 4 Xs I guess. Well Civilization does that really well with the different eras, you might only be getting +1 science but damn does it feel good to get to the medieval era.

However there's some nice ideas in BE, the tech tree is super complex and non-linear. Even unit upgrades work in a non-linear fashion because you get upgrades when you get affinity points. And you also get a ton of quests that shape your empire, I believe every single building has its own decision tree for how to specialize it. The aliens are pretty derp though, sometimes they hate you, sometimes they don't. It's not clear like in SMAC. BE has potential, we'll see.

 

[codexian reject]

Trash

Civ 4 after Beyond the Sword is my favorite. The number of legitimate options and strategies is unsurpassed.

Felt too much like they just threw everything but the kitchen sink design wise and I found the combat mechanics pretty bad, but yeah, there sure is a ton of stuff to do and many ways to do them in Civ IV.

Civ 4 is a mixed bag:

The Good: The core mechanics are the best realised in Civ4 imo.

For example happiness. You won't allow riots in older games anyway, but you had to flip new citizens to a doctor/artist every time a city grew a point and went into riots. In civ4 new citizen just wont work but eat, same exact result, no micro.
Or health, it's even better. Instead of having specific tech and building that lift arbitrary limit on the city size that you always want to get as fast as possible, you have now multiple ways to tackle the issue and it's cool gameplay element that stays important for the whole game. There are more simillar examples to find.

The Bad: It's bloated game design wise.

There are tons of shallow and tacked on gameplay elements that have little impact individually, cost a ton of annoying micro to manage properly, but collectively will put you in a huge disadvantage if you neglect them.
You also quickly end with insane stacks of doom. Nothing of value from warfare layer depth, would be lost if units production and upkeep costs were balanced in a way, that units count in your stacks was reduced from 50 to 10 for example.

I haven't really played civ3 much - no precise opinion here. Civ2 is very tightly designed, fast and fun to play, but a bit simple compared to SMAC, or Civ4. No point in playing Civ1 over Civ2.
I would say SMAC > Civ4 >= Civ2, not sure about Civ3. I think all four are good and worth (re)trying.

I avoid huge maps, you only get more cities to repeat the same micro routines in them, little fun to gain from it. Because of the bloat In Civ4, maps one level smaller than medium are worth considering, if you like to play games to the end.

 

[mastroego]

Ok, guys, I've heard enough, I'm skipping it.
Thanks to those who spent money (and, most importantly, time) to try this one out.

We still have SMAC.
And honestly, I'm a crappy player too, so it's not like it hasn't anything more to offer...

 

[AngryEddy]

I've played the game for a few hours, it is completely soulless.

I completely fucking agree.

It's a very cartoony, PC, lifeless game. It's entertaining enough, but to call this a spiritual successor to SMAC is outright blasphemy.

 

[Thane Solus]

I've played the game for a few hours, it is completely soulless.

I completely fucking agree.

It's a very cartoony, PC, lifeless game. It's entertaining enough, but to call this a spiritual successor to SMAC is outright blasphemy.

I resisted two hours (basically what a "pro journalist" played to preview this mediocre mod ), maybe ill play it again after some "awesome addon". CIV 5 had its problems but i played it for a few weeks before i got tired of issues(also made 2 mods just to make the game better for myself...), BNW was pretty good by today's triple A standards, like somebody said in this thread, brought back a lot of missing features from previous games.

It's too cartonish, the leaders are useless and diplomacy is bad (tho favors are a good idea), no crazy ideologies and atmosphere like in SMAC, barebones units, it's a MOD....


Anybody surprised? NO? Good, lets move on...

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

I've played the game for a few hours, it is completely soulless.

I completely fucking agree.

It's a very cartoony, PC, lifeless game. It's entertaining enough, but to call this a spiritual successor to SMAC is outright blasphemy.

This is my biggest complaint at this point. The game has a lot of weaknesses that will probably get ironed out with patches and expansions, but the factions have no identity and the world and aliens no mystery. There's very little sense of advancement beyond seeing your score increment, and very little reason to continue playing except to win. I'm disappointed, even if I am sporadically having fun.

 

[Space Satan]

What could you expect from this "developers"? They are kids, carefully nurtured by Electronic Arts, Activision and other scum "products". They thought they could catch the trend of retro classics' remake and turned out like a kid, who tried to shave with his father's stright razor and ended up with throat wound.

Pathetic.

 

[Zewp]

Yeah, I give up too. None of the other factions even have any soul. Even Civ5 did that better with a peaceful Ghandi who wanted to nuke the shit out of you.

It really feels like I'm playing a cheap indie 4X. There's no point to this game.

 

[Thane Solus]

What could you expect from this "developers"? They are kids, carefully nurtured by Electronic Arts, Activision and other scum "products". They thought they could catch the trend of retro classics' remake and turned out like a kid, who tried to shave with his father's stright razor and ended up with throat wound.

Pathetic.

I worked with a similar team in the past, nurtured by Electronic Arts. Their gaming culture was Console mainstream garbage and lol indie/flash platformers, hipsters games. I resisted 3 months with them before i left the company, it was impossible to create anything worthwhile with such a mindset... Now i think most of them are without jobs, or back to mommy house (EA).



In the end age doesn't matter much, its the gaming culture, experience and the will and passion to make games, not products. Best example: You want to make a proper X-COM Sequel(one of the best PC Games ever made), and you start to develop it with consoles in mind (lol purty colors art direction, no random maps, no mission loot interactions, base assaults, etc...) that will end well, right? (even if it was much better than i expected with EW and Long War, is still feels like unfinished game, like most of Firaxis games )

 

[Drakron]

No, AI still declares war upon you after praising you for killing aliens for a long time. After long trade deals etc. Gets pised because you cleaned miasma on another side of the planets. Its a clusterfuck. Combat inability just supplements my statement.

The AI declares war based on many factors, one example of the problem is if you army rating is low they will declare war simply because they think they will win, doesnt matter if their entire economy is depending on trading with the player, in Civ V you always need to have a standing srmy because otherwise they would declare war on you.

The only time I seen were that made some sense was when a Civ was pretty much boxed within me, China and the ocean and since it had 2 cities it decided to attack one of mine since my military was smaller ... except my military was enough to wipe then and they could just try to expand across the ocean, some sense but not enough.

The problem is the AI have no much idea of what to do, they can decllare war simply because you have wonders but they are dumb to the point were they will NOT try to wipe you when you are going to get a Science Victory, I also suppose that if you build the Beacon or a Gate the AI will simply ignore it despite being a victory condition.

The AI always been trigger happy but the small maps simply make the situation worst because it just gives them more reason to attack because they want to go wide and simply there isnt enough room.

Also what you said about Diplomacy is true, in older Civ games we had the ability to trade maps, technology ... that is gone, the diplomatic victory is gone too ... only thing that they added was favors that would have worked if we had a World Congress because then we could trade those favors for votes but since there isnt favors are just crap because you never get what you payed for them and they have no use, why bother with favors for science if you can just pay for science?

Its about as bad as in vanilla Civ V, at least the expansions given us the World Congress and the Diplomatic Victory.

 

[Thane Solus]

Its about as bad as in vanilla Civ V, at least the expansions given us the World Congress and the Diplomatic Victory.

Those features are locked in the game as future expansions to be released in the next years