Exploration in Beta 1B

Beta 1B is in fact crushingly unfun. But it doesn't have to be this bad.

First off, it's not going to matter if Elemental has a great tech tree, a fantastic unit design system, a cool economy, etc., if the first 200 turns of the game are End Turn, End Turn, End Turn, Find a Potion, End Turn, End Turn, Build a Farm, End Turn, End Turn...

Exploration, the first X, is non-existent so far. There's just *nothing* of interest to find. With Civ, terrain means something. With Elemental, the terrain is just useless void that you have to go through to get to another fertile land, which tends to be way too distant to keep the game interesting in the first group of turns. The idea of starting a game and then spending a hundreds of turns doing nothing is agonizing.

The beginning of this game is like playing Galactic Civilizations with no planets, just those stupid anomalies. And I'll say it right now: those anomalies are one of the *worst* aspects of GalCiv. And so far, they're terrible here too. I don't want a potion. And I don't want 30,000 dragon skulls all over the map. Give me the goodie hut model. Give me a tech. If I find something, it had better be important.

I get it. Elemental wants to be EPIC and have a large, sparse map. But, if you can't hook people in the early game, nobody is going to come back for more. Make it smaller, and make each choice have more consequence.

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I can see where you are coming from, this is probably the least fun beta so far. I think they are tweaking several settings (like tech research time and movement speed) to see what impact they have. However, if the final is anything like this, they might want to consider one free Scout with your Sov (he's your first follower or something) just so you have something to do. Also, keep in mind they have talked about having a larger variety of terrain types than just plains, forest and mountains, which should add some interest.

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Different terrain types might help some... if the terrain mattered in some way. And if your cities had some chance to exploit those differences by some choice of your own. Right now, I tend to see vast plains and vast forests. Which looks great on a zoomed out cloth map, but it means my cities are going to be all plains. Because that's where the fertile land is.

Civ wasn't this way. When you plunked down a city, the terrain around that city tended to be varied. A hill or two. A forest or two or three. Perhaps a river and maybe some floodlands. The varied terrain made things more interesting at an individual square level. That variety is completely gone in the Elemental model so far. Maybe the big mountain ranges and big forests are more realistic, but there's a reason why you don't see them in strategy games. They're boring and they annihilate choice.

Cities still plunk down improvements at individual squares though, and it seems a waste to remove the effect of terrain from such a system. Maybe there's something further down the tech tree that I haven't bothered to research yet because my brain has stopped operating by turn 400 though.

Okay, so now I guess I'm saying that there's nothing to eXplore AND nothing to eXploit.

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Most of the content is a LONG ways from being implemented at this point. We're just working on the engine basics. This was how the basic economy engine works for 1B.

If there isn't some substance to it by beta 3A then I'll starting worrying a good deal more.

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That's fine, but if you want to change the trajectory of a large moving object, it's better to start early. I can still voice complaints at the 3A stage too.

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I think the main reason you perceive it to be a bunch of empty land is because you're only looking at the cloth map. With the 3D engine involved it actually looks like land, plus, I'm sure in later stages of the beta we'll be seeing more complete lands. Hills, Snow, Tundra, Ice, Rocky Volcano type lands, etc etc. Not to mention with every new build they add more "places" and things on the map. It'll look much better in time.

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And I don't want 30,000 dragon skulls all over the map. Give me the goodie hut model. Give me a tech. If I find something, it had better be important.

It's coming.

There is already more variety with the goodie places: something stuck in a giant spiderweb, a corpse and bones of a giant creature, ruins...

Ok, they give you gold or potion most of the time but I just found another useful thing: the map of a not-so-far away city, making it appear on the cloth map.

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