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Can confirm, all BE made me want to do was play SMAC, and now I am. Happily.
ID take a refund and a Hd remake and they could apply it to that and id be happy.. Wonder if i could rescale the videos to mach 2,4 and 5k displays...
Not saying all of Be is bad it just feels like something that should be on ps4 not pc..
I agree Op should have known better lol
Are you even playing the same game?
You can automate city construction, while the 'alien menace' consists of a few Mindworms getting hotdropped on your colonies or a couple of your tiles getting blown up by fungus.
I won a conquest victory on Ironman and didn't have 'hundreds' of units all needing orders:
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y74/Squatdog/AlphaCentauri_zps7726fe87.jpg
I can't argue your points as we both know they are valid. What I would add is that there is a definite learning curve to SMAC. When you first begin playing the AI is brutal they are completely unforgiving and well armed. It takes awhile to gain a foothold in it due to this. It's not just confusing like Crusader Kings either it's an actual challenge you'll get your butt kicked. I've seen no challenge in this game just many cut and pastes directly from Civ V. I see quite a bit of people coming in here and saying they never claimed to be making an SMAC game. However, anytime somebody discussed this game with them it was brought up and they didn't knock it down they let it ride. Many of the problems you see in the game they denied would be like that. As an example of this to the people that are going to come at me here shortly I'd point you to the youtube interview with Angry Joe. I think he did a very nice job of bringing up the issues we all now see. Many of them will not see it that way but it happened and when this guy tries to counter what he says he begins to make false promises.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9IS6JD4lSw
I commented that he did a good job making this guy sweat and twirk. The guy even repeats Joe's saying that it is a cut and paste. I think this made him nervous as nobody had commented in days then after I said that in a sea of people saying how awesome the game is... boom comments disabled.
LOL.
You're playing on Talent - not a difficult level at all, and one that removes two key pressures:
AI Computer-Player Effects:
1. Easier Diplomacy. Except Intense Rivalry.
2. Delayed Gang Tackles.
3. No Mind Control. Citizen, Specialist, Talent.
Misc. Diff. Effects & Handicaps:
4. Secret Projects. As above: At Talent & below, others will not start if you don't have the Tech.
5. Colony Pod. Citizen, Specialist: won't abandon size 1 base.
6. No Early Research. Citizen & Specialst: no research points during first 5 years.
7. Command Center Maintenance. Citizen always 0. Specialist & Talent always 1. Librarian & Thinker starts at 1, rises to 2 at Fusion Power. Transcend starts at 1, 2 at Fusion, 3 at Quantum.
8. No Power Overloads. Citizen & Specialist.
9. No Population Lost to Attack. Citizen.
10. Random Events. Do not occur before [75 - (DIFF x 10)]).
11. No Prototype Cost. Citizen & Specialist.
12. No Production Penalty when switching production. Citizen & Specialist.
13. Cost to Change Society. CHANGE^3 x DIFF, where CHANGE = number of areas changed. (1=DIFF, 2=8*DIFF, 3=27*DIFF, 4=64*DIFF).
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=4256.0
So, yeah. Playing at Talent, as you were, no wonder the mind worms aren't a threat.
For the record: SMAC difficulty goes:
Citizen
Specialist
Talent <--- troll played here, pretends ironman makes this tough
Librarian
Thinker
Transcend
Ironman just means you can't save-scumm - which playing Santiago military steam-roller when you can't lose wonders to them is an amazing show of skill. :rolleyes:
Civ:BE is easy on the third difficulty as well...
I actually played and won on Transcend difficulty on a single game over the course of 2 years. In between moving houses, moving computers, my little save disk (on a floppy - remember them, LoL) was my pride and joy. It was kept safe and snug and warm ready to continue my struggle amongst the stars.
Playing as lady deidre (who doesn't love a hot tree hugger), I fought and made alliances with intensly different and engaging leaders. I didn't have a huge army, instead I had an experienced army backed up with strong supply lines, good tech and a sense of accomplishment and achievement in every step I took. I feel absoloutely nothing like this in CIV:BE. It feels a hollow shell, a misnomer trading on broken promises and hints of what it should have been.
Yes, CIV:BE has nice in game graphics. I should b loody well hope so considering the time that has gone by and the processing power in modern PCs that is available to it but quite frankly, that's it. It really is.
SM:AC was subtly brilliant. It snuck up on you and injected you with quotes and lore from past, present and future that quite frankly made by myself and others I knew who played it way back then, actually stop and think. To think of the context, the appropriateness of it all and that was given to us in individual well spoken verse. Each of the leaders were different, each of them had a story to tell and each one told it eloquently.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ-OoNp3LwQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO_xh7xIabk
CIV:BE does not have this. It has reasonably rendered avatars speaking almost gibberish with half formed raison d'etre. They mean nothing to me. Do I feel a sense of concern if I forget about an explorer who happens to run into one miasma too many and consequently die? No, 4 turns later and I have another one that I can blithely send out again, as it skips merrily past an indigenous species nest site surrounded by 5 or 6 entities as I know it won't get harmed. Pah! Try that in SM:AC and you know even crossing a fungal line that something might be hiding within it and your brain is toast. Exploration and units had meaning, had worth.
Secret Projects meant something back then. Who didn't get that 'Oh S hit' feeling when they first researched The Cloning Vats. That was a game changer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmRpLLs7SNE
Others like the Hunter Seeker were soooo helpful and if you played the expansion with those darn data jackers (who could steal units - units! the cheeky bar stewards) then this was sometimes all that stood between you and infiltration and defeat from within. Where is this even given credence or thought in CIV:BE? Spies? Please, don't make me laugh. They are essentially rogue bankers filtering money from some random faction's bank account (sorry energy storage) into yours. I even managed to kill one trying to do it to mine when my intrigue level was only 1.5 and I had a fully levelled up spy in my home base. Too freaking easy. No thought given to it at all.
Your (and the) environment really meant something. The ability to terraform the land and cause your opponent on another continent away to lose moisture and therefore food and therefore population and induce drone riots was unbelievable. It had so many many beautiful and subtle ways to enage in your secret war that it was quite simply astonishingly and creatively brilliant. You could drill to acquifer, bringing life back to the desert and move mountains through terraforming to change the direction of those rivers. Fantastic! You could plant forests and see those forests self seed and spread themselves! Seriously?! How can you not see the sheer brilliance in even thinking of the possibilites incumbent in such a strategy? CIV:BE has not even a whisper of this that I can discern. How can one not be excessively disapointed that the developers didn't see this and even think about taking even a little onboard with what they saw. Did they even play the game?
Then there of course was the A.I. You could forge alliances and know that piece by piece, as you gave assistance or gave research or asked for something back, that it was meaningful and well thought and backed up age old friendships that you had cultivated and nurtured (either for good or bad) and were a reasonably logical foundation on what they would do next. CIV:BE is a joke - 1 point over a trigger point of what they consider unacceptable and BAM! invasion time or condemnation time. It's laughable and really, really sloppy. I remember people did courses at Uni in Artifical Intelligence when I went there, didn't they think to hire a few of them?
. . and thats just some of the points off the top of my head. Major bug bears like copying and pasting even the terrain labels over (Grassland? Really? Doesn't look like grass to me . . looks like purple gloop) is again sloppy. CIV:BE is a disapointment. It has quite a way to go before it even touches (or dares to reach for) the cloth in which SM:AC is draped. It is a shallow pretender that quite frankly has disapointed me intensly. It will be a long day before i even think about pre-ordering and thereby supporting CIV again. I will bide my time and wait for a Steam Sale to get it, if and I mean if it is actually worht spending money on. It's not the monetary value you understand, it's the principle of the thing. You disapointed me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmjn_vrShmU
I'm sure you appreciate the similarity :)
Anyway, great discussion and I enjoyed reading the various opinions.
Stuff that is nice but felt useless most of the time.
-Self made custom units?useless your going to always make the asme kind fo units (anit air anti land anti aliens ect...)
-AI diplomatic relation were... too easy the AI was too predictable too easy to controle.(doesnt mean BE sometime crazy AI is goof)
-Production spam spiraling out fo control.
-late game tech and event becasue,ICBM spam late game, same problem as nuke spam in civ4
-Massiv cities construction nice that you can build a lot of cities but its degenerate into cities spam very quickly.
Stuff that felt useless but is brilliant but remove player control.
-progression and change of the land throught terraformation and natural occurences progression of grassland and forestect...? Nice but often a problem and more micromanagement more than a fun stuff, it also remove player controle which was proven to annoy people more than it make them happy, and its slow...
-mind control spam...its good and bad at the same time...
Personally a fusion of BE and SMAC would be more to my liking.
some stuff trully need to be more simple in SMAC and in BE stuff need more options to get to your result.
Techs advancement:
The random tech vs web tech is a hard one because i love both..
random tech make each playthrough unique and mean even Great start and bad middle game aren't the end the AI can also get ♥♥♥♥ pick in tech early or later on.(i like that in stelaris too)
Webs allow to strategise more about were you want to go and what you want to do.
Battle/units and wars:
Units simplification but not as much as BE, the special units of BE are fun to use(dead stealthy nano drones, subs with planes) but the fact they only gain attack throught experience is a bit sad
and they do lack customisation beeing able to create "your" few special units woudl have been fun
And total combat prediciton is a bit boring.
SMAC do the complete opposite
Too much customisation and total randomness of combat in SMAC is annoying you often have to rely a lot on doom stack to get reliable result. which isnt fun. And create lot of micro to put units up to dates because you have to do it to stay relevant(which is normal, but its just annoying).
Interaction with other civ:
The gain from making trade with ofther in BE feel more usefull on a economical level(cheaper unit sustain, better roads, better combat in your land, in other peoples lands ect...), the AI is capricious but two alliances will not have the sames bonuses thx to their choices
But in SMAC the diplomatie economie allow to create lasting alliances, but you don't feel like they give you something truly special, two alliances will gain the sames things from each other
Environemental interaction:
Nothing to say here SMAC is better since you can do something.Its something the 4x games have abandonned lately you can't put effort to make a bad place good or a good place great or make good place bad for other...seing forest and fungus grow by themsleves was very interesting. and the aliens felt like a opponent/allies of their own. in Be they are just barbarien tha become pointless laer on when your unit get better.
Some other things may come to me later but its a quick resume of what i think about both game. SMAC is a beautifull mess of a game but "too much" would be a good way to describe it for me
and BE is lots of good idea but too bare bone its "not enough"
I keep playing both and they both fill a different need for me.
Different chasis absolutely had different use. Ok, so do "unit types" in other games, but in SMAC the same chasis with different customizations would have different uses.
I wouldn't use my "AAA-trooper" as the main line of defense against ground forces. "AAA Tracking" is useless when attacked by a land unit, and in the meantime there are other modifications that actually complement ground defense (like Comm Jammer that adds a whooping 50% defense against "fast" ground units). Not to mention that you probably can do without counter-attack ability on your AAA defense unit, and keeping attack at 1 makes it that much cheaper.
Pulse armor (more bonus defense against "fast" units to stack if you need it) wouldn't do diddly when engaged by a Psi-attack enemy (something you can customize for your own unit, too). Or an air unit, or just good ole' infantry. And if you go with "specialist" unit design, the boni quickly stack to outperform a "generalist" by a wide margin. Which necessites a choice - are you going to invest in something that may become obsolete by enemy's change of tactics, or try to "min-max" your unit design for maximum effect with mimum production investment?
Of all the things to complain about in SMAC, this is a really bad thing to pick. If anything, this was a core feature. Frankly, I wish more strategy games used this depth of unit customization (as an example, Star Ruler 2 goes even deeper, allowing specification of actual internal unit design that has a HUGE impact on the effectiveness of your spacecraft in combat).
You could randomize leader's personalities as a game setup option, and then good luck figuring out who will do what without some serious rude awakenings. Also, SMAC included not a small portion of "story-telling" approach, so having faction leaders act in certain pre-determined way was a feature, not a bug. You knew that sooner or later Santiago will come a-knocking, unless you show your military depot is larger than hers. You knew Miriam would flip out the moment you start embracing non-fundie social values. And so on, so forth. Hell, it's part of what gave SMAC such memorable immersion that people still remember those imaginary figures.
Again, I think this added to the gameplay (in an "emergent storytelling" kind of way long before the term was in common use). Not to mention that the diplo algos had more sense than those in a lot of much more recent high-budget titles.
A what?
If you mean AI churning out needed units, it did so at the expense of infrastructure and science investment. It was also something heavily dependent on the game speed you set up the game for. Faster production resulted in greater unit availability. Super slow speed would make them often prohibitively expensive to "spam."
Also, good luck with energy upkeep on unit "spam" without some serious work put in ahead of time to make it a viable strategy.
Except SMAC had that much better defensive capability against it in terms of Orbital Defense Pod (50% chance of destroying a Planet Buster launch for each pod in orbit). Which was the next tech right after Planet Buster (a weapon that required a LOT of manufacturing power), meaning there was only a short window of opportunity for its reliable use against any opponent not already too far behind in science (and if they were, this was the result on focusing resources elsewhere).
Seeing how you can set up your custom automated governor, how exactly is that an issue? Not to mention that it's also something heavily dependent on game difficulty settings. You build too many cities too quickly, your "economy" will tank. Pretty standard for any similar title out on the market.
"Remove player control?"
Funny, because "player control" is exactly what helped me set up "food/energy" ridges to maximize cities' production. Or reclaim submerged territory to expand. Or, from time to time, drown enemy's colony because if I'm going to war, might as well start it off on a high note... so that my reputation with other factions tanks into a joyfull global genocide >.>
The effect of terrain change on weather patters (and therefore city production) was a brilliant element, not "useless."
Again, what?
There is a huge difference between going xeno-biology and spamming fungus everywhere, setting up hybrid forests, and going "environmental control" route and relying on specific production facilities instead. FFS, about half the factions you can play RELY on specific approach to be truly effective.
That's pretty much something that can be said about any balanced game element.
I mean, you're welcome to your opinion, but to me it seems your criticism of SMAC comes from limited understanding of the game mechanics.
I still play it long after getting (rather quickly) bored with Beyond Earth.
(... congratulations, you just got me to start a new SMAC session. Damnit, there goes another week...)