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[Mictlantecuhtli]

Getting crashes/new turn lockups on 'Other Faction' phase sometimes..

[Fikes]

I love how people in the YouTube comments rage over anything possible that comes to mind.

FTFY, I was looking for the slavic blessing rage.. all I found was tangentially related 'this game is racist/religion is dumb' rage.

I raged when rocket ground control cheered before the ships even cleared the tower. No you idiots, that just means things have suddenly become really super dangerous.

On the other hand, props for showing ground control. No one ever shows ground control.

[umiman]

I played about two hours so far.

My first colony got owned by a siege worm so... ignore that one.

My second colony was on an aquatic world with tonnes of tiny little islands. Also all the aliens seem really polite this time and conveniently ignore all my explorers, which is nice. I got lucky and managed to get some flying drones through one of the random events so I had an excellent scout for the whole game so far.

I haven't had to fight anything as all the other leaders are pretty far away from me so I'm just building economy nonstop. It seem pretty easy so far, just chillaxing and watching the native lifeforms ignore me.

Other than that it's pretty freaking similar to Civ 5 though I like the sci-fi skin. There's a lot of graphical shenanigans though, like texture pop ins and such.

[MarcAFK]

I love how people in the YouTube comments rage over anything possible that comes to mind.

FTFY, I was looking for the slavic blessing rage.. all I found was tangentially related 'this game is racist/religion is dumb' rage.

I raged when rocket ground control cheered before the ships even cleared the tower. No you idiots, that just means things have suddenly become really super dangerous.

I thought I was alone in thinking this.

[Neonivek]

So am I wrong about this game feeling a bit TOO MUCH like Civilization 5?

[Ultimuh]

So am I wrong about this game feeling a bit TOO MUCH like Civilization 5?

Well, I did not think about it when playing the game.
Always had to play "just one more turn" to really give it any thought.

[Culise]

It does feel an awful lot like Civ 5 to me as well.  Also, it's a little thing, but they had a single person do the VO work for the tech quotes.  It feels a bit odd, since Alpha Centauri actually went to the trouble to use their voice actors for the faction leaders to actually voice the quotes from said faction leaders, in addition to the Datalinks voice, and BE needed to pick up VA for the diplomacy in either case. 

I do like how the aliens aren't immediately aggressive, though.  It's a pleasant change from barbarians. 

[umiman]

Yeah. Everyone making Alpha Centauri clones seem to forget that the biggest thing that made AC, AC was the huge amount of personality from all the faction leaders, quotes, and voicework.

This game doesn't have that.

One thing that I noticed is that I really can't be arsed to read any of the flavor text this time around. Maybe it's because there's so much nonsensical "sci-fi" speak or maybe it's because the font is too small. For example, if you look at their, what-is-essentially-Facebook, wonder. Holy crap. Who on earth wrote that?!

------------------------------

Everything I'm about to say here is based on Gemini difficulty (I think it's equivalent to monarch in Civ 5).

Trade still can't be automated and is still a massive pain in the ass. You can't ignore it because the bonuses are so huge so the beginning of every turn is spent micromanaging a few dozen freighters.

Espionage is nice and also dumb. There's a lot of options and they have huge impact. Also the fact that you can't just mass produce spies makes it riskier. However, the game refuses to tell you anything about what ranks do... which actions generate XP... how big a bonus you get to improve the odds of success are when you put your agents in HQ... things like that. It's very annoying. Also I don't know if it's just me but I have not managed to succeed at a single difficulty 4 mission yet even after 6 hours of the same game.

The air combat animations are just as stupidly, pointlessly long as ever. There's also a very annoying bug where if an air unit is bombing an embarked unit, it has to fly round and round and round it about 20 times before the animation can end.

There's no governors for cities for some reason so no city automation.

I wish the aliens were more interesting. Snake in sea. Snake on land. Flying bugs. Running bugs. Kraken. That's about it.

I actually like the unit system. It's challenging and balanced. However, I think the sea combat is retarded. You only get two kinds of boats. A cruiser / destroyer / tiny boat and a carrier. You don't get the carrier to way later either. So most of the time is spent fiddling around with the cruiser. Except cruisers kill each other in one hit. This is because their HP is garbage while their attack is huge. So all your cruisers are just constantly dying to everything. If you fight a naval war, you better strike first if not all your boats are going to sink on the first turn. Not to matter though, as you can sink all his boats right after that too.

I'm kinda mixed about the diplomacy. It's basically a cookie cutter copy of Civ 5 though. However, I've managed to have alternating alliances with different faction members, even ones I've been at war with in the past, which is something I could never do in Civ 5. Also, the faction leaders really try to ambush me now which is very amusing. For example, the Brazilians hid a huge task force from my sight until one turn before they declared war. However, you still need to do that stupid-ass refreshing of deals every time they expire. Also they do that stupid, "no personality whatsoever", mannequin thing from Civ 5.

The tech tree is way too small.

I like the art design.

I haven't really used any of my strategic resources. Nothing much in the game demands them. Really takes the fun out of racing to claim things like uranium. I have a full late game army and I think I'm only using 2 petroleum and 1 geothermal.

[Puzzlemaker]

Hmm, I cant seem to set the resolution to 1920x1080.  From googling it looks like it's some sort of bug.  Hopefully they patch it by the time I actually have time to play.

[Werdna]

Umiman, you said you were on an island world - how is the computer AI?  Historically the Civ naval AI has always been pretty bad - not generating enough or the right mix of naval/air units, mounting laughable invasions, and unable to effectively defend their coastal cities... any better in this iteration?

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I can say this definitely feels like Civ5, but I can also mention that I hated Civ 5, while this game is much more.. well, better. Marathon mode is actually a marathon [One of my main complaints about Endless Legend is braindead AI+SUPER short 'marathon' game setting] a la Civilization 3. I'm about 250 turns in and hardly any real tech progression. I wouldn't want to play it on less than marathon, since the tech tree would go too fast in my opinion.

There's lots of silly functionality stuff, like a lack of auto managing your settlements [you can automanage civilians and that's it], trade routes are an absolute pain in the ass to deal with because there's no 'renew route automatically' setting that I found. Total lack of balance in the Ethics/Civics area in my opinion after a few play sessions. If you focus on the culture tier one you're going to have a massive advantage over anyone who doesn't usually since culture is so important in this game.  The UI is absolutely awful when you are looking for specific units/icons or are just trying to pick a satellite in orbit. I have no idea why the icon's don't 'pop up' more, the unit icons are stuck to the ground like resource indicators so I can hardly see them usually. The entire UI is really just functionality vs form. I don't understand why there's 5 little menus hidden in the + on the bottom right, either. There's plenty of room for those to have icons right there.

On balance: The tech tree is literally balanced perfectly to where I'm at. There's no best path to win and minmax your way to the best research point combo. The research times take so damn long in marathon that you have to think hard and long about what you're researching and the actual short term vs long term benefits. Once again, this isn't present in games like Pandora or Endless Legend. I played Legend and three sessions in I had figured out the best way to minmax my stats, research, etc and all the useless techs because it's so clear what is the best path and if you diverge from it you're playing wrong. Basically, you're going to have a hard time deciding between the first tiers especially.

You can make captured cities into puppets or directly annex them. For some reason this gives you a huge malus to health. I just raze cities, instead of taking -9[Seriously! This is about all the low-mid tier health building outputs combined!] health for every occupied city. That needs to be changed. As it is, there's literally no benefit to annexing/taking hostile cities from others since it harms your health level so much.

Diplomacy actually works in this game, surprisingly the AI isn't schizophrenic or passive. Tends to come to you with proposals if they're down and out and need a friend. Usually use their head and surrender under your terms when you have their capital city surrounded with rangers. All in all I haven't had to do gamey BS with the AI to interact with it. Much better than Civ 5 by lightyears.

On AI: They're not as suicidal as they once were. They'll actively avoid attacking you head on if they can't win. I've not seen a Civ AI be so conservative with units. Massive wars in Beyond Earth are going to be grueling against a reasonably established AI.

Speaking of, culture has been buffed in many ways. There's lots of synergism to your culture and production/etc. So if you focus on a single-megalopolis culture-domination society in this game, you're actually probably not going to fail miserably like you would in Civ 5.

I *still* really really wish the series didn't decide to go the 'no stacking' route. I absolutely hate being forced to have one troop in one tile.

Some other stuff in mind as well but I honestly don't have all that many complaints. Get locked up on Ai vs AI combat sometimes, but it's very sporadic. I really enjoy the flavor to having to choose a certain 'path' with your technology and buildings. Gives alot more variety to what the in-game player differences will be and makes me use my brain hole while building and progressing instead of mindlessly slamming next turn over and over. Neat little stuff like your satellites falling back to the planet causing debris for espionage/recovery and also rather fun questing/interacting with the world at large. [I haven't seen if a crashing satellite can damage areas, knowing bay12 someone will find that out for me]

It's better than Eclipse. And comparable to Alpha Centauri, which is really all it can ever wish for.

[umiman]

Umiman, you said you were on an island world - how is the computer AI?  Historically the Civ naval AI has always been pretty bad - not generating enough or the right mix of naval/air units, mounting laughable invasions, and unable to effectively defend their coastal cities... any better in this iteration?

Umm... It has its bright moments and its stupid moments. If I were to round it up, it'd be dumb.

For example, I mentioned that the Brazilians amassed a gigantic fleet (4 aircraft carriers with two planes each + 8 cruisers) in a surprise attack against me with an actual formation. That one caught me completely off guard and in one turn they completely wiped out my navy. I was shitting bricks as that force was more than large enough to annihilate me to nonexistence. He also surprise launched offensive satellites into my cities.

Then the next turn they split up all their ships and sent them into random directions, which included into the middle of all my cities, so I could destroy all of them with no trouble.

Then after that they hid their remaining aircraft carriers in very annoying spots and kept moving them around while smashing my forces with airstrikes.

When I turned the tide around and sent my own retaliatory fleet back to attack them, they grouped up their remaining aircraft carriers and sent them to sit outside one of my cities for no reason. Then I use the city to destroy them one by one. I think it was trying to blockade me? Either way, I think the invasion thing was scripted as the follow up was just disastrous.

As for whether it can actually defend against invasions, yes. But I don't think it's because it's smart, but rather how brutally strong anti-ship defenses are. The cities themselves can one shot any cruiser. Planes can take them down to 10%hp in one strike. Etc. The AI will also garrison its cities with artillery and lots and lots of planes too.

I'm also watching two countries duke it out with one another. They've been fighting for the entirety of the game now (over 200 turns). The Russians are like 5x larger than the Australians but even after all this time he hasn't managed to conquer a single thing. In fact, the only time any headway was made was when the Americans dragged me into that war. I didn't do jack shit and after 10 turns the Australians surrendered to me and gave me their second largest city (which I razed). All the Russians do is send one guy at a time to get nuked by city defenses.

At this point I'm fairly certain I could win this game without building a single military unit.

[timferius]

As someone who quite enjoys Civ V, is this a good buy then? How's the bugginess?

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I've not seen anything outright broken [number and modifier-wise] so far actually. Those are usually the biggest game breakers in release on these. AI isn't godawful either. If you like Civ 5 I don't see how you wouldn't like this. I hate Civ 5 and I like it by virtue of the fact that it's a rebooted Alpha Centauri. And mostly because it's not a slog to play through like Pandora [thanks to them poorly implementing spies the game is ruined].

[nyulzsiraf]

49,99€