Well that was rubbish. Played a couple of starts to see the mechanics then to a Transcendence victory on Gemini (?) difficulty (4 out of 6). Took 290 turns but felt a lot lot longer. Won't be going back. FUCKING TRADE CONVOYS
As a point of reference, I've only played one game of Civ5 about 4 years ago but think that Civ4:BtS is awesome and has sunk 100s of hours into it.
CBE fails on a number of fronts. Firstly (and the easiest to fix with patches) it's just not great as a piece of software. I might expect a few bugs but some of the shit felt like there was no QA at all. Some stuff off the top of my head:
- Generally crappy/half baked UI: no crtl+click or alt+click queue management like Civ4, can't pan tech web at edge of screen or with arrow keys (only click+drag)
- 'bind mouse' doesn't work for dual monitors so can't pan right at screen edge
- You'll get quests to build building X in city Y, but if it already exists the quest will just sit there unfinished. Maybe you could sell it and rebuild but fuck that
- There's a checkbox labelled 'Show Failed Quests'. When it's ticked failed quests are hidden, they're shown when it's unticked
- Speaking of - I got a failed quest because an objective said to start an expedition on tile X. Halfway through it just failed - maybe it's supposed to be random but it didn't really communicate that at all
- Try switching from an ongoing building project (ie convert production to science) to a normal building while production queues are active. If you even can figure out how, its at least 4 clicks
- The 'city governor' can be set to maximise food, production etc. but will often do so worse than manually setting it
- Constant interruption from AI leaders condemning or condoning your choice of affinity (with seemingly little consequence)
- Building and unit icons are monochrome and all have the same outline making them nearly indistinguishable
- If you start to issue a right-click move order there's no way to cancel except moving the mouse back to unit before releasing (contrast Civ4 where you just left click)
- Constantly hiding useful information / mechanics. I hovered over my culture income for a city and it said "X from buildings, Y from terrain, Z from other sources". What are these sources? How can I maximise them?
- FUCKING TRADE CONVOYS
There's a few other little niggles in there that wear you down but that's enough of that. Point is if you want to call yourself a professional AAA studio you really need to put in a lot before effort than this.
Next big failure is, as other people have pointed out, it's completely bland and banal. For me sci-fi tends to falls broadly into one of two categories: an early examination of questions we'll be faced with in the future (see anything by Asimov), or an examination of today without the burden of a setting constrained to present reality (ala Futarama). Despite CBE's large amount of text (Tech quotes, Wonder quotes, Quest descriptions, the Civilopedia) it has nothing to say about anything. It's almost impressive the extent to which it fails to make any sort of point. And I know some people won't care that a 4x doesn't have anything interesting to say, for me it's a damned shame. The Civ series has always been a love letter to human history and all that has been achieved, you'd think following that up into a space theme would be simple. And of course I'm deliberately avoiding comparisons to a certain other space theme civ-like that shows just how well it can be done - they're not even in the same league.
As for the other artistic parts of the game, some thoughts:
- The graphics themselves are well polished and I didn't have any glitches or performance issues there. Too much DoF sometimes tough
- The planet itself was nothing interesting, biomes were exactly distributed as you'd expect to find on earth, just grassland, desert, plains, tundra. The world of Fall From Heaven 2 felt more alien
- As mentioned above, all the tech/building/unit icons were in Web 3.0 flat monochrome making them a pain to tell apart at a glance. I'm pretty sure we'll be over that shit by 2060
- Sounds were sufficiently spacey, and I quickly got a feel for which sfx went with which notifications, so that was nice
- Music was ok but inoffensive and unmemorable. I regret not just putting the Brood War soundtrack on in the background instead. At least it doesn't do that thing where the music cuts when examining a city like Civ4
- Voice acting was horrific. All tech quotes are read but the same Indian woman who frequently stresses the wrong words, or uses a tone that in no way matches the content of the quote. It almost seems like she barely understands English. A massive WTF
- Speaking of the quotes, as said above they are completely devoid of any point. Some of them have a gaia-hippy bent, and some are cartoonish corporate evil, but all sound like a teenager trying to be profound
- Building a wonder rewards you only with a quote and a sketch of whatever it's supposed to be
- Maybe a gameplay complaint: the wonders themselves have no interesting effects at all. I researched a tech that allowed a building for every city that gave +3 production. Also a wonder that can only exist in place on the whole planet that gave.... +4 production. Thrilling
- It's really hard to tell if miasma (environmental hazard) is present in certain tile types - meant I was constantly hovering over tiles to see if they were safe to move to
- FUCKING TRADE CONVOYS
Of course all of the above pales in comparison to: is it a good strategy game. Spoilers: NO. For one it seems altogether too easy, I don't feel like I should have cruised to a largely uncontested victory on a difficulty where AIs have 2 steps of bonuses on my first playthrough. In fact only one other faction managed to get any points on the board toward any victory - they made it to 25%. Next up the pace - lots and lots of turns of doing nothing. Which is ironic because my next complaint would be there's a lot of busywork. So basically your chances of making a meaningful decision on any given turn is pretty low. Further ramblings about game issues follow:
- You get to choose a faction, city bonus, starting unit and some other starting condition (ie premapped coastline) on startup. Each bonus feels so marginal I couldn't imagine them changing the way you play beyond the first couple of turns though. This is just the first of many 'non-choices'
- Initially, techs and buildings take forever to complete. Buildings will eventually speed up, but techs not so much, meaning every city can have every building you need.
- Tech web is an interesting idea poorly implemented. In particular if you spent the extra time going for some high tier tech out of order, you'll find that the buildings/units it unlocks actually aren't available until you have enough affinity (gained from other techs) anyway, making it a pointless endeavour
- 2 of the 4 virtue trees seem like rubbish, I just can't imagine when investing in them would be a winning strategy compared to the others two, rendering half the system moot
- Pretty much all buildings, wonders, improvements - everything you can do in a normal turn - is +n to X. Not much in the way of percentage multipliers, trade-offs (except maintenance cost, which is negligible) - all quite boring
- Per the above, this means that you productivity over the course of the game increases linearly, not exponentially like previous Civs, so you don't really feel that much more advanced at victory time then when you found your second city
- AI is retarded in every way. It doesn't seem to be 'playing to win' or at least not in any reasonable amount of time. It couldn't fight a war to save its life. And there's only one diplomatic option I wanted with them: "please don't attack the stations I'm trading with". Apparently this is too much to ask. If you kill a station they're trading with you'll be chastised though
- A lot of important information seems to be hidden away. Two key examples:
-- Founding a new city makes virtues and techs more expensive (why? I don't fucking know) and costs health which will also make you research slower if negative. Since the exact size of these effects is unknown, it's pure guesswork as to whether you should found additional cities in marginal/non-optimal locations.
-- Nearly every building has a 'quest' attached where you can choose to improve it (civ-wide) in one of two ways. But you won't know the options until you've both researched the tech and built one, there's no way to look it up otherwise. So for example I didn't prioritise building auto plants because +2 production was not so important. Little did I know the quest would add an extra trade route to cities which had one, which translates to +5 food +5 prod on average... better than most wonders. How are you supposed to know to prioritise this?
- FUCKING TRADE CONVOYS
Another big issue that I can see is that both the pacifist victories and unit upgrades are directly tied to affinity points. The net effect is that there's no trade-off between warmongering and a race to peaceful victory, because if you try the latter you'll end up with the strongest army in the game with no extra effort. Just to give it a go, when I researched all required unity techs to build the victory building I also produced their super unique unit and went to war with just it - nothing else. I conquered one town with ease and could have easily taken the whole civ with just that unit given sufficient resting to heal - but they actually gave me a second city in the peace offering. Prior to that I had just enough army to fight aliens and prevent uppity neighbours getting in. The upshot of all this is that if you keep clicking next turn you basically can't lose. There's not even a turn limit to catch you out.
And finally, the thing prompted me to uninstall it the quickets: FUCKING TRADE CONVOYS. There's a mechanic whereby after building a trade depot in a city, you build a trade convoy and assign it a route to generate some income. I would say this is strictly non-optional - the tech to get trade depots is the same as the one that allows settlers and by the end of the game about 1/4 of my food and science was from trade and over 1/2 of my production was too. So far, so normal. The problem is these trade routes have to be renewed every fucking 25 turns. With my 6 cities I had 20 routes, so for only 20% of my turns I didn't have to scour a list of cities to find the one they were previously assigned to and choose it again. I can't imagine how anyone could run a larger civ. In fact it's hard to imagine anyone at all testing this at Firaxis and not finding it completely fucking retarded. It will drain your will to live.
So anyway, that was a whole lot of rambling. It's simply because I loved Civ (2 and 4 mostly), I like 4Xs, I like space and I liked SMAC. I didn't follow the development of this too closely and hoped I could just dive in and they wouldn't have fucked it up too badly. Well, don't make the same mistake I did. It's fundamentally broken and I can't see a real way to patch or expand it's way out of the current unfun mess.
