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I still play Beyond every so often and never understood all the hate. Or all the hate on Civ 5 and 6. All three are entertaining empire building games with a bit of an emergent narrative. I’m not an expert player though and never play beyond King or Prince, but still I enjoy myself. Also BE is a very pretty game.
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Oct 31, 2018 19:29
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:What's everyone's most memorable game of Civ (in any iteration of the franchise) i was playing permanent alliances on civ 4 with my bros, but we all started on separate teams so we could gently caress with each other until PA unlocked. we were all playing like normal but for some reason one of my friends was taking loving forever to finish his turns. when we finally found him we learned that it was because he was naming all his cities weird poo poo. he was really proud of the names he gave them but he misspelled almost all of them. not on purpose
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Oct 31, 2018 19:33
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Ham Sandwiches posted:Yeah that's legit. The Civ formula could use a bit of shakeup. I was really hoping that Beyond Earth would be a neat mix of Civ gameplay with a tiny bit of survival / resource / exploration gameplay. It really ended up being a fairly standard space reskin of Civ, and yet it really could have been quite badass had they gone in a different direction with it. I really like the idea of a game about settling and exploring a new planet, but I've not yet found a game that really satisfied that for me - not even SMAC, which I like for different reasons. CBE rather quickly skips over that phase, and Anno 2205 treats the arctic and especially the moon as expensive afterthoughts you will spend as little time with as possible in favor of the beautiful but boring temperate zone. The closest to a satisfying game about that that I've come is an old 90s game called Outpost, though that may be nostalgia talking. Pity that Rising Tide seemed to be such a promising step in the right direction but the game seems to be dead now in Firaxis' eyes.
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Oct 31, 2018 19:34
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I like the idea and presentation of BE. The execution, not so much. It has so many cool little takes on the Civ formula that turn to poo poo the second you actually start interacting with them during gameplay. The writing is sub-par in a vacuum, but when you look at it as a whole, you can truly appreciate how little thought went into making it tell a coherent story. The art style is okay, but super samey, which is sad, when a core tenet of the game is the affinity system and how 'different' the various empires turn out. And don't get me started on balance and AI. Good lord. At least Civ 5 and 6 are reasonably balanced for multiplayer, even if the singleplayer AI is brainless. BE is just insanity all the way down.
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Oct 31, 2018 19:37
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Cythereal posted:I really like the idea of a game about settling and exploring a new planet, but I've not yet found a game that really satisfied that for me - not even SMAC, which I like for different reasons. CBE rather quickly skips over that phase, and Anno 2205 treats the arctic and especially the moon as expensive afterthoughts you will spend as little time with as possible in favor of the beautiful but boring temperate zone. The closest to a satisfying game about that that I've come is an old 90s game called Outpost, though that may be nostalgia talking. Outpost was amazing but so broken. I vaguely remember there was some really bad bugs that were never fixed and made late game impossible Ill try SMAC again, I probably can make it work on wine
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Oct 31, 2018 19:39
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The company behind the Age of Wonders series is currently producing AoW: Planetfall. It’s looking real pretty so far.
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Oct 31, 2018 19:46
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:The company behind the Age of Wonders series is currently producing AoW: Planetfall. It’s looking real pretty so far. It's looking pretty dull to me. I stopped following the thread because Planetfall was looking so boring. I just don't care about combat in 4X games. Generally I play games for their story and characters, and since 4X games tend to be short on those, I play 4X games to relax and build cool looking empires. I want more of the first three Xs, less of the last. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Oct 31, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 19:49
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Cythereal posted:It's looking pretty dull to me. I stopped following the thread because Planetfall was looking so boring. Not a civ game but in Total War Warhammer I really hated when you finally made a "nice" empire, and could just focus on stabilizing and building poo poo for some while, kablam! The world ends chaos event kicks in and you are shoehorned into the endgame. Especially annoying if you were around the northern parts of the map; would it kill to have a 20-25 turn cooldown warning, or a short campaign without the chaos poo poo and a long one which included that spamtastic chaos rising?
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Oct 31, 2018 20:00
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Cythereal posted:the writing now seems more pretentious to me than anything. Lmao report this guy. As for the game, is dated as gently caress even if I love it. Reading it's wiki is a far more enjoyable experience for me.
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Oct 31, 2018 20:03
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Are there any neat mods for BE? I know it's on the Workshop and I found some interesting-looking ones on affinities and such but I don't know if any are worth poking into.
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Oct 31, 2018 20:35
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Cythereal posted:It's looking pretty dull to me. I stopped following the thread because Planetfall was looking so boring. The trouble is that in 4X games, combat beats everything else.
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Oct 31, 2018 21:02
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General Battuta posted:I only played it for the first time a few years ago, the UI is 90s hell but once you're past that it's a hell of a game in a way Civ just isn't any more. Especially in the late game, where the pace of technological development and environmental change spirals so far out of control that you're getting a new game-breaking tech every turn and the planet is devouring your people by the millions. It's one of the best games-that-tell-a-story-through-gameplay I've ever played. That's a good rear end link
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Oct 31, 2018 21:15
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I usually avoid combat in such games when I can. I build a decent enough standing army so the enemy computer AI doesn't auto-target me, then I just merrily tech up and grab victories rooted in culture or diplomacy.
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Oct 31, 2018 21:15
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Gort posted:I don't think there's anyone at Firaxis who actually knows how to play a Civ game well. Every time they bring someone out to demonstrate their new game, it looks like someone playing the game for the first time. If they don't know how to play the game themselves, they're unlikely to know how to program an AI to do it. The stare of the Firaxis marketing dude as Mad Djinn broke Beyond Earth like a twig right there on stream is still one of my favorite moments ever.  Staltran posted:I liked BE's space twitter. Like legit in all of BERT's failures, AI diplomacy via space twitter was the best idea ever. 1) You no longer have to stop the AI's turn for the AI to tell the player "You smell like poo and have a stinky butt" and wait for the player to hit "Okay" just to get their turn back and actually play the game again. No, just have the message delivered into the player's inbox. Trade agreements? Those are also in the inbox for the player to look at during their turn. No more of this awkward clicking 2-3 times during what's basically a loading/compiling screen. 2) No more of the player having to listen to "As Adam Smith Once Said..." or other grating lines 1,000 times a game  3) since the message is just a little text pop-up with a still of the character's face with a text line suddenly it's very cheap for the writers to communicate with the player. No more having to pay to animate and voice act each line so you can have dozens, hundreds of lines that show off the personality of the characters they were trying to write for the same cost. Suddenly the faction leaders start to have personality, you get a real sense of what they liked, didn't like, and how they knew each other before this and some had long friendships or even longer, deeper grudges (seriously the spats between Space France/Space Germany and Space China/Space Korea were always fun to watch). In the end you get a much more detailed, nuanced and well-written world to play in. Shame none of that thought was put into balancing the game or teaching the AI to use (or pretend to use) new or old systems. Alkydere fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Oct 31, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 21:33
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Alkydere posted:The stare of the Firaxis marketing dude as Mad Djinn broke Beyond Earth like a twig right there on stream is still one of my favorite moments ever. Can you share that? Somehow I missed this gem.
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Oct 31, 2018 21:48
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Cythereal posted:It's looking pretty dull to me. I stopped following the thread because Planetfall was looking so boring. That’s fair. AoW has always been combat-focused. At least the combat is solid and the AI is actually competent at it.
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Oct 31, 2018 22:12
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Can't find it at the moment and I gotta run to work but honestly the developer-streamer and Mad Djinn got along pretty well up until the point where Mad Djinn showed off what you could do with explorers. See, previously the Firaxis people had shown off "when you get your first level of Purity your explorers become 100% immune to aliens." and everyone and their grandmother told them it was exploitable while Firaxis went "no, no, it's fine!" Mad Djinn went "and I took the policy where killing aliens gives me free tech and now I have made a corral/wall of explorers for my artillery to shoot over to murder aliens." The bonus was *very* noticeably changed the next stream to just be a 100% defense bonus instead of "immunity from even being attacked".
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Oct 31, 2018 22:13
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I suggest euro board games to all people who love civ without combat. Combat is there as an integral part of balance, I also love building an empire and my last multiplayer game managed to produce 70culture per turn before the Rennaissance and I'm mighty proud about it. When I got destroyed, it wasn't because Civ is a bad game tho. It was because I only had one city wall on one city and two archers.
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Oct 31, 2018 22:14
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Sephyr posted:Can you share that? Somehow I missed this gem. I remember Mad Djinn being absolutely gleeful about how he was breaking the game, which is what made it memorable for me. It wasn't the dour smugness you'd see from some other streamers, he was like a kid in a candy store. I only now realized that Mad Djinn deleted his YouTube channel earlier this year, too. That's too bad, as I remember watching and enjoying his old Civ 5 videos. Anyone know what might have happened there?
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Oct 31, 2018 22:34
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turboraton posted:I suggest euro board games to all people who love civ without combat. Combat is there as an integral part of balance, I also love building an empire and my last multiplayer game managed to produce 70culture per turn before the Rennaissance and I'm mighty proud about it. I like stuff like Seven Wonders, where completely neglecting your defenses to focus elsewhere can be a legitimate strategy, but more typically you want to keep up with your neighbours to at least make them spend resources to keep ahead of you, or you want to sneak into a lead so you can get the bonuses for having a superior military without paying over the odds for it. In 4X games it's more like, "Have the most powerful military or you can't ever win any kind of victory against a competent opponent".
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Oct 31, 2018 22:36
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turboraton posted:I suggest euro board games to all people who love civ without combat. Combat is there as an integral part of balance, I also love building an empire and my last multiplayer game managed to produce 70culture per turn before the Rennaissance and I'm mighty proud about it. I never considered it, but I'm a big Euro gamer and I grew up playing Civ games. Maybe it is scratching the same optimization itch somewhere deep down. Also explains why I write curmudgeonly posts here about how Civ is a boardgame goddamnit, and why I get a headache when people post about how they play Civ for the story and don't want the AI to try to win because its not in character.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:24
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I posit that the boardgame version of a "I play it for the role playing" Civ player is that guy at your Carcassonne game who insists on placing a tile where it's going to actively hurt him and help his opponent, because the placement is aesthetically pleasing.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:28
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Pakistani Brad Pitt posted:I never considered it, but I'm a big Euro gamer and I grew up playing Civ games. Maybe it is scratching the same optimization itch somewhere deep down. Also explains why I write curmudgeonly posts here about how Civ is a boardgame goddamnit, and why I get a headache when people post about how they play Civ for the story and don't want the AI to try to win because its not in character. when the AI wins then nobody wins, the computer gets no enjoyment, reflection, or narrative out of its victory. when you lose at catan then one of your bros still won, and they are enriched for it
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Nov 1, 2018 00:58
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On the other hand, while they won they still had to subject themselves to playing Catan, which no one should have to do in 2018.
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Nov 1, 2018 01:07
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General Battuta posted:The writing is fantastic and deep enough that someone did a line by line analysis of every tech quote, facility description, and wonder video in the game and found a bunch of poo poo I'd never noticed. It's been a big inspiration to me and part of the reason I got into writing for games. Cythereal got very tired of people complaining about Beyond Earth's bad writing by comparing it to SMAC in the pre-release thread. That site is amazing, thanks edit: Also owns that Brian Reynolds himself shows up in some of the comments sections Zohar fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 01:51
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Zohar posted:That site is amazing, thanks Holy gently caress. This is SO good!
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Nov 1, 2018 03:09
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Pakistani Brad Pitt posted:I posit that the boardgame version of a "I play it for the role playing" Civ player is that guy at your Carcassonne game who insists on placing a tile where it's going to actively hurt him and help his opponent, because the placement is aesthetically pleasing. My issue with Civ 6 is that it swung so hard that it seems to have abandoned the aesthetics part of the game entirely. Civ has always succeeded when it balanced out both the weird spreadsheet-y "maximize everything" with the urge to actually make a rad looking and/or sounding empire. Absolutely nothing in Civ 6 made me feel like I was actually building a, well, civilization. turboraton posted:I suggest euro board games to all people who love civ without combat. Combat is there as an integral part of balance, I also love building an empire and my last multiplayer game managed to produce 70culture per turn before the Rennaissance and I'm mighty proud about it. What if my state is "I'm fine with combat being a thing, I'm tired of it's rewards and punishments dramatically overshadowing everything else so much that you will always be better off as a rampaging warmonger?" This goes back to one of my other complaints - how nothing in Civ 6 feels all that connected. Take religion. If you aren't going for a religion victory, your best action is to never invest anything in religion at all. How loving boring is that? And how does that match any civilization that has ever existed? And culture - if you aren't aiming specifically for a tourism victory, how much are going to care about your actual tourist output? How much energy are you going to put into culture beyond scoring government cards? Except war. War is the one thing in Civ 6 that makes almost everything better, and better by a lot. Every victory type wants to do at least a little bit of war, and probably a whole lot of war, to get what they want. It's all so ridiculously unbalanced in how it looks at play type. I don't want a civ where war doesn't exist - I want a civ where that isn't the best answer to almost every problem.
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Nov 1, 2018 03:38
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ProfessorCirno posted:My issue with Civ 6 is that it swung so hard that it seems to have abandoned the aesthetics part of the game entirely. Civ has always succeeded when it balanced out both the weird spreadsheet-y "maximize everything" with the urge to actually make a rad looking and/or sounding empire. Absolutely nothing in Civ 6 made me feel like I was actually building a, well, civilization. still not really sure what's up with your hateboner. districts are super rad if you just want to chill and play SimCiv, the culture tree gives you the best concrete reasons to invest in culture beyond pursuing it as a victory that Civ has ever had, war does tend to eclipse everything else but welp welcome to the Civ series I guess
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Nov 1, 2018 03:53
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That's actually a very valid complaint. I'm ok with War [capital W] being a major driving force in the world, since it's the most hugely interactive thing you can do with your neighbors, and it can have simple, intuitive, yet deep and subtle interactions that are easy for devs to implement. You're right that religion is a criminal wash in Civ6, and empires really should have other borders & tensions that are pressing against each other. Cultural border shifts, etc. And not just for the guy winning with that schtick, for everyone. Diminishing returns and all that. (Or at least in the base game, I'm not paying for the xpack.) This is a totaly different Genre, but Sins of a Solar Empire is a RTS game at heart, with the scale of a space 4x. It's all about harvesting resources and building armies and positioning/moving said armies against each other. But it still has the very best diplomancy system vs an AI I've yet to even hear about, and I've been caught out several times by an AI faction pushing for fast culture and suddenly having all their systems being unable to be claimed, even after I raze them. But the thing is, culture is literally just a single building you make in each system. It's so simple, yet it's something I have to balance in my infrastructure not to get clowned on. This is a huge tangent, but basically Civ series has so many missed opportunities that are really highlighted when you play other great games and see how easily done cool stuff is. And you should all play SoSE.
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Nov 1, 2018 03:56
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religion admittedly is the one area that the series actually did peak mechanically at in Civ 4, so I'll grant you that one
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Nov 1, 2018 04:05
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Cythereal posted:I really like the idea of a game about settling and exploring a new planet, but I've not yet found a game that really satisfied that for me - not even SMAC, which I like for different reasons. CBE rather quickly skips over that phase, and Anno 2205 treats the arctic and especially the moon as expensive afterthoughts you will spend as little time with as possible in favor of the beautiful but boring temperate zone. The closest to a satisfying game about that that I've come is an old 90s game called Outpost, though that may be nostalgia talking. Outpost was another of those cool concepts of a game where something like half the research tree doesn't do anything, and many of the building's don't actually do anything, but I do like playing it every once in while. It would be cool if a Sci-Fi yet grounded survival game existed.
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Nov 1, 2018 05:15
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The White Dragon posted:when the AI wins then nobody wins, the computer gets no enjoyment, reflection, or narrative out of its victory. when you lose at catan then one of your bros still won, and they are enriched for it If you can't lose, a victory is hollow. If you don't care about winning then why would you care about losing?
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Nov 1, 2018 05:21
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:If you can't lose, a victory is hollow. If you don't care about winning then why would you care about losing? true--i mean more like in the scenario where the player does lose, it just sucks. on a mechanical level it should be possible, so victory isn't hollow, but playing against a computer is a zero sum game where only one party cares whether it wins or loses. but civ 6 takes it a step further, where only one party even understands how to win
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Nov 1, 2018 05:31
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for me I really like civ4 because the AI can and regularly will win, especially on Prince and above unless you, the player, actively attempts to stop it. Because of the mechanics of the game you have a lot of ways you can stop it, and depending on your specific game situation the best way isn't necessarily direct military action. Trade embargos are super useful to delay that computer until you can out-tech him. If you delve really deep into the mechanic's of culture you can win a cultural victory earlier then any other victory condition except the Apostolic Palace. You can start wars between rivals which will create a quagmire where neither will win, but they will slow everyone involed down a lot (this is a particularly good tactic during the lull period between the discovery of long-bows and before the creation of cavalry.) And of course you can just straight up kick over the AI player's sand castles with military might (and some tactics) but make sure you do it before tactical nukes, cause 
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Nov 1, 2018 06:06
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tbh during the longbow era i usually just pump trebs and suicide them into the enemy by the dozens  they don't cost too many hammers and you should have a fair number of developed cities by that point, so it's not like production is scarce like it is in the early game.
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Nov 1, 2018 06:10
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ProfessorCirno posted:
If you warmonger from the start and someone actually defends, the warmonger has to weigh in if he can actually defeat that guy on time because the players on the other side of the world will surely surpass him. Combat is quite balanced on a 4+ game.
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Nov 1, 2018 06:29
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Straight White Shark posted:still not really sure what's up with your hateboner. districts are super rad if you just want to chill and play SimCiv, the culture tree gives you the best concrete reasons to invest in culture beyond pursuing it as a victory that Civ has ever had, war does tend to eclipse everything else but welp welcome to the Civ series I guess Districts are not particularly aesthetic. Outside of unique districts, your districts always have the same buildings. Theater Squares/Campuses have a distinctly Greco-Roman look, Entertainment Squares always have a big honkin' circus tent, and all the buildings have a distinctly western European design, which also doesn't upgrade outside of the military ones, so you're still building amphitheaters and colosseums in the 21st century. The only concession to the civ you're playing is the city center and the little buildings it'll pepper around any districts adjacent to it, and that will eventually be painted over with some generic skyscrapers in the latter half of the tech tree. Civ V had some of this, too, but at least you'd still have big sandstone skyscrapers in the modern era if you were playing as an American civ, and most visible buildings would be changed to match the aesthetic of the civ you were playing. VI manages to have more than 4 distinct aesthetic styles, like the gorgeous red brick cities you get in medieval Russia/Georgia, but it's entirely limited to the city center and goes away in the Atomic Era. You can build massive sprawling metropoles that end up bleeding into each other, but they never look the part, and that sucks because the game definitely had the budget to be gorgeous if there was anyone on the board who cared about aesthetics. It's the same reason people are bummed that the civpedia is garbage and that all the tech/wonder quotes were written by someone googling "Cartography quote" and plugging in something from the first few hits. Civ V was designed by someone who wanted a pretty and readable game, and VI wasn't.
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Nov 1, 2018 09:11
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I do like districts from a gameplay perspective but they do make the world seem rather small. In Civ5 and Civ4 it felt like there were miles of countryside between cities, now they practically overlap. Anyway my most memorable game of civ was one of my first in Civ 5, when i built a maginot line on my south border because i just couldn't be bothered with Attila's constant attacks (he was the only other one sharing my continent). I built a string of forts on the north bank of a river through thick hilly jungle, and fortified a bunch of samurai along the length of it. It was impenetrable. Microplastics fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 10:21
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turboraton posted:If you warmonger from the start and someone actually defends, the warmonger has to weigh in if he can actually defeat that guy on time because the players on the other side of the world will surely surpass him. Combat is quite balanced on a 4+ game. In order for that to work everyone has to warmonger from the start since you don't know who you're gonna start next to. And if you've gotten strong enough to defeat the warmonger next door rushing you, you might as well archer rush him right back so you've got two capitals.
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Nov 1, 2018 12:06
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Dr. Krieger posted:Yes please, Colonization was such a great game Yeah, I'd probably contribute to this thread more if I wasn't constantly busy micromanaging my colonies, eradicating all Tory sentiment, and throwing the "Montreal Ore Party"
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Nov 1, 2018 13:30
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