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All I'm saying is that I find it very annoying and unfun that I have to build a separate ship to put my soldiers onto than the one I use to sink the other guy's ships and block their trade routes.
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Jan 20, 2016 07:53
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DrSunshine posted:That's needlessly fiddly, to me. Why can't I just have "Soldiers, Tanks, Planes, Ships"? why do i need to click poo poo at all? why do i have to declare war? make trade and research? ugh, it's so stupid. let me just click the icon on my steam games list and let the game play itself without these obtuse things like player interaction.
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Jan 20, 2016 07:57
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Mans posted:why do i need to click poo poo at all? why do i have to declare war? make trade and research? ugh, it's so stupid. let me just click the icon on my steam games list and let the game play itself without these obtuse things like player interaction. That sounds needlessly fiddly. I'm thinking of a game..... i just won it!
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Jan 20, 2016 07:58
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It's almost as if the whole conversation so far has been about the difference between meaningful decisions in games and pointless "decisions" that either have an obvious correct choice or just literally don't matter at all. But don't mind me, I'm busy tweaking the number of shells each of my tiger tanks carry in order to maximise their effectiveness while minimising the chance of them being destroyed by an ammo hit.
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Jan 20, 2016 08:00
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Psychotic Weasel posted:
Rome II takes a long time to arrive... I don't know why I bother sometimes 
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Jan 20, 2016 10:18
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Darkrenown posted:Rome II takes a long time to arrive... I don't know why I bother sometimes 
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Jan 20, 2016 11:12
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I don't get the space 4X focus on ship design. It's a lot of micromanagement which is rarely interesting, inobtrusive and doable for the AI. I like this kind of games, but having to replace lasers on each of my ship types every time I research a new technology is the opposite of fun to me.
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Jan 20, 2016 11:13
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Spaceships look cool and I want my spaceships to look the coolest.
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Jan 20, 2016 11:46
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Gantolandon posted:I don't get the space 4X focus on ship design. It's a lot of micromanagement which is rarely interesting, inobtrusive and doable for the AI. I like this kind of games, but having to replace lasers on each of my ship types every time I research a new technology is the opposite of fun to me. I've never seen a unit designer in a 4x work out in an interesting way.
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Jan 20, 2016 12:11
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Darkrenown posted:Rome II takes a long time to arrive... I don't know why I bother sometimes 
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Jan 20, 2016 12:27
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Mans posted:why do i need to click poo poo at all? why do i have to declare war? make trade and research? ugh, it's so stupid. let me just click the icon on my steam games list and let the game play itself without these obtuse things like player interaction.
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Jan 20, 2016 14:14
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I would pay a few bucks for Paradox Clicker, an idling game that goes through every era of Paradox games. But that seems slightly off topic from how an avalanche of adjustable parameters is usually awful.
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Jan 20, 2016 14:32
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Panzeh posted:I've never seen a unit designer in a 4x work out in an interesting way. MoO2?
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Jan 20, 2016 14:35
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Infrastructure suffered collateral damage!
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Jan 20, 2016 15:21
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Brian Reynolds said that after seeing Starcraft he realised factions don't all need the same units. If he had known, SMAC would have unique units, but no unit workshop.
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Jan 20, 2016 15:21
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Riso posted:Brian Reynolds said that after seeing Starcraft he realised factions don't all need the same units. If he had known, SMAC would have unique units, but no unit workshop. SMAC designer was actually quite inobtrusive because at least it didn't have a lot of slots and replacing a component with its better version would upgrade your obsolete designs. The most infuriating cases are the ones that force you to manually redesign all your ships every time you get a new component. Then, of course, you need to give orders to refit then or scrap them and produce new ones. In the meantime, your scientists will improve on Missiles That Go Poof, making Missiles That Go Boom, forcing you to repeat the whole process. In Galciv 2, for me the necessity of using the ship designer was the best cure for "Just one more turn" problem.
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Jan 20, 2016 16:53
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Yeah moo2 had good ship design and combat, even moo1 I enjoyed making ships and then seeing how the fight went. Galciv I mostly only loved how you could really get into how your ship LOOKED. I will spend a lot of time if you let me customize looks!! The rock paper scissors thing was dumb though. SMAC too let you make units. The AI could design them for you and would do a fine job since there weren't a lot of valid options, but if you ever wanted to make some really weird over-specialized unit or ridiculous expensive nazi super weapon that wasn't worth the cost, you could. Hell I even enjoyed the overly fiddly micro-management hell of hand-designing my units in the old Space Empires series. I love designing units, if the scale and focus of the game is such that my designs are meaningful and the combat system and it's feedback lets me quickly notice the subtle differences between my designs. If Stellaris some how has automated combat that still provides enough obvious feedback on how my designs are doing I'll be all over it. Or just let the AI design most ships and hand craft weird special ships like I would in SMAC.
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Jan 20, 2016 17:56
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Darkrenown posted:Rome II takes a long time to arrive... I don't know why I bother sometimes
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Jan 20, 2016 18:04
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Baronjutter posted:I love designing units, if the scale and focus of the game is such that my designs are meaningful and the combat system and it's feedback lets me quickly notice the subtle differences between my designs. If Stellaris some how has automated combat that still provides enough obvious feedback on how my designs are doing I'll be all over it. Or just let the AI design most ships and hand craft weird special ships like I would in SMAC. Yeah, if you're going to have elaborate designs you really need good feedback on them. With a hands-off automatic system like Paradox games, I hope the combat reports are very detailed and let you know everything you need to know about how things performed with your designs. I think the worst one I played in this regard was Star Ruler 1, I sent a ship off to combat, looked back later and there was nothing there. No combat alert, no combat feedback, literally nothing even telling me what happened. And that game has a pretty in-depth designer.
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Jan 20, 2016 18:38
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Panzeh posted:I've never seen a unit designer in a 4x work out in an interesting way. SMAC's unit designer was no more unbalanced and badly thought out than the rest of the game's systems
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Jan 20, 2016 19:02
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Bold Robot posted:Hard to really say this early but HoI4's system looks spergy and unfun, too. There's no way I'm going to want to care that much about the makeup of an individual division when I have at least dozens of them. I think there's some genius in the HoI IV division design. This is my take. If you don't want to plan a single division, this is probably not the game for you. However, if you don't want to plan 100 divisions, that's pretty understandable. There's probably a sweet spot between planning 0 divisions and planning 100, though. What's tricky is deciding this sweet spot. In most games that have this mechanic, the sweet spot is "whenever you get too frustrated / lazy / apathetic to plan yet another division." This means that you've already hit the spergy and unfun point. This seems like a failure. However, in HoI IV, there's a different rate limiter. Your available experience controls how many divisions you can plan. This is important because there's a chance that this limiter, properly designed, will stop you from designing further divisions before you hit the spergy and unfun point. That's a win. It also means that, since experience is a limited resource, there might actually be a psychological incentive to design divisions. You're not doing busywork; you're using all of your resources as effectively as you can. This might have the added effect of making the division design work you do before the rate limit point feel more rewarding than it would otherwise be. I'm theorycrafting about a game that isn't out yet, of course. But I think this could work. I think it's important to both limit the extent to which players have to do "busywork" like this, as well as to reward players for doing the limited amount that the game requires.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:10
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zedprime posted:I would pay a few bucks for Paradox Clicker, an idling game that goes through every era of Paradox games. But that seems slightly off topic from how an avalanche of adjustable parameters is usually awful. paradox blob simulator. you click a button every now and then and your blob gets bigger by taking a piece of blob from neighboring blobs. every now and then your blob changes colour.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:12
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"I never ordered anybody to attack the Maginot Line," Jacob says as he orders 37 divisions to attack the Maginot Line.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:19
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Dibujante posted:I think there's some genius in the HoI IV division design. This is my take. I guess I just don't want to sperg that hard about even one division. I would be totally cool with just using the system from HoI2, where there were basic types of divisions and you could put a brigade on them if you really felt like it. It feels like Paradox is trying to pander to Matrix Games players who need an obsessive level of detail. For me it just comes down to whether it's a meaningful choice - if not then I don't care about the feature. Like, EU4 in theory has "division design" since you can have exactly the mix of inf/art/cav that you want. In practice you want the same unit makeup the vast majority of the time, so there's not much meaningful choice there. In HoI it's different of course because there are different types of divisions, but I guarantee you there ends up being an optimal makeup for each of infantry, armor, mountain, etc. divisions that you almost never want to deviate from. Like, you know there are going to be guys coming into the thread complaining about getting their rear end kicked and the standard goon advice will be "oh you fell into a trap in the unit designer, here just make your divisions like this." I'd love to be proven wrong but as of right now it looks like complexity with no payoff.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:39
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Bold Robot posted:I guess I just don't want to sperg that hard about even one division. I would be totally cool with just using the system from HoI2, where there were basic types of divisions and you could put a brigade on them if you really felt like it. It feels like Paradox is trying to pander to Matrix Games players who need an obsessive level of detail. I think the division builder has to work this way so that the production lines system works with it (swapping light tanks for medium tanks over time and gradually phasing them out as you ramp up production)
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Jan 20, 2016 19:46
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Bold Robot posted:For me it just comes down to whether it's a meaningful choice - if not then I don't care about the feature. Like, EU4 in theory has "division design" since you can have exactly the mix of inf/art/cav that you want. In practice you want the same unit makeup the vast majority of the time, so there's not much meaningful choice there. In HoI it's different of course because there are different types of divisions, but I guarantee you there ends up being an optimal makeup for each of infantry, armor, mountain, etc. divisions that you almost never want to deviate from. Like, you know there are going to be guys coming into the thread complaining about getting their rear end kicked and the standard goon advice will be "oh you fell into a trap in the unit designer, here just make your divisions like this." I'd love to be proven wrong but as of right now it looks like complexity with no payoff. Yeah I'm interested in how it will work out too, if it will be like this or not. I think a big part of the consideration when designing divisions is probably what your industry can sustain. You want more armor or mechanization where possible, but you need to have the materials to support the production and reinforcement of that. You might go with more Medics if you have serious manpower issues. All of those things might depend on just who becomes your enemy or just doesn't want to trade with you. You might design your default divisions with more Mountain troops if you are a country with tons of mountainous terrain nearby. I can see where it could be interesting if it works right. Also like Dibujante said, I like the idea of division design being more like an RPG feedback loop. Gain XP, spend it to expand division size and diversify, make it harder to lose divisions, etc. But I'll have to see how it pans out in practice.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:47
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One thing that worries me is the apparent absence of special systems in the ship designer. Fiddling with the weapon systems was only one half of what made Master of Orion 2's ship designer so great. Special systems that eliminate inertia for your ship, fry incoming missiles or make you invisible in the first combat round were one of the most intriguing design choices. Due to the combat being totally different from MoO 2, I understand why these systems are absent, but it may still make the ship designer less fun.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:56
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Darkrenown posted:Rome II takes a long time to arrive... I don't know why I bother sometimes Another Person posted:paradox blob simulator. you click a button every now and then and your blob gets bigger by taking a piece of blob from neighboring blobs. every now and then your blob changes colour. Torrannor posted:One thing that worries me is the apparent absence of special systems in the ship designer. Fiddling with the weapon systems was only one half of what made Master of Orion 2's ship designer so great. Special systems that eliminate inertia for your ship, fry incoming missiles or make you invisible in the first combat round were one of the most intriguing design choices. Due to the combat being totally different from MoO 2, I understand why these systems are absent, but it may still make the ship designer less fun.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:58
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ship designer looks potentially cool but for some reason i'm deeply dissatisfied with only being able to design military things.
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Jan 20, 2016 20:11
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If we're talking about meaningful ship designs in 4X games, then I'd like to give a shoutout to Stars!, an ancient Excel-em-up resembling a slightly less complex Aurora. Combat was entirely automated but took place a chessboard, meaning that speed, initiative and range were vital considerations and directly affected by design - and were easily visible to the player. Stealth and scanning were key to warfare, and again affected by design. Different components had wildly different resource costs and resources were finite for practical purposes, meaning that betting the farm on a high-ironium missile fleet was a risky strategy. There's a great LP here: http://wiki.starsautohost.org/wiki/Operational_Stars!_by_Example Given that Stellaris will be using some sort of auto-resolve, I'm hoping Paradox ensure that provide sufficient feedback to give players a sense of whether their designs are successful or not, and why. In EUIV it took me ages to understand why I was losing fights in which I had overwhelming numbers, until I realised different terrain affected combat width.
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Jan 20, 2016 20:12
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you know that it's almost 90% garanteed that two months into HoI4's release someone will know just exactly what fleet combination is the utter OP one, like the all destroyer fleet of HoI2 was, so in a way it's understandable that people are afraid that Stellaris' ship creation will be worthless. The solution to this is increase the details of choice, make fully fleshed out 3D battles where every single ergonomic detail counts and possibly with real life space fight ranges. '
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Jan 20, 2016 20:20
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Mans posted:The solution to this is increase the details of choice, make fully fleshed out 3D battles where every single ergonomic detail counts and possibly with real life space fight ranges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT6NeZSS3_8
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Jan 20, 2016 20:22
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Isn't the division builder supposed to help with that, though? Early in the game, you might not have enough experience to fill every slot. So even if there's an optimal build, you might not be able to deploy it until you've earned some XP.
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Jan 20, 2016 20:27
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Aethernet posted:Given that Stellaris will be using some sort of auto-resolve, I'm hoping Paradox ensure that provide sufficient feedback to give players a sense of whether their designs are successful or not, and why. In EUIV it took me ages to understand why I was losing fights in which I had overwhelming numbers, until I realised different terrain affected combat width.
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Jan 20, 2016 20:34
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The game even has vassal swarms.
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Jan 20, 2016 20:52
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dublish posted:"I never ordered anybody to attack the Maginot Line," Jacob says as he orders 37 divisions to attack the Maginot Line. Yeah, I was wondering why there was a yellow line a couple of hundred miles into France while he assured us he was taking a defensive stance. The "such-and-such has suffered collateral damage!" pop-ups have gotta go, as well. It's not important information. I was a little surprised by the revelation that you can deliver nuclear weapons by rocket as well as by plane - in reality the first nuclear missiles were deployed in 1959, well outside the time-frame of Hearts of Iron 4. Gort fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jan 20, 2016 |
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Jan 20, 2016 20:55
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Gort posted:I was a little surprised by the revelation that you can deliver nuclear weapons by rocket as well as by plane - in reality the first nuclear missiles were deployed in 1959, well outside the time-frame of Hearts of Iron 4.
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Jan 20, 2016 21:10
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A Buttery Pastry posted:HoI4 including parts of the Cold War was confirmed when East vs. West was cancelled. Someone should tell hoi4wiki.com then, they think it ends in 1948.
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Jan 20, 2016 21:12
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Dibujante posted:I think there's some genius in the HoI IV division design. This is my take. I really liked this post. My biggest problem with paradox games is when they release a system that is theoretically very diverse, like hoi iii's division designer, but there are actually only a few "right" ways to use it. I think limiting the number of divisions you can make will lead to a lot more thinking along the lines of "my light armor division is really getting creamed by their regular armor, let me redesign it to include more heavy weaponry...", and then, if you were playing against another person, six months later they'd redesign their divisions to counter yours. I think the main thing that would make a system like this satisfying would be to have VERY good metrics for how your units and divisions compare to your opponent's after some combat. There's very little satisfaction in ordering 37 divisions to attack Stalingrad and having the only data point be "is the battle going in my favor or not?" Ideally, you'd be able to see the kinds of casualties each division took and inflicted, and what circumstances they faced (attacking a mountain vs defending). This is the kind of feedback that lets players make meaningful choices about what equipment to use, and is historical to boot. I remember Darkest Hour's system of reporting individual casualties for each combat, seemingly trivial at first, by the end of the game had turned into a really useful tool for understand what was actually happening "on the ground" (say for instance, winning a battle but taking 2x the casualties).
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Jan 20, 2016 21:55
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Dibujante posted:Isn't the division builder supposed to help with that, though? Early in the game, you might not have enough experience to fill every slot. So even if there's an optimal build, you might not be able to deploy it until you've earned some XP. I think the entire point of it is to model the way that Italy had a lot of thin, lovely divisions, and the way that France had a lot of really good tanks but couldn't use them properly because they were all stuck playing fire support for infantry, and there was a lot of institutional inertia that made changing that difficult. Actually, it might be worth looking at how that second one is modelled in the various incarnations of HOI, so we can examine the contours of the different systems. HOI2/DH: Divisions are an indivisible block. Every division of the same type performs in roughly the same way, subject to bonuses from tech and doctrines- your only customisation options are brigades, which are like these little mods you weld on to your divisions. So France (I'm assuming this is how they work it, I don't think I've ever actually played them) has a bunch of INF divisions with LARM and (maybe?) ARM brigades attached. Problem: you want to "fix France", get those tanks out of those divisions and into their own pure-ARM divisions so you can use them as an armoured spearhead. What do you do? Well, you start building a bunch of ARM divisions from scratch, because there aren't any actual "tanks", as such, there's just divisions and brigades, and the two are entirely different species. Nothing you can do can turn those brigades into divisions. Pros: Simple, easy to understand Cons: Not a lot of variation between nations, simulation weirdness caused by abstraction/reality mismatch. HOI3: Everything is brigades now. Brigades in the HOI2-division-mods sense no longer exist; they are now the atomic building block of armies, basically what divisions used to be, only smaller and more numerous. A division is just a word for a stack of brigades. Okay, so you get a combined arms bonus if your stacks have a certain sort of composition, w/e. France has a bunch of INF brigades mashed together with a bunch of ARM brigades (...probably...). Problem: you want to "fix France", get those tanks out of those divisions and into their own pure-ARM divisions so you can use them as an armoured spearhead. What do you do? You go through those divisions and split off your ARM brigades, of course! Nae buther. And then you flip to blitzkrieg doctrine because hell, you're not even locked to a specific tree anymore. Also you have to remove every single one of those brigades individually by hand good luck with that. Pros: You can do anything you want! Cons: ...which is bad, because there's no walls anywhere, so everyone just gravitates to the most efficient solution and there's still no variety. It's really messy, too, and holy poo poo would you look at all that micro. HOI4: The division makes its triumphant return, once more the fundamental building block of power. The brigade isn't an attachable widget, nor is it its own little baby division thing- in fact, it's gone a bit metaphysical on us. The division is a big wodge of manpower with a pile of equipment and a type or template grafted on. The latter is a sort of theoretical, abstract internal structure to the division that doesn't really exist in any sort of tangible sense, and does exciting things like determine how many trained man-dudes and the exact sort of equipement pile the division needs to fight properly, and what "fight properly" actually means in soft/hard attack terms. The template itself is a collection of abstract "brigades", which you can add to or remove from the structure using a new "experience points" resource. Furthermore, the template is a shared property of all divisions using that template- if you add a brigade to the template, then that brigade is also added to every division using that template in the field! Neat! So what does France look like now? They've got a bunch of mostly-infantry divisions with a few tank brigades in for good measure. Probably. Problem: you want to "fix France", get those tanks out of those divisions and into their own pure-ARM divisions so you can use them as an armoured spearhead. What do you do? Well, you start by going to the relevant template and removing those brigades. All the tanks your divisions were using are returned to the pool. Then you go and whip up an entirely new template that is 100% tanks, at some outrageous exp cost I guess, and your tanks trundle out of the pool and into your new divisions, to frolic happily in the fields of Ile-de-France with their tank friends. Pros: Flexible and sticky, Goldilocks will be pleased. Cons: CK2, EU4, Stellaris dev teams on suicide watch as they realise they are working on the inferior games. ...sorry, that was more of a tangent than I was expecting. Gort posted:Yeah, I was wondering why there was a yellow line a couple of hundred miles into France while he assured us he was taking a defensive stance. Keeping up the fine Nazi tradition of being full of poo poo  (Alternatively, laying out a battleplan for the future and hitting "execute" by accident) KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jan 20, 2016 |
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