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Civilization Weekend!; Not actually a weekend, but I like "Weekend" at the end of it.
Topic Started: Aug 12 2014, 08:52 PM (2,986 Views)
Olinea
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Same format as last time, an Imgur album with a bunch of screencaps.

http://imgur.com/a/K6WmJ
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Romanticide
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I really like that format and I think I'll try it out with a game sometime. The only hard part for me would be remembering to take screenies that show how the game is progressing. It probably beats the other approach, which is WORDS WORDS WORDS/few screenshots and this isn't exactly civfanatics or something, so...

I'd probably try to include some tips, too. Anything that would require a longer explanation is probably best suited for the thread.
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MilkAndCookies
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sadjan stevens playing the world's saddest song on the world's saddest banjo
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Spoiler: click to toggle


Thinking I should ramp up the difficulty for the next game -- I'm on Warlord now. Catherine just got into the Modern Era about ten turns after I got into the Information Era. This is just too easy.
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MilkAndCookies
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sadjan stevens playing the world's saddest song on the world's saddest banjo
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I can't believe I just fucking won a science victory in 2046 AD. I had the lowest score, and the would-be Time winner had over twice my score.

Holy shit I didn't think a game this damn slow could give me such a rush.
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Romanticide
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I played this Indonesia game because I wanted to warmonger, because Indonesia seems like a really interesting civ, and because I wanted to try this imgur thing.

This turned out to be a wide Science/Liberty victory. I built two of my cities after Scientific Theory, which isn't something I normally do, but this is Things I Don't Do: The Game. I figured I might as well try it. The cities didn't turn out very well, but I think that was in large part due to the lack of good places to found a city. I'd say wide Science is more viable than I would have thought, but if you're going for the fastest/safest wins, tall 4 cities/Tradition is still King. I won on T357 here, which is easily beatable if you're playing tall Science from the get-go.

I really like Indonesia. The Candi is a crazy building. Even if you have the normal 4 cities, you'll probably have followers of 2-3 religions that aren't yours (allow Open Borders so Missionaries don't die), which means 4-6 extra faith a city. You can leverage that into more Missionaries, more faith-bought buildings/units, or more Great People in the late game. This is useful for all types of victory, but I'd say Indonesia is least cut-out for Diplomacy because faith and the Unique Unit don't lend themselves to that. You can buy Great Merchants, not that I recommend this for many reasons, but once they hit 6k per the cost is prohibitive for anyone.

I want to play another game with them where I get to use the Kris Swordsmen. If you can get the right promotions, you would have one hell of an army.

ANYWAY, my game.

http://imgur.com/a/7BLD9


EDIT: Score is heavily biased towards Wonder and city spammers. In other words, it means less than nothing. They might have 2000 points but they might be completely unable to win because they can't fulfill their wincon. Matter of fact, they don't really try to fulfill one until Emperor.
Edited by Romanticide, Aug 27 2014, 07:17 AM.
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Olinea
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Someone's working on a x10 mod where as many bonuses that can be multiplied by 10 are done so. Korea gets 20 Science per specialist, Poland gets 10 social policies for advancing eras, England gets +20 naval movement and 10 extra Spies (and Longbows have +10 range), Netherlands gets 500% of happiness benefits from trading away luxes and Polders have +30 food/+10 production/+20 gold, etc. Seems broke as fuck (naturally) but also pretty damn fun.
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Romanticide
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brb playing aztec and stacking all the food bonuses
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Olinea
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Gah such a long game. Zulus done. Chu-Ko-Nus remain my favorite UU, Impis are cool I guess but Impis didn't beat them for enjoyment.

http://imgur.com/a/MHrkw
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Olinea
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Started a Celts game. Almost named my religion POOpoop

i am drunk yes
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Romanticide
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I AM A GOD

Deity stuff


inb4 >Babylon

People say the jump from Immortal to Deity is huge, bigger than any other jump in the game.

I thought the biggest difference was in the speed at which I/everyone else teched. I suppose I'll post my benchmarks.

(3 city) National College: T91
Education: T104
Scientific Theory: ~T160
Ideology: ~T190
Plastics: T206

Simply put, this speed is insane. I can't reach these benchmarks in my best science games on lower difficulties because I pass everyone around the Medieval/Renaissance Era on Emperor and maybe around the Industrial Era on Immortal. If someone you've met has discovered a tech, it's cheaper for you to research. Yes, this stacks with Scholars in Residence. Because Deity AI can and will stay in the tech race, most techs until at least the Modern Era will be cheaper for you to research.

The endgame went slow for me because I couldn't grow my cities as huge as I normally do. In a normal game, I'll easily hit ~40 or even higher in my capital, and 30+ in my expansions. That didn't happen this game because I had few luxuries and when Ideologies came online, I was busy fighting the unhappiness from the other civs and their ideologies. Didn't have to switch, but it was close at points. #Based Universal Suffrage saved me though.

I built an early defense army, but the thing that really saves your bacon on (Immortal/)Deity is bribing other civs to war with each other. I had Mongolia/Arabia/Rome at war with each other for a lot of the game, so they were never real threats. I had money/resource problems, but I always made sure to find money/resources to keep them at war. If they came after me at any point after like T150, I'd have lost in a matter of turns. They didn't; nobody declared war on me.

The other continent was Rome/Greece/Iroquois/the Zulu/Songhai. That continent would have been hell, even though Songhai died off early. Mongolia/Arabia isn't bad, because Genghis is a loyal friend (well, he DID denounce me twice, for what idfk) and he'll do stupid things that will make other AI hate him, like capture city-states, and Arabia just isn't very aggressive in my experience.

It felt like Immortal but with way more... everything. If the AI knew how to leverage its advantages on Deity (or even Immortal), the game would be far harder, if not impossible. Seriously, 500+ GPT and those assholes weren't Venice? Population 20+ cities by T160? Endless carpets of death from T150 on? Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Edited by Romanticide, Sep 2 2014, 04:35 AM.
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Romanticide
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http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/09/26/civilization-beyond-earth-gameplay-video-and-hands-on-impressions/

One of the most detailed videos yet. Firaxis themselves have shown us a fair bit of stuff, but we haven't really seen much beyond the early game. Unfortunately this build only has 250 turns, so we won't get to see endgame stuff until full builds are sent to reviewers. (I suspect they're being sent soon-ish and we'll start seeing reviews around the 17th.)

I haven't posted any Beyond Earth thoughts, so might as well do so now.

EDIT: Holy shit this turned out to be longer than I thought it would be. Just noting that now.


Aliens are a bit more complex than Barbarians, as you might expect. They'll probably attack your Explorers (Scout equivalents obv) if you leave them too close to an alien/an alien nest. Idk if you guys do this in Civ V, but it might be a good idea to move these guys one hex at a time. If you see something you don't like, you have 1 move left to escape.

There are also more ways to interact with the aliens. You can only kill Barbs in Civ V, which kind of blows. If there were some way to convince them your empire is the shit and they should assimilate instead of futilely attack and die, or even set them against other empires, that would be cool for Civ VI. But yeah, I suspect if you go far enough down the Harmony path (natural co-existence with the planet), the aliens will essentially be on your side. All I know of are the supersonic fences or whatever that keep aliens from coming within two tiles of your city, which is a pretty sweet building. It'd probably be on the list of early essentials for most cities, but without playing it a fair bit I obv won't know.

Founding cities doesn't seem as easy as it does in Civ V. The idea for safe, turtling Tradition victories is to normally get 3-4 cities out as early as you can, but I don't know if that will be possible here. You have to research Pioneering to even build Colonists (Settlers), but you can also take some Cargo (or in more normal gaming parlance, a perk) that allows you to start with the technology. I think this is the worst Cargo on offer; I'd rather have a Worker, a free Clinic, +1 pop, or a Soldier any day of the week. All of those things have more immediate uses IMO. Anyway... Even once you found a new outpost, it doesn't start with the normal seven hexes - It starts with one or two and become a new city when it claims all seven.

Also, not all civs arrive on the planet on T0. Between that and the Pioneering stuff, I suspect founding new colonies won't be a big part of the early game, though it'd obviously be to your advantage to get them out there ASAP. That might be hard to do if siege worms are on the map from T0 because they one-shot a lot of things.

I suspect that civs that arrive later than you will be given free technologies/general bonuses/maybe free buildings to compensate. If they arrive on T50 but start with T0 stuff, they're at a significant disadvantage and even Deity-equivalent AI would have a hard time catching a good human being.

Only eight civs right now is ass. Not because I play with more than eight (I don't 95% of the time), but because if there are only eight, there are fewer possibilities for civ interactions and you'll adapt to their personalities much sooner than you otherwise would. I suspect civs will be added to this game via expansions, if at all. I really doubt someone would pony up real cash money for fictitious civs, especially in a game that lets you tailor them however you desire. Then again, if the civ is good enough from a gameplay perspective, I wouldn't be surprised to see people buy it. Three of Civ V's best civs (Babylon, Korea, The Inca) are DLC, and that's probably not a coincidence.

Also, their bonuses seem vanilla as hell. In one sense, this is a good thing. You can pick a civ and be reasonably assured that their Unique Ability will come into play for you. Some of Civ V's civs have fairly specialized UAs. Sweden comes to mind here, with its bonus to Great Person generation. I get the *idea* behind it, but you need a plan to exploit it (namely, near-perpetual war with whoever's hated for Great Generals, which you gift to a CS) and no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Some of Civ V's UAs aren't very powerful. Byzantine comes to mind here. One more belief when you found a religion isn't all that powerful, especially with no bonuses to ensure you actually GET a religion. If you get no religion, you're playing a vanilla civ.

In this game, you're getting vanilla UAs but all of them seem to be fairly useful throughout the game, if not as powerful as some of the best Civ V UAs. I suppose that's a plus in its own way. I'd like a more Science-focused civ, but that might be coming in the future. A more culturally-oriented civ might be interesting, but we dunno if Culture will matter outside of Virtues. Right now African Union seems to be the most powerful civ because Growth is King, but I guess we'll see when the game comes out.

The tech tree being more of a tech web seems interesting. In Civ V, the definitive tech order for not-domination went something like Pottery -> Mining -> Lux techs -> Writing, and then you beelined the science techs, and after that the spaceship techs. If you were good at diplo/bribing you could do so with little to no sidetracking for military techs. My hope is that the tech web makes it so there's less of a definitive tech order, so you actually have to adapt to the circumstances of each game.

Growth is King, and by extension, Science is King. I don't see that changing much here, especially considering the endgame techs are most likely the ones you need for Purity/Harmony/Supremacy victories.

The new Virtues system places less of an emphasis on completing social policy trees than there was in Civ V. Now, I never really bought into needing to complete every tree you open, at least in BNW. Sure, you should complete your opening tree (Tradition or Liberty) because those bonuses are very powerful, but other than that, completing a tree depends on the type of game you're playing. Anyway, you can dabble in any of the game's four trees because you'll get synergies (bonuses) for taking a certain amount of policies in a given tree or in the given tiers of policies. Each tree has three tiers, and if you take enough tier 1 policies, you'll get a synergy. If anything, you need to balance going deep into a given tree with dipping into the others so you get the best of both worlds.

I felt that in most games of Civ V, it was fairly obvious what you should do in terms of social policies because some trees (Tradition/Rationalism, mainly, though Liberty to a lesser extent) were absurdly powerful, a few other trees lent themselves to certain kinds of games (Aesthetics to Culture, Patronage to Diplomacy, Honor to Domination), and the remaining trees (Piety/Commerce/Exploration) were pretty meh in all but special circumstances. I hope the trees in BE are well-balanced and contain mostly viable policies.

We haven't seen much of the Espionage system, but you can do more than steal techs, which is sweet. In this video, we saw you can steal energy ($$$) and beakers (science obv) from other civs, which is cool as shit. I've heard you can do other stuff to sabotage other civs, like plant dirty bombs and such. The spy system in Civ V is useful but underdeveloped. With a system that gives you more use for your spies, they should become a bigger part of the mid and endgames.

No video has focused on diplomacy yet. I want to see the Favors system, which sounds small but is something I'm surprised never existed in Civ IV/V. Favors have been a part of diplomacy probably since the first empires were founded. I'd love to see what happens if, say, a fellow civ calls in your favor and wants you to go to war, despite that not being one of your objectives in the game. It'd be more interesting if they asked you to backstab a friend, if only for the diplomatic repercussions. There are a ton of possibilities for Favors and I wonder what will be asked of me when I play.

I also hope that red modifiers aren't essentially permanent. In Civ V, good luck getting rid of them. I mean, even a civ with like 5 negative modifiers can declare friendship, but it's like they never forgive you of your past transgressions. Some I can understand, like taking cities, but declaring war on a city-state for one turn in 2000 BC or something equally minor? Please.

At this point, what I really want to see is the late-game. What happens when you take, say, Purity and your neighbors all take Harmony or Supremacy? We can safely say that will lead to strained relations, but I want to actually *see* something like that. Are there aliens that we haven't seen yet? Are there units we haven't seen yet? How do you accomplish each of the given victory types? Are there other victories we don't know about? How do the aliens and perhaps the planet interact with you if you take Purity/Harmony/Supremacy? Etc, etc.


Without having played it, I'm hesitant to say "it's just Civ V in space", but I kinda see how people can draw that conclusion. Much of the framework of Civ V is still present; it's just been renamed and improved on. I love how not being tied to history/reality has given the designers the freedom to just go nuts. The planets and aliens all look fucking awesome, and the concepts for buildings/technologies are all very interesting.

I look forward to playing this. Even if it turns out to be "Civ V in space", a new coat of paint and a new theme should be enough to ensure I sink a few hundred hours into this.
Edited by Romanticide, Sep 27 2014, 08:41 AM.
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Romanticide
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[utube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_jp88pnNzE[/utube]

We now know what victory types are possible.

Purity, Harmony, and Supremacy all build a Wonder. I've heard that, yes, you build a Wonder and wait thirty turns to win from a reliable source (I believe it was Destructoid), but Firaxis hasn't said anything about that yet. These wincons strike me as being kind of like Culture in vanilla Civ V/G&K, where you complete 5 social policy trees and then build the Utopia Project. It was always the most boring wincon though (yes, more boring than Diplo), so I hope this game has done something to spice them up.

The other two aren't tied to any affinity. Contact is where you get a mysterious signal and then build a Wonder (I'm assuming; it's not really said what the beacon is) that allows you to contact an advanced alien race. And of course we have the classic Domination, where you just take everyone's capital.

It'll probably be quickly discovered which type(s) of victory is easiest (my guess is Contact), but before then I hope to win in every way possible, just to see for myself.
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Romanticide
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[utube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbTfLeBsu8Q[/utube]

THE HYPE IS REAL

Also how are Civ opening cinematics so consistently *good*? If they really wanted a Civ game with a story, they could probably do it. I love these things.
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Outlaw454
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Ok, I am kinda interested in Beyond Earth, but I have never played a Civ game. (Also still need my laptop fixed, but that is beside the point)

So, I come to you guys to say this: sell me on Civ.
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Granskjegg
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Outlaw454
Oct 24 2014, 10:16 PM
Ok, I am kinda interested in Beyond Earth, but I have never played a Civ game.

So, I come to you guys to say this: sell me on Civ.
This.
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