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Rob Zacny

Episode 329: Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide

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Three Moves Ahead 329:

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Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide

Civilization®: Beyond Earth had a bumpy start. Despite Firaxis's's...s attempts to distance Beyond Earth the from the venerable Alpha Centauri, the game was inevitably compared to the genre favorite and found to be wanting. A new expansion is here and special guest Martin Glaude - best known for his Let's Play videos on Youtube as quill18 - joins Rob and Troy "There's Always Money in the Banana Stand" Goodfellow to discuss the latest addition to the Civilization franchise.

Civilization: Beyond Earth, Civilization V, Civilization IV, Alpha Centauri

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Very interesting talk. This Quill18 guy is not just a Letsplayer as we all see now.

 

I feel multitude of victory types is the real strength and definitive quality of 4X games. Sid Meier solved design problem of turtling before it appeared. In a typical strategy game going into defensive brings game to a stall. Attacker grinds through defenses to win but as he still controls all the resources he'll win. In a way infinite expansion problem was there from the very beginning. How do you make a game with big map that is not inevitably about moving 100 units every turn? Not everyone wants to do that. And what do you do with inevitable snowballing? Civ1 solved this problem by adding alternative victory condition - the country that was in a lead could just prove it without destroying others. Alternatively, faction that sees it looses the domination game can divert its resources into something else and win this way. 

 

So basically all of 4X games were really this XIX century Big Game domination Rob earns for. Alternative victory is to add spice to the real competition, the war. Same for Master of Orion - it's about war, diplomatic victory is really shortcut for when you are already dominating the galaxy and destroyed anyone who opposes you. And Antarans are there for additional challenge. Basically it's the same philosophy for all 4X/Grand Strategy games till a recent time - same for Civ2-4, GalCiv1-3, Age of Wonders 3 (once they've added alternative victory and surrendering the game pacing has come very close to 4X), Warlock 1, Rise of Nations, Elemental.

 

Now Civ5 as well as some recent 4X's (Endless Space/Legend, Distant Worlds) gives it another philosophy. It's not a competition and zero-sum game anymore, it's sort of race, boardgame. We're all coming together and each play our own game. Now Rob with his XIX century imperialist mentality still can own us modern peaceloving people cause UN denouncement and sanctions do not work against destroying us one after another and no amount of our cultural superiority beats his evil hordes. But his hordes have harder time getting to us thanks to 1 unit per tile (though tactical system gives him an edge if he likes to micromanage) and we can influence him somehow through other types of competition like World Congress or ideological pressure. Same in Endless Legend - you don't just win by being the coolest guy (Space ship victory is this in Civ1-4. As well as culture in 4.) unless it's a time score victory. You win by being specific type of empire. You can go for science. Go for money. Go for diplomatic agreements. You can go complete quests. There's a synergy between those so you can really chose your victory type around midgame but then you specialize and decide who you are in a big picture. It's a more of a roleplaying and simulationist way, I feel. After all, when a game tries to tell me it's about human development and it's not just about war I feel cheated when it turns out that you're still supposed to be conqueror if you want to be effective.

 

TLDR: before recently you could only win 4X games by being Rome, Mongols, Great Britain etc. Nowadays you can win by being good in something else apart from being an Empire. You can win by being a very good Swiss or Sweden. And Rob still can be a dick and ruin everyone's life if he wants, but now it's not the only way to play.

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Ilitarist I know you jest, but I'm with Rob about how I end up enjoying Civ games, which is primary as this weird war themed game with other stuff attached.  That's why I really enjoyed Gods & Kings expansion because religion pretty much eliminated practical barrier to wide empires (not infinite city sprawl (ICS)) because religions gave you so much happiness.  BNY... I really liked addition of caravan but outside of that I didn't think game changed that significantly for me.

 

Similar with EU4, diplomacy is there so that you can pick and choose who you fight.

 

But also I agree with you that there is this... 'role-play' element that by having all the peaceful paths exists, make the game better?  At the risk of sounding like a total asshole, 4X world becomes better one to stomp with my military boots, than say most pure war games, because there is so much peaceful stuff in it.

 

It is just that I see and enjoy them in a framework of a war themed games (not wargame or Wargame).

 

If I were to try to enjoy a game about civilizations in a non-war-like ways, I think concept of factions would have to be thrown out or if it has to have multiplayer, be a cooperative game.

 

Also yeah, Quill18 is a smart and insightful guy.  Doesn't stream excel of Eve Online like Arumba does but instead he does game jams and make rockets in KSP.

 

And you know if you disagree, Rob and I will invade your puny cultural nations with our horde of army dudes.

 

On side note, is it better for 3MA to listen to podcast on itunes?

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Great episode.  God, this game sounds like such a pile of trash - I don't think I've ever read a positive review of it from a respectable source.

 

Hope you boys take a look at the new Anno.  

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Beyond Earth is the first Civ game I've not bought. I played the demo and, despite following the development of the game closely was left with the overwhelming feeling of....... 'Meh'....... After I played it.

So much of what was said here still follows my feelings of the demo - I wanted to be in harmony with the wildlife but was forced to take out the worms (a painfully lengthy process) in order to get any development going or able to explore in relative peace, the trading system just seemed very confused and not worth the effort if my land train was going to be devoured the second it left my sight, and that all the 'quests' and technologies were just about numbers - improve this a couple of %, reduce the probability that that will happen. Even the quest system in Fallen Enchantress had more going for that, and you would have thought they would have taken a look at the Endless Legend system and had a rethink. Given you are exploring an alien world that quest system could have added so much flavour and charisma to the game given the (understandable) blandness of the faction leaders.

Nothing said in this podcast is going to make me pick it up with Rising Tides, even if it's super cheap in the steam sale. I guess I'm looking at Gal Civ 3 next (any chance of a podcast on this now it's released?) and then looking to Endless Space 2 (again, no podcast?) and Stellaris (Rob if you don't flog Troy into arranging an interview about that soon..... I mean there's conflict of interest, and then there's conflict of interest you know?)

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I kinda liked the discussion near the end where they got into the idea that maybe big empires didn't need 'fixing' as bad as Firaxis thought, but I thought a bit too much of the discussion was on fluff, which has been gone over before.  SMAC was a weak game mechanically held together by quotes between massive caricatures of ideologies.  Beyond Earth is trying to copy it but doing that even worse.

 

Game mechanics, though, Civ 4's limitations on expansion only really applied in the beginning.  Later on you want to be as big as you can.  I think that's fine.  Civ is a game about getting big and beating other players, it's not really about having a smorgasboard of different-sized powers ala EU4.  A lot of Civ 5's mistakes come back to trying to accomodate 'tall' play- if you want to play civ 4 sub-optimally, you can play tall, too, but you're going to suffer on a difficulty like deity.  I'm okay with difficulties like deity requiring more optimal play.

 

I do think the city management in civ doesn't lend itself very well to managing huge empires, and that's perhaps the big problem.  I think the solution is probably changing the mechanics of cities to make them simple to manage- e.g. making cities on the periphery have no building/pop management at all, just some kind of basic trickle production, making zones where you can lose and gain things and not hugely turn the game one way or the other the way losing a real city would.  One could even ditch a seperate city management screen entirely, opting to put all the "city" improvements on a map the way tile improvements are now.  Chris Park kinda has this idea with Stars Beyond Reach, though he got a bit burned out on designing it and took a break from that one for a couple months.  Moo1's planets were just sets of sliders, that with a coat of paint and a couple new automation settings could be easy to manage in high numbers.

 

I wish GalCiv3 was a better designed game, unfortunately I think the developers didn't think through just how insane specialization made things, from shoving tons of sensors on ships to shoving tons of factories on a world.  Civ 4 encouraged specialization, but it wasn't a super power the way it is in GC3.  In the beginning you could make a scout ship that sees 20+ tiles by just stacking sensors on a big ship, though I think they finally patched in diminishing returns.  AFAIK you can still put a ton of mobility on a ship, making the combat very trivial against the AI because it never builds ships that can go 4-5 tiles so you can just never fight a bad fight.

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I kinda liked the discussion near the end where they got into the idea that maybe big empires didn't need 'fixing' as bad as Firaxis thought, but I thought a bit too much of the discussion was on fluff, which has been gone over before.  SMAC was a weak game mechanically held together by quotes between massive caricatures of ideologies.  Beyond Earth is trying to copy it but doing that even worse.

 

Yeah, that was my favorite bit and more discussion on this topic would be amazing.  I also like the inclusion of lot of fluff though.

 

I think Civ 4's cottages were an excellent marriage of town/city in most simplistic management terms.

 

I miss cottages so much that right now that's like 90% of what empire building is like in my dream game.

 

Cottages grow.  It's automated.  It visually changes.  It's just amazingly beautiful.  We need more cottages in our 4X/empire builder games.

 

Endless Legend's district comes close but outside of the cultists, the districts only grow to lvl 2 which isn't as good as cottages.

 

Please empire builders out there, let me have more cottages...

 

If Soren visits this forum and reads this, please talk about how the amazing cottages came to be in design process.  Please I need more cottages.

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Yeah, that was my favorite bit and more discussion on this topic would be amazing.  I also like the inclusion of lot of fluff though.

 

I think Civ 4's cottages were an excellent marriage of town/city in most simplistic management terms.

 

I miss cottages so much that right now that's like 90% of what empire building is like in my dream game.

 

Cottages grow.  It's automated.  It visually changes.  It's just amazingly beautiful.  We need more cottages in our 4X/empire builder games.

 

Endless Legend's district comes close but outside of the cultists, the districts only grow to lvl 2 which isn't as good as cottages.

 

Please empire builders out there, let me have more cottages...

 

If Soren visits this forum and reads this, please talk about how the amazing cottages came to be in design process.  Please I need more cottages.

 

Cottages were still part-and-parcel of the two-layer setup, but I think they were pretty cool.  I'm kinda imagining 'minor cities' working a lot like them, sprouting up early and growing up over time, the older ones being more grown than the newer ones, but that would come with trying to reduce or eliminate the 'city layer' from the game, shoving everything onto the map tiles themselves.

 

I'm kinda sad that there aren't actually more clones of civ the way everyone cloned moo2.

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I kinda liked the discussion near the end where they got into the idea that maybe big empires didn't need 'fixing' as bad as Firaxis thought, but I thought a bit too much of the discussion was on fluff, which has been gone over before.  SMAC was a weak game mechanically held together by quotes between massive caricatures of ideologies.  Beyond Earth is trying to copy it but doing that even worse.

 

I love the rest of your post, but I do just want to give a little bit of pushback on your opening statement, because I'm not sure what mechanics in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri were weak, really.

 

When I think of SMAC, I think of the planetary council, which was the best implementation of the mechanic in a Civ-derivative because of its early emergence in any given game and its potential to alter the landscape so radically. I think of the terrain and weather system, which gave the climate and elevation of a square more significance than just its military value, as well as allowing for a player to create land bridges and rain shadows in a kind of low-level ecological warfare. I think of the native wildlife, not just the fungus that plugged into the aforementioned terrain system, but the mindworms and locusts that escalated with the increasing economic development of the planet and therefore kept them from being a solved problem by the midgame, not to mention giving a Planet-focused strategy a better payoff for its early weakness. I think of the social policies, which actually enabled drastically different playstyles instead of just being bonuses to boost a preexisting strategy that the other factions would applaud or condemn. I think of the faction-on-faction diplomacy, which is largely scripted in nature but still uses that scripting to be responsive to a player's actions, whether by being prepared to make a deal for almost any technology or by trying to surrender absolutely when defeated (as opposed to fighting to death).

 

And yeah, I even think of the unit workshop. Everyone rightly hates it now, because it's clumsy and messy even for the auto-generated units, but I also still appreciate the agency that it tries to give me. Where SMAC fails mechanically, it's because it exposes a level of complexity and control that the player simply does not need and is not rewarded for using. With the workshop, that's mostly due to bad UI, which makes it hard to understand how one unit improves upon another, and the prototyping system, which strongly encourages the use of preexisting designs in sub-optimal circumstances over the expense of creating a custom-made design to handle those circumstances. It's also a UI issue for most of the systems described above. I know old games can get pretty long in the tooth, but when the changes that SMAC made to Civilization 2 are all so innovative and influential, I have trouble calling it "weak" myself.

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I feel like the idea of factions not having fixed personalities but instead adopting one along the way wasn´t that bad - it could have worked if there was more weight in the theme and the steps toward this or that affinity begin more drastic, because in the current form I felt (from the demo and what I could hear and read about), the result is exactly what the podcast pointed, that factions end having no personality because they have to fit in the potential affinities which can be quite bland.

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I liked the brief discussion about the possible management bottleneck at Firaxis. Between this and Starships, I've been thinking that something is wrong over there on the execution side. I hope they can sort it out soon.

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Just wanted to drop by to +1 Martin Glaude as a fantastic guest. Make sure you invite him back! A good episode all round, I even found myself agreeing with Rob more than I usually do! :P [in particular, the conversation at the end of the game about what CiV lost when it decided to remove large empires from the game]

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Martin was a great guest, I hope you'll have him back in the future if he's willing.

 

I'm a bit late, but Rob bringing up winning by warfare in Civ2 being really memorable got me thinking. I think in the Civ series warfare has gotten more tedious, or if not tedious time-consuming, if only in terms of movement.

 

In Civ2 you could use enemy roads and railroads, which meant when I played I often gifted other Civs railroads when building up my later-game army to attack. You could really do some blitzkrieg stuff capturing multiple cities on one turn.

 

I didn't like Civ3 and went straight back to Civ2, so I can't speak to that but Civ4 you can't use enemy roads or railroads. It means that attacking an empire with depth of territory is going to turn into a slog (which is historically accurate?) while attacking an empire with a wide border but little depth is easy because you can always hop back home and use your own roads.

 

I only played vanilla Civ5, and not much of it (I went back to 4) but one unit per hex means you're taking time to move and then arrange units in the proper manner before attacking.

 

Combat's become a bit more fiddly.

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Combat in Civilization to me will never really be that great because the railroads are fundamentally broken.  I remember launching a massive amphibious invasion in Civilization 2 or 3, with 6+ transports loaded with armour and mechanized troops and after quickly capturing a coastal city and digging in, two countries worth of Dragoons which were located on the same continent attacked me the next turn.

 

Basically every unit in the enemy empire that was available for combat could be instantly transported to the front lines via railroads with no loss of movement, completely devaluing any concept of strategic positioning.

 

I then focused on destroying the Railroad infrastructure to slow their approach, but with 3 movement the Dragoons could easily and instantly get into combat the turn they were built. Meanwhile my own ships had to sail back to my continent for 3 turns both ways, load up, etcetera before bringing another load of troops.

 

Conversely, the AI in Civilization has never been able to launch any sort of meaningful amphibious invasion. At best in the older games you'd get a few troops in transports, like 2-3 in a ship that holds 10 and they'd get trounced. That tactic works in the age of sail, not in the age of world wars.

 

I've heard they've ignored that in recent civilizations by giving any unit the ability to become a transport once it hits the ocean.

 

 

Civilization was great fun in my youth, but recently when trying to get into the newer games it no longer appeals to me.

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