I’m pleased that you can apparently unlock the units and buildings associated with all three affinities in a single game (though you do have to commit to certain unit upgrades).
I’ve run into an annoying problem where my late-game saves aren’t loading properly. It’s on a massive map, so maybe my computer is just overwhelmed somehow. I got a save to work, and it wasn’t displaying my farms correctly. Oh, well. I powered through to an Emancipation victory. I think my next game will be Purity-focused.
That glitch also existed in Civ V and yeah, it happens when your system is starting to crap itself. In Civ V farms and roads seemed to be the most common offenders - CivBE having animated tiles I guess it’s even harder on the system in that regards.
You can generally solve the problem by zooming all the way in on (some of) the offending tiles, which both limits the number of tiles it has to display at once and tells the game “hey, how about displaying these tiles ?”. Then you can zoom back out and everything should be fine, AFAIK the game “unloads” tiles far away to free up graphical resources for your stuff.
In other news, I finally puzzled out why that stupid early game “an Earth plant is going invasive !” quest would consistently ask me for resources my cap didn’t have : it’s actually fixed, and what it asks for depends on your chosen path through the quest. The Harmony path will require a xenomass well, the Purity path will ask for algae, the Supremacy one is oil. Of those three, only the Harmony one can be done with ressources outside of your capital’s fat hex.
So either you’ve got oil/algae on hand and if so more power to you, but if not always go the Harmony route on that one (if only to clean up your quest journal). It’s free affinity - you can afford free :).
Spent the last 5 hours in a “just one more turn” haze, but even so I’m not really impressed. Everything is so gosh darn bland. I build some new wonder of the world and I have no idea what it is, just that it gives a few production and some food and some all-cities buff. Yay. My generic supersoldiers are running around killing beetles and other colonists and I’m not even sure what the unit’s name is - Marines? And when those Marines manage to survive long enough to gain a level, instead of CiV’s awesome and interesting buffs they get +10% gooderer buff or a heal.
When I built my first ship and the turn it exited the harbor a kraken ate it I couldn’t even muster the outrage to yell at my screen, I just mutter “oh, be like that, then”. And decided to pass on navies for now.
It’s not a bad game, it’s just so devoid of original theme or any sort of IP it feels completely soulless. I’ve heard there’s some interesting fluff in the civilopedia but that stuff needs to be in your face, in the game. Show me some sort of short animation when I finish a wonder at least.
On that note, a link to Errant Signal’s take on the game. He likes to really study the intellectual aspects of the game… and was disappointed to find so few.
One thing I simply do not understand is why the Civ series, and other similar games, are so damn stingy with animations, short movies, and so on. I mean, they managed to pack those into Civ 2, and compared to today those were built on pitifully small staffs. Short 2D videos simply aren’t that expensive, but doing them right can add immense value to games like these, precisely because they do tend to be rather limited in terms of interactivity.
Yeah, the wonders are awful. If memory serves, the Daedalus Ladder only has clues as to what it is in the Civilopedia. The description there indicates it would not just revolutionize what it means to be human, but make the very idea obsolete. The in-game effect? +5 food in one city.
Well, yeah, they aren’t that expensive but they still take quite a bit of time and effort, and the rest of the modern games also costs a whole lot more. Civ V can’t boast the wonderful little clips of Alpha Centauri, but OTOH the terrain and units of AC are quite frankly vomit-worthy (and already were back then). As for unit animations, it had none whatsoever.
When it comes right down to it, you spend a lot more of your game time watching little pixeltrüppen duking it out than wonders videos.
I’m sure if they had infinite money and man.hours they’d do both, but…
There was a lot of hype for BE before it came out and so I got it shortly after. At first it felt sort of like a washed out version of Civ V. The colour pallet felt limited and so the maps felt dull and bland. I lost about an hour and a half into my first game and just shelved it for a while. A few friends of mine who had bought it asked if I wanted to join them for a group game and I agreed, just to give it another shot and I was pleasantly surprised. They gave me a few tips and before I knew it I was really enjoying it. The game does feel superficially like Civ V, in terms of how the game plays etc, but I’m not actually too surprised about that. Each generation of Civilization was improved and modified from previous generations up until Civ V was released. Civ V could have live patches distributed online for download, and I think it really allowed them to make the game they really wanted. I think they’d spent so much time working in the environment and refining it that it seemed natural to port it to BE, and I think they did it well. There are enough new features and aspects to keep the game interesting. The UI layout and core of the game are the same, but the way you play is different. Like a lot of others, BE sort of feels like the sequel to Civ V rather than an entirely new installment in the franchise (specifically, it feels like the science victory). Some of the changes that I really appreciated included the shift away from money and into energy as the main commodity. In Civ V, I really didn’t like building trading posts everywhere. It just felt sort of weak. Having solar plants instead feels a lot better to me though. Maybe it’s just a 21st century perspective, but energy just seems so vital to everything we do these days. Of course the other thing is that happiness was changed into health. This makes a lot of sense too. It means that health is city-specific instead of empire-wide. I can build all the medical centres I want in a new city, but until the population grows, that doesn’t do anything for me. It just feels like a stronger motive than happiness- I never really got why a single resource was enough for your entire empire in Civ V- the first luxury at the beginning of the game would provide 4 happiness, and that same single tile (let’s assume you don’t get any extra copies of it) provides 4 happiness at the end of the game as well. The physical output of any tile can’t change so drastically with the advance of technology (there’s only so much you can do in a given area) so it always seemed weird that my population of a few thousand got the same benefit from my silver mine as my population of 20 million did. You could argue that the quantity of the resource is spread evenly across each person, but then of course you might think that having MORE would be even better, but it isn’t. You could consider that only the rich would get the luxuries, but that again would leave plenty of room for the poor to be happy as well.
This has sort of turned into a rant on Civ V… What I meant to communicate is that I think BE cleanly resolves some of the problems that I had with Civ V.
Game-play itself aside, I also noticed that the game boots faster on my machine than Civ V did and we had fewer drops and lag when playing in multiplayer than we do in Civ V, so I think the game is designed better as well.
I find this surprising given how rich the back story of Alpha Centauri was, to the point where there were several Alpha Centauri novels and a table top RPG supplement for GURPS.
I got it at Christmas and I’ve played it quite a bit. By Civ standards it’s very sandboxy - between the Civ options, the tile upgrades, the quests and the virtues, it’s pretty much possible to do anything with anything - if you play an alien-hugging Transcendence game it’s because that’s what you wanted to do, not because you picked Pan-Africa/Harmony and that’s the way they play. And the balance is good - no must-have wonders, no obviously dominant Civs or units or affinities.
But the price of that is that everything is vanilla - nothing is very different from anything else unless you consciously stack minor differences to make it so (which the AI never does). Even the choice of Affinity doesn’t change gameplay all that much.
In fact, the flavour’s so dialled back that I wouldn’t be surprised see a bunch of faction-specific or affinity-specific DLCs in the next few months.
The Good
Looks good, sounds good, runs rock-solid, very few blatant bugs or balance issues (and after EU4 and RTW2, this is a big plus)
I like the tech web - lots of different ways to advance, and the Affinity upgrades may be thematically weird (why does devoting yourself to Harmony with the planet make your tanks better?) but it avoids the “rush the key military techs” syndrome
More tile upgrade options than I’ve seen in any other Civ game - coupled with the tech web and building quests means lots of ways to tailor your colony.
The Bad
Diplomacy is simply lacking - it’s not (just) that the other factions have vanilla personalities, it’s that the options are so limited that there’s no real reason to talk to anyone unless you desperately need a strategic resource. “Friendly” leaders call me up to offer rip-off trades, unfriendly ones call up to offer insults. I laugh at both.
Espionage is both overpowered (in mid-game it’s quite possible to have 3 spies producing more energy than your entire civilization) and dull.
The game has not solved the age-old Civ problem of 20, 30 or more long turns between “this game is mine” and “Victory screen”.
The Ugly
The pathing/movement AI simply cannot handle the one-unit-per-tile restriction, which leads to frequent unit suicides and cripples its ability to actually threaten cities. Worse, unless you micromanage everything, the game is only too happy to inflict the same blunders on you.
Trace routes are powerful enough to be essential. Trade routes last ~20 turns before they must be manually reset. Every city can have 2 trade routes. You do the math.
Land aliens are barbarians - scary at the start, tractable once you’ve got a few unit upgrades, target practice by the midgame. Sea aliens, on the other hand, are just plain annoying - “build a ship, sail it 2 hexes out of harbour, have it pounced on and sunk” happens so reliably that I’ve given up building ships before the second upgrade.
If you’re the sort of chess-player strategist who enjoys trying to play a game as well as possible - or if you’re a tweaker who looks at a rules system and thinks “now what can I do with this?” - you’ll like Civ-BE. If you’re more on the RPG side and want an immersive experience, not so much.