I've noticed there was a change in the tone of feedback from Victor to the Poe OpenDev (I'm going to refer to the Closed Beta as the Poe OpenDev, to make things objective considering the weight of the word "beta" has for a lot of gamers). There's more vocal criticism to Poe than there was to Victor, which got me thinking. 

Was the Victor OpenDev better than the Poe OpenDev? Was Poe lacking in some aspects as compared to Victor? Or were those criticisms dependent on the fact that this was labelled "closed beta"? 

I wanna hear your thoughts.

Stability is more balanced in Poe, money and religion felt fantastic in Victor, and while Lucy had me going for the awesome man o war, nothing can beat my excitement over seeing the biplane take its first flight back in victor. Tough question.

The main aspect in which Victor was better was the more interesting map. In almost all other aspects the game felt better with Poe (except for some specific details). So overall the game went into the right direction.

I guess the reason for bigger criticism is that we are getting closer to release and people have higher expectations now than they had earlier and maybe some people felt that too few has changed between the two versions because don't know how hard software development is and how slow this moves in the real world. That's not Amplitude's fault. That's just the complexity of the software development process. It's like if you would expect your architect to build a central air conditioning into your 100 years old house in just two weeks. It just takes time.

The only thing I think was better in victor was mony rush buy cost, which for some reason was greatly increased and made useless in Poe. But affinites, religion, influence from population ect felt alot better in Poe. However the balance issues are in many cases the same.

Victor because I was actually able to play that one. No clue what changes they made between Victor and Poe but it completely tanked performance.

I think the Poe OpenDev was the better game, but Victor felt more polished. The bugs and other issues with Poe (resource starvation, interface bugs, instability) made it less enjoyable to play.

I liked the terrain on the maps of both OpenDevs, but I felt the Victor map was more varied and was a more "complete" world.

ritchiaro wrote:

 It's like if you would expect your architect to build a central air conditioning into your 100 years old house in just two weeks. It just takes time.

Um, no. It's like they're building a brand new house, and it doesn't have a solid roof, working bathroom or kitchen. I ran the Poe version on my computer that ran Victor just fine, and my computer was overheating, running its fan constantly, and the game ran extremely slowly from the Medieval era on. I received error messages that required me to close and re-open the game to continue playing, which did not happen with the Victor dev. Add to that, a major feature of the previous version (Civics points) was ripped out this close to release. Add to that, the Civics points were replaced by Influence points, but Civs that get Influence points were not re-balanced. Not only is the game buggy as **** but also, the dev appears to be flailing around trying to balance game mechanics. This is what I would expect from an alpha game that isn't supposed to launch in the next several weeks. A more interesting map isn't going to make or break this game. What will is deficient game systems (religion, diplomacy, stability, influence, war resolution, naval play, trade, city building), bugs, and an inability to run well on many computers. Oh, and a UI with font so small, many people can't navigate it. This is just one UI problem that has been reported since the beginning, that the dev refuses to fix. I want to like this game. But. quite honestly, the game has a lot of problems. The community has reported these, and the dev either doesn't listen or "fixes" the issue in a way that is not helpful in any way at all.

Poe felt better overall, but Victor and Lucy both did their own things right imo.

As others stated, I feel money was much better balanced in the Victor opendev. In Closed Beta I felt like I had to build into industry, or do a mixed build. I couldn't make a money-focused build where I buy everything and be equally strong to someone who heavily invests into industry and produces everything with barely any money income. Despite specializing my entire civilization into making as much money as possible, in the later game I found that I just changed every pop that was working on making money over to industry and massively increasing how fast I was able to build anything, suddenly no longer feeling like my entire industry was terrible, despite making around 400-500 money per turn when I had everything going into it as well as having the Phoenicians as a previous culture reducing purchase costs by 20%. I had a stranglehold on resources and a booming money economy, as well as having literally every AI rely on trade with me so I was never going to have any issues with that - war with me or breaking those deals would hurt them more than help - but my overall economy suffered and was barely functional because it just didn't matter. While in Victor I felt that I could specialize in industry or money and have it work, although industry felt a tiny bit weaker.

Ironically, despite Individualism / Collectivism being well balanced on their own, if money and industry aren't well balanced then one or the other becomes objectively better.

I do think that Poe's stability was better balanced overall than in any previous opendev, however I feel they tipped a bit too far into stability's importance. I felt like stability was, especially as I tried to expand more, almost forcing me to focus on it over other resources to too much of a degree. I felt like I was constantly at around 20-40% stability at most unless I specifically ignored everything except stability, or had a wonder and holy site built in the city. It's definitely the most balanced it's been so far, but it's still a bit off the mark, but in the other direction this time. A little too important, rather than much too insignificant.

Also, I found that I've had some performance issues with every opendev, but ironically the one I've had the least performance issues (and crashes) with was the closed beta / poe opendev. I figure that part of this is due to the game being very unfinished and part of it due to my computer, although it's certainly not that bad and has been able to smoothly run many other games, even recent ones at high or medium settings (and I use the lowest possible settings on Humankind) (Some examples of other games that I don't have issues with being civilization 6, warhammer vermintide, rocket league, destiny 2, and apex legends, just to name a few). However, I had the most bugs by far. First of all, I was unable to reduce the amount of autosaves I had, while able to increase it. Next, I still had occasional crashes, and I even had an issue where I got frozen in the controls menu and had to alt-F4 because while trying to change one of my keybinds the menu got stuck and the buttons stopped doing anything. I mostly noticed the game running slower and crashing in the late game, which is where it was more often (but not exclusively) previously. And on top of this, randomly in the midgame my capital city began "starving" and losing a pop every few turns, while getting around +70-80 food per turn or more with only 14-15 pops and simultaneously gaining population X per turns, sometimes doing both in the same turn, and even putting my entire city on food production wouldn't fix the issue. And that's just what I remember off the top of my head.

I don't know that it's a fair question. But Victor was stable and enjoyable. It would have been pretty unbalanced but the stability meant that you could imagine playing it with mods to tailor an experience. Both Poe and Lucy ran poorly and had a few too many bugs to get super excited about. I did appreciate the increase in Events and their variety in Poe's launch. But ultimately Poe made the game seem like it was behind schedule. Good luck.