Beyond Earth: Rising Tide

[OrcusMcP]

The first expansion for Civilization: Beyond Earth is here! Rising Tide!

I think it's safe to say that while Beyond Earth wasn't bad, it was very underwhelming. Affinities sounded pretty good, but were bland in execution. The factions, techs and wonders lacked texture. The aliens were barely worth a mention.

Rising Tide gives us aquatic cities, more active aliens, more intricate diplomacy, smoother affinity growth and even hybrid affinities, beyond the usual extra factions and maps.

Firaxis has had a tendency for the past few years of releasing decent/good games that become amazing after being expanded. What's your take on Rising Tide? Has it redeemed Beyond Earth? Has it at least got you intrigued again?

[Binks]

I liked Beyond Earth. I didn't think it was up to Civ 5 + DLC, but that's because no Civ game has been as good as the previous Civ game until it received at least 1 DLC. I've played Civ since Call to Power way back in the day and every single Civ has been a little worse than the current status of the last Civ, then gotten better over time and surpassed the prior one. Rising Tide feels to me like it brings Beyond Earth up to on-par with Civ 5 + all DLC.

The aquatic cities are just distinct enough to be interesting without feeling either over or under powered. They feel like they need more work to get up and running well but have advantages the land based cities don't that mostly make up for those issues. I haven't figured out what the value in being able to move them is, but I know that's going to really useful at some point.

I love the new diplomacy system. I play against AI mostly and I have wanted a good diplomacy system since Civ 4, and it feels like they finally nailed it. It uses a lot of the religion mechanics from Gods and Kings with the Diplomatic Capital, and the constant pings from the AI regarding how they feel about your empire are useful and unobtrusive enough to not be annoying.

Still need to get more games under my belt to be certain, but I like this expansion to Civ. It feels like it meets the goals of revolutionizing the frankly always underwhelming diplomacy system that's plagued AI games of Civ for multiple version now. I feel like I understand what the AI's up to, and am given sufficient time to respond to changes and sufficient reason to develop relationships. All that, plus expanding the tech tree, some additional rebalancing, and adding the new aquatic cities seems worthwhile to me.

[Ailurus]

Got to put in about an hr or so this morning, but I like it so far as well with one annoying UI exception. Is there any way to tell the advisors to NOT spam you with "you can set up a XXX agreement with YYY! This might help our civilization!" at the start of every other turn? Sure, please tell me when new agreements become available, but if I choose not to do an agreement please stop reminding me constantly! I may have chosen not to do it for a good reason, or maybe I just don't want to play nice with that civ, or maybe I want to save my diplomatic capital for something else.



The aquatic cities are just distinct enough to be interesting without feeling either over or under powered. They feel like they need more work to get up and running well but have advantages the land based cities don't that mostly make up for those issues. I haven't figured out what the value in being able to move them is, but I know that's going to really useful at some point.


Several things I found already (started my first RT game as North Sea Alliance). The first is claiming tiles. Sure, you can buy tiles with energy but moving the city one hex will claim 3 tiles for you making it a lot easier and cheaper for a new city to grab resources to work (at least with the NSA's significantly cheaper move costs, no idea how expensive it is with the other civs). And, secondly, while you can't (at least, not without several techs) settle cities on oceans, you can settle them in shallow water and then move them into ocean hexes, allowing you to again claim a wider range of territory you wouldn't otherwise be able to.

Edit: And just found another use for city movement. Station settles near where you want to put your city, and that's now fine. Settle near where your ideal spot is, and when the station is destroyed/fades away/etc. just rotate the city into the spot you wanted.

[Cespenar]

It's a pretty solid expansion IMHO. Brings a lot of new mechanics on board and enriches the game enough for new playthroughs.

[druid91]

It's enjoyable so far. Though I've been playing as pretty straightforward Supremacy rather than one of the hybrids.

[Manticoran]

I've been quite enjoying this, I feel like land starts are generally better, but as you get later in the game having a couple sea cities is really important.

[Tvtyrant]

My experiment game isn't going great. Doing all water cities leads to really slow development, and my neighbors are more aggressive then usual. I love the new diplomacy options though, massive improvement.

[Driderman]

I really like this expansion, seems like it makes the game a lot less "hollow", I guess I'd call it. The original game always felt a bit sterile but Rising Tide goes a long way to fix that. I still feel like there should be multiple "quests" for the various buildings so instead of getting the same one for the same building every game there would be some variation. And the Marvels, which are nice, seem to lose their marvelous-ness pretty quickly since there's only a few of them and you'll pretty much have seen it all after only a couple of games.

Still, very decent expansion, I am not regretting buying it at launch.

[druid91]

Though one irritating feature I've discovered is the inability to modify truce terms. So if you want to end a war you have to aquiesce to whatever terms the AI offers. And if the game thinks you should demand for cities as spoils, you have to demand for cities as spoils. Which the AI will refuse. Prolonging the war... :smallannoyed:

Also you can't trade strategic resources or energy anymore.

[Cespenar]

Yeah, for some reason, no game has tried to, you know, take Europa Universalis' deal system and simply splice it onto their game.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Well even in EUIV, you're still missing the feature of being able to have mixed deals, where you give up some things in return for others, but yeah.