Sid Meier's Beyond Earth - Alpha Centauri 2?!

Oh, wow.

Play the current code for any serious length of time and you’ll find what strikes me as a pretty major bug lurking near the heart of the game’s reworking of diplomacy mechanics. I’ve been in contact with 2K about this, and they’ve confirmed that the game isn’t working properly at present but that a fix is on the way.

The bug is to do with going to war. In old Civ games, you could just ask another civ if they wanted to join you in ganging up on a third: playground tactics, to quote the diplomats of Jurassic 5. That option isn’t available any more, and I suspect it’s because the designers want to automate things slightly and make them a bit cleaner and more reliable. The idea now is that you can change your relationship with a civ, ranging from being at war to being allies, and now this relationship controls what happens when one of you goes to war.

In other words, if I’m allies with INTEGR and they go to war with the North Sea Alliance, I suddenly find myself dragged in too. This is bewildering enough in itself, but it’s compounded at present by a bug that means it doesn’t seem to work in reverse: ie, if I want to go to war with the North Sea Alliance and I’m allies with INTEGR, they don’t seem to feel the need to join me.

I’ve been talking to 2K about this bug, and I’ve been unable at present to get an ETA on a patch. The current quote I have is: “Firaxis is working on getting this fixed.” I gather it will appear as a known issue on the website and a patch should be on the way swiftly. My workaround so far is simply not to go into alliance with anyone - and in truth, I think this gets at a problem that goes deeper than the bug anyway. Old Civ diplomacy could be confusing, but it was also flexible. Here, I’ve spent a lot of time being yoinked into wars I didn’t even know were brewing.

Who would want to make alliances with that system, even without the bug.

Bugs are fine, hey that happens and they are fixing it.

The bigger issue is IGN’s fairly luke-warm review, I didn’t read it (yet) but the bullet points indicated a lack of replay-ability. It’s like they learned nothing.

The main thing I learned, is not to pre-order it this time. :p

Yeah, I skipped a pre-order. It helps it is dropping when a bunch of other things are coming out, or I will admit I may well have bitten just to try and get more mileage out of my initial purchase. I still may yet pick this expansion up later next year, likely during a summer sale and hopefully after a patch or two.

Sounds like further degradation of the Sid Meier brand.

My thoughts exactly. The bug isn’t the main concern for me. Yes, it sucks, but they’re aware of it and are apparently working on it.

The systems itself is stupid. Just flat-out dumb.

When I was in the closed beta for Sovereignty, alliances worked in a similar way - forming an alliance meant that your partner may or may not intervene in a war that you are in. By the same token, you didn’t have to go to war just because your alliance partner did.

I don’t see why they couldn’t adopt the same system.

(It’s been months since I’ve played it, so that may have changed. Come to think of it, perhaps I should fire it up again.)

Makes perfect sense to me. What’s the point of an alliance if you won’t go to war if you ally does, and vice versa? Should make you think a lot longer and harder about that potential alliance.

Why? Why have an alliance that is “optional”? That makes it worthless if allies can just pick and choose when/who they want to fight. An alliance means you choose to defend your ally if they go to war.

Because the AI is dumb, and therefore it will pick bad wars, and unrealistic, and therefore won’t consult his allies before declaring war.

Yeah, I’ve played games like what they described and enjoyed the mechanic. It made alliances risky, which added to my interest. However, there wasn’t a robust system that was backing it up, so it was a better-than-nothing kind of thing. In Civ V, I could rarely get another nation to go to war against someone else without bribing them. That created a favored technique of offering various goodies to team up and then after defeating your opponent you ould decalre war against your once-ally and all the per-turn items (luxury and strategic resources and gold) that you promised them revert back to you. This would frequently have the impact of cratering your new opponent’s economy, happiness (“health” in BE), and sometime military if they were using the loaned strategic resources for their units. I think that was the kind of workaround that Firaxis was attempting to dodge with the new system. Working properly, the simplicity is nice but I agree it could certainly be better.

Because acting like an ally isn’t compulsory. Part of the longstanding tradition of diplomacy is saying one thing and doing the opposite. Signing a peace treaty while building up your forces on your rival’s border. Declaring your alliance while letting them get bogged down in a protracted war and not helping them. Trading tech while crippling their trade routes. Part of 4x gaming is the pleasure you get from acting like a jerk.

I get what they’re trying to do here, but it’s dumb. Especially when Civ A.I. is goofy when it comes to declaring war and peace on each other.

Oh, don’t get me wrong - I understand it’s nowhere near “realistic.” Also, you can always sever your alliance. Imagine this:
[AI X to AI Y]“Haha! Now you will feel the combined might of both my forces and those of my human ally! You will never defeat us!”
[human to AI X] “Yeah, so … um … look, I know that I said I’d help you out in your wars, and all, but I kinda like their background color better than yours. So, um … I’m not your ally anymore. It’s just time that we both moved on.”
[AI X]“WTH?!? You promised!”
[human]“Yeah, I know. Look, I’m just not up for a committed relationship at this time. It’s me, not you.”
[human to AI Y]“So, the thing is, I’m not currently seeing X in my embassy anymore. Here’s my number, so give me a call sometime if you’d like to talk. Cool background color, by the way. So, are we good?”
[AI Y]“Yeah, we’re good. Just tell me, what did you ever see in X, anyway?”
[human]“Well, he was the first empire I met after landing on the planet, so …”
[AI Y]“Say no more, I understand.”

Honestly, I’ve never been terribly happy with any diplomacy system. But like I said above, they’re usually better than nothing.

That’s the risk of an alliance and comes with the territory. i think alliances where you can can just bail are very unrealistic and let you manipulate the AI too much.

RPS’ WIT (they will revisit it soon).

And even putting bugs aside, I found the new Diplomacy system infuriating in its restrictions. The wholesale removal of active negotiation for peace or requests for your allies to join you in a war is bewildering, as is the gutting of trade negotations. I appreciate that Beyond Earth finally has the confidence to not simply hang off Civ V’s coat-tails, but taking away meaningful agency when it comes to a critical part of the game – how you relate to other Civs – seems absolutely crazy.

And so it is that this piece must end on something of a cliffhanger. I can’t safely recommend for or against Rising Tide, because I need to see how the Diplomacy plays out over the coming days. In the build I have here, it’s a disaster, so I need to see whether that changes, and how soon.

-Todd

Actually, that’s not really true. Historically, most countries seem to honor their treaty commitments. With a few exceptions, for example, in the last two world wars, the alliances on each side largely held with a few exceptions.

Signing a peace treaty while building up your forces on your rival’s border. Declaring your alliance while letting them get bogged down in a protracted war and not helping them. Trading tech while crippling their trade routes. Part of 4x gaming is the pleasure you get from acting like a jerk.

But acting like a jerk too much is totally unrealistic. The US isn’t going to start screwing the UK tomorrow - there’s too much history there and too much mutual interest and values.

I’m not talking about realistic. Note that I never used that word. I’m saying that part of the joy or mastery, if you will, of 4x games is manipulating the AI into doing stupid things based on your clearly superior skills. Part of that is being a jackass in diplomacy.

This system does the opposite. It forces me, the player, to do the AI’s bidding. That’s never a good thing.

Edit: Plus, you seem to be ignoring the basic criticism that most game AI’s suck at diplomacy when it comes to dealing with one another, (I saw nothing in Beyond Earth to challenge that) so it puts the player into states of war for essentially random reasons.

Edit 2: How is this not dumb?

Where Civ traditionally allows you to stipulate what you want and/or are prepared to sacrifice, now it decides for you. So, for instance, I’d absolutely steamrollered this troublesome Civ; I didn’t want to wipe them out but I needed to stop them attacking me. I crushed their army, then went to offer peace. The game decreed that I would demand one of their cities from them – there was no option to alter this deal. They said no. Of course they said no. I didn’t even want their city: I just wanted peace so I could get back on pursuing a chilled-out Transcendence victory. Instead, I was locked into conquest. Later on, they came to me offering me their city in the name of peace. I had to accept. They hated me for it and so attacked again later. Stupid, just stupid. Similarly, had I instead kicked seven bells out of another Civ and they then begged me for peace, I would not be able to make demands in exchange for mercy. The deal is fixed, based only upon whatever the game has silently decided behind the scenes.

I love that the PC Gamer review doesn’t even mention the obvious bug, or touch on the huge change to alliances or how negotiations have been “streamlined” in the new system.

That direction being Alpha Centauri, it’s no surprise that the diplomacy section has seen the biggest overhaul. The new system has two basic goals, to make things more transparent, and to give the leaders more personality. Sorry, typo. I mean any personality, rather than them being just a load of cardboard cutouts. Unfortunately, while they do have more than they did, Beyond Earth continues being more comfortable with the numbers side of humanity than its humans.

The more mechanical side works better. Each faction now has a Fear and Respect bar, the first based on your strength and the latter based on how your actions mesh with their philosophies, such as worrying about your peoples’ health. Everyone also now has Traits that offer direct upgrades, and advantages that others can buy into using the new Diplomatic Capital resource—a stipend each turn in exchange for a boost. You can have up to four in play, and swap them out, as well as spend DC to purchase units and buildings outright. Combined, all this opens up a much more interesting diplomatic metagame of mutual favours and reasons to side with specific leaders, without ruling out making deals with assorted devils if the need arises. It’s also now much easier to read them, and see when you’re clashing with someone or they’re likely to bail on a deal.

Even if you like the new system, you should probably cover it and explain what it means in terms of gameplay.

Well it’s worked great for the series in the past. As for “why”, maybe you have a neighbor that’s allied with the guy your ally is at war with. Jumping in means they jump in. Are you ready? Maybe the enemy is better position to wreak havoc in your empire. Maybe you aren’t ready to go to war just yet. It was possible to keep an ally happy without jumping into a terrible war, too (funneling units/tech).

Given that Civ has modeled war weariness for several versions now, forcing you into wars would be a really bad mechanic. And it’s not really a quantifiable cost of creating an alliance to begin with. Not forcing you into a war, in the Civ games, has been a great system.