Beyond Earth: Rising Tide

[DrPraetor]

So the Rising Tide expansion makes not-Alpha Centauri II a much better game. It's still not very well balanced, but it has a good trade/diplomacy system. It has some improvements. The telepathy in Alpha Centauri was annoying garbage. The power of your earth-moving equipment defied reason (we can't launch missiles yet, but we can build a mountain 3km high!). That stuff has been cleaned up, while retaining the Alien hive mind (more on that in a bit), and it is an improvement.

Now, my complaint: Rising Tide lacks the sparkle of Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri was a very-successful mashup of the Red Mars novels and the Russian science fiction film Solaris (see the 1972 version, which is one of the greatest films ever and worth the three hours to watch; reviewers like the 2002 version but I don't.)
The drama in Alpha Centauri was between different futures with present-day currency: police state vs. democracy, communists vs. capitalists vs. environmentalists, radical rationalists vs. believers in God. As in the Red Mars novels, you really believed people would, even after humanity just dodged extinction, fight for this stuff.
In Rising Tide, you're supposed to fight to the death over whether the glowing doodads on your head are cyan, magenta or yellow. It's literally Sophomoric - your roommate (Supremacy) keeps going on about the Singularity but it's not clear what the fuck he even means, and his Wiccan girlfriend (Harmony) goes on about whatever health and environment stuff but is actually just hyper-aggressive and crazy.
Some of the new text in Rising Tide is good. "This is not Exile" (by the African leader http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Sama ... re_(CivBE) ) has some solid verbiage, but it pales to some of the quotes from Alpha Centauri - every single leader had some gems ( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier ... a_Centauri ) and nothing in Beyond Earth comes *close* to stuff like "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
As battlefield opponents, the mind worms were lame (but gross, if the Aliens had *spies* they could be mind worms, that would be neat - might be moddable?), but Planet herself was pretty cool. It was a shame in Alpha Centauri that you couldn't meaningfully win by declaring war on Planet and just fighting the aliens; but in BE:RT, there's no better option. You will eventually make the aliens max-hatred you and you'll pillage their nests. Planet will not talk to you.
The negotiation system in the Rising Tide expansion, while it supports a cool system of mutually-beneficial agreements, was packaged with a really stupid system for diplomacy-proper.
Foreign leaders have priorities which are reflected in the personality bonuses they choose. Then, if you are good at whatever focus (have a high research rate, have a lot of technologies, have a lot of troops, have highly-elite troops, etc. etc.) they like you, and if you fall behind they hate you. There are a few cases where this almost makes sense, but by and large you'll get angry messages about not claiming enough territory or having enough spies or intra-national trade routes and this is an even-dumber reason for the last survivors of humanity to turn on one another in murderous fury than the color of the LEDs people glue to their heads.

Anyway, I'm having fun playing it (I cheat like hell, the game isn't really challenging anyway) but that's my $0.02.

[name_here]

It's hard to grasp just how monstrously annoying the diplomacy thing is just from the description. As far as I can tell, on some regular timer they check the priorities thing and then send you an appropriate message (though the techs positive one in particular reads like someone told the designer that it was supposed to insult you for spending too much effort on research) and this pops up at the top of your screen, and it took me like three rounds of this before I started swearing at my computer whenever someone dropped in to bitch at me for not building more cities. Note: game mechanics are designed to absolutely fuck you in the ass for building more cities. It's got a health system that works a lot like the Civ V happiness system, except that there aren't any luxuries.

Then I used the Madoka civilization mod and this got more annoying, because one of the things it tracks is energy stockpile and the mod civ has this feature where you donate energy to the "Avert the Heat Death of the Universe" fund (starting at 750 and spiking every time you use it) and get a free tech of your choice from the ones you meet the preqs for. So I'd get people complementing me for my huge energy stockpiles and then insulting me for my tiny energy stockpiles every time I bought a new one. Though one of the default civilizations has a low energy complaint line ending with "Don't let entropy get the upper hand", which was hilariously appropriate.

Also yeah, the quotes are not nearly as good. Alpha Centauri set a very high bar that Beyond Earth is not close to matching.

I can actually kind of go for the ideological poles thing; Supremacy is transhumanist, Harmony is all about genetic modification and human-alien hybridization, Purity is about retaining baseline humanity (with stirrings of Nazism) and turning the planet into a new Earth. The problem is that only Purity really does anything with this beyond swapping your unit types; they're big on building the Terrascape improvement everywhere because it's +2 to food, energy, and production and makes it look like you're bulldozing the planet to turn it into a golf course. Harmony kind of makes you want to use fungus Miasma, but not nearly as much as Alpha Centauri does. And it doesn't really help with getting along with the aliens. Supremacy has a better orbital game from its bonuses, but then Harmony is the one with the Rocktopus.

[Stahlseele]

BE/RT are really not worth it for what they are asking for it right now . .
They are nowhere near as good as Civ5 was. Nowhere near as good as it should have been either. MAYBE if you can get BE and RT TOGETHER for 20 bucks. But not a single cent more. If i remember correctly, there was a MOD for Civ5 for free that allowed you to build cities on the oceans as well . .

[DrPraetor]

Rising Tide does have the same (very powerful) modding engine as Civ V et al. (it's basically a reskin on Civ V, in fact.)

So it might be possible to replace the current (lame, flavorless) personality traits with government options from:
Politics:
Democracy - Population rules.
Guided Democracy - Population endorses elite agenda.
Police State - Elites rule.
Theocracy - (Need not be religious, needs new name) Experts support elite rule.
Meritocracy - Rule by experts.
Polyarchy - Population chooses among experts.

Economics:
Green - No large ventures, regulation to prevent externalized costs.
Syndicalist - Green with central coordination.
Planned - Large ventures run by government.
Mixed - Private and government ventures compete.
Market - Minimal central intervention/regulation, large ventures are private.
Regulated - Some large private ventures, with green regulation.

Values:
Power - Society celebrates military might, conquest, domination.
Expansion - Society glorifies adventurism to gain wealth.
Wealth - Society focused on the good life, fashionable consumption.
Progress - Society revolves around high-tech consumerism.
Knowledge - Society devoted to education, personal growth.
??? - Each individual person wants high-tech weapons???

Anyway, I'm having trouble fitting a value between Power and Knowledge, but the point is, you have six-point wheels and the further two civilizations are apart, the more hostile.

It would be a lot of work but this would be modable.

[Username17]

A problem I ran into with modding Alpha Centauri is that Police States and Theocracies aren't really different things. Whether you rise to become supreme leader by being the head of the Communist Party or by being the head of the Council on Islamic Law, but in either case you're rising through the ranks of a cutthroat secretive parallel bureaucracy in order to become the public face. You'd think that secular police states and theocratic dictatorships would hate each other, but they honestly don't seem to. The European axis was almost all Catholic, but they had no particular problem having Japanese ancestor worshipers and Hindus and Muslims onside.

Dictatorships are very militaristic, and go to war with each other all the time. But they seem to be super best friends with other dictatorships the rest of the time - regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof. The Islamic Republic of Iran ain't got no problems trading with the Buddhist Myanmar or the Juchei North Korea.

As for the value between Power and Knowledge, might it be "Security?" Society devoted to protecting itself from threats external and internal.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Oh, and I agree with Stahlseele about the price point; if I were under any pressure to economize I would not have bought it.

"Security" it is.
Security - Society values a technologically sophisticated military and intelligence apparatus, ostensibly for defensive purposes.

I do want some compromise between a Police State and Confucianism - you're right that it shouldn't be called a Theocracy at all.

Under the system above, Iran and the United States are both "Guided Democracies" - which strike some compromise between public input and elite repression/control. We just have non-compatible propoganda systems - we're enemies for realpolitik reasons,

Also, each government has a development level. Guided Democracies have both more Elite control and more individual freedom as they develop, because Elites develop more sophisticated strategies of retaining control without frequent resort to clubs. So the U.S. is a high development Guided Democracy (we've had protection for freedom of speech since we raised our development level in the 1960s) while Iran is a low-development guided Democracy, and simultaneously doesn't have the same individual freedoms and has a government apparatus that goes off the rails and doesn't serve Elite demands.

The Ba'ath party states (Syria, Saddam's Iraq) were Police States but with extensive and well-educated professional services making a lot of the decisions (as opposed to North Korea, for example, which is purely a Police State.) So whatever you call it, you need a name for governments which strike a compromise between expert input and control.

For the "price" of one development step, you can either raise your development level one (almost always what you want, once you've selected a government form), or move one step around the wheel, or move two steps around the wheel and sacrifice a development level.

So a Democracy-2 can develop into a Democracy-3, a Guided-Democracy-2, a Polyarchy-2, a Police-State-1 or a Meritocracy-1.

[Username17]

You possibly want all the government types to be the same type of speech. So if you are using Democracy, you might want to have other governments be cracies as well. Kratocracy (rule by those with strength or cunning) and Bureaucracy (rule by rules) are good solid examples.

But you probably don't even want any of the governments to be called "democracy," because the term is so loaded. Everyone so completely accepts that "democracy is good" that even fucking North Korea is nominally a democracy (ask them, they'll tell you). Indeed, you probably should just assume that every government has a ruling elite and that every government is nominally justified by popular mandate that has been rigged in some way to be perpetual (at least for the duration of the game).

What you should have instead is have the different countries/factions differ in how one becomes a member of the ruling elite. So you have situations like the EU where you join the ruling elite by going to the right schools and telling higher ranked members of the bureaucracy what they want to hear ("technocratic advancement"). And you have more American-style popularity contests where you join the ruling elite by giving good interviews on trid shows ("populist advancement"). And you have situations like Russia where whoever has the gold simply makes the rules ("plutocratic advancement"). And you have situations like Baathism, where the strongest bastard takes the newest open seat that they probably opened themselves with a bullet ("kratocratic advancement" or perhaps "military advancement"). And you have situations like China, where there is a completely arbitrary set of criteria for promotion and anyone who ticks off enough of them joins the ruling elite ("meritocratic advancement"). And finally, you have the classical Roman (or Vampire conspiracy) shtick where the ruling elite adopt people into their ranks to nip potential threats or add potential powerbases to their own ("aristocratic" or "oligarchic" advancement).

So the wheel would be:

• Plutocratic
• Technocratic
• Meritocratic
• Kratocratic
• Aristocratic
• Populist

So Zakharov is the head of a Meritocratic elite, and he hates the people who are ruled by a fickle appeal to mass public sentiment: Domai's Populist elite. Morgan is the head of a Plutocratic elite, and has no problems with government by reality TV stars but gets all upset at the people whose elites are chosen strictly for being strong military leader types: Santiago's Kratocratic elite.

-Username17

[name_here]

One of the design goals that the team adopted as of the Civ V Brave New World expansion is apparently for the late-game to splinter into three hostile power blocs. In that one it was with the ideology system; you get bonus policies for being an early member of an ideology and so the first three civs to unlock ideologies get different ones. That seems to have also been the objective with the Affinity system. Doing three six-point stars would probably not carry that forward.

I kind of like the endgame power bloc concept, but the implementation really bugs me. In BNW, the problem is that once the ideologies unlock it basically invalidates your prior diplomatic history; a civ that used to like you doesn't seem to be inclined to pick your ideology, and the ideology bonus/penalty trumps almost anything. It basically randomly shuffles teams. In BE, you pretty much have to commit to a team in the early game before you've even met most civs. In both cases you can't really recruit people to your team; BNW lets you give people penalties for not following your ideology based on tourism output and theoretically allows switching, but I have literally never seen the AI actually switch even in games I won by culture victory. I'd rather it tend to intensify and augment the alliances that naturally form over the course of the game.

Back to the subject of a possible diplomacy mod, I'd like it if you could get the AI to migrate to your policies rather than either conforming to theirs or letting the dice fall where they may and teaming up with whoever happens to side with you. Obviously you'd want to avoid having every game turn into a hugbox of whatever policy combo gives diplomacy bonuses by making it difficult or resistant to snowballing.

[Username17]

Well, if you're trying to be a history simulator, then randomly shuffling teams shortly after the development of nationalism and then again after the development of the welfare state seems like a thing you'd want to do.

Consider the sides that develop when France declares itself a revolutionary power. Suddenly Russia, Germany, and England are fighting against France and America. That's pretty left field. Then a hundred years go by and suddenly bam, we got England, Russia, and France versus Germany and Turkey. And then after the world wars, you got England and France versus Russia. That's a pretty big resortment. The only constant is that so far the Americans have been on the same side as France in every conflict since they became a splinter faction.

So if anything, I would say that randomly reshuffling the teams only once isn't enough to be like real history. It should happen several times.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

One of the design goals that the team adopted as of the Civ V Brave New World expansion is apparently for the late-game to splinter into three hostile power blocs. In that one it was with the ideology system

Good lord really? Because it is a spectacular failure as far as I can tell in that case.

For me the influence of ideologies always plays out as "First to pick gets huge bonuses, second to pick tries their own thing but the first one snowballs hard (and was already lead snowball in order to be first to pick) then the penalties for not being in the "winning" ideology kick in and gradually force EVERYONE to eventually take the first snowballing ideology OR DIE."

Every damn time. I do not understand how the fuck the system is supposed to encourage a three way split when it has major snowballing "not on the winning team" penalties going on. But then again "utterly bizarre game design decisions" are the name of the game for Firaxis in recent times.

[Stahlseele]

the forcing your ideology on others depends on your culture and maybe tourism levels.

[name_here]

It depends on tourism. But I've never seen the AI switch no matter how badly the tourism penalties are hitting it. I've seen them stick it out at -20 happiness. Granted, it's possible that's because I only see that much tourism when I'm actively gunning for a culture victory and maybe the AI wants to keep the differing ideology tourism penalty to block me.

My experience has been that civs pick ideologies round-robin style; one for A, then one for B, then one for C, then a second for each.

It might also depend on the size of the starting lead. The system seems rigged to make teams form around the three most powerful civs, who in my games usually will unlock their ideologies around the same time, and every founder gets the same number of bonus policies, so if the lead pack is fairly even you get three snowballs going.

[PhoneLobster]

I have not only seen AI switch ideologies when faced with crushing "not the biggest snowballed ideology" penalty (I mean not reliably or at a sensible time, the AI isn't THAT smart), I have ALSO seen the AI switch away from the penalty, but then SWITCH BACK to the ideology they really want, and then do so AGAIN. (Civ AI, especially in 5 is inexcusably bad)

[Stahlseele]

i have seen them switch ideologies around like dirty shirts as well.
on one ocassion where i was really from the beginning gunning for culture(brazil on jungle will do that) victory, cities started defecting to me o.O

[Occluded Sun]

Have they at least fixed the quest design? I can't even express how frustrating it was that most of the game's quests didn't work properly because they weren't programmed correctly.

[DrPraetor]

• Plutocratic
• Technocratic
• Meritocratic
• Kratocratic
• Aristocratic
• Populist

Problem is, "Aristocratic" and "Plutocratic" both overlap too much with the economic system. This is a fantasy-fulfillment future society game, and the PaulTards should be allowed to set the sliders to maximum-capitalism and maximum-freedom at the same time, even if that's nonsense in real-world political economy.

So:

• Democracy
• Meritocracy / Technocracy
• Police State

Becomes:

• Anarchy - Personal freedom, lack of authority, social status, or formal restrictions. May be an organized society (as Spanish anarchism) but highly egalitarian and loose in the political domain.
• Meritarchy - Personal intellectual political freedom / freedom of conscience, but with a hierarchy based on intellect/accomplishment (the merit). Popular ratification of scientific management.
• Technarchy - Decisions are made according to scientific management principles; personal freedoms are restricted as needed to achieve rational objectives. Authorities scientifically (maybe intrusively) manage people.
• Cryptarchy - A paternalistic system where a hierarchy of established experts governs society in secret. Authorities are highly intrusive in both personal and political dimensions, without need to explain or justify.
• Oligarchy - Decisions are made by the leadership of established constituencies. These constituencies can be intrusive, especially in matters of political expression, as they deem to maintain order.
• Polyarchy - Personal intellectual political freedom / freedom of conscience, but with different competing constituencies (the poly) competing for popular ratification of their agendas.

Meritarchy is actually established in the literature as a system of elections with results somehow informed by merit. The more-proper greek rooted term would be slightly different (from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BC%C ... ient_Greek) but wouldn't mean the correct thing either, being something more-literally like "government where you get what you deserve" rather than "government by those who deserve to govern."

Technarchy is also attested, has been out of fashion since the 1920s, but did mean

a scientific business government has of late been dubbed a “technarchy” and its members “technarchs.”

For the root political term for a fascist government or police state, we're looking for something like polyarchy (rule by constituencies with democratic ratification, plus personal and political freedoms) but without the freedoms. That's right in the ideological manifesto for fascists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

Corporarchy, like Aristocracy or Plutocracy, has a mainly economic rather than political connotation. Oligarchy - rule by the few, as opposed to Polyarchy rule by the many - carries more or less the connotation I want.

Finally, we need the most-non-anarchist position, in which a rigid hierarchy of experts runs things ostensibly for your own good. Paternalistic + -archy would seem like a good place to start, but unfortunately Patriarchy means something totally different.

http://phrontistery.info/govern.html
Cryptarchy? A system of government by conspiracy? I'll go with that for now.