Here in the twilight months of 2016, Civilization VI has just received its first balance-and-polish patch. There is a large part of me that would like to pick it up, but there’s an even larger part that would like to pay down my credit card debt first. Besides which, if there’s one thing Civ V taught me, it’s that the longer I wait to buy the game myself, the more expansion packs will come out, and the better it will be. Plus, I barely played Beyond Earth after the Rising Tides expansion came out; I want to give that another shot.
As my Steam profile will attest, Civ V is my most-played game on the platform. What it won’t show you is the many, many more hours I played hotseat multiplayer matches with my roommates without having been signed into Steam. Meanwhile, poor BE clocks in at just 25 hours on record, at the moment. That was just enough time to play most of the way through one game on quick speed, and start half a dozen more that didn’t go anywhere.
I’d have played more, but the game is fragile like a house of cards; one wrong breath, and it crashes to the desktop. (Or more frequently, goes unresponsive to most interaction commands and has to be restarted.)
However! I am accustomed to frustrating software behavior. I once spent more than a year using a version of Windows XP with a corrupted version of explorer.exe; I had to do folder maintenance and launch programs from the task manager. Making BERT playable is even easier: I just have to set it to autosave every turn.
So, having DONE that, I played a few hours last night. With as little as I remember about this game (and even less that I’ve actually played), there are a few things I like about BERT better than BNW. I want to get back to playing, so let’s wind this up with a list:
I like the asymmetrical symmetry of the Harmony/Purity/Supremacy triad! Symmetrical in that their benefits are roughly commensurate, but asymmetric in that your technological development and resources available in your environment will bias you in one direction or another. The whole thing pleasantly reminds me of the patterned level layouts in the 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia. I especially like that Rising Tides rewards hybridization more, because that makes this system a bit more like my favorite–
The culture system! Seriously, the social policy tree in Beyond Earth is my favorite method of handling these unlocks in any of these games, since it’s designed both to reward focusing on a particular avenue of development AND to reward developing a broad range of policies. Do you focus on unlocking the path to a particular policy that will especially help you, or waste a little time along the way to shore up aspects of your development you’ve been neglecting, along with a free bonus of some sort? There are strong arguments for either approach.
I appreciate how quests provide a constant focus on what you should be doing at each stage of the game. There’s not much unpredictable about them, which is a little unfortunate; quests are probably the main contributor toward each new game of BERT feeling the same as the last. Still, there is a little variety, and I feel in the end the system is a positive one.
The tech web’s pretty good, once you get accustomed to it. I’d still prefer the option to view the currently-accessible technologies as a list rather than always just looking at the web. The filter system helps somewhat.
This is the only video game I’ve ever seen my wife play, and she has spent probably dozens and dozens of hours on it. I’m afraid she is better at this game than I ever will be at anything.
There’s an expansion for this game? Hm. Better reinstall
I bounced off of this really hard when I first played it. I really wanted to like it but it bored me. There seemed to be no real difference between any game I played - just build as many cities and trade routes as possible, then win bc the ai is awful. Every other choice is just aesthetic.
Civ 6 on the other hand seems it has more friction to a single early-game turn than ten civ v turns. I was frequently surprised at how much I felt I had accomplished by turn 30 or so. But I haven’t had the kind of interest in actually playing strategy games by my lonesome to get past the turn 100 mark, so I’m still don’t feel comfortable rendering a verdict on it. I do like the paper-crinkling sound design though, that’s nice asmr for me
Hello, new to the forum. Been listening to your guys podcast for months now and thought I would finally join.
Any who, CivBERT is my favorite Civ game. Not even sure if I can articulate exactly why I like it so damn much. I know a big reason is simply due to the Sci Fi theme. I play the Civ games to relax and let my imagination continuously make stories about what is happening in the game and I found that Beyond Earth really compliments this more than the others. Probably because of the affinity system.
I have Civ 6, and while I think it’s cool I find myself booting up Beyond Earth instead.
Why thank you! I can’t even remember how the heck I stumbled upon the podcast. Obviously thought it was rather groovy. Maybe I will be able to share some form of insight on something while I am here. Maybe.
Let’s acknowledge some flaws in BERT. Because it’s a web of roughly three concentric rings, science progression doesn’t much resemble the grand parade of eras from Civ V, making the game feel fat more homogenous. This is somewhat supplanted by the progression of quests as a pacing mechanism, but they don’t have the visual POP of seeing your city upgrade its architecture–instead, the graphical differentiation is entirely moderated by your attunement. As cool and as omnipresent as the attunement system is, though, all three philosophies wind up feeling really similar, particularly in Rising Tides where the smart play is always to level up your rank in all three of them. With the bonuses to hybridization every bit as symmetrical as the focused bonuses are, there’s very little reason to limit yourself.
The biggest issue, though, is probably how unambiguous the best strategies become once you understand them: there’s very little the AI can do to interfere with your plans once you’re playing optimally. This might be mitigated somewhat if the different factions played differently, but their unique characteristics don’t do enough to diversify their priorities. Everybody basically needs the same stuff to get ahead, there’s little meaningful struggle for resources, and you can’t pressure a player short of going to war with them.
I don’t disagree with any thing you have said. And I believe it’s why the game did not succeed selling wise. Making it easier to go single affinity or have more reason to go single affinity as opposed to fusion might have helped but hard to say. Because I play the game to just let my imagination wonder I always focus on just one affinity and I feel that makes the game more different from play to play. But because I don’t really play the game to try and break the system or even to make the good tactical decisions/out play my opponent and play it to just impose my narrative upon the game, I have a bias. I can imagine most people would not find much difference between the “ultimate” units from affinity to affinity.
Reminds me of the way I used to play Civ Call to Power back in the day. I never even considered trying to manipulate systems in order to win; like, I didn’t even get that that would appeal to anybody. I just wanted all the AI to leave me alone so I could launch the Scottish Empire into space.