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Prav posted:lotta wildly unreasonable people out there, apparently I haven't seen that many reviews calling it early access - most are just unhappy with the game. But yes, I do think those of the reviewers who think the game is in early access state are being wildly unreasonable. I do not think it's unreasonable to give the game a negative review - if someone finds it boring, shallow, unfun, is unhappy with the UI or whatever, fair enough. But calling it unfinished?
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May 10, 2019 18:27
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well certainly not very many find it fun in its current state. maybe it wasn't supposed to be? but then paradox seem to intend to update their finished product, making it better. possibly even fun. very nice of them.
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May 10, 2019 18:30
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The best thing about being a republic is being able to turn the former king of your annexed foe into your new ruler  It's hard to do unless they're exactly the same culture as you though, the senate is mega racist apparently But yeah the king of sparta is pretty confused right now
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May 10, 2019 18:34
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Cynic Jester posted:Expecting that QoL features from both games, implemented in DLC or not, would be there on release is hardly some draconian gamer entitlement. Most people who point to EU4 and CK2, at least here, don't bemoan the lack of equivalent and equal amounts of content, but rather that the game lacks QoL and features that are present in EU4 and CK2. That what is there wasn't polished doesn't help. I do completely agree with this here, IMO it's the most valid criticism of the game. I still think it's fun and good (calling it "early access" is quite the stretch I think) but I think a lot of the things that were sorted out through EU4's development history should've been included at release. E.G. All belligerents have access to territory any of them have access to, so you can't hide in a third party's lands.
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May 10, 2019 18:40
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RabidWeasel posted:The best thing about being a republic is being able to turn the former king of your annexed foe into your new ruler I went back a few saves in my Boeotia game once I realized I could have done that with Phyrrus. It’s only a courtesy that I let the Aecidaes stick around since they were the only ones so far to really be a tough opponent while also still being kind-of-proper Greeks. Right now the Boeotian League is an ugly snake of territory stretching all the way from Thebes to the border with Illyria. My plan is to use the supercharge of resources from Epirus to conquer all the Cretan minors (both for iron and for the Hellenic League decision), then conquer as many of the remaining mainland Greek minors not guaranteed by the Diadochi as possible. After consolidating that, I’ll finally kick Phrygia and then Macedonia out of Greece proper and absorb the remaining independent poleises.
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May 10, 2019 19:01
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It's actually stupid how easy it is to get the guy you want to be consul, fight 1 or 2 wars and throw some triumphs with your worthless mil points
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May 10, 2019 20:10
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PederP posted:And it makes map-painting completely optional. By making AI impotent mostly. Any game makes expansion optional if you play on lowest difficulty or with cheats.
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May 10, 2019 20:33
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Charlie Bobson posted:does this game actually suck at a base level or are the complaints mostly coming from elite paradox pros with 10000 hours across all games? not saying that the game being not very fun for super experienced people isn't a valid complaint, but if im a dumb baby who doesnt understand how to play these games what would the experience be like? will the game be a beautiful wonderland of sunshine and roses once it gets a load of dlc and patches or is it just flawed at a fundamental level? I feel like this game is a great stepping stone into ck2 or eu4. It's simple enough but will give you a rough idea of how to play these type of games. I can see where the complaints come from but I'm having a good time playing the game. I expect it to be one of their best games if they support it and flesh it out like they have with their other games.
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May 10, 2019 21:03
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I'd never recommend this game as a stepping stone because it would bore a new player to tears. The only people defending this game are those with preexisting paradox experience who are willing to put up with a clearly unfinished product because they know it'll get better. If I wanted to introduce somebody new to paradox GS games, Id go straight to CK2.
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May 10, 2019 21:06
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Sydin posted:I'd never recommend this game as a stepping stone because it would bore a new player to tears. The only people defending this game are those with preexisting paradox experience who are willing to put up with a clearly unfinished product because they know it'll get better. I wouldn’t recommend CK2 but that’s because I don’t really care for it much. Hell I like imperator more really
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May 10, 2019 21:08
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Sydin posted:If I wanted to introduce somebody new to paradox GS games, Id go straight to CK2. God no. I have 220 hours in CK2, I like it very much, but it is NOT a newbie game, not in the slightest. It has the most opaque mechanics esp. regarding war, dated user interface (even though the latest graphics overhaul made it almost decent) and a huge amount of RNG that will gently caress you over hard if you don't know how to keep it in check and minimize its effects. The only thing that is appropriate for a newbie is newbie island (Ireland) and that's still pretty complicated, especially if you play with Conclave. Vanilla EU4 with a minimum of DLC, playing a superpower like Ottomans, is the gateway game.
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May 10, 2019 21:11
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ilitarist posted:By making AI impotent mostly. Any game makes expansion optional if you play on lowest difficulty or with cheats. No, it's got very little to do with the AI. It's mostly a function of game design. And for me, Stellaris doesn't require me to conquer the universe to have a fun game. In Rome if you stop expanding there is very little else to do. It's not the AI forcing me to expand - it's the game design. There are very few strategy games with challenging AI to the extent that the player is forced to actually optimize strategy. Handing the AI cheats can have the effect of forcing the player to use a specific optimal strategy, which can be anything from tall to wide. Which is much worse than just making a game that focuses on a specific aspect or playstyle. Abusing mechanics and imbalances to win isn't fun to me. Brawns vs brains turns strategy into puzzle. There's also the question of whether the AI should larp or try to "win". I prefer the former, but some prefer the latter. I want to play against an AI which has the same rules as me. I want to play against an AI which acts like the entity it controls. It's never going to be a real challenge, so I prefer to have it act in-character. PederP fucked around with this message at 21:16 on May 10, 2019 |
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May 10, 2019 21:12
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yeah i am here for the strategy and systems and reading the wiki for hours at a time to try and understand what the gently caress is happening. i love excessively complex games of massive scale. larping as a country does not interest me much, if at all.
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May 10, 2019 21:25
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Charlie Bobson posted:yeah i am here for the strategy and systems and reading the wiki for hours at a time to try and understand what the gently caress is happening. i love excessively complex games of massive scale. larping as a country does not interest me much, if at all. I dont see why the gently caress you're playing paradox games.
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May 10, 2019 21:28
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I am, controversially, enjoying Imperator
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May 10, 2019 21:34
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reignonyourparade posted:I dont see why the gently caress you're playing paradox games. does this mean paradox games are not good for this? do they just suck as anything but a larping vehicle? ive only played a few hours of ck2 so far and it would be nice to know before i deeply invest myself
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May 10, 2019 21:37
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Charlie Bobson posted:does this mean paradox games are not good for this? do they just suck as anything but a larping vehicle? ive only played a few hours of ck2 so far and it would be nice to know before i deeply invest myself Other people appear to also play them for those reasons so I could just be not 'getting' something, but I personally at least feel there are much BETTER games for such out there.
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May 10, 2019 21:40
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Do none of y'all know what a larp is?
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May 10, 2019 21:41
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reignonyourparade posted:Other people appear to also play them for those reasons so I could just be not 'getting' something, but I personally at least feel there are much BETTER games for such out there. which games are these? TTBF posted:Do none of y'all know what a larp is? its a live action roleplay which a video game isnt but it seems to be the lingo
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May 10, 2019 21:43
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PederP posted:. I wonder what kind of definition of strategy game do you use if it includes games where "player is not forced to actually optimize strategy". I don't see at all how Stellaris is more interesting when you don't expand. You can read that anomaly text about box with jokes again. The outliner from time to time asks you whether you want to have another factory on your forge world. It's a clicker. Honestly it looks like a Stockholm syndrome to me - saying that lack of challenge and ability to just move pieces wherever you want makes your favourite chess app superior.
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May 10, 2019 21:48
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Personally, I enjoy the convoluted nature of most pdx games. Yea, its not super spelled out. Yea you might do something stupid for 100 hours into the game until you finally realize there was an easier solution or a ledger exists. This game at release is already better a lot better than civ or tw nowadays.
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May 10, 2019 21:51
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I will say this For all Imperator Rome's faults... It is not as bad as Rome 2 Total War was at launch.
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May 10, 2019 21:55
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Charlie Bobson posted:does this mean paradox games are not good for this? do they just suck as anything but a larping vehicle? ive only played a few hours of ck2 so far and it would be nice to know before i deeply invest myself Paradox games are deeply integrated with their setting. You can play, say, Hearthstone or Dota without any interest in the lore because you just adore gameplay. But CK2 mechanics are integrated with a story that game tells. If you don't care about crusades or family soap opera then this will be a confusing unbalanced game. It's open ended so there's no real victory screen. So you'll have to find satisfaction in what happens. Restoring Jewish temple or killing all descendants of Charlemagne are vanity projects, real optimized way of playing will have you use 10% of the game mechanics. That's why they say it's larping, but it's a larping with a very complex ruleset that is surprisingly not completely broken. If you want a good strategy game specifically then you should look for something less bloated and more focused. This will always be a game where you might get screwed by a comet, ugly dwarf heir or AI randomly deciding to do something you can't ubdo.
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May 10, 2019 21:58
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ilitarist posted:I wonder what kind of definition of strategy game do you use if it includes games where "player is not forced to actually optimize strategy". If I want an actual cerebral challenge in a videogame I play against other humans (Galactic Civilizations III has pretty good AI and can be a challenging game, but I don't really like the mechanics and aesthetics that much, so I rarely play it). As for Stellaris, I am not saying I don't expand at all, but I don't conquer the galaxy. I spend my time building up my planets, mega-structures, researching tech. Yes, it's pretty much a clicker - if you go the reductionist route. But so is "beating" the AI. It's just an exercise in abusing game mechanics and imbalances to get the snowball rolling and then it becomes a whack-a-mole clicker. All movies involve staring at an image, but some are better than others. Same with "clickers". Paradox Games give me an interesting story as a reward for my clicking. Much of it is in my head, but that's ok. I don't find challenge in reading through the wiki for the mechanics and figuring out how to beat the game. It's not difficult to do and optimized strategy (to achieve domination) results in a game experience that is full of drudgery and with little of my beloved larping. I don't find the paradox games overly complex and difficult to navigate. But I do find them a great framework for larping. And are you claiming that Imperator: Rome is more challenging than Stellaris? Both have essentially 0 challenge if you don't care about larping. Edit: You just described extremely well in your last post why larping is fun in these games, so I don't understand the passive-aggressive tone about my Stellaris playstyle, and the weird insinuations that I'm somehow unable to cope with challenge. PederP fucked around with this message at 22:16 on May 10, 2019 |
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May 10, 2019 22:02
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PederP posted:I don't find challenge in reading through the wiki for the mechanics and figuring out how to beat the game. It's not difficult to do and optimized strategy (to achieve domination) results in a game experience that is full of drudgery and with little of my beloved larping. I don't find the paradox games overly complex and difficult to navigate. But I do find them a great framework for larping. CK2 is the king of emergent stories, honestly I do remember some "shenanigans" in EU4 but mostly from a mechanical standpoint like lol, I conquered all of Africa and the Middle East as Ethiopia and unlocked a cheevo, or crushed Russia and Ming as Japan basically doing what Japan wanted to actually do during ww1 and ww2, but 200 years earlier From CK2 I remember that the first born son of my first character (Matilda di Canossa), which I named after myself because obviously that can't go wrong, became the Devil Spawn around 6 years of age and started maiming his little brothers and sisters, outright killing one and leaving the other 2 unlikely to reach adulthood. Most people would've rejoiced at that because getting to be the Demon Spawn literally 16 years into the game (and with your real name too!) is kind of a wet dream with the awesome stats and events, but no, I decided that I'd roleplay the zealous Catholic Duchess to the bitter end; he would've surely assassinated his mother and brought shame to the dynasty, and ruin to the world! after a few years of trying to mitigate his damage, chasing away the witch courtiers that pop up around the Devil Spawn, and watching my realm slowly descend into utter contempt for the sinning ways of my child, he finally turned 16 and got fed up with me. Clearly he could not outintrigue me (I had a lucky roll or something at character creation and had sky-high intrigue of like 35 after court modifiers which probably saved my sorry rear end), so he fled the realm to assemble a demonic pretender army to challenge my rule! I prepared for what was to be the loving battle to save the entire world, hired all the mercenaries I could, not caring if they'd send me into bankruptcy and eventually rebel against me, I just wanted the threat to the world to end no matter the cost. After a few close calls (the bastard had his witches as generals with enormous martial scores and Satan's advice), I managed to defeat their main stack in a huge battle in the mountainous Alps, and got him as prisoner! I immediately executed him because the devil has a knack for regrowing limbs and freeing people from jails, I had my own child's head lopped off, and did the world thank me for it? No, they thought me a kinslayer, even if they knew full well what he was, and what I was doing. The ungrateful fuckers. Short few years later, hated and despised by all, Matilda died of severe stress leaving only a maimed 12 year old female child to inherit her precarious realm, so I called it quits. This all lasted a very short time in game terms, but I remember every little detail and it's probably the most intense experience I had in a videogame, ever. EU4, Imperator, Stellaris are literally unable to provide such a narrative, and that's why some people absolutely love CK2. TorakFade fucked around with this message at 22:20 on May 10, 2019 |
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May 10, 2019 22:17
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This is very confusing. So if I choose to play in the most boring way possible it will be a boring game, and if I actually attempt to engage with its systems like a normal human being it will be fun? Like ostensibly the goal of CK2 is to get the most score possible or whatever, and maybe the best strategy for that is to chill as a vassal to a powerful ruler and hold feasts and collect taxes for 400 years (I actually have no idea) but then you're just sitting on fast forward for 10 hours or however long it takes. I like big dumb bloated games because theirs a ton of stuff to mess around with and dumb poo poo to try. If engaging with all the mechanics to their fullest is leaping then maybe I want to larp after all?
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May 10, 2019 22:19
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@PederP, I don't want to sound offensive but it sounds to me like you haven't really played strategy games as strategy games. I remember having such outlook on the genre - all this Starcraft is just about fast clicking and remembering build orders, Civilization is just about remembering all the stuff. And all those games are not real strategies because AI has a lot of cheats, it's not fair. Don't remember what exactly showed me the beauty of the genre. Perhaps it was XCOM which had you fighting against the enemy that fights with his own rules. Maybe Rise of Nations clicked for me one day. But then I saw the joy of planning and executing the plan, finding right numbers from an information noise, seeing that it doesn't matter what game AI plays. That is a strategy, other games may look like strategy games but really are sandboxes that ask you to jump through the loops before allowing you to get your sand castle. It's fine but it's not cathartic, it doesn't make you feel like you've ascended to godhood. ...And that's why I don't really understand how playing tall in I:R - which is an interesting challenge cause you'll have certain bonuses and certain penalties compared to others - is worse than playing tall in Stellaris which doesn't care at all what you do and let's you see that if any of AIs was not a complete idiot for a several minutes ghen you'd be dead. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 22:30 on May 10, 2019 |
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May 10, 2019 22:21
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Charlie Bobson posted:This is very confusing. So if I choose to play in the most boring way possible it will be a boring game, and if I actually attempt to engage with its systems like a normal human being it will be fun? Like ostensibly the goal of CK2 is to get the most score possible or whatever, and maybe the best strategy for that is to chill as a vassal to a powerful ruler and hold feasts and collect taxes for 400 years (I actually have no idea) but then you're just sitting on fast forward for 10 hours or however long it takes. I like big dumb bloated games because theirs a ton of stuff to mess around with and dumb poo poo to try. If engaging with all the mechanics to their fullest is leaping then maybe I want to larp after all? if you want a big dumb bloated game with a lot of stuff to try, you don't want imperator cause there isn't a lot of stuff
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May 10, 2019 22:22
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Charlie Bobson posted:If engaging with all the mechanics to their fullest is leaping then maybe I want to larp after all? You probably do, yeah. CK2 is also good in that no matter how committed to a boring optimal path you are - and it's not like everyone has the same path - it will force you to engage with its systems. And it may be infuriating for some people. 90% of playable characters will probably lose their sovereignty if not the game if one of bigger powers decides they want to capture them, and so you either rage quit or learn to play as vassal. You get imbecile poet heir - you laugh and try to survive. You are destroyed by peasant rebellion - there's probably nothing you can do. Your healer decides to cure your rash with castration - that's just RNG for you. EU4 is much less intrusive. I:R is in the middle and for me it feels like it has as much randomness so that it's good as a strategy, unlike CK2 which is good about how strategy usually works in real life.
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May 10, 2019 22:29
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ilitarist posted:I don't want to sound offensive but it sounds to me like you haven't really played strategy games as strategy games. I remember having such outlook on the genre - all this Starcraft is just about fast clicking and remembering build orders, Civilization is just about remembering all the stuff. And all those games are not real strategies because AI has a lot of cheats, it's not fair. It's difficult to explain without sounding like a bragging buffoon. But for me it's the other way around - years ago I used to play games in the fashion you describe. But these days I simply don't get enjoyment from winning over an AI. There are a few exceptions. But Paradox games are not among them. They have no element of intellectual challenge, so it simply doesn't make sense for me to approach them like you describe. But as you mention they're excellent vehicles for story-telling. Especially when they have arbitrary and unfair elements to them (like CK2). Stellaris is fun because it has lots of clicking. Actions carry the impetus for future actions. It's certainly not a challenge, but it's cathartic. I:R playing tall is a lot of waiting for points to shuffle around pops until they're optimal and then... nothing. I get annoyed more than anything. Perhaps the difference sounds like naught, but it is a very tangible difference to me. On the other hand playing conquer the world in I:R is decently fun, which I don't think it is in Stellaris.
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May 10, 2019 22:31
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Sounds like you have a special kind of zen relations with those games. Perhaps Srellaris scratches that itch indeed. I myself get irritated when I play suboptimally in strategy games so I can't properly see Paradox games from this point of view. By the way, which games vs AI are your exceptions?
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May 10, 2019 22:38
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Stellaris is my favorite paradox game to play tall in because instead of watching your numbers go up you instead get to build pretty looking megastructures and turn everyone into a robot. Sure the end result is still your numbers going up but its so cool both conceptually and in execution that I can forgive that.
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May 10, 2019 22:52
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thanks for explaining and helping my dumb baby brain understand!! i had somehow got it into my head that larping in a paradox game meant intentionally hamstringing yourself by making poo poo choices in events or futzing around not doing anything because your character has the just trait and probably wouldnt really want to murder his lovely son, rather than doing fun stuff like making america a socialist empire or seducing half of ireland and siring 30 bastards or making Hellenism the dominant religion through all of europe or whatever other dumb poo poo you can do.
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May 11, 2019 00:07
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PederP posted:It's difficult to explain without sounding like a bragging buffoon. But for me it's the other way around - years ago I used to play games in the fashion you describe. But these days I simply don't get enjoyment from winning over an AI. There are a few exceptions. But Paradox games are not among them. They have no element of intellectual challenge, so it simply doesn't make sense for me to approach them like you describe. But as you mention they're excellent vehicles for story-telling. Especially when they have arbitrary and unfair elements to them (like CK2). EU4 can be plenty challenging if you don't start big IMHO fe: unless you just read an achievement guide and restart until the stars align but then you weren't really looking for a challenge anyway despite ur bragging buffoonness
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May 11, 2019 01:02
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TTBF posted:Do none of y'all know what a larp is? Seriously. It's fine to just say "roleplaying as the country". That's definitely how I play and that's why Stellaris hits so well for me (and EU2 did) but Imperator kinda falls flat.
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May 11, 2019 01:16
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PederP posted:I think that's wildly unreasonable. It's a polished, playable product, with minimal bugs (that were patched pretty quickly) and a solid core game-loop. Some may dislike the game-play, but that doesn't make it a work-in-progress. I think calling a game which actively reverted a bunch of UI improvements (and MP chat lmfao) and openly is missing things talked about in dev diaries "polished" is ambitious, but this is the most active this thread has been since launch so at least this debate is the most lively the game's community looks
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May 11, 2019 01:16
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PederP posted:
I think this is the crux of the issue. One of my board-game playing friends likes co-op game such as Pandemic, Arkham Horror etc but hates loosing to the point that he'll usually play easy modes or even "cheat" to get a win. I'm the opposite. I like getting wrecked in a game and having to struggle against unfair odds. I'm often left unsatisfied if I mange to win a co-op game within the first few tries. The most fun I've had with I:R is when I was fighting a desperate multi-sided hellwar with disloyal generals running around and barbarian hordes getting into the mix. Peacetime is only interesting as a tiny nation trying to eke out enough of an advantage to stomp a your neighbour. As a big nation it's dull as gently caress.
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May 11, 2019 01:50
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Ok, finished my first game of I:R. Game Summary: Started as a city on Crete, didn't have many expansion options because Phrygia was guarantee'ing literally all of the Greek states; so had to go down to Cyrenicia, then by opportunity hopped on Egypt after they got a civil war; taking most of the Nile Delta. Then pushed up into Greece on a coalition that somehow got out from underneath Phrygia's thumb. About that point, Phrygia had a civil war, so used that opportunity to push up through Epirus (who was guaranteed by Phrygia). Got me close enough to Rome to start tearing Italy down; which was rather easy because Rome apparently had lots of issues with Etruria earlier. Ended up taking half the boot and then going back across the Adriatic to push up into Dacia through some tribes that weren't guaranteed by Phrygia. (Did I mention that Phrygia was guaranteeing everyone in Greece?). Ended up making a weird looking claw around Odysria, and ended up having to keep pushing through most of Dacia trying to eliminate people who were guaranteeing Macedon. Surprisingly, Macedon was not guaranteed by Phrygia, but they were guaranteed by Egypt and successive Dacian alliances. By the time that campaign was done, I had completely surrounded Macedonia, formed the Hellenistic League, and my entire Eastern border was Phrygia north to south on the map (I guess they integrated all the people they had previously been guaranteeing, or lose them to Macedon). Finished off the rest of Rome (including Sicily) and that was ~year 650. I was big enough that I felt confident to finally take on Phrygia. Thank god for the ability to automate armies, because wars on that scale are a mess. I must have spent ~20 years losing armies in Anatolia while slowly taking Phrygia's holdings north of that one straight. When countries are that large, apparently even 50 warscore is enough to get 100 AE and warscore cost worth of provinces. In the meantime, Macedonia had a civil war and LOST, so all of Macedonian land was no longer guaranteed by Egypt, so snapped that up without a second thought. Finished the war with Phrygia taking a ton of their coastal provinces; and then decided to go beat up on some Gauls to the west of the Italian boot while waiting out the truce. Migratory tribes that get big are sick. As in, they have 160k stacks of troops for only holding two provinces sick (they're trash troops, but quantity can be its own quality). Had to rely on mercs to compete, because I just didn't have the manpower. That war went ok, and I took most of Transalpine Gaul. Apparently this was *too much* *too quick* as I got a timer for a rebellion. Spent 20 years letting AE tick down, and both Egypt and Phrygia decided they wanted a piece because I wasn't in great shape after bleeding all the manpower to the Gauls, so when the truce was up I had to fight both of them. I just scraped by 10 warscore for a white peace with both, because I definitely didn't need my unhappy provinces getting unhappier with more AE. I tried one more war with Phrygia after the second truce, and at this point, the game decided that it needed to take 5 second breaks every once in awhile...I...assume because of all the automated armies on both sides. It was mainly just a slog, even with automated armies, because Phrygia (and myself) just had so many troops and income. I took a little more of Anatolia, but peaced out without maxxing warscore because the game was about to end. Expanding around the Mediterranean by end-game is a pretty easy accomplishment without pushing hard (unless one of the major powers gets lucky and blobs out in your game). If Phrygia hadn't been such a powerhouse the entire game, I definitely could have seen myself taking a whole lot more land than I actually did. I'm thinking if that ever happens again, perhaps instead of taking land from the giant enemy after one hellwar, maybe release a bunch of nations out of it instead. Simple things that are maybe not obvious (required to push lots of territory acquisition): 1) This carried over from the other Paradox games (well, EU4 at least), and it's still just as unintuitive: when you're fighting a hellwar against a 5 nation alliance, you can separate peace the nations you've fully occupied (prior to peacing out the warleader). 2) You can build like 10 light infantry per __region__, move them into the region, don't assign a general to them, and click on one of the icons that looks like a flag to assign the army to the governor. This will reduce unrest to the point where loyalty of provinces in the region isn't really an issue (at least, for aggressive expansion values below 100). 3) Culture conversion is basically the only important governor policy for all newly acquired territories that are not already your culture group. Once a critical mass of the population is your culture in a province, you don't have to worry about doing (2). This will also help long-term the more provinces you acquire that are outside your main culture group. Can't have a rebellion if 80% of your population is your main culture group. 4) Mercenaries use no manpower. Acquire them early (as your economy allows), and use them as first-in troops to wear down the opponents armies. Use your own troops to occupy to preserve manpower. Reinforcement doesn't really occur (fast) in enemy territory, even if you've occupied it, so if one of your stacks does take a beating, having it sit back in friendly territory for a bit (and pressing one of the buttons on the army screen that increases reinforcement) to recover can be useful. 5) The game is only 275 years. It's...rather short for the number of provinces. Assuming you're only getting into a war every 10 years and letting AE burn off completely, you'll only get about 27 wars. This is not enough warring to do a world conquest. Additional AE tapers off the higher your AE is, so you're basically going to have to use all of the above, and never stop fighting wars if you ever intend to get close to conquering the entire world. Ship combat is so terribly bare-bones. Basically if you have more ships than them, you win. If you have equal ships, it could go either way; but the loser will probably lose 3/4 their fleet while the winner will lose nothing. The AI also likes to wander around with all their ships in one death-stack. There's no point contesting the seas unless you have more ships than the other person, and if you do have more ships than the other person, congratulations, you win all of the seas.
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May 11, 2019 03:47
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Half-wit posted:Ok, finished my first game of I:R. This is an entertaining post. Have a screenshot of what your nation looked like by the end of the game?
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May 11, 2019 04:11
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Beamed posted:I think calling a game which actively reverted a bunch of UI improvements (and MP chat lmfao) and openly is missing things talked about in dev diaries "polished" is ambitious, but this is the most active this thread has been since launch so at least this debate is the most lively the game's community looks Yes, that was perhaps a bit too flowery praise from my side. The UI is indeed a travesty - and not even at a stage where polish makes sense. I just got ticked off by the "game plain sucks" and "game is early access" comments. At release there were also quite a few broken events, that you didn't notice unless you looked in the logs and saw the error message spam. By polished I meant the game as a whole - there's lots of awesome details like the animal icons for tactics, more events than Stellaris had at release, culture-specific unit names, a large variety of trade good effects. Many games release with barely healed wounds from cut content and unfinished features. Imperator: Rome has some rough parts, true, but at least for me it feels like I'm playing a game which was refined over several iterations, and not just crunched into a barely functional mess as release got close. I'll admit that may be a bar lowered due to cynicism and past disappointments. ilitarist posted:Sounds like you have a special kind of zen relations with those games. Perhaps Stellaris scratches that itch indeed. I myself get irritated when I play suboptimally in strategy games so I can't properly see Paradox games from this point of view. Absolutely, playing Stellaris is a meditative experience for me. I do try to optimize but within self-defined parameters, as the optimal way of playing games is very often weird and not fun. As for AI, I mentioned Galactic Civilizations, which has a decently cutthroat AI. Battle Brothers, even if it's more of a tactics game than a strategy game, also has well-crafted AI (although some of the opponents, like animals and barbarians, are dumbed down and/or reckless by design). There was one of the older Civilization games, which did a decent attempt at optimizing and not just using cheats to throw hordes of units at you. EU4 seems to have gotten to a good point as well, so whoever said that EU4 is actually challenging with some starts is absolutely right. The player still has some meta-knowledge that gives a massive advantage of the AI, and a sufficiently determined human can reduce the challenge from the AI to nil (mechanics and assymmetric starts can still pose a challenge, but that's a different thing). I guess my point is that even the best of strategy game AI isn't at the level of chess AI, where it is able to beat human at playing the game proper. Game design relies heavily on mechanics, asymmetric starts and downright cheats to make the game challenging and creating speedbumps. I actually don't mind optimizing strategy to beat those challenges (except the cheats), as long as it doesn't stray into the abuse of mechanics or snowballing. I really dislike winning by snowballing, as the "mopping-up" phase is the most boring part of any strategy game to me. If playing against a human that's when your opponent would've conceded. Finally, it really does depend if I'm playing to fulfill some weird sell-defined objective, to just waste time and see what happens or if I'm actively trying to "win" the game. Stellaris was obviously designed by a team that's not too concerned about victory conditions (ie they even forgot to add any at release). Imperator: Rome feels like the opposite to me - designed by someone who cares about winning (or at least fulfilling well-defined territorial objectives) and less about emergent narratives. PederP fucked around with this message at 11:25 on May 11, 2019 |
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May 11, 2019 11:19
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