The video was a bit hard to follow because the sound was cutting out every other second or two.

They didn't show much of Harmony, though we did get to see the Harmony bonuses for the first time. Lots of Supremacy units shown. Supremacy's 20% bonus for formation seems pretty strong.

From the sound of it, Firaxis views Affinity as less of a choice made by the player and more a result of choices made because of pressures in the game ... especially available resources. I hope the map generator isn't playing a large role in what Affinity you can viably play. Affinity being an ideological component and dictating what sort of ending to pursue, I would prefer it to be very heavily weighted towards player intent, or at least a more interesting choice that it's being made out to be in the livestreams. Hopefully the availability of resources is less crucial than they are making it out to be.

Now that all the Affinity bonuses are known, I think Purity 1's ability to negate risk from Aliens completely while exploring/excavating looks to be out of line with the others. It's not quite clear how Affinity bonuses work yet (do you get all the effects, or just those from your dominant Affinity, or just those you get to that level first with?), or how the quest lines are affected by early choices ... but if there's a way to get Purity 1's effect without a big impact on ability to go with another Affinity, I would expect Purity 1 to be the "one right move" in all cases, and for it to be important to get as early as possible. Making units effectively immortal vs Aliens is going to open up exploits that completely negate Alien pressure. Siege Worm herding. Explorer "walls" ... with artillery backup. Given the public information so far ... this would be where I'd put my "massively exploited until patched out" money would go...

I would suggest something like reduced Expedition time instead. That would bring it in line with the other level 1 Affinity bonuses.

(Someone please pass this along to QA if it hasn't already been brought up or there's not some non-public mechanic that massively affects things in this regard. )

They showed Purity's warp gate. The VC looked more like busy-work than interesting action. There was plenty of space left to settle at that point in the game, and if you're on good terms with AIs on your continent (or there aren't any) there doesn't look to be much in the way of opposition. Not that Civ victory conditions other than Conquest have ever been very involved. But I thought that's what the new VC's were meant to address. Hopefully the situation in the video is an outlier, AIs will perform better on higher difficulties, and most of the time there will be more action (on the map and via Espionage and Orbital Layer) involved in achieving the victory conditions. Though Purity's VC would appear to be the one with the most action involved. The other two seem to be set up for less interaction because the additional room to plant Settlers component isn't there.

A small ant found it's way into the backlight of my LCD and died in a very annoying spot.

The video I found on YouTube is very out of sync, with the video and audio getting to be about a minute out of whack. Anyone have a link to a better video?

The Livestream 3 audio was just messed up. I don't think there's one with properly synced audio. Livestream 4 was good though.