Oh, excuse me, Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Not that the game will ever let you forget it.

I’m torn over Midnight Suns. My opinion of Firaxis as a developer has sunk deeper and deeper into the Mariana Trench over the last six years, and there was absolutely nothing about the pre-release footage that excited me. Everyone’s doing card games now since Slay the Spire blew the doors off of the genre, and the Midnight Suns take on it looked like a tremendous dumbing-down of XCOM with some of the most generic art direction on the planet. Not only that, but while the MCU has reshaped entertainment in its image (by which I mean almost every single film, television series and video game made today will involve insufferably quippy and quirky characters having cartoon battles over extremely shallow and poorly-defined stakes), Midnight Suns already had the stink of failure on it thanks to Square Enix’s The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy¹ bombing; I’m as surprised as anyone, but people just don’t seem to care about specifically Marvel-licensed videogames anywhere near as much as they do cinema and television.

So my expectations for it were rock-bottom, and that may have actually helped Midnight Suns; it didn’t need to do all that much to impress me, and it succeeded. But the more I played it, the more annoyed I found myself becoming — and not for the reasons you might expect, either. In spite of those low expectations I was surprised to discover there’s a very good game lurking somewhere inside of Midnight Suns; say what you like about the Civilization designers, but XCOM lead Jake Solomon at least still knows what he’s doing. The big problem with it, though, is that Midnight Suns hasn’t just got the Marvel license, it’s actually being written by people who are still fully in the tank for both the MCU (a series I checked out of a mere 11 years and 22 movies in) and Bioware RPGs, and who consequently are far more concerned with making me watch their Marvel action figures kiss than they are actually letting me play the damn thing.

Let’s get the number one misapprehension you might have about Midnight Suns out of the way first: despite looking a hell of a lot like the six year-old tactical strategy game XCOM 2, to the point where I had to double-check a few of my screenshots from 2016 to make sure that Midnight Suns hadn’t just straight up recycled some of the assets, in terms of gameplay Midnight Suns actually has very little to do with it. This is a deckbuilding card game like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, and aside from some vestigial flourishes that Midnight Suns inherits from the Alien Rulers DLC I can’t see all that much of XCOM in here. If you have any doubts about that statement, just go looking for the unsteady foundation that XCOM’s gameplay is built on: its famous RNG. There isn’t any in Midnight Suns — well, okay, there’s some in that you’re drawing cards from a deck, but once the cards are drawn they have static, predictable effects that are the same every time. This shifts the focus from XCOM’s risk management to Slay the Spire’s turn sequencing and damage calculus: given a particular hand of cards, what’s the right order to play them in to maximise the number of enemies killed that turn?

And in order to keep that shift in focus, Midnight Suns eliminates practically every other tactical consideration that you might have expected it to inherit from XCOM. Abilities and attacks can be used at any range, even on enemies on the other side of the map — because the maps are now so small that they comfortably fit within the bounds of a single screen. Movement ranges are similarly infinite, but you only get one pure Move action per turn — as in, you can move one hero, one time, to a new location of your choosing. Attacks will cause heroes to reposition themselves, either into melee range of the target for melee attacks or about ten foot away from it for ranged attacks, but this happens automatically and you have no control over where exactly your hero ends up. Positioning is a consideration for attacks with knockback and area effects, as well as attacks using environmental objects, but because your ability to alter that positioning is so limited it’s rare that it’ll be a major one; the most you’ll do is use your one Move to get a hero into a good position for a nice juicy push attack, and then for everything else you just do the best you can with the positioning that you have. You could quite easily convert Midnight Suns to a 2D game like… well, like Slay the Spire, and it’d play essentially the same way since many of the mechanics that rely on the 3D space have been dropped and it’s mostly just an unusually fancy wrapper for the card game.

How does that card game play, though? You can take three heroes into every fight; each hero has a deck of eight cards that you select beforehand, and all heroes’ cards are shuffled together to form your draw deck for that fight. At the start of your turn you draw up to six cards, and you also start the turn with three Card Plays, which are exactly what they sound like: playing a card will consume a Card Play, and when you hit zero Card Plays you can’t play any more cards until the next turn. The reason they’re a resource rather than a hard limit of three card plays per turn, though, is because there are cards in the game that can refund Card Plays if used in the right context. Midnight Suns uses a keyword-based system for its card mechanics (think Hearthstone or Magic), and cards with the “Quick” keyword will consume a Card Play when you play them, but if that card ability kills an opponent then you get the Card Play back. The catch is that Quick abilities tend to also be fairly low damage, so you’ll need to weaken enemies first and then use Quick attacks to finish them off. There are other cards that apply a debuff called Marked to targeted enemies, and if those enemies are killed by any subsequent card attack then you’ll also get the Card Play back; using these refund keywords to extend your turn is a big part of Midnight Suns, as it’s the best way for you to build up enough Heroism to deploy your really big guns.

If you’ve played a deckbuilding card game before then Heroism will look very familiar, since it’s your standard build/spend resource albeit somewhat simplified compared to the competition. You’ll notice that your heaviest-hitting cards all have a big orange number in the top left hand corner of the card; this is the Heroism cost required to play them, and the card will be greyed out and non-interactive if you don’t have enough Heroism banked to do it. The cards that don’t have a Heroism cost in the top left corner instead have a smaller orange number in the bottom left; this is the amount of Heroism you’ll gain by playing that card. Heroism persists between turns so it’s possible to spend one turn playing skills and basic attacks to build up your Heroism and then blow it all on Heroic abilities on the following turn, but it’s also perfectly possible to build and spend all in the same turn, especially if you’re properly leveraging abilities with Quick/Marked and card draw. And if you have a lot of Heroism but no Heroic cards in your hand, then you can burn some of it off by executing an environmental attack; there’s a bunch of environmental objects scattered across every map, and you can spend Heroism to kick crates into clusters of enemies or drop street lamps on their heads. Environmental attacks only do average damage, but the great advantage of them is that they don’t cost a Card Play to do and so are essentially “free” damage.

Midnight Suns does retain some tactical strategy trappings that are more than superficial, but it’s pretty telling that they look more like Into the Breach² than they do XCOM. Once you hit the “End Turn” button it’s the enemy’s turn, and they don’t bother with cards; instead, each enemy will attack your heroes once. You’re not told precisely how much damage the attacks will do, but you are told which hero each enemy is targeting and whether the incoming attack will be normal or heavy — this lets you prioritise targets on your turn to try and kill the heaviest hitters, or else use Taunt abilities to redirect incoming attacks away from wounded heroes. Some enemies do have additional abilities that they’ll execute after an attack, like deploying a big shield to protect the mission objective, but that’s a problem that you can deal with on your next turn; in general Midnight Suns is pretty good at flagging up the things you’ll need to care about on the enemy turn and letting you plan around them. Midnight Suns has the standard Firaxis-grade UI (that is to say, it’s absolutely terrible)  but it does at least adequately display how much of the enemy health bar your own attacks are going to knock off, and whether a given attack will kill them or not. When you use a Knockback ability the game will show you exactly where the enemies are going to end up, and in fact one of the big things that kept me playing was fine-tuning Knockback trajectories to cause as much damage as possible by throwing enemies into exploding barrels, electrical generators or other enemies. Again, this is a game about planning, not risk management, and Midnight Suns is at least smart enough to have restructured its combat layer around this core conceptual change.

The last thing to say about the combat in Midnight Suns — and probably the game’s most unexpected success given how disastrous the rest of the theming is — is that it does a very good job of making each hero’s card abilities tie into their thing. Captain Marvel is a walking tank who shrugs off everything thrown at her while obliterating enemies with her Photon Beam attack. Spiderman gets cards that grant additional moves and free environmental attacks, so he’s constantly flipping around the map pulling down cranes onto groups of enemies and jump-kicking off of platforms. Magik is a mutant who can summon portals, and every single one of her attacks is about spawning one end of a portal next to an environmental hazard and then punting an unfortunate enemy through the other end like she’s playing interdimensional golf. There are some heroes who are weaker than others (Ghost Rider’s defining thing is that he is fucking useless), but they all feel very distinct and well-themed in how they play, which is very impressive considering there’s 12 of them you can recruit to your team. That also goes for their look and feel; Midnight Suns is not exactly a good-looking game (in fact it might actually be uglier than the six year-old XCOM 2), but every hero has unique animations for every card ability and environmental attack that lend a lot to their character when they’re in the middle of a scrap.

Really, I was very pleasantly surprised at how good Midnight Suns’ combat was. It doesn’t have the depth of Slay the Spire, but it doesn’t need it; this is a combat system designed to provide the player with short and snappy combat problems that, for the most part, last no longer than 10 minutes, and it mostly succeeds in this. The different hero abilities, combinations and the distinctiveness of each hero also helps a great deal in staving off the battlescape fatigue that inevitably crept into both iterations of the new XCOM, and I think the combat system is potentially a very strong foundation for a game, just so long as it’s embedded within a strategy layer (or metagame) that’s had the same amount of thought put into it.

Unfortunately for Midnight Suns it seems that the people who designed the metagame were not able to remain grounded the in the same way that the people who designed the combat layer were³, and instead spent the vast, vast majority of their time geeking out over the fact that they got to play with their favourite Marvel characters. When I started the download for Midnight Suns I was shocked to see that it was 56 gigabytes; that is a chunky install size given that it’s not exactly graphically cutting edge, and I immediately had flashbacks to Age of Empires 4 being almost 100 gigabytes not because it was a particularly huge or expansive game, but because it included multiple hours of HD drone footage of real-life castles. These fears were unfortunately well-founded, because in the first two and a half hours of Midnight Suns the amount of actual gameplay I experienced consisted of the tutorial and two story missions, which took me maybe forty minutes. The rest of the time was spent in cutscenes — not necessarily cutscenes to explain the story, mind you, but cutscenes to introduce the vast, vast number of ways that Midnight Suns has to socialise with your superheroes and dress them up in some truly hideous outfits.

The most offensive thing about this is that the actual plot of Midnight Suns is some of the most disposable videogame trash garbage that I’ve seen in a while. Hydra defrost a big baddie called Lilith who looks like a palette swap of one of the Chosen from XCOM expansion War of the Chosen, and then we’re immediately shunted to Tony Stark and Doctor Strange trying to get a piece of paper off of Ghost Rider I, and then they teleport to Doctor Strange’s mansion where Lilith attacks for reasons that I don’t think are ever really explained, and then Doctor Strange mumbles something about a prophecy and teleports again to a place called the Abbey where they bring the player character — a personality black hole called The Hunter — out of suspended animation to fight Lilith. At no point is it explained why Lilith is so bad or why the Avengers are so scared of her or why, exactly, they need this Original Character Do Not Steal in order to defeat her. Perhaps this was all laid out in a comic at some point, but I doubt it. If Midnight Suns had spent a bit more of its voluminous cutscene time establishing stakes and character motivations I might have… not exactly liked it, but I would have at least accepted them as a valid part of the game.

Instead the vast bulk of these cutscenes are spent on all of the various activities you can engage with around the Abbey, which is your base of operations. There’s the Forge, where Doctor Strange and Tony Stark use a fusion of magic and technology and an imprisoned Babylonian demon to… unlock your card packs. There’s the Training Yard, which Blade does his best to big up but which is literally just a menu where you can spend money to give individual heroes temporary buffs as well as fuse your cards together for upgrades. There’s the CENTRAL computer, where you can give Captain Marvel intel boxes so that you can send heroes on daily missions where they bring back a card. Because all of these things can only be used once per day we’re already getting to that point in every Bioware RPG where you have to run down an itinerary every time you go back to base in case you accidentally miss one – but wait, there’s more! You’re additionally introduced to, in quick succession:

• Superlink, which is billed as “social media for heroes” and essentially functions as the game’s email system. If you want to see Nico from Runaways complain because Tony Stark broke the coffee machine, this is where to go.
• Hangouts. Every 3-4 missions you’ll get the opportunity to have a Hangout with one hero. This is a disposable conversation about precisely sod-all of relevance, and which functions solely to boost your Friendship meter with that hero.
• Havens, special points around the Abbey where you can bring a hero to, uh, paint with them? Or go fishing? I don’t even understand what the hell we’re doing here, but this gives you a big Friendship boost.
• Compliments. I forget how you get these actually, and the game never explains why there’s such a limited supply of them — although I can see The Hunter being so awkward that he has to write them down in advance — but you can Push F To Compliment for another Friendship boost.
• Clubs. The world is facing an apocalyptic (if extremely poorly-defined) threat, and Blade wants to start a book club. There are a few of these, and completing a club event gives you a Friendship boost with everyone who attended.
• Hero Requests. “The life of a hero is complicated”, says the blurb for these, “and sometimes they could use your advice.” Which amounts to them giving you missions where you have to buy them a new hat in exchange for — you guessed it — a Friendship boost.

Midnight Suns spends a staggering amount of time and effort on these events — and the worst thing about them is that even if you do not give the tiniest iota of a shit about asking Blade for help preparing for Magik’s birthday party, you still can’t afford to ignore the Friendship meters because improving a hero’s Friendship upgrades their combo abilities and then eventually unlocks their ultimate ability when it’s maxed out. This means that every time you come back after a mission you need to do your Friendship chores, and then in the morning unlock your card packs and do your training and intel missions. It is totally obnoxious, and totally exhausting.

This is the crux of my problem with Midnight Suns, then: Firaxis’ designers have come up with a good, if not great, combat system with a pretty tight 10-15 minute loop — and then bogged it down in a metagame where you have to do at least an equivalent amount of tedious bullshit back at the Abbey before you can start the next one. And that’s if you don’t get sideswiped by a story cutscene, which are some of the longest I’ve experienced outside of Final Fantasy 14 and where your choices are limited to either gritting your teeth and sitting through it (there’s no dialogue skipping), or just skipping the entire thing and being totally clueless as to what is going on.  The quality of the writing is truly dire; every single hero acts like a hormonal teen that takes turns holding the idiot ball, everyone keeps pointless secrets from one another so that there can be shocking revelations at the end of the story (spoiler: said revelations are not shocking, or particularly revelations seeing as how I’d figured them out thirty hours earlier), and in fact I think Midnight Suns would have worked far better as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game since the tone (if not the quality) of the writing is very similar and it would at least explain why everyone spends the entire game living in a magical dormitory.

And the game spends hours on this. In fact I can extrapolate from the number of missions I did during the campaign; if we generously say that each mission took an average of 20 minutes (some story missions are longer, and I did dabble in a few of the combat puzzles to be found around the Abbey) then 63 missions times twenty minutes is just under 21 hours. Steam says my total playtime for Midnight Suns is 41 hours, meaning I spent twenty hours in cutscenes, or conversations, or pissing about in the Abbey gathering herbs for Magik. Again, Final Fantasy 14 is one of my favourite games so I have a high tolerance for fetch quest-tier gameplay leading to extremely long cutscenes just so long as the cutscenes are good, but Midnight Suns spends far more time trying to make funny jokes than it does trying to tell a good story and since I counted exactly one good joke in the entire game it was almost entirely a wasted effort.

(And this is all without getting into the entire concept of the Hunter, who is one of the most laughable attempts at a “cool” character I’ve ever seen. You can tell they’re cool because they use two swords and magic and all of the big heroes have heard of them and use words like “legendary” to refer to them and say how cool and awesome they are in nearly every interaction. It is good that the game has told me they are so cool, because otherwise I might think that they were a total fucking charisma vacuum whose single defining character trait is that they are a knockoff of the Groosalug from Angel — again, more Whedon influence showing through on the writing here.)

There’s a lot more in Midnight Suns that I haven’t unpacked, both good and bad, In the good column I did like some of the Metroid-esque exploration of the Abbey grounds, shallow though it might have been, and in the bad column are the mission rewards you get for punching Hydra goons into the sun, which primarily consist of a currency called Gloss that is used solely to buy cosmetics, and further in the bad column is that due to story reasons you don’t get access to your full character roster until about three hours before the end of the game and so there are two heroes who basically never get used. Ultimately I don’t want to go to the effort, though; I think I’ve made my point, which is that Midnight Suns is a very appropriate release for 2022, the year of otherwise-good games that are sabotaged by their own developers’ insistence that their terrible videogame story is so important that it needs to be experienced by the player⁴ at the expense of actually being able to play the bloody thing. It’s a better game than I was expecting, but since I was expecting absolutely nothing that’s not exactly saying much.

The post Thoughts: Midnight Suns appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

And so we reach the arguable zenith of the Civilization series, the peak from which there is only a slow decline into senescence and eventual barbarism. Civilization 4 is actually the game that triggered this whole chain of posts, as I was looking for something relatively meaty to play over Christmas that would run on the Macbook I had with me while I was visiting family. It was meant to give me something to do in the evenings in between coding, reading and writing. Instead it ended up sucking me for two games in a row, like it was just released yesterday instead of almost fourteen years ago, and it’s the only one of the series where I barely notice the seams. Civilization 4 may well be ageless — Civilization 5 has aged far worse than 4 has, for god’s sake — and that’s entirely down to Firaxis’s drive to imbue the game with some of the character it had lost in Civilization 3’s relatively sterile treatment of the world, and an absolutely stellar piece of design work on the part of the game designers, especially lead designer Soren Johnson.

Yes, there were others involved in the development of Civilization 4 who probably deserve a lot of credit, but one of the things that’s stuck with me through the almost decade and a half since the game released is the designer notes in the back of the manual, written by Soren Johnson. These notes had been a tradition for Microprose and Firaxis games up until Civilization 4 (I think it was the last game to include them) and they were always a valuable read since they functioned both as a decent insight into why the game had been put together the way it was and as a brief chronology of the development process. However, the Civilization 4 designer notes made a lot of really insightful observations that have stuck with me ever since, and shaped how I think about just about every other 4X released since, because whenever I run into something too micromanagey, too counterintuitive, too unfun, I think back to Civ 4’s designer notes and the guidelines you can find there for avoiding pointless design cruft in strategy games. There’s a ready-made blueprint for doing it right, so I have a lower tolerance for games that do it wrong.

The key design ethos of Civilization 4 is positivity. There’s a good anecdote in the designer notes — actually about the in-development Civilization 3 — where Johnson talks about the Dark Ages that civilizations could experience that would apply penalties to growth and income. The idea was to represent the periods of decline that any civilization goes through over a time, but as far as the game was concerned it felt terrible to be hit with a bunch of arbitrary debuffs through no fault of your own. So they flipped it round: Dark Ages became Golden Ages where you’d experience boosts to your output instead of penalties, and this was a much more pleasant experience for the player¹. For an actual example of the principle being applied to Civilization 4, look no further than corruption. Firaxis had known for years that the entirely negative corruption mechanic was widely hated, but it was seen as a necessary counterbalance to unfettered player growth — until the development of Civilization 4, where they decided to just remove it from the prototype to see how it felt. Unsurprisingly with the corruption gone it was a much smoother experience; more importantly, it opened up design space for the alternate braking force of city maintenance, where founding successive cities incurred geometrically increasing financial upkeep costs. A newly-founded city can eventually pay for itself once it’s been fully developed, but it’s going to require support from the rest of the empire while it gets up and running and spamming too many Settlers will put your empire into the red and cripple you. This remains the most elegant (not to mention logical) method I’ve seen of limiting Infinite City Sprawl, which is why it’s so curious that the series immediately ditched it in favour of the bizarre empire-wide happiness mechanic in Civilization 5.

As a general rule, Civilization 4 tries to couch everything in positive terms. Building a wonder gives you a big advantage that is eventually obsoleted by a technological advance, as in other Civilization games, but the difference in 4 is that the technology that obsoletes the wonder you’ve built is usually one that unlocks a similar bonus to the wonder effect. For example, the Great Lighthouse gives you +2 trade routes in all coastal cities, and will be obsoleted by researching The Corporation, which gives +1 trade route in every city; unless you have an awful lot of coastal cities the Corporation bonus works out as being a bit better than the one granted by the Lighthouse, and so you don’t feel bad about having it be obsoleted. More to the point, you don’t feel bad about being beaten to a wonder either because you know you’ll get that power boost eventually; all the wonders really do is allow you to unlock them earlier than you would from technological research². Speaking of wonders, Civilization 4 is a game that understands there’s a big difference between saying “Construction speed doubled with marble” and “Construction speed halved without marble”. They’re exactly the same effect, but receiving a bonus feels good to the player and experiencing a penalty is not, so Civ 4 tries to communicate all of its gameplay mechanics in the language of the former rather than the latter.

This positive ethos that runs through the core of Civilization 4 guides the rework of some mechanics that, up until now, had been a core part of Civilization. Take building Settlers and Workers, for example. In all previous Civilization games, building a Settler was a) quite expensive in terms of production and b) also cost a unit of population that was subtracted from the city that built it. It feels crap to have a city go backwards in growth to build the most essential units in the game, so Civilization 4 rearranges the process; now, instead of population loss upon Settler completion, the city’s growth is put on pause while the Settler is being constructed and the city’s food harvest is converted into production that boosts the Settler’s build speed. Again, this preserves the idea of some of the city’s population leaving to found a new city while transforming what had previously been a quite unpleasant penalty into something that’s perceived by the player as a bonus, even though the end result is the same; you’re just paying the food/population cost up front now instead of having it deferred until the Settler is built. It also makes building Workers much less painful, as they can now have an appropriately reduced build cost without also applying the sledgehammer blow of a population loss just because you wanted to improve your tiles.

Speaking of tile improvements, guess what? That’s right, tile improvements now provide even more bonuses when combined with the appropriate type of natural resource, which have been greatly expanded for Civilization 4; there are a lot more of them, and all of them bring at least two benefits to your empire. We’d already seen the idea of certain types of unit being dependent on having certain types of strategic resource available in order to build them in Civilization 3, although that first pass on it was incredibly clumsy and narrowed your choices (particularly around the Space Race, which required Aluminium to start at all) instead of expanding them. Civilization 4 switches things around to the model the series has followed ever since³, where strategic resources are required to build powerful variants of attacking units (Axemen, Tanks etc.) but there’s always a less powerful, often defensively-oriented unit on the same tier that can be built with no resource requirements whatever; this means that while resources are still important for aggressive civs to build their units, if they’re aggressive they’ll likely have access to them anyway through conquest, while peaceful civs don’t need to care so much as they can still put up a good fight without them. It’s yet another example of the mechanics being rejigged so that having a resource gives you additional options instead of not having the resource locking you off from that tier of military completely.

Civ 4’s big innovation with the resources, though, is to promote all of them to the same level as the strategic ones. Previously there were a lot of different resources in Civilization that just gave a passive boost to tile yields and had no special function past that. Here, though, all of the non-strategic resources have been split into two additional types: Luxury resources provide a civilization-wide happiness bonus, while Food resources provide a health bonus. Happiness works much as it always has, counteracting unhappiness from city size and recent events, while health is a new concept for Civ 4 that effectively replaces the ultra-negative pollution mechanic. The larger a city grows and the more negative environmental factors there are surrounding it (flood plains, factories, coal plants etc.), the more unhealthy it becomes, and unhealthiness is subtracted from your food harvests. Unhealthiness can substantially slow a city’s growth, and too much of it can even tip the city into starvation, so it’s a good idea to counteract it by giving your citizens access to healthy foods like Bananas and Rice. In practice you’ll rarely encounter starvation in Civ 4 unless some prick of a spy poisons the water supply, which fits with with the idea that penalties should be minimised as much as possible, but sooner or later your city growth will peter out and you really want that to come later instead of sooner by grabbing as many different types of Food resources as possible.

This means that every resource must now have the appropriate improvement built on them (which must be unlocked by researching the relevant technology, lending yet another dimension to the decision-making as you clamber up the tech tree) and be connected up to your road network, not just the strategic ones. This incidentally gives Workers much more to do than building endless roads and railways — especially since the ludicrous commerce and production bonuses awarded by roads and railways have been removed from the game entirely. Yes, this is a rare case where Civ 4 actually rows back on a bonus, but it’s for a good cause: covering every square inch of your empire with a spaghetti network of railways was always deeply tedious, and so they’ve removed the primary driving force behind having to do that. Instead, for most of the game road networks grow out somewhat organically, connecting together resources as as they are claimed and cities as they are founded, and the road-spam is staved off until the very end of the game when all possible tiles have been improved and you have a lot of idle workers sitting around. Until then there’s always stuff to be doing in a Civilization 4 turn, and not the tedious make-work of the later games where you have to individually move twenty different units to get your war on. No, the orders you give in Civilization 4 are never less than engrossing because, thanks to that ethos of positivity that wraps almost everything in it, you know that each one is going to result in an incremental boost to your civilization’s power. It never feels like you’re wasting your time in Civ 4, and that’s something I haven’t felt in a Civilization game in almost a decade.

Positivity isn’t the only driving force behind Civilization 4, mind. There’s a secondary strand of thought to its design: that everything should be much more transparent and legible to the player. Combat has been greatly overhauled, with the old attack/defence values being thrown out of the window in favour of a single numerical strength value on each unit that can be modified by a whole host of external factors such as terrain type and fortifications, as well as special attributes of the unit itself — for example, spear units get bonuses against cavalry and archer units get one or two free hits at the start of each combat to reflect their ranged capability. This could all be quite fearsomely complex, except all of these factors are broken down, listed and precalculated by the game and then presented to you as an overall percentage chance of that unit winning a given combat before you commit to it. This makes combat much more understandable — and interesting, as you can start to manipulate it in ways that simply weren’t possible before this information was made available to the player. The same goes for diplomatic interactions with the AI, as all of the positive and negative factors that make up its opinion of you are listed for you with the push of a button; as a result, Civilization 4’s diplomatic AI is still the gold standard for the series as it was predictable. I don’t mean that in a bad way because it’s still a very tough opponent on the higher difficulty settings, but rather that it’s never a surprise when Montuzema declares war on you because you can see exactly why he’s upset (spoiler: it’s because he’s Montuzema.) and will hopefully have made the appropriate preparations beforehand.

Before I get too effusive with my praise, it should also be remembered that Civilization 4 wasn’t quite a perfect game on release. It introduced religion but, aside from it being an additional driver of diplomatic opinion, failed to do anything really interesting with it. It brought back the Social Engineering government interface from Alpha Centauri, but forgot to make half of the options viable and so you end up taking the same route through it every time: beeline to Slavery for the production, and then tech up to a facsimile of Democracy or Communism according to taste. I was also never convinced by the built-in counter to the infamous Stack Of Doom tactic, where you’d suicide siege units into a stack so that they could damage multiple units at once; it’s an unusually clumsy piece of design in a game that otherwise feels extremely logical and intuitive. The expansions failed to do much to rectify these issues, instead choosing to lather on more and more half-baked mechanics such as colonies, corporations and espionage, and if it wasn’t for the additional units that bulk out gaps in the tech tree (AT Infantry in particular is a core unit that makes sure you’re never caught short by not having Oil resources) I’d almost prefer to play without them. With the exception of espionage, though, all of these subpar elements are almost totally ignorable, which is a far cry from Civ VI’s attitude that you’ll fucking shut up and send hordes of missionaries to die in the Religion Wars every few turns, or else risk the AI winning a Religious Victory out of nowhere

The last thing I want to mention is Civilization 4’s sense of your civilization being thrust into a living world, and its obvious reverence for humanity’s accomplishments to date⁴. It is the first game in the series to go full 3D, and (staggeringly) it was built on top of the same 3D engine that drove the godawful strategic battles in Pirates! Given that, it has absolutely no right to look as good as it does, even fourteen years on. Everything on the map has a charming little animation. Trees sway in the wind. Elephants trumpet as they march around their tile. Minecarts rumble in and out of mines. Look at a Civilization 4 map, even in the early game, and you’ll see a lot of movement, a lot of things going on. It was also the first game in the series to start reflecting city improvements on the world map — build an aqueduct and it’ll pop up on the map connecting that city to the nearest water source, and certain wonders such as the Great Wall have a very tangible presence there too. The look of tile improvements updates as you advance your civilization through successive eras, too, with Cottages upgrading from medieval towns to modern suburbs. The Beyond The Sword expansion added culture-specific models for various units, so a Modern Armor unit built by the USA would look like an Abrams while one built by Russia or China would look like a T-80, which is a really nice, flavourful touch that I’ve missed in subsequent games⁵.

Despite the comparatively primitive textures the overall art direction for Civilization 4 is outstanding, producing a world for you to make your mark on that already feels vibrant and alive, and that’s a feeling that’s amplified a hundred-fold by the audio. The soundtrack has yet to be bettered, in my opinion; the original music in Civ 5 and Civ 6 is no slouch whatsoever but it can’t hold a candle to the classical, baroque and modern music used in 4. Each era is given a distinctive feeling simply by matching it to its appropriate music, and nothing has captured the relentless pace of modern technological development for me quite as much as The People Are The Heroes Now. And then you’ve got the signature feature of Civilization 4 that is probably the first thing anyone who played it will think of when they hear its name mentioned: the tech quotes, and Leonard Nimoy’s narration of them. The quotes themselves are extremely well-selected in how they sum up the thing that you’ve just researched, and. Nimoy was an inspired choice of narrator, as he’s got more than enough gravitas for the job while also being able to inject a hint of wry humour for the more comedic quotes without going full nudge-nudge wink-wink as Civilization 6 does. Basically, the people who made Civilization 4 were smart. They’d read books. They’d done their research. They understood what they were talking about, and they understood how to talk about it, and they generally know a lot about, and have a deep appreciation for, the history of civilization, and so the tech quotes end up having a hell of an effect on the game as they’re an opportunity to take a quick moment to reflect on what you’ve just accomplished instead of it just being another ticked box on your way to world domination.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I think Civilization 4 is a masterpiece of player-positive design. It does as much as it possibly can to eliminate all of the annoyances that had plagued the series up until that point, and in most cases it does it in a startlingly elegant fashion that judo-flips what had previously been a weakness into a big strength. Where it can’t get rid of the micromanagement it at least tries to make it feel worthwhile, and it wraps all of this up in an audiovisual package that’s yet to be bettered; when I replayed it at Christmas I was really struck by the fact that the UI was the only thing that looked a little long in the tooth, and even though it’s comparatively ugly I’d still take the Civ 4 UI in a heartbeat over the disasterpieces in Civ 5 and Civ 6 since it actually tells me useful things without having to dig through a billion misleading sub-menus. And as far as how it felt to play, well, Civilization 4 hasn’t aged a day. I think that’s partly down to the two sequels dropping the ball in a quite astonishing fashion, but I’ve also played other 4Xes that have been more successful in how they innovate (mostly made by Amplitude) and Civilization 4 compares very favourably to those as well; it might have its own idiosyncrasies and flaws but it also hangs together far better as a coherent, unified design than any Civilization game has before or since. Given how the subsequent Civilization games turned out, I think that’s a doubly impressive accomplishment; I strongly suspect we’ll not see Civilization 4’s like again.

The post Civilization Through The Ages: Civilization 4 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Civilization 3 was the first Civilization I actually bought with money. It was released in 2001, and by that point I wasn’t having to rely on bootleg copies or swiping my brother’s Civilization 2 CD when he wasn’t looking; I was still in sixth form¹ but had a small amount of disposable income thanks to a rather unpleasant summer job, and so I wandered down to Dixons² the lunchtime of release day and bought what might actually have been my very last big-box³ PC game ever.

It was a big disappointment.

Civilization 3 has two major problems, both of which were readily apparent to me at the time, but which are drawn into even sharper relief by an additional 18 years of playing 4X games. The first is that even in 2001 I thought it was a startlingly ugly game. The colour palette that’s been chosen is far too light and makes the entire game look like it’s take place on a sun-drenched Pacific island, the tile art is crude and indistinct and features the brownest mountains in  videogames, and the isometric perspective that seemed so fitting in Civilization 2 just looks incredibly flat here. In fact it’s interesting to note a couple of other games that ran into this problem: Call To Power and its sequel are both highly unattractive games that resemble nothing quite so much as a tabletop stuffed full of incoherent junk thanks to the isometric perspective. Alpha Centauri on the other hand has aged a little better; it’s handicapped a great deal by how brown the thing is, but it uses voxels to implement the concept of tiles having variable heights and this pseudo-3D nature is easier to parse two decades on and prevents the game from collapsing into a bland mass of nothing.

Now, Civilization 3 did have something of a surprise for me here. When I initially booted Civilization 3 for a replay last week — only the second time I’d done so since Civilization 4 came out in 2005 — it was set to the 1024×768 resolution that was standard at the time and looked just as bad as it did when it first came out (and believe me, the intervening eighteen years haven’t helped it at all). However, these days there’s widescreen patches and/or hacks for just about every older strategy game out there, so I went looking for a way to upscale Civilization 3 to 1080p. It turns out this is quite easy to do by editing an .ini file, and so I discovered that some of Civilization 3’s rough edges disappear entirely at 1920×1080. Many of the UI components lose their jaggedness and the advisor portraits actually look pretty damn good, and while the actual map is still a goddamn mess and isn’t dramatically improved by being able to see more of it at once, the military units scattered across it are at least a little more attractive for having been made smaller and sharper. Civilization 3 is almost on the cusp of being acceptable-looking at 1080p, and it’s just a shame it came out a decade too early for that resolution to be an option.

Civilization 3’s other problem is that it’s the first game in the series to make major changes to the classic Civilization formula. Given the almost-godlike status Civilization 2 had during the latter half of the 1990s this was something that I saw as sacreligious at the time. I was expecting something that was to Civilization 2 what Civ 2 was to the original Civilization: something evolutionary rather than revolutionary, something that was very recognisably the same game with some tweaks, additions and updated graphics.Instead I got a game where the visuals were arguably worse than in Civ 2 and Firaxis had taken a sledgehammer to the mechanics, smashing them into tiny pieces and reassembling them into something that, at best, only half-resembled what I recognised as being Civilization. I didn’t exactly hate the resulting game, but I definitely enjoyed it far less than Civilization 2 and didn’t really understand why they’d decided to mess with one of the best games of all time.

Looking back on it with the benefit of eighteen years and another three games’ worth of hindsight, that reaction is partially on me rather than Civilization 3; the series can’t stay still forever and Civilization 3 had to do something to seriously shake up the game mechanics if it was going to avoid the kind of stagnation that the RTS genre was undergoing at around about the same time. In fact, the first thing that struck me when I went back to it recently with a fresh pair of eyes is how forward-thinking Civilization 3 really is, since most of what it introduced has gone on to form the core building blocks of modern Civilization. Things like tile improvements being split off from Settlers and handed to a dedicated Worker unit. Giving your cities a clearly-defined set of borders around their territory, along with a new Culture resource that drives the expansion of your city borders and which can make neighbouring enemy cities revolt and join your empire. Switching unit maintenance to cost money instead of production. The arrival of the modern diplomatic interface⁴ and the ability to make deals that go beyond technology trading and peace treaties. Strategic resources that allow you to build certain units and improvements. National wonders that can be built by every civilization as long as you fulfil the prerequisite conditions. Bombardment of enemy cities and units to weaken a strong defensive position. Even great leaders, albeit in an extremely prototypical form where they can’t do a whole lot yet. It’s really quite remarkable how much new ground Civilization 3 broke, and how much of it was later polished into excellence by Civilization 4 in particular.

Because I was now coming at it from the world of modern Civ, where all of those mechanics are now commonplace, I initially found myself enjoying my playthrough of Civilization 3 far more than I was expecting to. The biggest issues the new mechanics have during those first few hours stem from the fact that the implementation isn’t quite there yet, and that they have to coexist with an underlying structure that’s still — just about — driven by the same concepts that were at the core of Civilization 2. For example, Civilization 3 makes the conceptual leap of introducing a cheaper Worker unit to handle building tile improvements, but still makes building a Worker cost a unit of city population just like a Settler, which feels totally ridiculous given how valuable the first few units of each city’s population are. It shows you where your civilization borders are for the first time in the series, but the AI is still just as aggressive with its own colonization efforts and seeing it hike across your territory to settle in the single square that wasn’t covered by your borders — even though that square was in the middle of desert — is a thousand times more obnoxious than anything it got up to in Civilization 2. It introduces strategic resources such as coal, rubber and aluminium which are required to build certain units and improvements, but makes the mistake of making that a hard requirement rather than a soft one — so rather than the resource boosting your build speed, or having a less-powerful alternative that’s always available, if you aren’t lucky enough to have one of that resource within your civilization borders (and remember, you can’t see where they’ve spawned until you research the appropriate technology) then you’re screwed unless you declare war on a neighbouring AI that does have it.

This gives Civilization 3 a sort of lumpy, half-baked feel, especially in light of later games which perfected the new mechanics, but for the first few hours it’s not enough to get in the way of the game being fun. Or at least interesting; despite all of this new stuff Civilization 3 is still playing with a paradigm where Libraries increase science by 50%, your choice of government types are split between Monarchy/Republic and Communism/Democracy (albeit with a third alternative of Fascism bolted into the modern era), and military combat is decided by comparing the same attack/defence values that have been in every Civilization to date. The new bits don’t sit with the old all that well, but I can’t deny that watching them attempt to coexist is fascinating, and up until the endgame the friction between the two isn’t yet so great that the whole thing bursts into flames. It’s pleasant to play something that, at times, feels quite like classic Civ with many of the quality-of-life features I found myself missing in Civilization 2, as well as a few ideas that were killed before they could make it into Civilization 4. You can sacrifice Workers to claim resources outside of your territory with Colonies, which would have been very helpful for those silver and fur deposits that crop up in the frozen north without having to build the city from Frostpunk to get at them, and the Civilization 3 spin on the tech tree is pretty novel, with most branches ending in clearly-marked dead ends that nevertheless give you access to powerful Wonders, buildings and units, while the main route up to the top of the tree only gives you the barest minimum to get by. I understand why those ideas weren’t taken forward from here, but they highlight just how experimental Civilization 3 is and, given that the vast majority of it still exists in modern games in some form, how successful that experiment ultimately was.

That payoff was still several years (and another game) distant, though. Even going back to it now, bereft of prejudice, there are too many pain points in Civilization 3 to be properly consumed by it the way I was in the previous two games I replayed, and those pain points become positively agonising once you hit the endgame. The number one culprit is the strategic resource system, which seems designed to force you into wars more than anything else. For example, a key part of Civilization since the very beginning of the series has been beelining for railroads since they boost the yields of the tiles they build them on. Later titles toned the bonus down, or made it selective, but in Civilization 3 railroads are still boosting tile yields by +1 per Irrigation or Mine (and every tile has one of those two improvements on it), so getting access to them is kind of a big deal. It’s the first and most important step your civilization takes along the road from medieval subsistence to modern mastery. Unfortunately Civilization 3 chooses to gate the ability to build railroads behind access to Coal; if you don’t have a Coal resource, you can’t build railroads. Period. You could try and trade for Coal, but this relies upon the AI knowing what Coal is (it’s not visible until you get Steam Power) and having it hooked up to their road network with a mine. If you’re in the situation of having beelined for Railroads you likely have a big tech advantage anyway, so it’s far more practical to declare war and seize a nearby Coal deposit by force before your civilization falls behind again.

It’s at this point that Civilization 3’s second major pain point rears its ugly head: combat between military units has actually regressed from Civilization 2. We’re still fighting out combat over multiple rounds via a comparison of attack/defence values, but in Civilization 2 a more advanced unit had more HP, meaning that even if a spearman was fighting a tank and got a lucky roll it was still likely to lose the overall combat because the tank had so much more HP to wear down. In Civilization 3, though, we’re back to all units having the same amount of HP regardless of era; Green units start with 3 HP, Veterans have 4 HP and Elite units have 5 HP, and that holds true whether the unit in question is high-tech mechanized infantry or a man holding a stick. I appreciate that we’re starting to sketch the outline of a proper unit veterancy system here, but by giving both the spearman and the tank the same base HP we’re back to a world where a spearman can — with the appropriate boosts from fortification, city walls etc — beat a tank. It just happens a bit less because it needs three lucky rolls instead of one.

So fighting another civilization in Civilization 3 can be very annoying; you suffer attrition even if you’ve brought a huge technological advantage to the fight, so you also need to go in with overwhelming force to make up for it, which leads to micromanaging dozens of units just to put down a bunch of hicks who are barely out of the stone age. Still, let’s assume you’ve won that war, and you’ve now got your Coal, and are happily building Railroads everywhere. You then get the tech required to build Infantry — a key, key unit that in other Civilization games is the thing you build if you can’t build Tanks yet — only to discover that they require Rubber. Tanks? Those require Oil. Good luck prosecuting a war in the modern era without those two resources. And of course I’ve left the best for last: if you are going for a Spaceship victory you’re likely in for a rude shock when you research Rocketry, because that’s the point when you find out that your empire has no Aluminum, which is — you’ve guessed it — a hard requirement to build the spaceship. (Not that Civilization 3 will surface this; it just won’t display the spaceship options in the build menu, which led to some baffled searching through game options because I thought I’d somehow managed to turn the Spaceship Victory off.) If you don’t have it you need to go and get it, which means that even if you’re going for the non-violent Science Victory you need to fight multiple wars to keep your technological advantage and build the sodding thing.

This is why my dominant memory of Civilization 3 from when I originally played it is of an infinite series of wars, and going back to it with more experienced eyes it’s interesting that a) I had almost exactly the same experience and b) I can finally pinpoint why it annoyed me so much: it’s forcing the player to play in one specific way, when Civilization is supposed to accommodate a range of playstyles. It’s proof that while I might have been a little unfair on the game in the past, most of Civilization 3’s problems are very real and its reputation as The Worst Civilization is entirely deserved. However, it also did a remarkable amount to move the series forward in terms of mechanics; never mind that many of the changes don’t successfully land, it’s enough that Civilization 3 dared to make them in the first place, because it opened up the design space for subsequent games to make them actually good. I’m not going to call Civilization 3 a visionary game, but it was definitely a necessary one since without it I don’t think we’d have any of the modern games, and Civilization 4 especially would have been a profound loss. Given that,  I’ll grudgingly accept the way it turned out, especially now that I never have to play it ever again.

(A quick word about Civilization 3’s soundtrack before we wrap up, because I do like talking about soundtracks: it’s a little surprising how underwhelming Civ 3’s base soundtrack is considering the lead designer was Jeff Briggs, who composed the music for the first two Civilization games. The Ancient age themes are okay, if a little percussion-heavy, but it’s somewhat fitting that the Medieval and Industrial themes are basically depression in musical form. It isn’t until you hit the Modern age until you get some properly lively tunes going on, and your enjoyment of them will be gated by how much you like Simcity-style artificial guitar tracks. Still, the Conquests expansion did some work to redress the balance, adding some much better themes for the Ancient and Medieval ages and a truly stellar menu theme, which is still great to zone out to sixteen years on.)

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The post Civilization Through The Ages: Civilization 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’ve not dabbled with mods for many years. That might sound a little strange considering the high volume of PC games that I get through, but it’s partly because of the high volume of PC games that I get through: I usually play games with an eye to reviewing them, you can’t review them fairly if they’re plastered in mods, and over the last few years I’ve had little time to revisit games I’ve already played to see how they change. With the slightly more relaxed (or less obsessive, anyway) attitude I’m taking this year, though, I have the opportunity to do ridiculous, time-expensive things like reinstalling XCOM 2 along with the recently-released Long War mod for it to see what all the fuss is about.

As a mod, Long War 2 doesn’t do much in the way of the classic mod approach of adding new assets or enemies to the game. Well, no, that’s not quite fair, it does add a fair few new weapons and enemies, but that’s a comparatively low-key change and takes a backseat to what Long War 2 is really here for, which is a massive and comprehensive restructure of the mechanics behind the geoscape and battlescape layers of XCOM 2. The base game tried to run with the idea that XCOM was now a guerrilla organisation that had to work in the shadows to undermine the alien regime, but aside from starting most battlescape missions in concealment it didn’t actually do a whole lot to play to that concept, and in places it was painfully obvious that several of the mechanics (Terror missions, the missions where you can counter one of three Dark Events etc.) were simply hurriedly repainted versions of things that already existed in the first XCOM. On its surface Long War 2 is supposed to make the game longer and more intricate, just as the original Long War mod for XCOM 1 did, but what’s impressed me about this sequel is how nearly every single one of its geoscape mechanics embraces the guerrilla concept, weaving it into the game’s structure far more seamlessly than Firaxis managed.

So, here’s what’s still the same on the geoscape:

• You still fly around unlocking new regions with Intel.
• There’s still an Avatar Project counter along with associated Dark Events that you can counter by doing certain missions.

And here is what has changed:

• Literally everything else.

I really wasn’t kidding when I said this mod was comprehensive: nearly everything that the base game did with the geoscape has been either jettisoned completely, or else altered so drastically that it’s barely recognisable in its new form. Take the regions, for example: instead of being simple passive resource generators once unlocked, they’re now individual resistance havens staffed with named rebels who you can passively recruit, or – more likely – break out of prison in one of the jailbreak missions on the battlescape. Each haven can support up to 13 rebels, each of which can be put to work scrounging up supplies, slowly recruiting more rebels or gathering Intel.

Gathering Intel, again, now means more than just receiving an Intel income. Behind the scenes Long War 2 is periodically spawning prospective guerrilla operations around the world – but you’ll only find out about them if you have enough resistance members sniffing around for leads in the region where the operation has secretly spawned. The way this works behind the scenes is that aside from the familiar Intel currency used to unlock more regions, your rebels on Intel duty are also building up a hidden region-specific hoard of intel. Each operation has a minimum threshold of regional intel required to even detect it in the first place, and the chances of detection get better the more regional intel that you have. Checks for detecting an operation happen every six hours so in theory if you just beat that minimum intel threshold you’re going to get a lot of rolls on whether you detect a given operation regardless, but you still want as many rebels on Intel duty as possible because the higher the chance of detection, the earlier you’ll detect the operation in the first place. And this is very, very important because guerrilla operations do not stick around forever; each of them has a limited shelf-life of around 8-12 days after which they disappear from the geoscape, and so if your intel gathering is too anaemic you’ll only detect an operation with a single day left before it expires.

This is bad because of the new Infiltration mechanic. No longer do your strike teams instantly hurl themselves into action the moment they leap off the Skyranger; instead they must now spend multiple days infiltrating the mission area so that they can strike when opposition forces are at their weakest. The strike team will start building up an Infiltration percentage when they arrive, and it takes around five days for a six-man squad to get to 100% Infiltration. Each operation has a baseline level of opposition (ranging from Extremely Light/Light on most operations I’ve done so far to Swarming for HQ assaults) that determines how many enemies you’ll be facing – but you’ll only do this if you infiltrate your team to 100% or more. You’re free to attempt missions with less than 100% Infiltration if you want, but this will increase the number of enemies over and above the baseline; the one mission I tried at 57% Infiltration upped the opposition from Extremely Light to Moderate, which translated to facing 20-odd enemies in huge pods of 6 enemies each compared to the usual 3 x 3 man pods on Extremely Light. I successfully completed the mission, but at the cost of having to leave a sniper behind to stall the bad guys while the rest of the team sprinted for the Skyranger evac zone along with the VIP.

That’s another good thing about having high Infiltration: it means that when you call for an evac the Skyranger will turn up in one or two turns. Low Infiltration means it’ll take three, four, five turns before Firebrand turns up to evacuate the burned and shredded remnants of your team. Low Infiltration also means the enemies will patrol much closer in to your mission objective, as well as causing enemy vision ranges to be larger when your squad is in concealment — and if it’s too low you won’t start the mission in concealment at all. And finally enemy reinforcement drops have been made far more frequent once the shooting starts, making a prolonged fight with Advent forces a losing proposition. You want to spend as much of the mission in concealment as possible, and once you go loud you need to clear out the opposition in just a couple of turns or you’ll eventually be overwhelmed.

Infiltration has two knock-on effects for the rest of the game. First, stealth is now incredibly important. Concealment is far too valuable to be pissed away on getting a free shot in on the first enemy pod you see; instead you end up stalking pods around the map to see if you can potentially get past them without breaking concealment, or if you can catch two together with a rocket or a grenade. Some missions are ideally completed without breaking stealth at all, and — pleasingly — this is now perfectly possible if you drop in a one- or two-man team of the insanely mobile and stealthy Shinobi class. Second, though, and more importantly, while your squad is infiltrating a mission site they’re committed to that location on the geoscape and unavailable for any other activities. Infiltration takes a base of 5-6 days for a 6-person team to infiltrate to 100% – this incidentally means you ideally have to detect operations with at least that long left before they expire, or else make an unwelcome choice between compromising on force strength (fewer soldiers take less time to infiltrate) and facing those 6-8 enemy super-pods, which can quickly lead to things spiralling out of control in the early game. That’s at least five days during which you potentially won’t have access to your finest squad of alien murderers for any other juicy opportunities that might crop up in the meantime. Clearly the usual XCOM approach of having a single A-team with 3-4 reserves being trained up on rotation in case of mishaps isn’t going to work all that well here if the A-team is stuck infiltrating a mission site while the aliens hit one of your resistance havens in a retaliation operation.

This is why Long War 2 features massively expanded soldier rosters along with a named squad management system for convenience. Instead of having 3-4 reserves on rotation I found myself with three entirely separate squads on rotation in the early game, eventually adding a fourth to cover injuries (which take far longer to heal in Long War) and to provide an additional pool of manpower during the set-piece base assaults. I have 28 soldiers on the active duty roster with a further 6 recovering from poison and plasma burns following an unfortunate encounter with a brace of Muton and Viper pods. There are also 3-4 soldiers in training at any one time, either gaining additional abilities in the Advanced Warfare Centre or else being trained up in the Psi Lab or along the new Officer branch in the Guerrilla Tactics School, which confers one-shot abilities that can be used to boost your squad for a turn or delay enemy reinforcements from turning up. There can only be one officer in command on a given mission, but they’ll confer passive Will bonuses to your squad that increase the more missions they go on together, which in the mid-game means Sectoid mindspin attacks have a tendency to just bounce off your fired-up troopers and incentivises keeping the same group soldiers together instead of chopping and changing all the time (although often necessity forces you to do this anyway).

The soldier classes and progression trees have also been significantly changed up, mostly through the expedient of separating out each of the original classes’ ability trees and building a new set that focuses on one specific facet in more depth. Take the base game’s Grenadier, for example, who ran around with a heavy machine gun for suppression and a grenade launcher for demolition; in Long War 2, these weapons and abilities have been split out to the new Grenadier class, who gets the grenade launcher along with a choice between abilities that boost either damaging grenades or support grenades such as flashbangs, and the Gunner, who gets the heavy machine gun and the ability to suppress enemies and reliably destroy cover. (Grenades are basically useless for this now, and only the Gunner’s Demolition ability and the Technical’s rockets will destroy cover 100% of the time.)  The Ranger has been split out into the Shinobi, who gets the sword and the stealth abilities, and the returning Assault class which is built around sprinting through enemy overwatch fire and shotgunning people to death at close range. The Specialist’s drone abilities remain with them, but the rifleman skills go to the new Ranger class.All in all there are now 8 different classes in the game, each of which has a selection of new and familiar skills to choose from, and all of which can be built into a sickeningly powerful murder machine that provides you with an awful lot of options in a fight – if they survive enough missions. Yet another good idea Long War 2 has is to mostly decouple soldier experience from alien kills – you still get some XP for that, but it’s much reduced in comparison to the amount of experience you now get from simply going on a mission in the first place, allowing you to level up new recruits relatively easily without having to faff around arranging killshots for them.

I was deeply impressed by all of these new and altered mechanics and how they supported each other as well as the core fiction that you’re a guerrilla operation going on multiple hit and run raids that require forward planning. The base geoscape design of Long War 2 is one of the most elegant pieces of design I’ve seen in quite some time, and they can lead to some thrilling missions – sending in full 10-man squads to clear the 45-odd baddies populating HQ missions gets downright apocalyptic with the amount of fire and shrapnel that gets sprayed around. Unfortunately I have a bone to pick with the way the campaign has been balanced, and one that might seem a little unreasonable given the name of the mod: it’s too damn long. I accept that having three times as many squads means you now go on three times as many missions; I don’t think that that in and of itself is a bad thing, especially since the tactical decision space created by the new stealth and concealment mechanics is more fulfilling to engage with. I think Long War 2 is actually good enough to support sending your troops on 90 missions in a campaign (as opposed to the 30-ish of the base game).

What it can’t do, though, and what no XCOM game could ever do, is remain engaging through 150+ missions — and this, sadly, is what Long War 2 forces you to do. I am 40(!) hours into my Long War 2 campaign and I’ve just about hit the midpoint with a few regions liberated and the Shadow Chamber being built, and I haven’t even started on the first blacksite mission I got just after the game started. I welcome the meatier mechanics, the more detailed research trees and a more expensive and detailed manufacturing process that’s meant I’ve still been gradually teching up this whole time instead of just plateauing for long periods; there’s always been a sense of forward progress in my campaign. At the same time I look at the game and wonder if it’s really worth spending another 40 hours getting to the end; when I do almost nothing else with my free time for 3 weeks that isn’t playing XCOM¹ and I still only make it halfway through a single campaign, I seriously have to question the point of doing all that insanely good work on the design and then asking so much of the player that you ensure that only the tiniest fraction of the people who download Long War 2 will ever see it all the way through.

Oh, and also Long War 2 is, if anything, even worse than the base game at obfuscating its mechanics. It doesn’t explain a single goddamn thing about them, which is really weird considering how well put together they are; I have a suspicion that various regions increasing their Advent troop strength in response to my guerrilla activities is pulling resources away from the Avatar project given how slowly it’s progressing, but I have no way to link the two to prove the cause, and I wouldn’t have had a clue as to how gathering Intel related to unlocking missions if I hadn’t watched a couple of Youtube videos on the subject. There’s a specific chain of missions that lead to each region being liberated from Advent control, but the only way you can tell the difference between the mission that kicks this chain off and the generic guerrilla operations that otherwise spawn all the time is that the liberation chain will have the objective “Find a lead” and the generic operation will have the objective “Find a Lead”. I know Firaxis are the current market leaders at fucking up literally everything to do with communicating to the player how they should play their games, but just because Long War 2 is built on top of one of their products it’s no excuse for Pavonis to do the same thing here. I enjoy the more complex systems of Long War, but they really, really need to be explained to the player far better than they currently are, especially considering the huge time investment the mod is asking them to make – as it is you’re making far-reaching strategic decisions with almost no background information informing your actions, making it very easy for misunderstandings at the start of the game to eventually scupper a campaign 20 or 30 hours in.

I feel a little bad putting the boot into Long War for being too long, especially since it’s very easy to forget that it is “just” a mod rather than the full-blown (and far superior) remake of XCOM 2 that Long War 2 feels like. Pavonis have some crazy talent and it’s good that they’ve made the jump from mod team to independent developer, as I feel that they have some really good ideas about how to make strategy games that could end up creating something special if given the chance to blossom properly in a standalone game. However they suffer from a not-uncommon malady amongst developers of all stripes these days, which is that they lack somebody who’ll tell them when they’ve gone too far and when to reign the project back in scope. I prize focus above all else in the games that I play, but while Long War 2’s mechanics are admirably well-focused (for the most part) there was absolutely no need to bloat the game length the way they have here, other than that it was a sequel to a mod called Long War. I’d be very interested in a mod for this mod that adjusted the pacing so that it took half the time — the Short Long War, if you will. As it is, Long War 2 heroically staves off blundering into the trap of becoming a repetitive slog for a very long time, but that it does eventually fall in regardless is entirely its own fault and ensures it just misses out on being a version of XCOM 2 that I’d always choose over the base game.

The post Replay: XCOM 2 – Long War 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

God help me, but I was actually looking forward to Civilization VI. After experiencing both Civilization V and Beyond Earth at launch I really shouldn’t have been; both were eventually patched into a decent state and after two expansions Civ V even went on to surpass its predecessors, but at launch they were flawed, buggy messes with plenty of basic functionality missing. Given Firaxis’s previous track record here it seems foolish to have expected great things from Civilization VI on launch, but after peeking at the development videos I just couldn’t help myself. The lead designer is the guy who pulled Civ V out of the muck. As a headline idea I can’t exactly call unpacking city management onto the world map inspired since Endless Legend got there first, but it’s potentially completely game-changing and Civ VI looked like it was going to explore the concept in far more depth. And in a departure from previous Civs they weren’t going to leave trade, espionage and religion for the expansion packs and instead integrated them into Civ VI as core features, essentially making it a Greatest Hits version of Civ V post-expansions. How could this possibly go wrong?

Well, if you have any familiarity with Firaxis whatsoever all I need to do is say “It’s Firaxis” and you’ll probably just know what’s wrong with Civilization VI. It is a classic Firaxis game, packed full of great design and mechanical ideas that are genuinely daring and will impact the entire genre for the next decade, if not more, but which technically-speaking is a bit of a car crash — I’m not talking about basic code quality here as it ran perfectly acceptably on my system, but rather the eternal Firaxis bugbears of AI, general game balance and user interface. It would be unfair to say that Civ VI has been executed badly since it gets so much right, but I definitely think that (for example) Firaxis considers any flaws in the UI as a secondary priority, a cosmetic feature that they can polish up later, and then it goes on to have a disproportionately bad impact on the game because the player is having to use that busted UI literally 100% of the time that they are playing it.

As usual I’m getting ahead of myself, though. There’s a hell of a lot to like about Civilization VI and it’s also a little unfair to set the tone of the review by opening with a diatribe about what it does badly even if that also happens to be a pretty fucking long list of stuff that really got up my nose. For what it’s worth I feel like the issues are less acute than they were in Civ V or Beyond Earth — I certainly don’t think Civ VI is going to require a full expansion in order to fix the worst of what’s wrong with it — and so I’ll leave the badness for the end where it can be examined in the full context of Civilization VI’s considerable accomplishments.

The Civilization series is the PC’s flagship turn-based strategy game franchise that covers the progress of human history from the invention of irrigation and the wheel all the way up to nuclear weapons and the space race. Probably you’ve at least heard of it, but I apologise in advance if you’ve never played it since I’m going to be referring to certain core game mechanics that have persisted throughout the series’ 25-year history — and the state they were in as of Civilization V in particular — as if you know what I’m talking about. The interesting thing about Civilization VI (and about all iterations of the series, really) is what it changes from the installment that preceded it, and it’s impossible to have detailed discussion about these changes and why they are good (or not) without assuming some pre-existing knowledge – that or making this review the length of a small book, and if you scroll down some way you’ll see that it’s already pretty damn long. So let’s get cracking, shall we?

Civilization V, then. It launched in a pretty abject state, but after two expansions and four years of patches it ended up being the best of the series by quite some considerable way. It wasn’t without certain systemic flaws, however, the most acute of which was that it was absolutely pointless to go wide (4X-speak for building a lot of cities to monopolise as many resources and produce as much stuff as possible) thanks to the global happiness mechanic. Going tall and pouring all your investment into just 4-6 incredibly built-up super-cities was by far the best way to play until you were ready to unleash the blitzkrieg and make a bunch of puppet cities via war. That drastically restricted the range of viable strategies on offer, and the various attempted solutions that the expansion packs added all suffered from the same issue: since they hadn’t been in the design from the very start they always functioned as more of a band-aid to a problem that was never truly solved.

Now, the nice thing about Firaxis — and why they’re one of my favourite developers despite their repeated UI catastrophes — is that they take mechanical criticism of their games very seriously. Civ V’s Going Tall problem was itself caused by an overzealous attempt to fix the previous problem with the series: ICS, or Infinite City Sprawl, where it was never not a good idea to build another city even if it was on a one-tile island in the middle of an ocean, and so the player ended up in micromanagement hell dealing with dozens and dozens of cities. Civ VI similarly tries to fix Going Tall, but its solution is far more subtle than the sledgehammer of Global Happiness. Instead it opts to overhaul something that’s remained fundamentally unchanged since the very first Civilization: the way cities build their improvements. In Civ VI, cities are now semi-unpacked, with almost no buildings existing in the central city tile and most being built in themed District tiles that exist externally to the city on the world map. Some of these districts have strict requirements on where they can go (like military Encampments not being allowed to be placed adjacent to the central city tile), but most of them instead have passive adjacency bonuses that let them derive a benefit from clever placement, and it’s this that now prevents you from just spamming out cities willy-nilly since you really have to think about tile placement and how to make the most of the surrounding terrain in order to get the best out of them.

An example. The science district is the Campus, which can initially build a Library that gives two science per turn. Later it can build a University that gives 4 science per turn, and then a Research Lab that gives 6 science per turn, but you won’t be building either of those until 100-200 turns into the game. Initially the Library and its relatively piddly 2 science are all that are available to you — that, plus any adjacency bonuses you manage to get from putting the Campus down somewhere good. It gets +1 science for being next to rainforest or mountain tiles, so if you find a particularly good spot to plonk one down next to one chunk of rainforest and two mountain tiles that’ll be +3 science. That’s huge in the early game. It’s more than doubled the initial yield of the Campus without doing anything more than settling your city in a place where you could actually make use of that bonus. Commerce Districts get similar bonuses for being next to rivers; Industrial Districts for being next to mines (which must now be built on hills or resources, so you can’t just spam six mines on grassland around an Industrial District); Theatre Districts for being next to Wonders. The adjacency bonuses become less important as you move into the mid-game and the rest of the game systems start coming online, but in the early game they’re absolutely critical for getting a good start, especially since building a district is quite expensive and the cost goes up with the total number of districts of a certain type existing within your empire (so building a Commerce District will increase the cost of the next Commerce District you build in a different city).

Just considered on its own, without bringing any other game mechanics into the equation, the District system achieves two things. First, while we’ve gone back to expanding relatively early almost always being a good idea there’s absolutely no point in doing so unless you’ve got a really good spot lined up for your next city; somewhere with lots of space to expand into the right type of terrain. If you found your city in a bad place your districts will get poor yields and you’ll have made it harder for yourself further down the line. Finding a good spot for the second city is easy. Finding a good spot for the third city is slightly less easy. Finding good spots for cities four, five and six becomes increasingly difficult as you and the AI eat up all of the available room. Space is now the major limiting factor on expansion; space and terrain and the availability of fresh water, which feels far more natural than the Global Happiness system and the inflating tech/social policy costs in Civ V. And the second major impact of Districts is that unless you have found an absolutely amazing location it’s no longer possible – or efficient – for one city to do everything. With the spiralling District costs you need to specialise to at least some degree, and I’m happy to report that aside from Commerce there’s no district type that you absolutely have to have in every single one of your cities; in all previous Civs the Library has been the second or third thing I’ve built in all of my cities, but in Civ VI I never even built a Campus in about half of them. It just wasn’t worthwhile – or necessary — and so I instead focused on what those cities were going to be best at, whether that be production, money or just being in a good spot for building Wonders.

Ah yes, the Wonders. Certain Wonders have always had terrain-based requirements in order for them to be built, like the city having to be next to a mountain to build Neuschwanstein or next to the coast to build the Great Lighthouse or The Colossus. This was always a little too restrictive, however, as finding a good city location that combined these Wonder requirements with the production required to actually build the thing ended up being a bit of a pain. Civilization VI’s Wonders are at the same time both more flexible and more restrictive thanks to the city management system; Wonders take up their own tile and so can in theory be built anywhere within a three-hex radius of the building city, but the tile they’re built on has to fulfil some very specific requirements such as being a river tile next to an Industrial District, or a tile that’s adjacent to both a Commerce District and a Cattle resource. With foreknowledge the majority of these requirements can be planned for, but if you’re targeting a specific Wonder it’s a very good idea to check in advance what you’ll need and to make sure you have an appropriate tile ready and waiting for it when it becomes available.

I like this system a lot. Wonders and Districts spill out onto the world map to share space with the usual city improvements, in effect bringing back the City Screen I so missed from Civilization 1 and integrating it into the game seamlessly. Once you have a good understanding of the system you start to plan your expansion the moment you plop a city down — building mines on that cluster of three hills will ensure a hefty bonus for an adjacent Industrial District, but you need to remember to leave some space free next to the Entertainment Complex so that you can take a stab at building the Colosseum wonder. You also need to keep in mind the fact that you still do need the basic improvements such as farms, mines and lumber mills in order for your cities to grow in the first place – a city can only support one or two districts when it is first built, with further districts being unlocked once the city hits certain population milestones.  Building a district or Wonder initially blocks off a tile from being worked by a citizen and you’ll lose any basic yields that tile might have had, meaning it’s sometimes an agonising choice over whether or not to sacrifice a tile that could otherwise be useful later on in the game. The new city management adds a lot of interesting decision-making space to the game, and what I particularly like about it is that at the moment it appears to be quite flexible; there is no one true way to build a city, and how you expand is going to change based on where the city is and your strategy at the time.

It’s an avowed goal of the Civilization designers that when they add complexity in one place they take it away in another to avoid overwhelming the player. Or rather I should say they streamline, since what Civ VI does as a tradeoff for city management in no way diminishes the game: they’ve taken a fair chunk of faff out of how you build tile improvements. The improvements themselves still have the yield-boosting effects you’d expect, and they’re still (mostly) constructed by Builder units who roam around the map setting up farms and seaside resorts; the difference is that where in previous Civs you’d have a lengthy wait before your improvement was finished (sometimes 15-20 turns depending on what you were building), Civ VI’s improvements are built instantly. This is a huge quality-of-life feature that cannot be understated, and it feels fantastic to just immediately get a set of farms up and running the moment your first Builder spawns. The instant builds are balanced by Builders having a limited set of build charges — a base of three, with more being added by Wonders, social policies and unique civilization bonuses — and once those charges are gone the Builder is expended and disappears from the map. Basically they’re converting city production into tile improvements more or less efficiently depending on how you’ve got your empire set up, which strikes me as a more elegant, less spammy version of the Public Works system from Call To Power. The only thing that Builders cannot build are roads; these are now spawned automatically as your trade caravans travel between cities, which both removes a sizeable pain point from the game (was there anything more tedious in Civ than building a million roads?) and makes getting your trade engine online early even more important.

The other big change Civ VI makes is to the technology tree, which up until this point has been possibly the single most important part of Civilization and which has received only comparatively minor tweaks in the twenty-five years that the series has been going. Civ V introduced a second tree of Social Policies that could be bought with your Culture income and which basically functioned as your government type, but ultimately they were far too static and limited for any really interesting decisions to be made. Usually you’d decide at the start of the game if you wanted to go Tradition or Liberalism, and then a little further you’d pick another tree based on which victory type you were after; all your choices were basically predetermined. As this bolt-on solution didn’t really work, Civ VI opts for something rather more drastic: it chops the technology tree in half, and takes the 50% of it that consisted of social technologies and puts it in a new Civics Tree. Now you’ve got two tech trees running in parallel, each focusing on a different side of the game: in general Science buys Technologies which introduce new resources, tile improvements, production boosts and military units, while Culture buys Civics that unlock both faith- and culture- based buildings and Wonders as well as new policy cards that can be used to customise your form of government – more on this in a paragraph or two.

The effect this has is to lessen the emphasis on a strong science base while boosting the importance of culture even if you’re not actively pursuing a Culture Victory. As I said earlier, while science remains important throughout the game it is no longer necessary to construct a Library in every single damn city you build; you can get by with just a few cities specialising in it. Meanwhile if you take the anaemic approach to culture that I usually do you’ll find yourself falling behind in both trees thanks to the technology/civic boosts built into this new system. The way these work is that every single technology and civic in each tree has 50% of the progress bar part-shaded in, along with a short condition listed at the bottom of the tech card like “Meet another civilization” or “Kill 3 Barbarians”. Once you fulfil that condition you’ll activate the boost for that tech and the part-shaded 50% of the progress bar is immediately filled in for free. All of the boost conditions are themed to the technology in question (so the “Kill 3 Barbarians” one boosts Bronze Working as your civilization suddenly comprehends the importance of finding new and better ways to stab people) and so you’re probably not going to get all of them if you’re specialising in the way I just described, but you can target the majority of these boosts with just minor modifications to your playstyle and so progress along both the Civic and Technology trees much faster than you would do otherwise. The boosts are also used to make both trees somewhat interdependent, in that some Tech boosts require you to have researched certain Civics and vice versa.

The real impact of the Civic tree is to be found in the Government screen, however. You start the game auto-researching Code Of Laws; once that’s done you get access to your first form of government, Chiefdom, and four potential policies – two Economic, two Military. Each policy card has an effect which is relatively powerful but extremely specific, such as +2 build charges for Builders or +5 Combat Strength when fighting Barbarians. Each government type has a certain number of policy slots in one of four categories — Military, Economic, Diplomatic and Wildcard, which can take any policy type — along with a passive bonus such as cheaper gold purchases. This being the start of the game, Chiefdom is fairly crap with just one Military and one Economic slot for your four policy cards, so you have to pick one of each of the two types that best fits your opening strategy. It quickly gets better, though; every single Civic that you research unlocks new policy cards, and as your options expand you find yourself chopping and changing policies according to short term goals – for example, those Builder bonus cards are less useful towards the mid- and end-game when most tiles have already been developed, so you’ll find yourself tossing those in favour of a gold, culture or science policy of some sort. After a couple of dozen turns your Civic progress unlocks the first real tier of Government types There’s three governments on each tier, and each set of three can be broadly summed up as “Military-focused”, “Economy-focused”, and “Middle of the road”.  A military-focused government will have more slots for military policies and fewer for economic policies while the reverse is true for the economy-focused government, and moving up a government tier adds two more policy slots to each government type. In short, the faster you go up the Civic tree the more choice you will have between policies and the more policy bonuses you will be able to enact.

This is essentially going back all the way to Civilization 1 and dragging the government system there kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and I have to say it works really well. The policies are a bit of a mixed bag and there are some pretty duff ones in there, but also some very powerful ones, and once you start opening up policy slots and stacking bonuses in a certain area you can really start to get an engine going, whether that engine is generating gold, culture, faith or is just really well optimised for kicking the shit out of other civilizations. The Government screen where you make these policy changes is locked most of the time and requires a gold fee to unlock — however, any time you complete a Civic it unlocks for free, and once it’s unlocked you can make any changes to your policies and your form of government that you want with no penalties such as unrest gumming up the works. Since you’re getting through the Civic tree at a rate of one Civic per 10-12 turns this means you have almost complete freedom to completely change your government and policies at will with very little bullshit involved.

This is why culture is now at least as important as science in Civ VI: it lets you do far, far more than it ever did before, and if you’re not interested in the military it’s probably even the superior of the two to invest in. It lends a new sense of purpose to the Great Works/Archaeologist shenanigans, which return from Civ V in a more-or-less unchanged format. Previously you only really cared about this stuff if you were going for a Culture Victory and wanted the Tourism bonuses, but now you want as many Great Works and Artifacts as you can stuff into your museums since doing so will boost your culture output to the max.

We have now reached the point where I stop saying complimentary things about Civ VI and start hitting it with my hating stick. Before I commence the beating, however, I should mention a few other bits and pieces: Great People have been overhauled so that they now provide unique bonuses when expended, and City States provide similar bonuses once you’re friends with them. Both types of bonus take a leaf out of the Explorer bonuses from Beyond Earth: Rising Tide, in that they’re split about 50-50 between “somewhat underwhelming” and “extremely goddamn powerful”; the latter group makes it well worth investing in both of these systems. Religion is back and basically unchanged save for Faith being slightly better-integrated into the game economy; ditto for the combat system, which lets you combine two units to create a single super-unit with a slightly higher attack value so that you can somewhat leverage a superior industrial base in the world of one-unit-per-tile, but which is otherwise the same apart from apparently removing ICBMs from the game, which made me sad (you have to drop your nukes from Bomber units now). This stuff is all perfectly functional and not really worth inflating the word count on this review any further for.

So! Time to start complaining. The first and most obvious complaint: you know all of that shit I just spent the last 3,500 words describing in detail? The game explains almost none of it to you. I wouldn’t have had a clue that Districts, Settlers and Builders all increased in cost each time you built one if I hadn’t read it on a forum. It genuinely took me some time to figure out that “Amenities” were simply a pointlessly-renamed Happiness system, which is now sort-of-kind-of-local again – each copy of a luxury resource provides enough for four cities, so once you make your fifth city you’d better make sure you haven’t traded away your second copy. Again, wouldn’t have known about that if I hadn’t read it on a forum. Yes, it is true that I haven’t played the tutorial, but I have literally thousands of hours invested in Civilization at this point and I really shouldn’t have to; the game should be perfectly capable of explaining itself through its tooltips and UI. I’ve been a huge fan of putting as many tooltips into the game as possible ever since Master of Orion 2, which is why I was utterly dismayed to find that Civ VI barely has any – and the ones it does have are so low-information that they might as well not exist at all.

Take city happiness – sorry, I mean Amenities. Click on a city and you’ll see its net Amenities value in the bottom right, which is basic functionality I don’t feel like giving any credit for. Try to mouseover it to find out what’s contributing to that net Amenity value and how it breaks down into positive and negative values, though, and you’ll be disappointed since nothing happens. If you go into the city report – which just summons a very small sidebar from the left of the screen — it’ll provide a partial breakdown, but the categories are very vague; it says I have one Amenity from my Civics, for example, but not which Civic. It says I have 3 from Luxury Resources, but not which Luxuries, or where they are. Viewing tile resource yields is a particularly important activity in Civ VI given the new city management, but the hotkey to summon them is inexplicably missing and you have to go in and check a box over the minimap. Once they’re turned on you’ll notice a strange omission: it won’t show you how many resources your districts are producing. Mousing over will show you the yield of any citizens currently working in a district, but there’s no way of seeing the contribution your buildings and adjacency bonuses are making to the yield short of going into the city report (again) and looking at the building tab. Yes, I know that technically these are buildings, but they exist on the map as tiles now and the UI should have been adjusted to take this into account.   Mousing over the various resource yields at the top of the city pane is a little more forthcoming, but even here there’s weirdly baffling stuff like +8 production from “outgoing districts”. I have 24 hours in Civ VI and four games completed, and I have absolutely no idea what this means.

This litany of woe is seemingly without end. There’s no way of seeing how close your cities are to claiming new tiles via culture, or which tiles they’re going to claim. The city production queue is completely absent. I had to figure out district adjacency bonuses through trial and error since the placement screen is so awful at telling you what’s going on. Some of the Policies you can enact double these bonuses, but they won’t tell you upfront what the net change in your culture/science output is going to be as a result; the only way to find out is to actually enact and confirm the policy (which locks the Government screen) and see how much your culture output goes up by. It might even go down if you’ve switched out another culture-boosting policy for that one, but there’s simply no way of knowing without actually doing it, and this cripples the interesting decision space created by the policy system since it’s impossible to judge the actual value of a lot of the policies you’re presented with. Still, even finding the policies you might want to enact in the first place is a bit of a challenge; even when you’ve got the selection filtered down to just Economic policies you still find yourself looking at a huge clump of twenty identical policy cards and reading through the very small text on each one to try and identify the one you want. I suppose Civ VI does try and help you out when you discover a new Civic by marking any new policies — but it does this with the tiniest, most adorable exclamation mark symbol in the world, and even when you’re actively looking for it it’s quite easy to miss.

Because the UI is so bad I found myself resorting to the Civilopedia far more often than I should have to see what was going on, but even this is fraught with risk. At the end of my Kongo game when I was making a final push for Tourism I decided to build some Seaside Resorts. Inexplicably, though, I couldn’t seem to build them on any of the coastal tiles I moved my Builders onto. Mousing over the improvement icon in the Builder menu was no help, so I opened up the Civilopedia and typed in “Seaside” and then clicked on the first item in the list, which was “Seaside Resorts”. This took me to a one-line description: “Seaside Resorts are a special improvement that can be built after researching the Radio technology. These generate Tourism based on the tile’s Appeal”. Thanks, Civ, but I already fucking knew that; what I want to know is where can I build the sodding things? I eventually found the answer in another Civilopedia entry for “Seaside Resort” which provided the detailed description that I wanted, but it failed me completely when I was looking up what to do with my Thermonuclear Devices. It was only because I’d built a couple of bombers in a previous game and had noticed the “Drop Nuclear Device” option in the Aerodrome menu that I eventually managed to nuke Sparta.

Final UI gripe (well, not final, but I don’t want to spend much more than a thousand words talking about this) are the unit controls. Civ VI repeats the Civ V mistake of auto-cycling through your units and having snap-to enabled – but on a short time delay. What that means is that the game will present you with a unit to move. You, perhaps, will move the unit, and then start moving another nearby unit – only for Civ VI to suddenly wrest control away from you; that’s not the unit it wanted you to move next; it wants you to move this unit over here instead. This would be annoying enough on its own, but the timing between selecting a new unit to move and the game interrupting you is just long enough so that you’ll be clicking the mouse button to commit the move order at the moment your unit control changes. This leads to a lot of occurrences of e.g. sending hapless Builders straight into the path of a marauding Barbarian unit. When you repeatedly do this over the course of a six hour game it becomes absolutely infuriating. It’s not okay to take control away from the player like that. It’s probably the number one UI sin you can commit, so of course Civilization VI throws itself wholeheartedly down this pathway to hell because this is Firaxis and, just like Blizzard will never hire a competent story writer, so Firaxis will never hire a competent UI designer. Or at least never let them do their jobs.

And as I said in the opening to this review, these issues with the UI are not a little deal. You are interfacing with it 100% of the time you are playing the game, which means you are constantly dealing with its shit. Nowhere is this more apparent than the trade system, which is pretty much just the trade system from the launch version of Beyond Earth. You know, the horribly broken one where the number of trade routes scaled exponentially with the number of cities that you had, but where they also expired after a certain period of time and the game gave no indication of what the previous route had been when it was time to manually reset it. That system rightly caught an awful lot of flak when Beyond Earth came out and Firaxis eventually did mark the previous route, but the fact that it’s been in three games now (Beyond Earth, Brave New World and now Civilization VI) must mean they think they’ve got this whole trade thing nailed when nothing could be further from the truth; I’m sick and tired of constantly batting away trade popups at the start of every single turn, and to add insult to injury they’ve used the same interface for counterspying. (In fact counterspying is worse, since you first have to confirm the city you want to “send” the spy to when in fact you want them to stay right where they are, and then you have to select which of the ten city districts you want them to protect. With three spies and an eight-turn timer on spy missions this gets old really fucking quickly.)  If you’re not going for a cultural victory — and so don’t need the Tourism bonuses from having active trade routes with other civilizations — I suppose it’s not too bad, just a matter of mindlessly clicking on the trade routes with the highest numbers, but if you need to maintain specific trade routes for whatever reason it’s an absolute nightmare to deal with.

The really annoying thing about this trade system, as ever, is that you’re forced to interact with it. Trade is an absolutely huge part of Civ VI, to the point where I suspect they’ve crippled other systems in order to “encourage” you to use it. It represents the vast majority of your gold income, and Firaxis have really taken a sledgehammer to production in this game; unless you have three cities with overlapping Industrial District bonuses and a shitload of hills the only way to get a decent rate of production going in the endgame is to bolster your cities with domestic trade routes. Even then it takes something like 60 turns to build all the spaceship projects for the Science Victory because you have to do a lot of them in series rather than in parallel; this constant mashing of the End Turn button triggered horrible flashbacks to Beyond Earth’s awful endgame. Whether you’re using caravans for gold or production you have to prioritise trade above all else, which means building Commerce Districts and Harbours ASAP (each of which lets you create an additional trade route). I thought this was a crying shame in a game that had otherwise managed to avoid having a One True Path to victory. Also, because you’re running so many trade routes it has the side-effect of massively boosting the value of the Policies that enhance them, to the point where you’re crippling yourself if you don’t have one or two active, It’s a system so bad it brings down other areas of Civilization VI where genuinely good work has been done. There’s basically nothing about trade that I like (save the fact that your caravans now create roads automatically) and it’s one of the areas that I really wish they’d streamlined a la the city improvements rather than cutting and pasting in a terrible system from one of their worst games.

Let’s wrap up by talking about Civ VI’s AI. It’s terrible. I suppose that doesn’t come as a huge shock; I’m a little more forgiving of weaknesses in AI than I am other areas as I’m very, very aware of how difficult it must be to make an AI that can play a game as complicated as Civilization VI in anything approaching a competent manner, and it’s one of the areas that tends to show the most genuine improvement once exposed to a wider playerbase who are very good at picking holes in it. Unfortunately Civ VI’s AI is nothing but holes, to the point where I’m struggling to see where the actual substance is. Strategically it’s not particularly coherent; the diplomatic AI is supposed to have set agendas that make it a bit more predictable, but I just got out of a very strange game as Qin Shi Huang versus Victoria and Teddy Roosevelt. Victoria has an agenda where she approves of anyone on the same continent as her, which I was. Roosevelt on the other hand is a big softy who wants to keep the peace and dislikes anyone who starts a fight. I hadn’t started any fights. I had a positive relationship score with them both. I also had a fairly decent standing army regardless of this as I’ve been conditioned by the psychotic Civ V AI to never display any weakness that might tip whatever algorithm governs war declarations over the edge, and this turned out to be a very good thing because they both wardecced me on the same turn despite our “good” relationship.

Of course because the AI still can’t handle one unit per tile and relies on what is informally referred to as the “unit carpet” to overwhelm the player it was a relatively trivial matter for me to take out twice my number of English Warriors without losing a single unit of my own, and once I’d done this both Teddy and Victoria seemed to lose heart and sued for peace – again, on the same turn. Not three turns later I received a Declaration of Friendship from Victoria; apparently my wholesale slaughter of her army hadn’t soured her on me any and it was all just a big misunderstanding. Teddy was also remarkably chummy after this as well, but I took it to heart as the same lesson I learned from Civ V: the agendas are just a flimsy camouflage and you cannot trust any of the indicators the diplomatic AI gives you as to its attitude because it still could go rabid and attack you at any moment. Relative military strength doesn’t seem to discourage them either; in other games I’ve had civs attack me with Warriors and Horsemen when I was fielding at least as many Musketmen, only to be eradicated from the map for their trouble. Even helping them out in a war doesn’t score you any points; I declared on a Qin Shi Huang that was midway through the the process of eating Victoria alive, only for Victoria to call me up and denounce me as a warmonger for having the temerity of joining the fight against a common foe.

The tactical AI is just as broken. Actually, back up a little bit: the way the AI deals with its armies in general is just plain weird. I don’t think it understands the Districts system all that well and so tends to undercook its science, but even when playing on Emperor where the inherent bonuses it got from the difficulty were enough to ensure it had rough technological parity with me I still never saw it upgrade a unit. It absolutely craps out Warriors and Spearmen and Horsemen (especially Horsemen) in the Ancient Age, but then once it has a standing army it refuses to keep them updated. If it suffers losses it’ll replace them with the latest and greatest version of whatever the latest horse unit is, but more often than not it’ll be 1600 AD (which in Civ VI’s timeline means you just hit the Atomic Age) and you’ll be gunning down hordes of Knights with Infantry despite the AI having had the capability to build Musketmen for quite some time.

Part of this I’m fairly sure is down to the AI’s weird obsession with horses. It fucking loves building horse units, and this is kind of a problem because while it knows not to attack a city directly with horses, it doesn’t know not to build armies composed 100% of horses. I’ve watched it roll up to a city-state with a dozen Knights, dispose of the defenders after a brief tussle and then sit impotently outside of the city walls because it didn’t bring any infantry or siege equipment. Anyway, I’m sure that even though it could build Musketmen there’s a significant chunk of the AI code that just reads “HORSES” and so it could do nothing but build the most advanced horse unit available to it, the considerably less-powerful Knight.  What this means in game terms is that all you have to do to beat the AI is survive until about turn 150, at which point its army of horses will be thoroughly obsolete and you can just roll over it with whatever passes for technologically modern units at that time.

I’ve intentionally omitted talking about quite a lot of stuff in Civ VI — both good stuff like the excellent visuals, and bad stuff like Sean Bean’s narration being fine but the content of the tech quotes he’s reading out being some of the most shallow and insipid horseshit I’ve ever seen in a 4X¹. This is already the longest review I’ve ever written by quite some way². The previous record holder is either Rome 2 or Stellaris, and you might notice something of a common theme here: both of those were pretty damn broken/incomplete on launch too. Despite my copious word-vomit I actually think Civ VI is the least broken of the three, though. AI aside all the working parts are there — sure, some of them are poorly-balanced and most of them are obfuscated behind an atrocious UI, but these will hopefully improve quickly. After all, the reason the constant UI fuckups enrage me so much is because they’re so easy to avoid, and the corollary to that is that they’re also quite easy to fix, or at least patch. That’s in no way an excuse and Civ VI deserves every word of the thrashing I’ve just given it, but the real reason this review turned out so long is because there are elements of Civ VI’s design that are just downright inspired; on paper, just speaking in terms of pure design, it is possibly the best game Firaxis have ever made. It’s so exciting to see the potential in how all the systems — science, culture, great people, city states, districts, faith, even the hated trade system — supplement and flow into one another, and even more frustrating to have all of these pointless fucking issues that simply didn’t need to be here constantly dragging the experience down. Both of these are emotions that induce me to write a lot of words. Right now I can’t help but be disappointed despite having had fair amount of fun with it, but there’s certainly a hell of a lot of potential here. Give Civilization VI three months and it’ll be a far more solid experience; give it a year and I strongly suspect it’ll be the best Civilization game ever. It’s just not there yet.

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P.S. if you need a quick injection of joy into your life try listening to the Civilization VI theme. Christopher Tin is really good at this stuff.

The post Thoughts: Civilization VI appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

About six months after my glowing review of the original XCOM reboot I wrote a followup piece that comprehensively laid into the game for flaws that had become apparent on subsequent playthroughs. The aliens’ completely passive presence on the geoscape. The introduction of new, tougher enemy types being linked to your completing plot missions that had no time factor involved, allowing you to game the system by researching endgame weapons and armour before tackling any of them. An inverse difficulty curve where the first three months of the game were by far the hardest as you desperately tried to keep your rookies alive with only basic weapons and equipment. A whole host of paper tiger systems (such as panic), where the various NPCs screamed at you to play the game in a certain way in an attempt to mask the fact that playing slowly and cautiously — and liberally vomiting explosives anywhere in direct contravention of Vahlen’s instructions — would result in flawless completion of 95% of missions. The Enemy Within expansion pack alleviated some of these flaws, but it couldn’t fix the worst of them as they were baked into the very structure of the game itself. Any trulycomprehensive cure would require a complete restructure of XCOM’s systems that only a sequel could provide.

Fast-forward three years, and my initial impression on playing XCOM 2 was that series lead Jake Solomon had been reading this blog¹ and had made a game that directly incorporated all of that feedback. At first glance XCOM 2 is specifically set up to counter nearly all of the criticisms that had become so apparent after several years with the first game. Just as with the first XCOM, though, “at first glance” is liable to lead to an unduly favourable impression of the game; it takes time to get under the hood and fully understand the new and improved systems and mechanics of the sequel, and my conclusion is that while XCOM 2 is a worthy sequel and a great game in its own right, it’s not quite the revolutionary experience it would like you to believe it is – both figuratively and mechanically.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twelve months you’ll be aware by now that XCOM 2 does do something pretty daring for a sequel: it sets itself against the backdrop of a future Earth where XCOM lost the first game in a matter of weeks. The aliens annihilated Earth’s military and gave XCOM enough hard knocks that the remnants of the Council were all too glad to surrender by signing an Accord that handed over control of the planet². Fast forward twenty years and the aliens have an ironclad grip on things via their quasi-militaristic front organisation ADVENT, which has gifted the population of Earth many marvellous scientific advances derived from alien technology that mask their nefarious true plans for the human race. There are various underground resistance groups fighting against these plans, coordinated by a still-operational XCOM that’s led by a scarred, embittered Bradford — whose sweater was presumably one of the many casualties of the First Alien War — but thematically there’s a definite role inversion here compared to the first game.  XCOM is no longer a legitimate entity fighting from a position of relative strength that’s backed by all the resources of Earth’s governments; they’re a quasi-terrorist organisation that has to engage in guerilla warfare against an entrenched alien enemy, and which is forced to scrounge up supplies (XCOM 2’s money) from a variety of sources in order to carry on the fight.

This is a great excuse to completely overhaul the geoscape layer – this is XCOM’s name for the strategic part of the game where you spend resources to research and develop new equipment and weapons, build new base facilities and decide which missions to take on next. In XCOM 1 the geoscape layer just didn’t work for long-term play; once you figured out what to research when and what you could get away with in terms of the panic meter and the plot missions it became an almost braindead experience. XCOM 2 attempts to throw nearly all of that out and starts from scratch, and the first step towards rebuilding it into something better is taken by giving XCOM a flying base: the Avenger. The Avenger travels around the globe to various mission sites and other points of interest, however it can only travel to regions where you have made contact with the local resistance cell. This is done by spending time and a secondary currency called Intel, however you can only contact a new region if you have enough “comms capacity” from the communications facilities inside your base – and the point that you understand this is the point at which you first realise that maybe XCOM 2 isn’t quite the drastic overhaul you were led to believe, since this is just a repackaged Satellites mechanic. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely a big improvement over Satellites since opening up new regions now goes far beyond just giving you more income  (each newly contacted region gives you a boost to your monthly supply), but it is something that is indicative of XCOM 2’s general approach: nearly all of the mechanics from XCOM are still present in some form, they’ve just been retooled into something that is in the vast majority of cases an improvement over what came before.

So the Terror Missions where you have to save civilians from encroaching alien forces are back, they’ve just been recast as Retaliation Events where the aliens assault a resistance cell. The pick-one-out-of-three Alien Activity/Abduction missions are back, except they’re now Guerilla Missions where you can counter one of three alien Dark Events – should these come to fruition they’ll give the aliens temporary bonuses like additional armour for their grunts or sending a UFO to hunt the Avenger. Panic has received a more significant retooling into the Avatar Project counter – more on this in just a second – but it still fulfils that basic role of a thing that loses you the game if you let it tick up too much. Something that is quite conspicuous by its absence are UFO interceptions; XCOM doesn’t have any fighter craft so instead you just get occasional leads on disabled UFOs/ADVENT supply convoys fed to you by the Resistance. I think there’s scope to make an interesting mechanic out of interceptions but since they added very little to XCOM in their current incarnation I’m fine with being dropped until somebody can figure out what that interesting mechanic is.

The one genuinely new concept the XCOM 2 geoscape layer introduces is the concept of time as a resource. In XCOM 1 the geoscape was somewhere you went to kill time while you waited for the next mission to pop up or the next piece of research to complete. XCOM 2’s geoscape by contrast has you deciding on the best place to spend time, as everything you do there that isn’t just flying from point A to point B takes a certain amount of it. The map is liberally scattered with points of interest where you can spend a certain amount of time “scanning” in order to get some bonus resource income. Or you can spend it contacting new Resistance regions or building Radio Relay towers to make contacting far-flung regions easier. You can fly back to Resistance HQ and spend time there to get some passive bonuses for the Avenger – faster facility construction, faster recovery time for wounded soldiers, or gathering Intel (which can be quite hard to come by otherwise). Even gathering your basic monthly supply income takes time, as it’s dumped somewhere on the globe and necessitates you having to fly over and spend time grabbing it all up.

This works quite well in tandem with the new incarnation of the Panic meter: the Avatar Project. The Avatar Project is the thing that the first XCOM very conspicuously did not do: it’s a secret goal for the aliens that they’re working towards all the time, and almost completely independently of your actions on the geoscape. Every so often the Avatar Project counter at the top of the geoscape screen will tick up. There are certain Dark Events which, if you do not block them, add one or two ticks to the Avatar counter. The aliens periodically construct facilities around the globe to aid in their Avatar Project research; allowing one of these facilities to exist looks like it also speeds up the rate at which that counter fills up. There are only two ways you can reduce the aliens’ Avatar progress:

• Blow up the Avatar research facilities by sending your soldiers in to plant C4 charges. This will remove any ticks that that facility was responsible for adding – worthwhile when its got three ticks on it, less so when it only has one unless you’re really desperate.
• Complete plot missions.

The second point is by far the best way to reduce Avatar progress – in the one campaign I’ve completed so far there was still an element of waiting until I was good and ready before doing these objectives, but I got really lucky with my initial facility spawns and was able to knock four ticks off of the counter relatively quickly. I was also lucky in that I was able to block nearly every single Dark Event that added to the Avatar counter. Even so there was definitely a point several months in where I was feeling very pressured – I’d had time to research Tier 2 weapons and armour, but Tier 3 was very much beyond my reach before I had to start paying attention to the plot objectives. The Avatar Project functions adequately for the first 50% of the campaign as a way of keeping pressure on the player and making them very aware that time is precious; I think that once you understand how it works it’s far too easy to get on top of the Avatar counter in the late game and keep it down to 3-4 ticks (out of 12), but I also know that I had it relatively easy when it came to initial non-plot options for buying myself time. The counter could definitely stand to advance a little more aggressively — but then I was only playing on Normal. Classic might be a whole other story. Regardless it’s a huge, huge improvement over Panic, and any flaws in its implementation could probably be fixed with balancing tweaks rather than yet another overhaul of the fundamental mechanics.

Base facility construction has also received an overhaul, although it’s a substantially subtler one. Nearly all the facilities from XCOM return in some form; the big difference here is how you deal with engineers and scientists in base management. First, you get them as individual, named engineers scientists from mission rewards (and, occasionally, purchasing them from Resistance HQ and/or the black market) rather than as the abstract numbers the first XCOM dealt with. Each scientist you acquire gives a passive, diminishing bonus to research speed (so the first scientist gives +50%, the second +33% and so on) and you can build laboratories and assign scientists to them for further research boosts – but I never found this to be necessary in my game, as having 3-4 scientists just sitting around was enough to get tolerable research speeds. Engineers are a different story entirely, however. Engineers are used to excavate debris to create new construction slots as well as speeding the construction of the facilities you place in those slots, but their real utility is in being assigned to your various base facilities for huge bonuses in how those facilities operate. For example, a basic, unstaffed Resistance Comms facility increases your Comms capacity by one (or maybe two, I forget which). Adding an engineer raises that capacity by an additional two. Upgrading the facility with an additional station and putting a second engineer in raises that capacity by an additional four. It’s a similar story with the other facilities, with engineers increasing your power output, soldier healing/training time or the construction time of prototype weapons in the Proving Ground. Because time is so precious now Engineers are insanely valuable, and I found myself blocked on geoscape progression more than a few times because I didn’t have enough; I was regularly swapping around the ones I had according to what I needed most at the time.

In hindsight I’m kicking myself for never building the Workshop, which is a facility that provides Engineer bonuses to all adjacent facilities – but that’s not something you can really understand the utility of until you’ve already run into Engineer blockages. I found the base management part of the geoscape really tricky because it’s something you need to plan months in advance, and you can’t plan effectively when you’re still figuring out how everything works. I remember having that problem with the first XCOM too, where I mis-attributed it to the base management actually being difficult. I don’t think that’s the case with XCOM 2 but I do think there are much more interesting decisions to be made here, especially with the early availability of psionics (another thing I didn’t make good use of in my campaign, but which were devastatingly powerful even in the endgame) and the Proving Ground facility that provides most of your best utility items. What I can definitely say is that I’m excited to try it again on Classic with a more optimal strategy – it feels like there’s multiple viable options and plenty of room for refinement, rather than the one-size-fits-all strategy of XCOM.

Compared to the geoscape the alterations to the tactical battlescape portion of the game are somewhat lower-key, even though one of them is basically the headline feature of XCOM 2. Most of these changes are designed to counter the foolproof method of beating battlescape missions in XCOM — which was to inch forward a couple of tiles at a time with everyone permanently on overwatch — as well as the common complaint that it was always you finding the aliens rather than the other way around, which put far too much power into the hands of the player. Since your soldiers are now part of a covert resistance organisation engaged in hit-and-run attacks they start most missions in a state of stealth; they can run around unhindered as long as they don’t blunder into any alien line-of-sight (helpfully marked by big red eyeball indicators on the relevant tiles) and set up devastating ambushes on oblivious groups of enemies who are standing around in the open. As soon as you fire your first shot stealth is dropped and the gameplay transitions to the standard XCOM battlescape – where uncovering a new group of enemies gives them a free move to seek cover — so making effective use of this first ambush by setting up your squad in overwatch (which doesn’t have any of the usual penalties to aim when you’re firing from an ambush position) prior to firing that first shot is critical, especially since the bad guys now have many more nasty tricks up their sleeve.

The flipside of stealth is that every mission involving it also has a time limit for you to achieve an objective, which is usually “Get to a thing and hack it” although there’s also destruction/protection of communication relays and the VIP extraction missions (which are awful in a good way, as you’re forced to be a little more discriminating in your use of firepower). This is the antidote to the overwatch-creeping tactic above; not only does overwatch appear to be less effective in XCOM 2, but if you’re super cautious you’ll simply run out of time to complete the mission. It would seem a little draconian if the stealth didn’t give you a free hand in setting up your assault; as it is the two go together very well indeed, allowing you to freely move around in the opening turns of the mission while punishing you for dragging your feet and encouraging you to come up with solutions to inconvenient tactical fuckups on the fly instead of avoiding them entirely by being conservative in your play. The stealth missions are also broken up with more conventional gameplay according to the old rules of XCOM - but even here I found myself being more aggressive simply because I could afford to be.

This is because, pound for pound, the redone soldier classes of XCOM 2 are vastly more effective than their XCOM counterparts. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still weak as kittens to start with and you have to be on your toes even in the late game to avoid unnecessary losses, but they have a much wider range of useful skills and items to draw upon in combat. There’s new utility items such as Mimic Beacons (arguably the MVP of my completed campaign, and something that should be researched ASAP), as well as passive boosts to your soldiers’ stats through Combat Sims and weapon upgrades that provide free reloads and bonuses to aim or crit. The soldier skill trees are still split out into two branches per class, however this time around each of the branches is powerful and worthwhile. The Assault has become the Ranger, able to specialise in either scouting or melee combat; the Support is now the Specialist, with access to drones that can either heal and buff allies remotely or hack and electrocute enemies; the Sniper’s pistol tree has now been reworked for the Sharpshooter so that it’s arguably more powerful than the sniper rifle in combination with special ammo; and then finally there’s the Grenadier.

The Grenadier deserves a special mention. Instead of the Heavy’s rocket launcher they lug around a grenade launcher that doesn’t have as much range, but which is capable of indirect fire and which can launch any type of grenade in the game with a boost to damage and lethal radius. Explosives in general are even more important in XCOM 2 than they were in the first XCOM, as there’s a new armour mechanic whereby armoured units have between one and six points of armour that absorb a corresponding amount of incoming damage; only damage that exceeds the target’s armour value will make it through and damage their HP bar. In order to defeat heavily armoured enemies you have to either use abilities that ignore armour completely (psionic powers and the Specialist’s electric shocks are great for this) or else shred the armour first using — you guessed it — a copious quantity of explosives. The Grenadier also has a skill that lets their standard cannon shots shred armour, making them the go-to guys for armour removal, cover removal and softening up large groups of enemies for the rest of your squad. The new equipment options include a vastly expanded array of grenade types such as EMP, flashbang, incendiary and gas grenades, all of which can be plugged into the grenade launcher for that damage and explosive radius boost. There’s also specialised sets of heavy armour that come with special inbuilt heavy weapons, the default version of which is a rocket launcher.

As a consequence I always found myself carting around at least two Grenadiers on every mission, and my level of comfort with how a mission was playing out was directly correlated with the number of grenades and/or rockets I had left.  The increased availability and use of explosive weapons also shows off the new destruction and environmental burning effects; if there are enemies perched on top of a roof you can now destroy the ground underneath their feet, dropping them one or two storeys and dealing additional fall damage, while all explosives have a chance to set buildings alight – and this fire will continue burning and destroying terrain in subsequent turns, which did come back on me a couple of times as I accidentally dropped a building on my squads’ heads. It’s worth noting that the aliens aren’t without their own tricks and have a number of new and incredibly annoying abilities to offset your soldiers’ increased power, but on the whole I think it’s a net win for the forces of XCOM.

And while I’m talking about the soldiers, I should spare a few words to talk about the general art direction of the game. The cutscenes and writing are the usual bland Firaxis crap, but I think that the general art direction — and the soldier customisation options in particular — is actually pretty amazing. You can take a screenshot of nearly any action zoom event from XCOM 2 and use it as a publicity photo for the game; XCOM 2 absolutely nails stylish soldiers killing aliens in stylish ways thanks to new weapon effects (plasma rifles in particular now look like they hit hard) and a dizzying array of options for playing soldier dress-up. These don’t fully unlock until you’ve levelled them up a bit, but once you do you can alter just about anything you can think of – I was particularly taken with the metallic camouflage options for the last tier of powered armour, as well as the belated realisation that I could have cigar-chewing Grenadiers blasting enemy Sectopods with their plasma cannon. The new environments provide a fitting backdrop for the carnage, with the camera and lighting effects really accentuating the highlights of the ongoing battle. Watching a battlescape action unfold is a genuine pleasure, and one I don’t think I’m going to get tired of any time soon. That’s a big contrast to the usual XCOM problem of battlescape fatigue.

As usual in my reviews, though, it’s time for the inevitable criticism. XCOM 2 is a fantastic game in many ways, but the areas where it continues to fuck up are the perennial Firaxis bugbears: tutorials, UI and scripted events. The tutorials are complete garbage once again, alternating between too hand-holdy (the tutorial battlescape mission literally locks off all possible moves except the one you’re supposed to make) and almost non-existent – contacting new resistance regions and the Comms facility are extremely badly explained, which is ironic considering they made exactly the same mistake with Satellites the first time around. The base navigation UI is absolutely terrible, requiring way too many clicks to change screens and generally making it a chore to get around. And the scripted events and objectives…

…yeah, this is probably the single worst thing XCOM 2 does, since not only do the objectives and scripted events seem intentionally designed to fuck over new players so that they have to restart their campaign, but it’s all entirely avoidable by this magic thing the original original X-COM did called “Not having scripted events in your game of procedurally generated battle maps”. It’s an entirely self-inflicted wound. Usually in grand strategy games any objectives you are given are designed so that they provide some structure for first-time players, but in XCOM 2 this couldn’t be further from the truth. Even apparently harmless objectives like building the Proving Ground early on seem intentionally misleading, as players will waste time and resources building a facility that doesn’t really come into its own until the mid-game when they could instead be building the Guerilla Tactics School – which is possibly the single most important facility you can build for the early game. The really unforgiveable thing about XCOM 2, though, is that fulfilling its equivalent of “Interrogate enemy species X” objectives – which has been a core part of XCOM since forever — now immediately spawn in very tough enemies who will make mincemeat of an unprepared squad. You have no warning that this is going to happen, and if you haven’t gamed the system by waiting for tier 2 or 3 armour and weapons, or you haven’t made sure you’ve cleared out every other enemy on the map first, you’re probably going to get screwed the first time you do it.

The thing about this that I find particularly annoying is that it’s a trap that will only catch out first time players. Veteran players will know what’s coming and plan ahead, but if you’re playing the game for the first time you’re already at a disadvantage while you figure out the systems and you’re probably relying on following the objectives to guide you through the game. Instead XCOM 2 sees no problem with throwing these additional obstacles in your way — obstacles that have absolutely no place in a game that’s supposed to be designed for repeated playthroughs — and I actually think that kind of design mentality is outright offensive, since not only is XCOM 2 lying to you about how you should play it (again) but this time it’s being actively malicious in doing so. It’s different from even the Alien Base in the first game, since at least with the Alien Base you knew you were heading into enemy territory and could prepare for a tough mission. By contrast these screw-you events can happen at any time if you trigger them by having the temerity to actually do what the game tells you you should be doing. Fortunately it wasn’t so much of a problem for me, as I (somewhat) intentionally decided to test the limits of the geoscape by waiting as long as possible before tackling the plot objectives – there was even some good news there as I discovered that the aliens level up their troops independently of your progress through the plot. However it still came across as tremendously awful game design, and it stood out even more when you consider how well the rest of it is put together.

XCOM 2 is still mostly the same game as its predecessor, and perhaps a little more so than I would have liked; it makes plenty of iterative changes but on the whole retains a surprisingly large quantity of the DNA of its parent. I don’t think the geoscape changes are an unqualified success – it’s a bit more hectic and there are some marginally interesting decisions to be made, but I still ended up killing time in the lategame — but the base management is genuinely tense as you try and figure out where to invest your resources and the battlescape missions are as good as they have ever been. To me, though, the most interesting thing about XCOM 2 is that it shows full awareness of the games preceding it.Too often I play sequels that have regressed in scope in some way when compared to the original title, with the usual excuse being that there wasn’t time to add certain features or functionality and that it’ll have to wait for a patch or expansion pack. XCOM 2 by contrast is just as feature-rich as XCOM was with the additional Enemy Within content, and since it refines most of that content into a better state it is one of the few sequels I’ve encountered that is just a flat-out upgrade. It’s not a perfect game by any means and makes some entirely avoidable mistakes, but it is in almost all respects better than what came before, and I don’t think I could ask for more from a sequel to the already-great XCOM.

The post Thoughts: XCOM 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Firaxis are a developer with a reputation for releasing expansion packs that dramatically improve their base game. Yes, you can say that this is partly because the base games tend to be broken, unbalanced or otherwise underwhelming in some way, but there’s no arguing that Civilization V was a much better game after Gods and Kings, and while Enemy Within added some flab in the form of Exalt it did wonders for the pacing and balancing of the XCOM campaign as a whole. They’re commendably committed to improving and expanding on their games post-launch; even so, the existence of the Rising Tide expansion pack for Civ-V-In-Space ‘em up Beyond Earth surprises me more than a little. There was so much wrong with Beyond Earth that I was convinced that this time around Firaxis would just tie a rock to it and let it sink rather than send good development money after bad.

Still, it’s not like Beyond Earth didn’t have any good ideas. Yes, it’s true; you might need truly advanced sensing equipment to detect it as it’s buried some considerable way beneath many layers of mediocrity and blandness, but a really good expansion pack might have been able to burrow down far enough to reach those rich seams of potential. Bring the backstory to the foreground. Surface those civilopedia entries somewhere where the player can actually find them. Make the endgame missions less of a soul-crushingly boring End Turn clickfest. Give the faction leaders more than one line of voice acting which they endlessly spout ad infinitum. Make the aliens a little more than Barbarians 2.0. It’s a long list, but if they’d manage to improve enough stuff it’s entirely possible Rising Tide might have been able to drag Beyond Earth kicking and screaming into the neighbourhood of an acceptably-fun 4X title.

Instead they have gone with, uh, boats.

Not that this is without precedent, mind. Gods and Kings did a big overhaul of naval combat to actually make it worthwhile, while the Alien Crossfire expansion for Alpha Centauri introduced specific improvements for waterborne cities and a faction whose gimmick was that it was massively overpowered on the ocean. It’s a little surprising that this is the headline improvement for Rising Tide, however – of all the things wrong with Beyond Earth the fact that ocean cities weren’t included wouldn’t even have made my top ten list, and I’m a little baffled as to why Firaxis thought that it was *this* that required their attention rather than the now almost stubbornly-intentional lack of character riddling the rest of it.

I will grudgingly admit that the new sea cities in Rising Tide are pretty nice. The sea itself is a much busier place than it was previously, full of beasties to kill and resources to exploit, and non-combat units such as Explorers and Workers are now fully amphibious and can use their special abilities on the water just as well as they can on dry land. There’s a couple of new classes of ship (including a melee class that’s capable of taking cities), but all of this stuff largely exists to enable the sea cities. These are somewhat the same as land cities – although there are some city improvements and wonders that can only exist in sea cities, and vice versa — except their big gimmick is that they can slowly move about the map. In the production list for the city there’s a “move city” option; complete this as you would any other construction project and you gain the ability to move the city one tile. Any unclaimed tiles that fall within a one-hex radius of the city’s new location are automatically claimed as your territory, and the city then carries on much as normal.

This move ability strikes me as a nice idea that’s gone a little bit wrong in practice. I always founded my sea cities in an optimum location — at the centre of a nice fat patch of resources, say — and once they’re in the best location, why would I bother moving them? Firaxis have coded in something of a stick to make you use the feature as sea cities cannot slowly expand their city radius by claiming tiles via culture; you’re supposed to do this by moving the city around to hoover up the tiles instead. Unfortunately you retain the option to simply buy unclaimed tiles with cash money, and it’s much easier to do this than it is to faff about wasting valuable production on moving the city one space across the map. Sea cities are great on their own, and developed right they’ll easily rival or even surpass your land cities thanks to their special sea-city-only improvements – thanks to modern Civ giving all units an ampibious capability they’re arguably even more useful than the ones in Alpha Centauri as they can make a valid contribution to your war effort without having to worry about transporting land units from city to shore. It’s just a shame that what was supposed to be their signature feature ended up being a bit of a damp (ha) squib – I think it’s pretty telling that across three games played and at least twenty-five built, I moved my sea cities a grand total of twenty times.

Still, the mere fact that ocean cities exist at all has a surprisingly significant effect on the way Beyond Earth plays. Traditionally I’ve always seen sea tiles in Civilization as dead tiles, and treated the ocean as a sort of negative space – something to be crossed to reach a prospective target, but never a target in and of itself. Rising Tide changes that; not only does it enable ocean cities in the first place by clustering resource tiles in the sea just as much as it does on land, but by giving workers the ability to properly improve sea tiles it also means that your coastal cities are that much more effective. You can now utilise the entire map for your settlements (except for the polar ice caps), and as you tech up your ability to exploit tiles of all types increases further and further until your endgame cities are of a size you’ll never see in a stock Civilization game. Spreading out over the map and watching the population counter tick up and up and up did remind me of Alpha Centauri in a good way – that was a game about using future technology to thoroughly shatter any and all constraints on your expansion until you hit a runaway exponential growth curve, and now Beyond Earth sort of is too.

Rising Tide provides a number of other shots in the arm to further boost Beyond Earth’s previously-anaemic vitality. First, the diplomatic system has been completely overhauled. Gone are the ineffective culture/scientific/economic agreements and the relatively opaque attitudes of your AI opponents; instead, your relationship with them is governed by twin Fear and Respect scores. Fear is simply a measure of how much your military outclasses theirs, and the Respect value indicates how much your activities in the game align with their goals. This is something that Civilization has attempted to surface before, but never with the frequency that Rising Tide does; pretty much every turn you’ll get a little pop-up notification at the top of the screen telling you about something you’re doing that’s changing your Respect score with a given Civilization. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, but the fact that the reasons behind the change are constantly visible makes it a lot easier to keep on the good side of your rivals – or not.

Meanwhile your actual relationship status – Neutral, Cooperating, Allied etc. – is altered by the investment of a new currency called Diplomatic Capital. This is generated by certain city improvements and all wonders, and is required to both improve your relationship status and set up ongoing agreements. Diplomatic Capital is also used to buy and upgrade traits for your faction – these start out relatively weak, but once they’re fully upgraded and you can get some synergy going on (like getting all the trade route bonus traits for Hutama, whose thing is that he gets more trade routes than anyone else) they can make a big difference to your faction’s power. These traits dictate which agreements will be available for the AI to make with you, and their traits will dictate what you can get out of them. Again, the agreements are fairly underwhelming to start with — a 20% decrease in the time it takes to complete covert ops, say — but they get more effective as your relationship status with the other party improves, with an agreement with an Allied faction being two or three times as good as an agreement with a Neutral one.

Sounds good on paper, certainly. I definitely did like the new faction traits as they provided a degree of customisation that I thought Beyond Earth had been sorely missing up until this point (no, the relatively weak options you get during game setup don’t weak). They’re powerful enough that they feel worthwhile to use, and there’s enough of them that every faction can find a combination that works for their playstyle. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of the diplomatic agreements; it’s pretty telling that I could call up the list of all potential agreements – and there’d be a good 15-20 of these available at any one time — and find maybe one that I thought was worth the investment of Diplomatic Capital. They’re not so much underpowered as they are ridiculously specific, and while a 40% increase in the rate at which an outpost grows into a colony has its uses, getting more orbital coverage from trade stations very definitely does not.

So the new diplomatic system has both good and bad points. The same goes for its new hybrid affinities, which are supposed to provide alternative unit upgrade paths for mixed affinity factions and make min/maxing the tech web for one specific type of affinity less necessary. For example, usually you’d need 12 affinity points in Purity to unlock the final upgrade for your tank unit, but you can also get that upgrade with 8 points in Purity and 4 points in any other affinity. Getting blanket upgrades for all of your military units is ridiculously powerful (you don’t even have to pay for them like you do in Civ) and it’s definitely a good thing that there’s less emphasis on *having* to go through the supposedly freeform tech web in a certain way in order to unlock them. I found myself judging the techs on their own individual merits rather than going “That’ll get me 20 points in Supremacy!” and treating the associated buildings and wonders as an incidental bonus.  It doesn’t eliminate this phenomenon entirely, however; the upgrade effect is too powerful to ignore affinity points completely and take a completely organic route through the web, and there were still times when I’d be researching a tech because I knew it would upgrade my 20 Cutter units into Broadsides rather than because I actually wanted the tech itself. Rising Tide will also try to market itself on the inclusion of a lot of new hybrid units in the game, but most of these are just different skins for basic unit types (the 8/4 tank will look different to the 12 point tank, but it’ll have almost exactly the same stats and abilities) and there’s *maybe* four new units that do something that’s actually new and different.

The last big change is the inclusion of artifacts for your Explorer units to dig up. Previously you’d send them out to find some alien remains, they’d set up shop for ten turns and use their single Expedition module to study those remains, and at the end of it you’d get 20 bonus culture or something equally shit. Now they have a chance to dig up artifacts of various types, which can be cashed in as sets of one, two or three artifacts to get either a big resource bonus (for one or two) or, if you cash in three at once, a unique building or permanent bonus for your faction that can’t be unlocked any other way. Some of these buildings/bonuses are really fucking good (+50% domestic trade route yield? Double speed on worker actions? Hell yes I’ll take some of that action) and so the artifacts do fulfil their intended purpose of sending explorer units out around the map to hoover them up before the other factions do – it also makes the cultural virtues that add more Expedition modules much more worthwhile. However, I found the biggest shakeup here was that you can also get artifacts out of alien nests, which meant I went from my previous attitude of live-and-let-live to purging and burning any and all alien filth whenever there was a chance I could get my hands on an artifact. It makes the early game much more proactive and disincentivises turtling up, and so while I thought the actual artifact cash-in mechanic itself was weirdly half-baked I’d say it was the single biggest change to the way Beyond Earth plays after the new ocean gameplay features.

Rising Tide’s various additions to Beyond Earth might not be unambiguous improvements to the formula, but they do move the game a lot closer to where it should have been in the first place – it now feels different enough from Civilization to merit being a different game rather than a simple mod using the Civ V engine. That means Rising Tide is something of a success, but it’s a very qualified one and this expansion pack has some very big weaknesses; namely that it does next to nothing to address the complaints I mentioned in the second paragraph. The fiction is all buried several levels down in the Civilopedia¹; you have next to no context for what the city improvements and wonders you’re building actually are besides the +1 to production or whatever they’ll add to your city; the faction leaders still have precisely one line of voice acting each and all the personality of a particularly dull brick; and – most criminally – every single one of the victory conditions is still an awful slog where you build the thing you need to win and then wait for a 40-turn timer to count down. It’s far quicker and easier to just kill everyone², which makes the endgame of Beyond Earth more than a little bit bland and samey. That the first expansion pack for Beyond Earth ignored these issues so comprehensively is a pretty decent indicator that Firaxis do not see them as a problem and they’ll never be fixed, which is why, despite the good work it does, I see Rising Tide as being particularly dismaying. It demonstrates that Beyond Earth can be a decent game, but it also indicates that it has no ambition to be a *good* one.

The post Thoughts: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Sid Meier’s Starships. It’s not a name that sounds particularly promising, is it? Sid’s a fan of pithy one- or two- word titles, and he’s used them to great effect in the past. What else would you call a game about the progress of human society through the ages except Civilization? They are usually appropriately descriptive; in Railroad Tycoon you play the part of an 1830-era railroad tycoon. Even the simplest ones were jazzed up by the addition of an exclamation mark: Pirates! is a little muddy as a descriptor, but you can at least tell Sid is very excited about it and thinks you’re going to have a lot of fun playing it. (And he was right.) Even the worst of his games, Railroads!, was saved by the exclamation mark and by the fact it did somewhat signal the transition from meaty business sim to playing with a virtual toy railway set.

Now we have Starships, however, a title so vague and humdrum they couldn’t even be bothered to give it a little pizzazz by calling it Starships! Maybe they felt like it’d be false advertising, since people would probably have expected a jauntily fun experience haring around the space-Caribbean rather than the second take on Ace Patrol that Starships really is. It has a very similar mechanical structure to Ace Patrol, splitting the game into two parts. One is the empire map where you order your fleet of starships to various planets in need of your assistance, which is rendered by completing some sort of procedurally generated mission for them.  Once you’ve selected a mission you’re then taken to a turn-based tactical combat segment in which you use the various weapons on your starships to blow an AI fleet into smithereens. Completing a mission successfully gets you resources and influence which you can use to expand your empire/federation/galactic hive mind on the empire map.

It’s that last sentence which signals the biggest improvement from Ace Patrol. Ace Patrol’s campaign was a painfully vestigial waste of time that had nowhere near enough variety or impact on the excellent tactical combat and which completely failed to provide it with any meaningful context, rendering the entire game repetitive and ultimately forgettable. Starships avoids falling into this particular trap by making its empire map far more than a barely-disguised mission select screen. Instead it’s a stripped down Civilization-lite; you can take over planets to expand your borders, build improvements to improve resource yield, grow your population by constructing cities and spend accumulated science points on technology upgrades that directly improve the effectiveness of your starships in combat. Competition is provided by a number of AI empires all tussling for the same territory, and even the victory conditions are ripped off wholesale from Civ.

In short, everything you’d expect to find in a Civilization game is present on Starships’ empire map, albeit in an incredibly basic, protoplasmic form. If Civilization is an oil painting then Starships is a cartoon — it’s still recognisably the same game, but it’s been reduced to only the barest essentials required to make it work. Take resources, for example. There are five resources in the game: energy, metals, food, science and credits. Each resource type is used for one thing, and one thing only¹: metals builds improvements and wonders, food builds new cities on your planets, and energy is used to build and upgrade starships. With the exception of the starship upgrades the things you build with those resources also do just one thing: each improvement increases the resource yield of a particular type of resource by a lot, each city increases the general resource yield of the planet by a little, and each tech you buy will increase your ships’ effectiveness in that tech area by a depressingly standard +25%.

This streamlined version of Civ certainly succeeds at being a more engaging method of setting up the tactical combat. It works as a system; I can even imagine somebody taking Starships’ empire maps and making a decent boardgame out of it. However I also think this aggressive streamlining has drastically reduced the decision space available to the player. Take the resource system I just described — since metals and food in particular are only used to increase resource yields it’s a no-brainer to spend all of your metals and food every turn to get more metals and food next turn. There’s nothing to save up for besides wonders, and hence no interesting decisions to be made. Energy and science are a little more engaging thanks to their effect on the starship combat (which we’ll be getting on to shortly) but you still end up spending as much as you can every turn since there’s no reason not to; the only real decision you make is which area you’re going to focus on, and then you just spend resources to maximise your return on that.

In spite of the vast improvement over Ace Patrol, then, I still found the Starships’ empire map to be very underwhelming. It’s been over-simplified to the point where it has next to no complexity and nothing to really get your teeth into — it’s so over-zealous with its training wheels that you’re not allowed to have more than one fleet, which is another major loss to its decision-making potential — and the most entertainment you’ll get out of it is in trying to find a particular combination of research and wonders that’ll break the game. (Which, because it’s so simple and has no room for finesse in its mechanical approach, is very, very easy to do.) The best of the empire map is experienced at the very start of the game, when most of the galaxy is unclaimed and you haven’t yet had time to invest your resources into making sickeningly overpowered starships; then at least the decision of where to send your fleet next is relatively taxing. Unfortunately because it is so simple you enter the steamroller phase far earlier than in other Civ titles, where you’ve amassed such an insurmountable advantage that your victory is inevitable and you’re just playing whack-a-mole with AI empires until one magic number or another tips over a threshold and the ending sequence cuts in. I spent nearly all of my time with it wishing I was playing something with just a little more depth to it, rather than just going through the motions until I won.

Now, the good news is that Starships’ tactical combat isn’t half bad. It’s a turn-based affair played out on a hex grid that’s liberally littered with asteroids that serve as cover, and the combat itself is, in principle, just as simple as the empire map. There are three main weapon types: lasers, which are terrible at range and which get blocked by asteroids but which guarantee some damage if you have a clean line of fire; fighters, which are disposable groups of ships that will often get one-shotted but which can do a lot of damage if they get in behind an enemy; and torpedoes, which are the most imaginative thing in all of Starships. Torpedoes are fired in a straight line away from your starships. On the turn you fire them they’ll run a certain distance away from the launching ship and then stop; you don’t get to actually detonate them until next turn, when the torpedo becomes active and you can detonate it at any point along its flight path. Torpedoes pass through asteroid fields and have a decent blast radius, and if you can nail a group of ships with one you’ll often take them out in one hit — but since the AI will frantically beeline away from any incoming torpedoes you’ll have to fire a spread from multiple ships to ensure something will be caught in the firing line. The AI does love to sit behind asteroids and fire pop-up shots with no chance of retaliation, so single torpedoes are useful for flushing them out of their cover, after which you can dispose of them with your searing beams of laser death.

Torpedoes aside, the rest of Starships’ combat doesn’t sound tremendously interesting on paper — like just about every other wargame out there the key is to shoot the baddies in the flanks or from the rear if possible, and you’ll rarely go astray. The fun part comes when you start upgrading your ships and researching techs to emphasise a particular weapon or strategy. In my first game I researched improved torpedo damage and built some wonders that made them move faster and let me shoot two of them per turn; this let me trap enemy ships in a criss-crossing web of dozens of torpedoes that were instant death to anything caught in the blast radius and which they had no chance of avoiding. In my second game I dumped a bunch of science and energy into stealth systems and got the Cloaking wonder, which automatically engaged my starships’ stealth at the end of every turn (usually you have to manually activate it instead of firing). Since you can only detect a stealthed ship by either making a sensor sweep or by moving inside the ship’s stealth radius, and since I both made sure to kill the enemy sensor ships first and had teched up enough that my starships’ stealth radius was smaller than one hex (i.e. they would have had to be physically in the same hex as one of my ships to spot it, which you’re not allowed to do with an enemy ship), this effectively made my ships untouchable. I used three super-cloakers to dismantle the 12-ship fleet of the galactic superpower — twice — and then triggered a Domination victory.

Still, I’m not sure how much mileage there is in finding new and exciting combinations of systems and tech to keep the starship combat interesting. The missions themselves are rather unimaginative – they’re dressed up with a variety of flavour text, but they still all boil down to protecting a civilian transport as it makes its way to the exit point or capturing and holding three space stations or whatever. Starship upgrades aren’t modular and you can stick any combination of upgrades onto any ship as long as you’ve got the energy to pay for it, but this also means that they’re disappointingly generic; once you’ve added the first laser, all adding more lasers will do is make your ships hit harder. As a result it’s impossible to make enemy starships that are memorable or which present an interesting challenge; they’ll do all the same things that your ships do, and so after the fifteenth battle or so you get the feeling you’ve seen it all and that there’s nothing more the starship combat can show you.

And you’d be right. Starships isn’t a particularly offensive game, but its ruthless amputation of anything that’s not absolutely necessary for its core concept to work means that it needs an incredibly strong core concept for it to work at all. Unfortunately the core concept of Starships isn’t particularly novel and doesn’t have the depth to sustain more than a couple of hours play in any engaging fashion. Past that point it’s just something you’re doing to pass the time. I could easily see myself playing it on an iPad during a long train ride for lack of anything better to do, but on the PC during the March game glut? Sorry, Sid, but I’d rather be playing Cities: Skylines.

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The post Thoughts: Sid Meier’s Starships appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Beyond Earth is a doomed-from-the-start attempt to shift the familiar Civilization empire-building action into the future. It’s doomed because no matter how good Firaxis made this game, by setting it around the colonisation of an alien world it draws inevitable comparison with one of Firaxis’ very first products: Alpha Centauri, a game that’s rightfully regarded as one of the genre’s absolute classics. Beyond Earth was never going to live up to Alpha Centauri’s better qualities, both real and imagined, and I’ve tried to take this into account when playing the thing; Beyond Earth should be judged on its own merits, not the nostalgia-fuelled remembrance of a sixteen year-old predecessor. What surprises me, however — and especially so for a Firaxis title — is that even if you take SMAC out of the equation, even when you compare Beyond Earth to the modern Civilization franchise that spawned it, I think it fundamentally still isn’t a very good game.

Given my recent tendency to randomly dislike 4xes for almost entirely subjective reasons, I have dragooned Jim into writing this review with me. Jim liked Endless Legend, so you’re getting both sides of the coin here.

Jim: I am the only man on Earth to hold that title, according to my Steam Friends list. But now I shall be…the only man…BEYOND IT

Hentzau: Jim, why not quickly sum up what Beyond Earth is about. Apart from rerouting trade convoys.

Jim: Well I mean the blurb is you and your fine faction being sent into deepest space to make Earth 2.0. You touch down, have a look around and realise you’ve accidentally landed in a game of Civ 5.

Hentzau: Yes, that’s rather sad, isn’t it. Beyond Earth boasts several features to distinguish it from its parent franchise, but nearly all of them are half-baked or just flat-out inconsequential. It’s six hundred years in the future, but you’re still building farms, sending out explorers to find goody huts and generating culture to buy social policies. Probably 60, 70% of Beyond Earth is you doing the exact same things you did in Civilization V, except with a palette swap.

Jim: It’s very similar to the Civ 4: Colonization experience, really.

Hentzau: Oh, I’d argue that actually went further in distinguishing itself from Civ IV. And I hated that version of Colonization, so I’m not often inclined to be kind to it.

Jim: Yeah I found Colonization boring and I hated Civ 5 because…I’m still not really sure why but it is really deep-seated at this point. So really I should find myself despising this. And yet, I’ve actually enjoyed these first thirty hours, there’s a decent game below the blank, botoxed facade

Hentzau: “First” thirty hours. That implies there’s going to be more, which is interesting because I’ve burned out on it after just twenty. I came to the conclusion after two playthroughs that the game was too limited to allow for really different playstyles, and that the differences between the factions were superficial at best.

Jim: And some of that is true, certainly. We’ve already referred to it off-hand a few times but it’s bizarre how little effort has been put into fleshing out this world.

Hentzau: The factions are just so underwhelmingly generic. You’ve got Space France, Space Russia, Space China, all with indistinguishable minor bonuses to their gameplay like “10% stronger in combat” or “Gets a free tech every 10 social policies” – bonuses so small that their impact on how a game unfolds is minimal, like Firaxis were terrified of letting the player have any fun with their faction.

Jim: I realised at some point that they’d found my notebooks from when I was 12 and pinched the names I wrote on pretend maps. Polystralia is a personal favourite. After a lot of play you do begin to notice some common threads between factions – Space France will always race into a tech lead, Space America will have three massive cities, Space Russia will make godawful decisions, but it’s nothing intrinsic to their bonuses.

Hentzau: That’s part of the AI personality that’s existed since Civ IV, I think – Montezuma is always a warmongering dick, Isabella is your best friend if you’re the same religion as her and a rampaging terror if you’re not etc. etc.

Jim: Fucking Gandhi and his technology. But maybe the point is that they don’t want to shoehorn you into certain playstyles, maybe they want every game to be a choose your own four-X-ture

Hentzau: I’d agree that they don’t want factions to really be limited to playing the game one particular way, especially given the way the affinities work. This comes at the great expense of any sense of personality about them, though.

Jim: I think if they’d had fill-in-the-blanks factions in an interesting world that’ll be fine, but…what’s the planet called. Space Earth is a bit rubbish.

Hentzau: It doesn’t have a name. It’d be nice if you could name it yourself or something, but as far as the game is concerned it’s just a random agglomeration of dust and water with resources sprinkled around every few hexes for you to exploit.

Jim: I particularly like how they palette-swapped horses with buggalo and everyone from Earth is just cool with it. “Better make a beetle paddock”, they say, “that’s what we did in Civ 5”

Hentzau: Exactly what you’re getting out of these paddocks is never really explained. One type gives you chitin, and another gives… beetle drugs? Maybe that’s what the developers were on when they decided it was a good idea to just give everything space names without really changing the way it worked.

Jim: Beetle juice. Remind me not to say that two more times. And then there are the aliens. Now, initially, I liked these. Civ’s barbarians are always so anaemic, and something Beyond Earth does differently is make expanding a right pain in the arse. Huge swarming nests of dinosaurs block your every move and your first instinct is to go kill them all.

 Hentzau: There’s no real downside to doing this, weirdly. I expected slaughtering aliens en masse to really piss off the rest of the alien fraternity, so there’d be a genuine decision you had to make: clear out the aliens now and claim that prime spot of land, but at the cost of all the dead aliens’ friends paying you a visit later on. I thought they’d react to me like the natives in Colonization or the mindworms in Alpha Centauri.

Jim: As far as I understand there is some Alien Fight-o-Meter running in the background, certainly it’s referred to, but you never see it or its impact. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say you can just bat them out of the way though – the massive units like siege worms and kraken stay a threat to your expansion for a hundred turns or more. And taking down a nest complex is a lot of manpower.

Hentzau: That’s the major mechanical impact the aliens have. Where barbarians in Civ V forced you to build a military to fend off their attacks, aliens in Beyond Earth require a large standing army to eradicate so that you can expand your empire. One Wolf Beetle is the match of a basic human Soldier. The Drones and Raptor bugs are a pain to take on without tier 2 military units. And the nests will be spawning a new alien unit every three or four turns, meaning that you can’t just wear them down through gradual attrition. You need to go in and clean out the nests in one fell swoop, and this usually requires at least 4-6 military units per nest. More, if there’s multiple nests clustered together. And believe me, it’s hard to find good city spots that don’t have aliens sitting on top of them.

Jim: But yeah you’re right. It changes your behaviour but there is no coherency to the foreign fauna and flora. There’s green shit all over the place called miasma. It damages you a bit if you step in it, it takes three turns to clear, it means you change what you do but it doesn’t lead to anything greater.

 Hentzau: Hey now, it’s not just green. It’s a combination of green and purple that’s been cunningly chosen so that it effortlessly blends into whatever the underlying terrain type is, making it very difficult to spot and leading to a lot of accidental moves into it. Miasma blocks trade routes and heals aliens, and does precisely sod all else apart from inexplicably making the other factions upset when you clear this annoying blight away from your cities. I don’t get the feeling I’m taming an alien world, instead I feel like I’m playing Planet Janitor and doing tedious make-work to sweep away all of these obstacles in my path that have no real point other than to be obstacles in my path.

Jim: The problem we’re both having is that we’re mentally comparing to SMAC’s xenofungus and tutting. Beyond Earth’s sense of place is non-existent. I have absolutely no clue what I’m building most of the time beyond what bonus it infers. And the wonders are even worse – tiny little changes with nothing to hang them on. This matters to me! Science Fiction games need to go out of their way to give you a place to stand because you’re floating in space.

Hentzau: Plus four food in one of my cities! That’s not something that gets me particularly excited about building a wonder. A friend got it spot on when they said that while old-style Civilization wonders like Da Vinci’s Workshop may have been overpowered, they were far more interesting than the anaemic modern variety because building them feels like a powerful decision.

Jim: Though it does make for a more ‘balanced’ experience.

Hentzau: That’s not what I’m after, though. It’s taken Beyond Earth to make me realise it, but what I want is a game that is intentionally unbalanced in an interesting way. This is the only direct comparison to SMAC I’ll make in this review, but that was a game that spurned balance. Each faction was fundamentally broken if you played it right. Many of the wonders were potentially game-winning. But it was all held in “balance” because each faction was broken in a different way, and each of the wonders did very different things, making it very difficult to say that one was out-and-out better than the rest.

Jim: I can’t disagree with the joy of taking game systems and stretching them to the nth degree, I’ve always loved theorycrafting, minning to the max and so on. Thing is, this is still in Beyond Earth, it’s just hidden below a suspiciously pedestrian disguise. Our Clark Kent is…

Hentzau: Trade routes. Sodding trade routes.

Jim: The most powerful force on Space Earth.

Hentzau: The irony is that the trade system is pretty much a direct rip of the one introduced in Brave New World and there’s nothing really interesting or spacey about it. All they’ve done is whacked jetpacks onto the camels and dialed the yield up to eleven. You build your trade depot, which is unlocked by a really early technology, and then you can send out two trade routes from that city, and oh my god they are so broken. And not in the good way I just described, either.

Jim: Not broken, just…crucial to win. A normal size 1 city can produce maybe four of each of your classic civ resources (foods, hammers, glowing orange balls…). Buy it a couple of convoys and you can increase that by a factor of 10 or more. Done right, maybe half the resources of your empire will come from trade routes. But like all great power, this comes with a cost. You must manually resend these convoys, by hand, every twenty turns. So the game becomes this balancing act between how many resources you need and how arsed you are to select the same city from a dropdown menu multiple times every turn. WHAT WILL SPACE JANITOR DO NOW?

Hentzau: Later on you get a building that can increase number of trade routes per city by 1. That’s three trade routes per city, multiplied by number of cities, divided by twenty to get the number of times you have to deal with that bloody trade route popup every turn. The trade interface is terrible and doesn’t give you an option to auto-resend or even highlight your previous route, meaning you have to check through a list of all potential trade routes from that city – which, again, is going to scale in proportion to the number of cities that you have — to figure out where the hell you sent it last.

Jim: This is the reason that I recommend playing on a small map. I think a lot of these problems are problems of scale. You can just about deal with the busywork, you are cramped enough that aliens can’t just be routed around or ignored, civilizations get right into each others grilles from the get-go and grudges can actually develop. I’ve really enjoyed my small map games, whereas the eight player marathon broke my will to minmax. That’s not something I say lightly

Hentzau: I’d agree with that. But then I’d also say that half the problem with the game’s scale is that they’ve taken most of the brakes off of going wide (i.e. having a large sprawling empire). Happiness has been replaced by “Health”, and the malus for having low health is far less than the malus for having low happiness in Civ V. This is not an inherently bad thing, but when each additional city you build multiplies the number of tedious maintenance chores you have to do, actually taking advantage of the space available on a larger map will quickly burn you out unless you really, really like micromanaging cities.

Jim: Can I just mention that whoever did the UI for cities needs a good hearty slap? Somehow there’s a few steps backward on there from even Civ III. Everything’s hidden in the weirdest ways.

Hentzau: Like build queues. A fundamental feature of the modern 4X is locked away from the player by default in Beyond Earth. To unlock it you have to check a tiny grey box on top of a large grey background, and only then will it trust you with the fearsome ability to queue your build orders. I forget how renaming cities was hidden but it was even more laughable.  Firaxis have always had a problem with their UIs, but Beyond Earth is their worst effort yet.

Jim: I think they did want to do something different. I like a lot of underlying ideas they’re trying to implement to change the Civ formula (we’ve been playing that game for 20 years now, so fair enough) but in a lot of cases they fell short. However there are two new inclusions which I really love and they dovetail nicely with each other. First off, the tech web is the most magnificent sight in strategy gaming. I beheld it and I made the same noise as those aliens in Toy Story.

Hentzau: Hell, even I liked the tech web. It’s plagued by the same UI issues as the rest of the game, but it’s absolutely thematically appropriate for a game about future science. You start in the centre and progress outward via nodes which each have two or three techs on them. The first tech on each node is cheap, and gets you the basic buildings and improvements associated with this research area. The other techs are more expensive and give you more specific bonuses that are very powerful within their niche. The basic tech has to be researched before you can progress to the next node, but once you’ve done that you can just ignore the other techs unless you really really want them. The web is only about four nodes deep from centre to edge but you can go in literally any direction you want, through any route you want. It’s a tremendous amount of freedom to offer to player in their research choices.

Jim: It took me a few games to realise the implications of this, I must admit, and a few more before I actually roughly knew where stuff was on the web, but… you can beeline for anything. Every single tech in the game is unlockable in six or fewer steps. The amount of potential strategies this opens up is huge, and this is part of what’s driving me on at the moment. It makes me want to experiment and gives me the tools to do so.

Hentzau: What I particularly liked about it is how effectively it embodies the potential of future science to go haring off down any one of a hundred different paths. We don’t know precisely how technology is going to evolve over the coming centuries, and Beyond Earth wisely doesn’t attempt to constrain it with a narrow research tree. Instead it’s the one part of the game where it says “It’s your story – you choose what happens” and it actually works.

Jim: It’s also tied into the other new system – affinities. Some techs have a red/orange/blue marker that indicates you are making certain choices about humanity’s future, roughly corresponding to humans, robots and hippies. There’s this Bioware-esque tracker of how far down each path you’re going and the levels decide how your units improve or evolve, and the types of buildings you can construct. It’s hard to max out more than one of these in the time you have, so I think this is another solid way to make you choose the future.

Hentzau: Thematically the affinities are a great idea. They even bleed through into the everyday game narrative through quest decisions that occasionally pop up – I think at one point I ended up launching the uploaded consciousness of the population of one of my colonies into space where they could keep an eye on things. The big problem I had with them, though… well, I had two big problems. First was that they weren’t exclusionary enough; Purity (humans are the best) and Harmony (aliens are the best) should have been mutually exclusive, and yet there’s nothing stopping me from mixing and matching these affinities to get the advantages of both. Sure, I can’t max out both of them, but the fact that I can progress very far down both of these affinities in the same game means that my choice of Purity or Harmony as the “dominant” affinity has that much less meaning. It could just as easily have been the other one as far as the game is concerned, and so it ends up feeling rather superficial.

The second problem is the way you unlock affinity points. As Jim says, you get most of them by researching special techs that come with the affinity points attached, but in almost every case the affinity points were the sole reason to research that tech in the first place. So it’s not like you make the decision of “Let’s splice our DNA with that of an alien for improved combat performance” and pick up some Harmony points as a consequence; instead you just beeline for the points and unlock your hybrid units once you’ve progressed far enough down the tree. It feels less like these are reflections of the individual decisions I’ve made in the development of my society, and more like the affinities themselves are the be-all and end-all of determining how my society develops. And that’s just a matter of amassing enough points. It’s just inherently less interesting.

Jim: There’s certainly room for improvement on this system, but I don’t object to the points influencing you down certain paths – that just reflects the snowball nature of one ideology taking control. And similarly, while there is nothing to stop you mixing and matching purity and harmony, it is at the price of not getting the higher tier purity/harmony units and bonuses. As a balancing act, it’s executed quite well and it again ties into that “tell your own story” thing I keep harking back to. And there’s one more amplification of that idea: Quests

Hentzau: Quests are Beyond Earth’s way of making everything seem a little more organic. Most of them aren’t really quests in the sense that we usually understand them; mostly it’s a case of choosing additional bonuses granted by your buildings (do you want your Thorium Reactor to produce two extra energy or one extra production?), but there’s a few meatier ones unlocked when you’ve advanced far enough down the relevant affinity tree that provide some much-needed flavour to your affinity choice. The launching-colony-consciousness-into-space was a good one for Supremacy, and Harmony and Purity also get appropriately themed quests that reflect their respective evolutions of human society. The most interesting thing Beyond Earth does with the quests, however, is that it uses them to tie its victory conditions into a narrative.

Jim: Obviously you can just kill everyone and that takes no affinity whatsoever, but the others are different. Rather than tie your victory to culture/technology/gold, the victories open to you are dependent on the path you have taken. A harmony civ will attempt to hack into the planet’s conciousness, a supremacy civ will head back to cleanse Earth, and so on. These generally boil down to building the appropriate giant monolith and defending it, admittedly, and there’s a problem with the weak fiction of the game making it seem like these huge changes have come from nowhere. Still, more interesting and less secure than most of the Civ endgames I’ve endured.

Hentzau: I’m not sure I’d agree. Jamming units into the Emancipation portal for twenty turns was soul-destroying, while I resorted to killing everyone on the planet rather than sit through the Promised Land victory. However, the idea is interesting, even if the mechanical execution of it is a failure. I’d like to see another 4X take this idea and run with it, since I think that if you can make the conditions themselves sufficiently varied the narrative will do the rest for you. Even Emancipation wouldn’t have been so bad if the actual mechanic behind it hadn’t been quite so transparently shit; if I’d maybe had some indication that the robot armies I was sending through the gate to “liberate” the population of Earth from their weak, fleshy bodies were doing more than filling up an arbitrary victory counter. With a bit more interactivity they could shine. As it is, they’re just another example of Beyond Earth’s weird tendency to make the player repeat the same pointless task fifty times before they can get anywhere.

Jim: Yeah, weird how we keep coming back to that. There’s a genuine attempt here, despite that fact that it is in so many ways a slightly recoloured Civ 5, to make a different Civ experience with some genuinely nice ideas, but the execution, the surrounding fiction, isn’t strong enough for me to say “This is a game you should buy” – yet. But I am still enjoying the experience.

In Beyond Earth, you don’t make big sweeping decisions, you make hundreds of little choices. In some cases, those choices are needless busywork – trade routes being the prime example, but the compound effects are potentially very powerful, and mean that for the first Civ in forever, the endgame can be drastically different from one game to the next, because you’ve focused on completely different sets of technology and ideas. The problem is they haven’t gone far enough with this process, they haven’t committed to it.

Hentzau: I think maybe it was a question of resources. It may sound harsh, but Beyond Earth strikes me as a product made on a limited budget by the Firaxis B-team. It has a lot of fresh ideas that, if they’d been given the resources and time to be polished and refined, could have really lifted the game above its origins as a total conversion of Civilization V. Time and again, though, it’s held back by an apparently shoestring budget that ensures too much of that Civilization DNA shows on the surface for it to really be anything more than a pale reflection of its parent that lacks any real personality of its own.

The future of mankind is such fertile ground for the imagination, and I’m very disappointed that — tech web aside — Firaxis’s latest take on it is such a timid offering that’s afraid to take any real chances or make any worthwhile statements. The one potential lifeline for Beyond Earth is that the one thing Firaxis are consistently good at is polishing up underwhelming games through patches and expansion packs. Hopefully Beyond Earth will get the same treatment Civilization V did, and if it does it’s very possible that in two or three years it will have evolved into an excellent 4X. The raw material is certainly good enough. For now, though, I’d have to recommend that you steer well clear.

The post Thoughts: Beyond Earth appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Enemy Within is the first expansion to the XCOM remake, a game which was pretty well received on here over a year ago but which in the long run turned out to suffer from some fairly deep-seated structural issues – the aliens’ completely supine geoscape presence and an inverse difficulty curve  being amongst the most prominent. A good thing, then, that it was made by Firaxis, since if there’s one thing Firaxis excel at it’s fixing critical flaws with comprehensive and well-designed expansion packs. After the success of Gods and Kings and the well-designed additions Brave New World made to Civ V (even if I didn’t particularly agree with them all that much) I had high hopes that Enemy Within would do the same for XCOM.

Unfortunately — and as I’ve mentioned several times on here — high hopes usually only lead to disappointment and broken dreams. So it goes with Enemy Within, which manages to be a solid expansion while only partially living up to its potential to turn XCOM from flawed gem into genuine classic. As with Gods and Kings the headline features – Meld and Exalt – fall kind of flat, and it’s left to the unannounced changes and additions to the research trees and game balance to pull EW’s soldiers out of the plasma fire.

Let’s talk about the expansion pack’s big failure first, because it involves the feature I was looking forward to the most: Exalt. Exalt is supposed to be a third faction in the game; they’re a sort of paramilitary anti-XCOM that wants to harness the alien technology to further their own end goal of taking over the world, which brings them into direct confrontation with your forces.  This seemed like it might be a neat way of fixing up the static, unreactive nature of the geoscape segments: the addition of a human(ish) organisation that has many similarities to XCOM and who is working in direct opposition to you would have let them run a version of that parallel campaign structure I so enjoyed in the original X-COM. Potentially we could have had three-way fights with XCOM and Exalt both trying to carry off as much alien tech from a crashed UFO as possible, and Exalt running their own game in the background of the geoscape, setting up hidden cells within funding countries and – if unchecked – increasing their influence to the point where your funding is reduced or even stopped. Perhaps I was letting my imagination run away with me, but this is why the reveal of Exalt a month or two ago got me quite excited. I thought they’d listened to the criticism they were getting about the dull geoscape and were actively trying to liven it up a bit in the expansion. Doing what Firaxis do best, in other words. I certainly never thought they’d stuff such a promising idea up quite so badly as they have here.

Sadly as things stand Exalt are worse than a wasted opportunity – rather, they’re actively detrimental to the game and I really, really wish they’d been cut from the final product. And they should have been cut, because Exalt in their current form simply cannot be taken seriously as either a gameplay mechanic or a threat to XCOM. The way they work is that every so often you’ll get a message saying that Exalt have done something annoying – stolen some money, say, or slowed down some research. Then you get the option to send in one of your soldiers as a covert operative to infiltrate the Exalt cell responsible. They go in with no armour and armed only with a pistol plus gadgets, but this doesn’t matter because when you extract them you get to send a full squad into the resulting battlescape mission, which then becomes a simple matter of keeping the operative’s head down while your soldiers who actually have guns do all the hard work of fighting the Exalt forces.

Exalt soldiers themselves are clones of your own XCOM troop classes dressed in pinstripe suits and face masks. They have the same abilities and basic weapons as your men, but the AI is much, much worse at using them than a human player; given the inherent fragility of humans in XCOM this means that most Exalt missions are braindead turkey shoots, especially because they’re so heavily scripted. There’s two types of mission: one is a king-of-the-hill style fight over a satellite transmitter, and the other just involves getting your covert operative to hack some beacons and then back to the Skyranger. The latter type of mission is never not insultingly easy, since I twigged very quickly that there’d be 2-3 groups of Exalt already on-map and once I’d cleared those out I was free to set up defensive positions to slaughter the reinforcements that would appear once I started hacking beacons. The fights over the transmitters are almost good, though; there’s a constant stream of Exalt coming in from off-map to try and storm the transmitter location, and depending on where it is the battles between your soldiers and the Exalt operatives can become incredibly short-range and nasty as you all try to pile on top of the transmitter. The close-quarters fighting gets so brutal, in fact, that I found myself wishing they’d included dedicated melee weapons. As it was Exalt at least provided me with one of the most memorable XCOM battles I’ll ever have, an absolutely cut-throat encounter on a rooftop where the staircase access and ground floor were wrecked by explosives very early on and Exalt switched to swarming up the sides of the building, critically wounding both my MEC trooper and the medic I sent in to stabilise her and prompting a desperate attempt to kill off the last of the enemy forces before they both bled out. By the end of it the building was a ruin, the roof was covered in corpses and every single one of my troops was nursing a heavy wound of some kind, but I got everyone out alive.

That’s very much the exception, though. For every encounter like that one you’ll have four where the transmitter is in some ludicrously defensible position where you can just dig in and gun down the Exalt as they spawn in from the sides of the map. Their AI for these missions doesn’t help, either, as they suicidally run forward to try to cram into the transmitter zone and turn themselves into prime targets for the much-increased quantity of explosives your squad can now carry. Exalt soldiers are also very much outclassed after the mid-game; they upgrade once to tougher Elite versions who carry laser weapons and have some interesting gene-mod abilities, but they have no answer to Titan armour and plasma guns, and even in the early game you’ve got the ability to bring a giant robot suit to this particular gunfight. In general the Exalt missions suffer from a particularly acute case of the level janitor feeling I get towards XCOM’s endgame, where I know clearing a mission is going to be fairly easy but I still have to go through the motions in order to avoid casualties, and this just compounds the overall feeling of pointlessness that afflicts the whole of the Exalt feature.

Exalt are given almost no explanation, you see. The aliens are inscrutable (at least until that godawful end mission) but you at least get to find out a little bit about who they are through the eyes of your scientists and engineers as they research alien biology and technology. They have backstory, even if its not related to the player through direct means. Exalt on the other hand have no backstory, no context and no point. Except for a few throwaway lines from Vahlen, Shen and Command Guy their motivations remain completely unclear; and their presence on the geoscape is almost maddeningly incidental: each covert operation you complete gives you a piece of information about where the Exalt HQ isn’t (this is a not-even-barely-disguised ripoff of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and I really think Firaxis can probably do slightly better than that for inspiration) but the cells come and go at random and their only purpose is to give you the opportunity to smack down some more Exalt in one of those dull and repetitive shooting galleries. Even once you’ve found and stormed the HQ you’re none the wiser as to who the fuck these people were or why you had to expend so much effort clearing up after them; they’re so insubstantial and compartmentalised from the main gameplay that you could remove them from the expansion entirely and it wouldn’t suffer at all, and in fact would probably be massively improved. I really don’t know how this headline game feature was botched so completely, but the end result is that everything to do with Exalt is textureless, flavourless and an almost colossal waste of time.

Then you’ve got Meld. I had my doubts about its effectiveness from the moment it was announced; the idea is that on most regular missions two containers of Meld will spawn somewhere on the map with a timer countdown, and in order to get to the Meld before they self-destruct you have to abandon the super-cautious tactics that maximise squad survival and play somewhat more aggressively. The incentive for getting Meld is that it’s used as currency for buying the other two headline features of Enemy Within – the gene-mod upgrades and the MEC troopers, which I’ll get to in a minute – but sadly I have to say that my doubts were well-founded for two reasons. The first is that even if you’re playing very cautiously you can still scrape up enough Meld to upgrade some soldiers and manufacture a couple of robot suits; as long as you don’t want an entire squad of genetically-engineered badasses this is a sufficient amount to get you through the whole campaign. The second is that if you offer me a choice between “a gene upgrade for my Assault trooper” and “a squad that’s alive at the end of the mission” I’m always going to pick the latter. The potential for failure cascade and the severe consequences of such mean that risking your squad’s well-being for a measly ten points of Meld just isn’t worth it.

(An aside: we have now finished the bitching part of the review. It’s probably going to turn out to be much longer than the good part largely because I find it much easier to pillory something than I do to sing its praises, but I would like to say up front that there’s at least as much good in Enemy Within as there is bad or mediocre. It’s just that the good parts are a lot subtler and harder to describe.)

Now, as to what the Meld buys you: I have mixed feelings about the gene mod upgrades since the whole process and most of the upgrades themselves are incredibly underwhelming, offering boring stat bonuses like +10 to aim after a miss and no visual changes to your gene modded soldiers except that they now look like Arnie in Predator. However there’s a significant minority of upgrades that make the feature worth including; I particularly like the leg upgrades that gives your troops super-jumping abilities and the anti-psi brain upgrades, while Mimetic skin (a sort of semi-permanent cloak) is arguably overpowered. Gene mods aren’t a bad idea, they just aren’t explored to their fullest potential. MEC troopers, on the other hand… well. MEC troopers do this.

MEC troopers can punch aliens through cars. MEC troopers can deploy flamethrowers to burn out Chyssalid infestations. MEC troopers can fire a ludicrous number of long-range grenades and proximity mines. MEC troopers can turn themselves into piece of High Cover and still fire their explosive weapons. MEC troopers are, in short, where a lot of the good design is hiding in Enemy Within, not to mention a lot of the content since once a soldier is converted into a MEC trooper (through the not-at-all creepy process of chopping off all their limbs and replacing them with bionics) they lose their old speciality and get access to a whole new class tree, with different additional abilities depending on which particular mech suit they’re piloting. Having a MEC trooper come along on a mission is a lot of fun, but you don’t get to have all of it since the aliens get their own version – the Mechtoid – that appears fairly early on and gives the Sectoids some much-needed punch.¹

The aliens in general has been subtly rebalanced so that waiting around to research everything before attacking the alien base doesn’t tilt the scales quite so heavily in your favour, with the appearance of certain advanced enemy types no longer tied to your hitting certain points in XCOM’s “plot”.  I still think it’s better to bide your time since there’s still some scripted appearances and replacements that can be avoided until you’re ready, but it’s no longer the guaranteed free ride it used to be.  Certainly I felt much more pressured in the mid-game, even losing some experienced soldiers in bloody, visceral battles with Mutons and Berserkers. Hell, I’ve even had to retreat from one or two missions because the squad got too beaten up to continue. As far as the battlescape goes this rebalancing has done a lot to shore up that inverse difficulty curve, and while there’s still a point where you’ve got such a tech and experience advantage that clearing missions becomes a triviality it at least occurs a couple of months further into the game than it used to.

As for the geoscape we’ve already established that Exalt is irrelevant, and the way panic management has gone in my EW game has matched my experience in vanilla XCOM: everything seems like it’s going to hell in the first three months, and then suddenly you get on top of it and all your remaining countries are at one panic. Thanks to the new game features, however, there’s a lot more to do in the base management part of the game, with new avenues of research, new base facilities and new Foundry projects all competing for your limited resources.  Some of these are very badly thought-out – I’d like to meet whoever on Firaxis’ design team thought a Needle grenade would be a worthwhile inclusion to the game – but most have at least limited utility and some are ridiculously useful, like the Foundry upgrade that gives all of your soldiers the ability to carry two items into combat instead of one. Like the alien rebalancing these new base management features don’t fix the core problems that the geoscape has, but by bulking it out a little they at least allieviate the symptoms.

The last two changes in particular are what turn Enemy Within into a worthwhile expansion. New content like the MEC troopers is always welcome, but these are the areas where Enemy Within does a half-decent job of tackling the issues that turned the original XCOM into a two-playthrough game. Along with the non-expansion Second Wave mutators they provide at least a semblance of replayability to a game that sorely lacked it, and whatever else you can say about Firaxis they do listen to feedback (even if they then take that feedback and make something like Exalt) as evidenced by the much-requested cosmetic improvements like new armour skins, helmets and voice acting for the multi-national XCOM soldiers in languages other than American. As with Gods and Kings there is actually far more content in this expansion than what’s written on the tin, and it’s the hidden stuff that ultimately makes Enemy Within well worth picking up – at least, if you liked XCOM in the first place. If you hated it, well, I very much doubt it’s going to change your mind since it’s still the same game, for better or worse. On the balance of what’s here, though, I do think it is better. Just.

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The post Thoughts: Enemy Within. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.