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[Sartain]

Terrascapes certainly haven't been my go-to terrain improvement. Too many options for that.

And yes, the voice-overs are pretty mediocre. I think my main complaint about the game is they tried too much to ape what made Alpha Centauri great. It's a bit like MMOs, I don't think there's a formula you can follow to recreate the initial brilliance and success. Still, the game is excellent and I'm looking forward to it being patched, balanced and hopefully expanded on.

[10ebbor10]

On a side note, Civ BE does apparently support Direct x9.

Or at least the demo does.

[Rakonas]

They really need to buff terrascapes. I figured that maybe if you go purity you get some bonuses to them through quests, but I haven't tried it. They should be totally worthwhile to spam if you're going purity. Personally I would make it so that a terrascape needs 1 energy maintenance for each non-terrascape/city/mountain/ocean tile it borders. So if I had a block of 7 terrascapes it would have 12 energy maintenance, potentially less if it's in a valley or it's a coast line, etc. The concept of the terrascape maintenace is that it needs to be prevented from reverting to the natural environment of planet, but if a tile literally does not border any then it makes little sense.

It would  have been a lot nicer if they stuck with fungus/forest and kelp/sea fungus and made it a natural competition of ecosystems like in SMAC.

[Tarran]

Wait. . . could this be described as a civ V overhaul mod?

It depends on how far mods can change Civ5. On one hand, numerous systems have direct equals from Civ5. On the other, numerous things are strikingly different.

Plus, well, I think the devs have direct access to the source code. That's more than what most modders can say.

[Shadowlord]

It sounds like they missed all the things I loved most about SMAC.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

After beating this with 3 victories I'm kinda burnt out on anything else to do. Same with all the other 4x releases recently, honestly. This is probably on my shelf till the modification scene comes. So I'm just going back to Civ 3 since there's some pretty large updates to the obnoxiously large mods from back in the day.

Some things I feel are really missing from 4x games like this is a way to actually define your nations policies [and therefore their 'personality'] in any real way, with a government type or decisions that don't boil down to +1statA/+1statb.. After a while you all start to feel like warmongers. Terrascapes are broken [they have the highest build priority!] but the point when I got them I already built a mind flower so I was well on my way to victory. There's some techs which boost the bonuses and lessen the maintenance I believe, so maybe they're not totally useless when all tech'd up.. which isn't an option in Marathon usually.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Terrascapes are a bit odd. Since they reset the terrain's yield to 2food/2prod/2culture rather than add to its base yield (despite the UI claiming somewhat differently), and vivaria turn desert tiles into plains, the only place where you really want to use terrascapes is in tundra and snow tiles. So you end up with tropical paradises... at the poles.

Various other thoughts I had:

- Kozlov has some pretty hilarious quotes. He's got an obsession for things like developing infrastructure and generally replacing nature with something better, and the Soviet bluster (and probably drunkenness) to express it.

- I'm a bit disappointed that stations (at least all the ones I've seen so far) only give you yields. There were plans before release for them to do stuff at the end of a trade route cycle, like give you units or a random tech. Not entirely sure that was gotten rid of, it leaves stations pretty boring.

- Purity Hutama is the swankest motherfucker ever. I mean, he's pretty swank even at the start, but when he goes to his wardrobe and thinks "brown", he knows what to go for.

- Trade routes are the new army of formers. They don't quite take over the game as much (SMAC gameplay tended to mostly consist of herding around your hundreds of formers, whereas you're generally only looking at a few trade routes per turn), but they're somehow even more tedious, maybe because it's so obvious that they're a gameplay problem that you can't help but wonder why the devs didn't do something about them.

[Chiefwaffles]

In other news, the model-stacking bug created what may be the best thing ever:

[Sartain]

Yeah, less trading routing and more expeditioning would be nice. I love the idea of doing expeditions with explorers but the rate drops very sharply after turn 40-60 or so, where people have explored. A higher frequency stuff to expedition would be awesome. Or at least a slider to scale it

[Niveras]

I'd also like to see more options when making quest selections, perhaps even chains (e.g. a quest later on building off a quest selection you made previously)... but the dialogue box would have to make it readily apparent that that "something" might arise in the future from it.

[Graknorke]

In other news, the model-stacking bug created what may be the best thing ever:

Patent it.

[GiglameshDespair]

Not really susre what the problem with trade routes is... every 30 turns or so, you click a couple of buttons. Job takes less than 30 seconds.

[Sergarr]

After beating this with 3 victories I'm kinda burnt out on anything else to do. Same with all the other 4x releases recently, honestly. This is probably on my shelf till the modification scene comes. So I'm just going back to Civ 3 since there's some pretty large updates to the obnoxiously large mods from back in the day.

Some things I feel are really missing from 4x games like this is a way to actually define your nations policies [and therefore their 'personality'] in any real way, with a government type or decisions that don't boil down to +1statA/+1statb.. After a while you all start to feel like warmongers. Terrascapes are broken [they have the highest build priority!] but the point when I got them I already built a mind flower so I was well on my way to victory. There's some techs which boost the bonuses and lessen the maintenance I believe, so maybe they're not totally useless when all tech'd up.. which isn't an option in Marathon usually.

Wait, people still make mod for Civ3?

Woah.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Not really susre what the problem with trade routes is... every 30 turns or so, you click a couple of buttons. Job takes less than 30 seconds.

It becomes a problem when you have 15+ of them [because they're so powerful]. Or if you're like me you have 2, 3 trade routes every turn that expire that need to be re setup for the same places they've always been.

Wait, people still make mod for Civ3?

Woah.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=352057

One of the biggest ones I can remember, with a patch this month..

[SharpKris]

personally i choose affinity by the relative closeness of the relevant resource to my cities, so that make me feel kinda limited to a certain extant.

the game is really lacking in visual novelty and faction story content, say... ARC what's their deal? how did they come to be? do they have anything interesting going on beyond bonus to covert ops? i wouldn't mind some "basic" story content at least so their traits could be better explained. arc being former illuminati or Nsa agents etc etc reason why they're that good in their given field

Endless legend to note really got some good things going for it which i'd wish Civ would adapt like the Hero/head of state system or weather/season cycle system that would effect wildlife and map resources