Pakled posted:

I hope they make a Cold War game. Not a half-baked World War 3 simulator like East vs West, but a proper game that's focused on diplomacy and politics. I want political parties, NGOs, and armed groups to be the cornerstone of the game and the most important things to manage and interact with, both within your country and abroad.

Mantis42 posted:

Naw, keep all the super specific miltech porn. Like you get to go full grog investing in a military you can never actually use to its fullest without the game ending, funneling ever increasing amounts of national resources into a bunch of pointless toys while your people's quality of life suffers. The ultimate Cold War simulation!

Mantis42 posted:

Naw, keep all the super specific miltech porn. Like you get to go full grog investing in a military you can never actually use to its fullest without the game ending, funneling ever increasing amounts of national resources into a bunch of pointless toys while your people's quality of life suffers. The ultimate Cold War simulation!

Jazerus posted:

the military in a cold war game should just be a black hole that you pour money into and if you don't pour enough money into it the other superpower laughs at you and you lose prestige

same for wars, no tactical movement

The Cheshire Cat posted:

You say this as a joke but I was thinking about how the prestige system in Victoria 2 works so well for incentivising all those stupid bullshit wastes of money and manpower that nations love to throw away on dick measuring contests. Like prestige as an abstract score thing that has no practical effect on anything - nobody cares about that. But making prestige matter as much as military and industrial power for the purpose of determining great power ranking, which has a major impact on gameplay? That's a great way to get players to shovel money into one failed expedition after another trying to reach the south pole. Plus it also lets small nations without a lot of natural resources leap up the ranking tables which would otherwise be impossible.

Koramei posted:

yeah, for real. if they do make a cold war game and it ends up just being a military hardware simulator like so many of the suggestions on the paradox forums, i'm gonna be pretty bummed. imo any WW3 should just be an instant game over. at least until some DLC or whatever.

cool new Metroid game posted:

Psychotic Weasel posted:

I don't know what pussy created that game but I still remember the goon Let's Play of Shadow President where France and the USSR were goaded into a nuclear exchange that left most of Europe and Asia an irradiated ruin, but America remained completely unscathed (except for the deadly clouds of radiation slowly enveloping the planet) and the last remaining superpower on Earth. That is how you win WW3.

That was a great game.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Looking at that, I realized I excluded religion-science from my suggestion. Time to make a true sphere grid, not the circle grids calling themselves sphere grids.

Jazerus posted:

my post was deadly serious

moving armies around has no place in a cold war game. proxy wars take place in small areas and are impossible to satisfyingly model with moving counters around, while war between the superpowers is a lose condition.

Dirk the Average posted:

I will only accept this if it is a Tetrisphere grid.

Pakled posted:

I hope they make a Cold War game. Not a half-baked World War 3 simulator like East vs West, but a proper game that's focused on diplomacy and politics. I want political parties, NGOs, and armed groups to be the cornerstone of the game and the most important things to manage and interact with, both within your country and abroad.

Stairmaster posted:

They should make a WW3 expansion(NOT DLC) for hoi4.

Don Gato posted:

I'm weird but I'd love a focused cold war game where you play as a minor nation in either Latin America, Asia or Africa. Kind of like how you can ally with either the US or the Soviets in Tropico, but with more

A Buttery Pastry posted:

So basically war is a diplomatic action against a country, sorta similar to annex in EU4, which drains resources instead of monarch points? Which other countries can then pour their own resources into to counter your progress? Sounds good.

Koramei posted:

The thing with that is how it'll work for minors. Abstracted war works pretty well for the superpowers, but then the superpowers weren't the only ones doing wars in the period.

Koramei posted:

The thing with that is how it'll work for minors. Abstracted war works pretty well for the superpowers, but then the superpowers weren't the only ones doing wars in the period.

AnoHito posted:

Have the enemy armies exist for you having numbers associated with what the majors are throwing at it, but be AI controlled. Also make sure the AI is as stupid as possible for extra realism.

Baronjutter posted:

Or just make the scale of the game such that manual control isn't a big problem. EU4 level of provinces, maybe even less granular than that. I never understood the endless desire for more and smaller provinces.

Baronjutter posted:

Or just make the scale of the game such that manual control isn't a big problem. EU4 level of provinces, maybe even less granular than that. I never understood the endless desire for more and smaller provinces.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

It's basically a scale thing. More provinces means you can have more units because you'll need them to cover all that area, so it feels like a big war between huge armies rather than a local skirmish.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Considering how little conquest the world has seen since the end of WW2, it'd frankly make sense to have provinces that are simply like "Metropolitan France" and so on, with perhaps the largest countries having multiple provinces. Maybe you could do it like states in Victoria, so Metropolitan France is subdivided into smaller provinces, though if it was me it'd basically limit the function of those to being containers for economic wealth and population - no actual direct interaction, they'd all just be summed up at the regional level and mostly exist to visually represent political changes and ensure a bit of granularity if history goes off the rails - like a completely dysfunctional UK losing Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Enjoy posted:

This approach worked very poorly in Empire Total War IMO. You'd think a single cataclysmic battle in Paris deciding the fate of France would be fun but it robbed you of the sense of progress you get from a gradual conquest

Enjoy posted:

This approach worked very poorly in Empire Total War IMO. You'd think a single cataclysmic battle in Paris deciding the fate of France would be fun but it robbed you of the sense of progress you get from a gradual conquest

Jazerus posted:

but the problem with less granularity in a proxy war is that it becomes south vietnam moving from their two provinces into north vietnam's two provinces, war over

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Yeah this is what I mean by granularity - modern era wars are not decided by one huge battle like they were in the Middle Ages. They're a long grinding slog where often very little territory changes hands.

I mean I suppose with enough abstraction you could think of a "battle" as representing the overall momentum of the various individual conflicts in a region (I think this is how Realpolitiks does it), but you'd have to make sure they actually last long enough for that abstraction to be believable - in-game months or years. The trouble is this might low scale down to smaller nations very well.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

You'd need a system that can represent both a huge superpower mustering their full military capabilities (which never happened in real life but in a game it would almost certainly be something players are going to want to be able to do) down to various local conflicts between revolutionary and government forces in Central American nations and others of that size. If "all of France" is only two provinces, how do you model somewhere like El Salvador?

Koramei posted:

Number of provinces doesn't just add granularity to warfare, it can do the same for the economic and political map as well. And if you're gonna try and fit that same level of detail in regional economic centers etc down into some UI window, why not just put it visibly on the map in the form of provinces instead? Likewise I don't like the idea of some regions like Northern Ireland getting special irregular provinces down to a specific scale with other places being left untouched just because they happened to not have anything happen to them historically.

I do agree a Cold War game isn't crying out for a huge amount of granularity in the provinces, but I think it shouldn't go too far in the other direction.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I can see why it'd be a terrible fit for a game about fighting real-time battles in a period defined by empire building. Making wars inglorious quagmires where you don't get a sense of progress seems like an entirely appropriate thing for the post-WW2 period though. Warfare shouldn't be where you get your sense of progress, that should be your factory lines and farms producing inhuman amounts of popcorn that you sell in cinemas showing your movies.