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[Majestic7]

I can't but feel that BE is a (well-made) total conversion mod for Civ5 attempting to remake Alpha Centauri but without the creative focus and direction. A shame really, I wish I could take some things from this game and bolt them on old AC, then go play it instead.

[Chiefwaffles]

Remember this? And how almost everyone said it? And how it's been discussed to death?

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

We've gone there. I'm pretty sure you went there.
Criticism of a game is all fine and dandy, but please at least try to not repeat the same criticism over and over again.

[Sinistar]

I remember how I said people were jumping on a hype train that just had Civ:BE painted over Spore, giggling madly because I knew I was rrrrright. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Speaking of that "free wonder per city" thing, even if we ignore the balance issue or the whole wonders are kinda dull thing - isn't the whole faction specialty of just getting a free wonder also a bit dull to begin with?

[pisskop]

Youve heard of world wonders, like the eternal pyrimads!  Youve heard of National wonders, like the explosive Ironworks!

Youve seen Machu Pichu built in Machu Puchu and the circus maximus built in New York!

But we at Firaxis are willing to take it yet again one step further!  Presenting City Wonders!
  Now all your cities can experience the joys of buildings that posses positive boons.

Why take the cicus maximus, for example.  In each and every city you can build a special, mini version of the circus maximus that conveys +1 to happiness and 20% culture bonus!  Now even slow cities can enjoy Wonders, built with hard earned hammers.  Its the best thing since failgold economies!

[Majestic7]

Are there any BE wonders that you think actually mean something? In the sense that you really really want to build them and rage if someone nabs them instead of being just "meh"? (Overtly dramatic example.)

I like the one that provides a worker for each new city (Gene Vault?) because it saves the time to produce them, but that is mainly just convenience for me. I don't really even remember other wonders from the game.

Oh wait, there is that one that makes aliens friendly to you. I don't know if it is that useful, but it is nice roleplaying when playing Harmony.

Dunno, I think the way the wonders are represented is part of this. The wireframe picture lacks the wow-effect of a small cutscene or the like.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Well wonders used to be really weak, but then the March or April patch completely rebalanced them, so a few are actually very powerful:

Markov eclipse removes all combat penalties for injuries: Japan's old civ bonus from CIV 5, which was quite powerful there and remains as powerful here.

Gene Vault gives a free worker per city, again, huge benefit for an early game wonder.

Crawler is +25% production for all buildings and wonders (sure you don't need if you are Chinese)

the already insane Holon chamber gives 10% of energy income as Science.

These are decent wonders

[IronyOwl]

Speaking of that "free wonder per city" thing, even if we ignore the balance issue or the whole wonders are kinda dull thing - isn't the whole faction specialty of just getting a free wonder also a bit dull to begin with?

It is, though really they're all kind of dull. This one also feels a bit scatterbrained, though, in that it doesn't really suggest a coherent focus or specialty the way "+10% food" or "you have really nice spies" does. Other than denying them to others or nabbing the +Culture per Wonder Virtue, what exactly is the grand strategy in having a wonder in each city?

Are there any BE wonders that you think actually mean something? In the sense that you really really want to build them and rage if someone nabs them instead of being just "meh"? (Overtly dramatic example.)

I like the one that provides a worker for each new city (Gene Vault?) because it saves the time to produce them, but that is mainly just convenience for me. I don't really even remember other wonders from the game.

Oh wait, there is that one that makes aliens friendly to you. I don't know if it is that useful, but it is nice roleplaying when playing Harmony.

Dunno, I think the way the wonders are represented is part of this. The wireframe picture lacks the wow-effect of a small cutscene or the like.

Thematically I do not have a clear idea of what most of them are supposed to be or how they operate. Mechanically the +X Stuff per Y Citizens ones always seem attractive to me, in part because I like building supercities anyway. Speaking of, the one that removes unhealth from the city altogether is nice. There's one that gives +10% to every production, which is also nice in a large and well-developed city.

Militarily, there's a wonder that lets units fight at full strength even when wounded and one that boosts ranged attack power by 25%. Either of those can be pretty brutal.

All that being said, any rage directed at losing any of those is, yes, more a result of completionism than because they were really, really useful and it's a huge problem that the enemy has them now and I don't.

[Jopax]

So I wanted to give this a shot, see what it's like. Six hours and almost 400 turns later I realised that it's pretty ok as far as crack cocaine goes. Also a decent CiV game too.

[Ibid Straydrink]

I wish I could say the same. While I wanted to enjoy the game profusely (I was actually quite fond of vanilla BE when it first came out), I feel like Rising Tide has spoiled what joy was in it for me. There are a number of problems that I find detract from the experience, such as...

1.) Aquatic cities are a nuisance. I have always preferred standard maps, or massive ones with sparse resources. This is because I hate there being a clusterfuck of cities to micromanage, and do not enjoy having to constantly expand, but instead prefer to settle, consolidate, refine and conquer. With the addition of aquatic cities, the period of expansion in an average game is practically endless, thus eliminating the benefit of conquest except as a victory condition.

2.) Diplomacy is dull. The idea of capital and policies is a fine one, but it has been executed very poorly. Policies are arbitrarily made and cancelled, and do not allow you to engage with other civilizations in any meaningful way. Capital is gained quickly, and becomes useless mid-game once you have established your favorite policies and fully meshed out your personality traits. Gone are the options to demand tribute, request gifts, give ultimatums for military and colonial infringement, and warn others not to attack alien life.

3.) Hybrid affinities are shallow. These seem like something they just tacked o should have either allowed players to use their imaginations with the old setup, or meshed out fully, with their own philosophies and an entire set of graphical modifications. Instead, you now wind up with blends of vague, seemingly conflicting affinities that stick out like a sore thumb and take their toll on immersion.

4.) A certain bug (or "feature"?) While playing as Brasilia, I found myself allied with most of the world's civilizations. After a long spell of peace, one of my allies declared war on another. In previous civilization games, this would simply terminate the alliance/defensive pact for the warring members. Instead, it caused all 6 civilizations to declare war on one another, myself included. Later, it occurred again. And again. And again.

Overall, I feel like this was a rather uninspired expansion. Whereas I felt that there was at least some genuine attempt to recreate the magic of AC in the original BE, whatever the restraints, Rising Tide feels more like a shameless money grub. As such, I think I'll go ahead and add future installments of the Civilization series to my "Molyneux List."

[Jopax]

Oh it certainly has its issues and shortcomings, but overall, they still manage to nail the one-more-turn-I-promise gameplay that's kinda the trademark of the series.

Diplomacy is pretty retarded, like, what's the point of it if I keep getting offered deals that clearly benefit the other guy more than me, simply because they never accepted any of my proposals so I had nothing to spend all that shitty political capital on.
Not sure if it was like this in vanilla BE, but the tech tree is retardedly bad design and most of the time I spent trying to hunt down that one tech I needed or something, what was wrong with a regular old tech tree like in other Civ games, they could've done the same branch/leaf system but horizontal and in neat categories of different areas, not this convoluted mess of everything on one big pile.
Also yeah, the wonders are kinda crappy and meh, if it weren't for the almost fancy pop-up they'd basically be slightly more expensive buildings.

[Niveras]

Yeah, the tech web is a good concept in theory, but poorly implemented. It ends up being just being a tech tree that's fancier for the sake of being fancy.

Maybe if there was some consistency in where the techs go - maybe in basic categories (think of the tech tree in Endless Space), maybe based around the affinities - but as it stands techs are pretty much just scattered at random so you end up going everywhere anyway.

[IronyOwl]

Yeah, the tech web is a good concept in theory, but poorly implemented. It ends up being just being a tech tree that's fancier for the sake of being fancy.

Maybe if there was some consistency in where the techs go - maybe in basic categories (think of the tech tree in Endless Space), maybe based around the affinities - but as it stands techs are pretty much just scattered at random so you end up going everywhere anyway.

There's some semicoherent "areas" you'll tend to gravitate towards for certain things, but yeah. A huge part of the problem, I think, is that the techs aren't especially intuitive; I could name the benefits of a lot of techs I don't remember the names or ideas behind at all. To be fair, this has always been kind of a problem in Civ games ("Pottery gives you granaries and leads to Writing", "Navigation is the Xth seafaring tech, it might give you a new ship or Harbors or something"), but it feels especially alien and incomprehensible this time for whatever reason(s).

I do kind of prefer the mixture to a pure "this is your military tree, research it for military things" approach, but yeah, there's probably more elegant, intuitive ways they could have done that.

[Chiefwaffles]

Alright. I've changed my mind on the diplomacy system. I don't like it.
It would have worked great if combined with the regular Civ diplomacy. Make it so Civilizations have their own opinions on you based on what you've been doing and respect/fear for you. Make it so you can still make trade agreements with other civilizations and use agreements and diplomatic capital.

Right now it just feels extremely stiff. The only way to make civilizations like you is to just be "good" at the game in a particular way, or to have a better military. In all my games, I could easily just be allies with everyone in the game. The only thing that could break that was the AI civilizations not liking each other, and even then; the war created by that was short and it felt like nothing happened.

I love Rising Tide, but the diplomacy is the weakest part.

[Greenbane]

For me, Rising Tide is an evident step forward in most regards. It's not without its flaws, but it's progress.

However, the AI remains Civ's bane since Civ5. They keep piling on features without doing the catch-up AI work, and that was specially notorious in CivBE.

Complex strategy games in general have been suffering from this as of late, to be honest, with them growing deeper but AI falling behind because it's just so much harder (and less profitable) to improve.

[Sartain]

For me, Rising Tide is an evident step forward in most regards. It's not without its flaws, but it's progress.

However, the AI remains Civ's bane since Civ5. They keep piling on features without doing the catch-up AI work, and that was specially notorious in CivBE.

Complex strategy games in general have been suffering from this as of late, to be honest, with them growing deeper but AI falling behind because it's just so much harder (and less profitable) to improve.

Yeah, the AI is atrocious. And it seems like the map sizes are too big for any meaningful interaction, if you play on the map sizes with the number of players the game recommends, everyone usually just sits in their respective corners in a far too big map, until the endgame at least. Then the AI might start a random war or two.