Rising Tide way too easy?

[FCKPTN]

First, I'm not that proficient with Beyond Earth. I bought and played it, and got driven away by the lackluster game design and the soul-crushing blandness of the factions and the flavor text reader (aka Grandma).
Still, I bought Rising Tides - sucker that I am - and the changes looked and played interesting enough.

I started ONE game as that new fat guy on Soyuz (second hardest difficulty level, large planet, maximum factions, island map) to check out the new features.
I managed to research most of the tech web, complete THREE virtue trees, gained about 40 affinity points and completed promised land victory while basically ignoring the other factions.

I just agreed to any ♥♥♥♥ the wanted from me, made agreements that suited my max-health strategy (had about 300 health in the end) and just settled in my corner of the map.

Just to be clear: I don't want to brag about how awesome my strategic genius is - I want to emphasize how ridiculously easy and overwhelming that victory was! I didn't even try to pursue the victory conditions for the most part (mostly because I only started looking them up in the middle of the game).

Ok, it probably gets harder on Apollo, mostly because the AI will cheat. But apart from that, I don't see what this game has to offer. Sure, I pushed conditions in my favor by using an island map with the fat water guy, but this was ridiculous.

[leandrombraz]

The expansion is unbalanced, a lot. There's a lot of things that scale up way too well and by the end you are making ridiculous amount of everything. With Al Falah, I got to the point where I could unlock 1 virtue per turn using her special trait. So yeah, it's easy as it's now and Firaxis have a lot of balance to do, I just hope they won't take too long.

[meiam]

Yeah it's really too easy, you can also ignore the alien and they won't bother you. The other sponsor are constantly declaring war with me, but they never actually attack me.

Also the bonus from the artifact are insane and it seems like the AI doesn't really bother exploring ruin, so you have that over them.

[m19]

The expansion may have added a lot of cool stuff, but it completely ruined the game because it's now so INSAINLY UNBALANCED. Anyone with half a brain could easily win on the hardest difficutly level.

The scale ups are ridiculous:

-play with ARC, get a couple diplomatic traits and you can steal a tech every three to four turns (it seems you can steal techs that they don't even have themselves), before you know it you're WAY ahead of the AI factions in every aspect and the game isn't the least bit fun anymore

-buy the Smart Grid agreement and quickly end up with an almost infinate amount of energy

These errors in game balance seem so obvious, how did they not realize these as they were adding this stuff into the game?


It's a shame that they added so many interesting aspects to the game, but it was all for nothing since the game now way to easy. Very disappointing.

It's barely worth playing until a rebalancing patch is released.

[[TAG]Alblaka]

AI in CIV:BE was bad, because it didn't fully utilize all the new concept BE added compared to V. With BERT this issue got even worse, because we got more new concepts and synergies the AI STILL doesnt comprehend. AKA, the AI got, relatively, dumber.

And with the new diplomacy it doesnt even try rushing you down or anything (the only thing the higher-difficulty AI's are good at, because of their initial spawn units), because the Fear/respect value first has to decline over a couple dozen turns.

[gmsh1964]

Unfortunately, I have to agree. I still enjoy it a lot, but yeah, the AI cannot handle all the "stuff" that is in there. I know most will say they will patch it up.., let's hope so because this is a great game.

[nabob57]

The nice thing about Civ BERT is that you can go into advanced settings and select all the things that will make the game more challenging. You can also try MP and see just how easy it is against a human player. :)

[Khatos]

I always play on Apollo, and at first things seemed to be a bit trickier with the nerf to academies. If you pump out a few explorers before anything else though, now you can get the ability to leash aliens right away. Tame some siege worms and krakens, and the computer becomes laughably easy to wipe out.

[Gordini]

Agreed,
Played 2 games now Apollo/Epic/Massive and won both easily taking all the tecs and almost all the virtues. With my pick of victories.
the AI havent started a war with me at all (maybe it's the size of map?) so it plays more like sim city than Civ. I had over 800 global health in my last game and just kept spamming cities, i guess it's fun in a strange way, though not the way i would have expected.

Internal trade it's insanely OP.

[PhailRaptor]

Originally posted by leandrombraz:

The expansion is unbalanced, a lot.

I would argue that vanilla was already very imbalanced, and that Firaxis hasn't done themselves any favors by releasing an expansion. Not only did they fail to balance the imbalances, but now they've added a whole cadre of new ones.

[heisfool]

Originally posted by PhailRaptor:

Originally posted by leandrombraz:

The expansion is unbalanced, a lot.

I would argue that vanilla was already very imbalanced, and that Firaxis hasn't done themselves any favors by releasing an expansion. Not only did they fail to balance the imbalances, but now they've added a whole cadre of new ones.

nope, the vanilla game was balanced after the so-call winter update, i enjoyed playing against AI at appollo difficulty a lot, quite challenging.

this RT DLC is a joke, i eventually stopped playing it after the first few days of release, because its not fun at all

[Nomad1]

My 2c about resources. Only in Sparse mode it is somewhat challenging to get all the strategic resources, but in all other modes you can stick with your starting plot and have nearly everything you need. Even more, in vanilla game there was a war of territories, but now we have whole ocean to take so one can expand most of the time even without making your neighbors angry.

[Traveler]

I'm wiping the floor with the game set at the highest setting, never came close to that in Civ5.

[hughw]

I quite like this game, but agree with Arrodo. I think of this more as a Role Play game than a Strategy game to be honest.

To make things more fun, play on arrid maps with raging aliens, I'm not sure if there's a scarce resource option as well. I spend some time over at the CivFanatics forums, and the Meta there semms to be beating the game in as few turns as possible. Thus you need to aim for around a 200 turn victory at Appollo - that makes things more interesting.

I think the team behind CIv BE has some great ideas, artwork, and music, however they do not appear to be experienced programmers or have sufficient knowledge of math such that glaring mistakes make their way into each release. This is in contrast to XCOM which is very tight all around.

[wildlifeluvr]

Why would any game be released by any company that looks like it never was played even for a few hours by the employees?

If there are Beta testers, then why .... let me stop here. It is impossible that there were Beta testers since they would have informed the company of the balance problems.

This is stuff that is hard to believe. If strategy games are not challenging and require hard decisions to be made, then they fail big. This company is failing big. It is a slap in the face to any serious gamer to purchase a game that does not even look like it was played for a few minutes by employees, let alone beta testers. Beyond ridiculous.

[Tericc]

Originally posted by wildlifeluvr:

Why would any game be released by any company that looks like it never was played even for a few hours by the employees?

If there are Beta testers, then why .... let me stop here. It is impossible that there were Beta testers since they would have informed the company of the balance problems.

This is stuff that is hard to believe. If strategy games are not challenging and require hard decisions to be made, then they fail big. This company is failing big. It is a slap in the face to any serious gamer to purchase a game that does not even look like it was played for a few minutes by employees, let alone beta testers. Beyond ridiculous.

Its a sad thing really, many game developers dont have the time to play games. Even if it is their own. sweat shops and all that