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[IronyOwl]

I never really noticed the graph thing before, but now that you mention it I do kind of miss that. Even if they weren't very accurate, being able to get a vague sense of how everyone is doing was kind of nice.

The city number and toughness thing is really, really easy to explain, though: They want to prevent snowballing. In games that don't do something like this or don't do something like this very hard, you want more cities which allow you to get more cities which in turn gives you more cities. Once somebody's on a roll, it's hard to stop them because they have more everything, including the tools to get even more of everything. Once somebody's taken a setback, it's hard to get them back into the game because they have less of everything, including the tools to get more of everything. And if the cities can't defend themselves, then it's really, really easy for either situation to happen because one side or the other just rolls a superstack up, takes a city, and then does that a few more times before their opponent can properly react.

This showed up well before Civ5, by the way. As far as I've noticed, each Civ game has been a little less spamhappy and conquest-friendly than the one before it. Civ5 just went a lot further than previously, realized that "you pay more money" was not a terribly good deterrent for owning the entire world, and came up with a bunch of little related systems (vassal/puppets, city states) to support the new intended paradigm.


As an aside, BE Health is a bit different from Civ5 Happiness. Health is harder to get than Happiness was, but the penalties for having it are milder. So in Civ5, the general idea was to never be Unhappy and fix the situation if you were. In BE... ideally you want to be Healthy, but you're not missing out on that much if you're a little in the red for long periods of time. The very first tier of effects is slightly slowed population growth, for instance, which while bad is a bit of a self-correcting problem.

[Sirbug]

I came across Beyond Earth before original Civ V. I used to pirate games back then, and I couldn't do it with Civ right. I quite enjoy BE. It's not as deep as SMAC, but SMAC's spam-friendly nature and lack of means to control all this comfortable was causing me much grief.

I don't like how in Rising Tide they made affinities on branches, so now I climb over affinities with time anyway, instead of having to go out of my way to acquire them. Floating cities turned out to be fairly pointless mechanic. Nothing really cool to do with them except spending production on acquiring tiles. Fleet battles became more fun though. And hybrid affinities offered some nice units and I actually managed to have infantry progress into final tire while my tanks were still faction-neutral.

[Aoi]

It feels like a lot of that stuff applies to Civ 5 as well, but they're all valid complaints depending on your opinion.

Yeah. I was reflecting on my comments towards the end there and realized that 5/BE had a lot of the same elements that I found distasteful. Guess I'll take this as a lesson and retreat back to the EGA version of Civilization, Colonization, or SMAC for my fix.

I never really noticed the graph thing before, but now that you mention it I do kind of miss that. Even if they weren't very accurate, being able to get a vague sense of how everyone is doing was kind of nice.

The city number and toughness thing is really, really easy to explain, though: They want to prevent snowballing. In games that don't do something like this or don't do something like this very hard, you want more cities which allow you to get more cities which in turn gives you more cities. Once somebody's on a roll, it's hard to stop them because they have more everything, including the tools to get even more of everything. Once somebody's taken a setback, it's hard to get them back into the game because they have less of everything, including the tools to get more of everything. And if the cities can't defend themselves, then it's really, really easy for either situation to happen because one side or the other just rolls a superstack up, takes a city, and then does that a few more times before their opponent can properly react.

This showed up well before Civ5, by the way. As far as I've noticed, each Civ game has been a little less spamhappy and conquest-friendly than the one before it. Civ5 just went a lot further than previously, realized that "you pay more money" was not a terribly good deterrent for owning the entire world, and came up with a bunch of little related systems (vassal/puppets, city states) to support the new intended paradigm.

The lack of any post-game info sort of hit hard because the last two hours (out of like a seven hour game) was mostly just waiting for turns to process so I could get enough units in place to take over a city, repeat. Then I realized why my beacon wasn't working (didn't notice the little 'activate' button...) so then I had to wait for that. The beacon ending felt a bit empty; unlike diplomatic or conquest victories where you have to work for it, this one was more akin to transcendence and copious waiting around. For all that, you send a message out... and that's it. They could've just shifted the numbers and gave five turns or something where, after sending out the message, you got a reply. Or they showed up. Or something. As it was, it's like ending a movie in the middle of the climax. You know what's going to happen, but you still want that satisfaction of something happening.

I think part of my problem with the impenetrable cities is just how hard it is to attack them. With a hex grid limited to one unit per space, you can surround it with a maximum of six units (plus whatever artillery you're using). Two of the cities I was trying to capture had impassable terrain on three sides which cut my potential offensive in half. I ended up finally capturing those cities over the course of like 80 turns by intentionally weakening my own units so they'd die in the assault, then sending them in a constant stream since they wouldn't be clogging up the battlefield. Doesn't matter how big an army you can field if the city just heals itself back up every round because there's not enough room to fight. That, and I ended up waging a war because some jerk decided to block the route by plopping an outpost smack in the middle, where it'd take a ~20 turn detour to get to the front...

Urgh. Hoping X-Com feels less like a waste.