Civ Beyond Earth

rtil · October 21, 2014 02:17 PM

there's a number of civs that are good for religion, but the celts are probably the best, provided you get a good start with the right tiles. another good civ for religion is ethiopia, because their monuments provide faith. spain, if you get lucky, is good if you get faith based natural wonders near you. any desert-favored start civ like morocco or arabia are also good if you are able to get a pantheon like desert folklore. but as far as straight base religion benefits go, the celts and byzantium are almost too good to the point where they're broken and your religion will dominate the world very quickly.

personally, my #1 priority in every civ game is gold. gold can solve almost any problem, and turn a grim situation around very quickly. 2nd i think is science. culture, religion, tourism.. these things can be important, but you can ignore them completely and still win games. gold and science, on the other hand, are something you always want to have the edge on. because you can use these two to create military might , and simply conquer other people's cultures, religions and tourism.

but that's just how i like to play. and from a practical point of view, it is much more frustrating to attempt to win tactfully.

crackers · October 22, 2014 02:27 PM

I'm really enjoying Ethiopia - I don't tend to enjoy building a second city very quickly, and it means i don't get penalised so badly for not doing so. What would you say was the best Civ for science?

rtil · October 23, 2014 12:27 AM

Korea is easily the best civ for science as they get +2 bonus science for every specialist and get a tech boost every time a science building or wonder is built in their capital. Babylon is 2nd because you get great scientists 50% faster and get a free one after you research writing. but i think they're both DLC civs. some other civs have science bonuses like China, but any civ that specializes in food would also be good because of high pops = better production for science buildings + more room for specialists without worrying about sacrificing production. so civs like Dutch and Poland, maybe Inca. Then civs like England would be good for the extra spy = more stealing tech, Siam+ Wat spam.. there's probably more but i can't think of them right now. but Korea is definitely worth buying if you're interested in a science victory.

crackers · October 25, 2014 02:07 AM

Don't know what I'm doing wrong, but early game it seems i'm always beaten to building the wonders? Every single time, it'll only be by about 2 turns or something, but obviously it's fucking annoying. Do you have any pointers?

EDIT: I'm playing on Emperor at the moment. Won one game through sheer luck, that's it so far

rtil · October 25, 2014 02:22 AM

that's a fairly common thing, if you really want a wonder on the higher difficulties you're going to have to prioritize production over anything else and rush to that tech. remember also that cutting down a forest will send a good amount of production to the nearest city. so save some forest to chop down for your wonder building time. to do this you need to manually control your workers or they will do things you don't want them to. you can limit what they will improve in the settings, but in my opinion it's best to manually control your workers until the late game. it's a lot of extra micromanaging but it is worth it for building the kind of empire you want. the AI doesn't know what you're planning, it only improves what it thinks is the most optimized tile improvement.

crackers · October 26, 2014 03:35 PM

Sick, most of the time i never really train workers, i mostly get all the ones i need from declaring war very early game and extorting the shit out of the AI, which has worked so far on the difficulty levels. What social policy tree do you recommend first, liberty or tradition? I know obviously in Civ there's no set build order but as a general rule of thumb what are the respective bonuses of either one?

rtil · October 27, 2014 12:17 AM

if you set the policy view to the other mode you can actually preview the policies without having to unlock the tree first. i forget what it's called exactly but it should be in the window.

the type of policy you open with depends on the type of civilization you're planning to run. or you could take advantage of some early quick policies for starting out. in general though, liberty is recommended for wide (lots of cities) empires, tradition is recommended for tall (few, but very large cities) empires, and honor is recommended for militant empires. i think you can also open piety in BNW now, if you're very interested in a religious empire. but i never thought that tree was very powerful.

BluPhoenix · October 27, 2014 01:22 AM

Quote from: rtil on October 27, 2014 12:17 AM
if you set the policy view to the other mode you can actually preview the policies without having to unlock the tree first. i forget what it's called exactly but it should be in the window.

"advanced view"

Sef · October 27, 2014 05:29 PM

So both the user score on Metacritic and the user reviews on steam , 6.0 and 68% respectively, seem low. Is the game a disappointment or something?

rtil · October 27, 2014 10:09 PM

i haven't played it yet but i think there are two factors in play regarding the reviews:
1. whenever a new civ game comes out after 4, a lot of players feel like features are missing, because the civ game they've been playing for the last x years has had 2 expansions and tons of features added, and they expect it to be in their new vanilla civ game, but it's not.
2. a lot of people are saying civ BE is a glorified mod for civ 5 and isn't worth the asking price. i can't comment on this since, again, i haven't played it yet, but "glorified mod" almost sounds like "expansion" to me. in which case, i'd say charge an expansion price ($30). the current asking price is $50. i have seen some screenshots which indicate they haven't changed any of the AI dialogue, which is pretty lazy, so maybe they're right.

Sef · October 27, 2014 10:48 PM

Definitely not getting it until it's on sale then. Price can easily soften the blow of possible disappointment.

crackers · November 13, 2014 12:41 PM

still playing a lot of civ

almost beat the game on diety - plan is 'start small' by going Spain, building up gold through wonder discovery early game etc and using low science output to stay in medieval age so i have longer to build cheaper missionaries, use religion to build allies (eg. if i start next to zulu, if we're the same religion (before he discovers one) he will be less likely to attack). Hopefully world religion is proposed by said converted nation so i dont take the diplo hit. Use money to ally with city states, and use the extra members to get scholars in residence passed. Then make an absolute beeline for science victory if diplomatic victory isn't achievable. Win by turn 290ish.

second attempt starting now, wish me luck