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As expected, the final Bronze Age culture is the Zhou: https://twitter.com/humankindgame/status/1227268600693739520?s=21
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Feb 12, 2020 09:08
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I have to say that this roll-out of information is stupid. We have no idea how anything works so every new culture is meaningless. What does the Zhou add to the game? A zhanche and a Confucian school. What do those do? I don't know. I don't know how units work, and I don't know how buildings work. They are clearly behind schedule, which is fine. Just hold back a month or so on the announcements, and actually release the information in a form that can actually pass as information.
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Feb 12, 2020 13:56
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Knowing the civs themselves is kinda cool.
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Feb 12, 2020 14:08
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The Human Crouton posted:I have to say that this roll-out of information is stupid. We have no idea how anything works so every new culture is meaningless.
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Feb 12, 2020 14:20
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I'm probably very shallow but I'm just waiting to see the first gameplay video before I start caring about this project that honestly does sound pretty neat.
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Feb 12, 2020 21:09
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I started playing a bit of Endless Legend again and i cannot wait to see them demonstrate combat with non-fantasy units. I know not everyone's that hot on EL combat but I'm proper well excited for that.
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Feb 12, 2020 21:42
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I started playing a bit of Endless Legend again and i cannot wait to see them demonstrate combat with non-fantasy units. I really like EL combat at the beginning of the game, but it fades when the number of units gets insane. It doesn't scale well.
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Feb 12, 2020 22:32
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The Human Crouton posted:I really like EL combat at the beginning of the game, but it fades when the number of units gets insane. It doesn't scale well. What killed EL's combat for me was the design-your-own-units-from-templates thing. I really, really hate that kind of thing, which plagues sci-fi 4Xes in particular. I don't want to design my own units or customize them to ridiculous levels. I want a premade list of units that each have a role and place in the game.
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Feb 13, 2020 00:16
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Cythereal posted:What killed EL's combat for me was the design-your-own-units-from-templates thing. i'm right there with you
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Feb 13, 2020 00:21
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Cythereal posted:What killed EL's combat for me was the design-your-own-units-from-templates thing.
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Feb 13, 2020 00:27
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I remember playing Alpha Centauri for the first time, and feeling relieved when I realised you just had to give every unit the most recent weapon/armour/battery, and the only real decisions were in the special attachments.
Kazzah fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Feb 13, 2020 |
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Feb 13, 2020 00:33
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Cythereal posted:What killed EL's combat for me was the design-your-own-units-from-templates thing. I don't really like unit construction in 4X games and I've dropped games before just because they expected me to become a starship engineer, but it's simple enough in EL that I think it works fine and I actually enjoy it for the most part.
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Feb 13, 2020 00:37
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Cythereal posted:What killed EL's combat for me was the design-your-own-units-from-templates thing. Yeah, I agree with that. It's what usually what stops me from playing any space 4X game. What makes this kind of thing even worse than having to take the time to design your own units is that you can never learn your opponents units. You can't simply look at a chariot and know that it moves 5 places, and does 10 damage from memory. Instead you must inspect each individual unit your opponent is fielding, and it takes forever. The Human Crouton fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Feb 13, 2020 |
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Feb 13, 2020 00:53
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The Human Crouton posted:Yeah, I agree with that. It's what usually what stops me from playing any space 4X game. Don't forget that your AI opponents create 30 disparate variants of each unit for their own inscrutable reasons.
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Feb 13, 2020 02:32
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Cythereal posted:What killed EL's combat for me was the design-your-own-units-from-templates thing. I think the only game that really did this well was Master of Orion II, back in the 90s. Different weapons had different roles; you weren't merely upgrading power levels. There were lots of special systems. Ship combat was small scale enough that individual ship systems mattered. Compare that with modern games like GalCiv where you have a huge variety of cosmetic options but a very basic rock/paper/scissors weapons-defense system and no control over actual combat. I tend to think nostalgia and slavish devotion to the "old school" is a bad thing, but this is one of the few areas where one of the genre originators hasn't been beaten.
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Feb 14, 2020 05:35
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Cythereal posted:What killed EL's combat for me was the design-your-own-units-from-templates thing. Agreed.
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Feb 14, 2020 05:50
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Megazver posted:I don't really like unit construction in 4X games and I've dropped games before just because they expected me to become a starship engineer, but it's simple enough in EL that I think it works fine and I actually enjoy it for the most part. Powerful Arcen vibes from that screenshot.
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Feb 14, 2020 07:48
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Stellar Monarch has manual fleet control though? Does it have an auto mode too? Manual fleet control is an option, but a slow one. For offence you manually designate the planets you want to conquer and the fleets you have set to attack start sizing them up. Unfortunately I cannot recall the admirals ever deciding to attack a weaker planet after picking an overly strong target. Defence fleets are automatically set up around each of your border planets based on your fleet templates.
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Feb 14, 2020 09:24
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prometheusbound2 posted:I think the only game that really did this well was Master of Orion II, back in the 90s. Different weapons had different roles; you weren't merely upgrading power levels. There were lots of special systems. Ship combat was small scale enough that individual ship systems mattered. Compare that with modern games like GalCiv where you have a huge variety of cosmetic options but a very basic rock/paper/scissors weapons-defense system and no control over actual combat. I tend to think nostalgia and slavish devotion to the "old school" is a bad thing, but this is one of the few areas where one of the genre originators hasn't been beaten. That was fun until you wanted to upgrade your exisitng fleet that easily consisted of 100+ units and you couldn't upgrade them in bulk.
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Feb 14, 2020 12:54
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SMAC was the only unit designer I thought added anything of value, even if bulk upgrading was a bit cumbersome. Just special abilities, and then best weapons/armor/both depending on whether you were building a defender, attacker, or all purpose dude. Maybe swap out some chassis for formers or colony pods. And even then it would have been fine without it.
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Feb 14, 2020 13:13
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GlyphGryph posted:SMAC was the only unit designer I thought added anything of value, even if bulk upgrading was a bit cumbersome. Just special abilities, and then best weapons/armor/both depending on whether you were building a defender, attacker, or all purpose dude. Maybe swap out some chassis for formers or colony pods. And even then it would have been fine without it. Yeah, the unit designer could have been entirely replaced with standard units with no loss. With the exception of losing the ability to turn your standard troops into mobile war crimes wrt nerve gas and stuff.
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Feb 14, 2020 18:27
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GlyphGryph posted:SMAC was the only unit designer I thought added anything of value, even if bulk upgrading was a bit cumbersome. Just special abilities, and then best weapons/armor/both depending on whether you were building a defender, attacker, or all purpose dude. Maybe swap out some chassis for formers or colony pods. And even then it would have been fine without it. Even then, the only things I ever really used SMAC's unit designer for was making formers with synthmetal armor so they'd count as combat units and shrug off worm attacks, and deciding which two of Comm Jammer, AAA Tracking, Hypnotic Trance, and Clean Reactor I'd put on my defense units. Also, seconding not being enthused by these culture previews in the absence of knowing what any of this poo poo actually means. The Phoenicians probably have some kind of naval advantage, but the teaser didn't say anything about it. You'd think providing some vague explanation of what the units and districts do would whet the appetite of players and get them thinking about what cultures they'd like to play as for their preferred strategies.
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Feb 14, 2020 18:28
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Brian Reynolds is on record saying that in retrospect the unit designer was a mistake and he would have tried to give each faction their own somewhat asymmetrical army instead if he could redesign it.
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Feb 14, 2020 18:38
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habituallyred posted:Manual fleet control is an option, but a slow one. For offence you manually designate the planets you want to conquer and the fleets you have set to attack start sizing them up. Unfortunately I cannot recall the admirals ever deciding to attack a weaker planet after picking an overly strong target. Defence fleets are automatically set up around each of your border planets based on your fleet templates. I've played a few games of SM to completion and never once bothered turning on automated fleets. I'm mad, I guess. Megazver posted:Brian Reynolds is on record saying that in retrospect the unit designer was a mistake and he would have tried to give each faction their own somewhat asymmetrical army instead if he could redesign it. I have a lot of time for unit designers and SMAC's in particular but this is a rad idea. I don't know if it'd make much sense for the genre in general but it would have worked great in SMAC. What do you guys think each faction would have gotten? Santiago is all about speed and flexibility, so I guess rovers, light naval craft and lots of air power. Deirdre seems obvious- high on worm boils, low on machines. Mass infantry and wave tactics seems almost too obvious for Yang. You'd maybe want to lean into the genejack/mastery of the flesh thing there- cyborgs and suchlike. With Miriam, again, it seems almost too easy to rest on the religious stuff. And if you take that in an "unsophisticated zealots with crude equipment" sort of direction then you're going to be overlapping a lot with a presumed human-wave-Hive. Guerilla tactics, maybe? Stealth? I forget, were the Believers' favoured civics good for probe teams? Zakharov, he's the science guy, so we're talking... high concept protoypes? Expensive, fragile, gimmicky and overspecialised? The guy who turns up to a fight with fifteen different types of scalpel. That leaves Morgan and Lal as the ones with no really obvious way of war. Lal, I guess, is the "rules of war" guy, so he wants the most straightforward and "honest" army. A take a bunch of tanks and push them down the centre sort of guy. But as the economic powerhouse, Morgan also sort of wants to be the "mass materiel" guy. Tank columns for Morgan and... fire support for Lal? Combined arms, creeping barrages, that sort of thing? Drawing on Lal's position as the unity and cooperation guy. You could make a case for Morgan as a "any thing you want, if you can pay for it" sort of guy, but that's a recipe for a balancing nightmare and a non-aesthetic. Of course, we'd be talking stack-on-stack combat here, so we should probably approach it looking less at individual unit types and more at how the composite would feel in play.
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Feb 15, 2020 02:30
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I've played a few games of SM to completion and never once bothered turning on automated fleets. I'm mad, I guess. Miriam had +1 probe and preferred fundamentalism which grants +2 probe, so yea, stealth/ambush units, good offensively but limited defensive options. University could focus on unmanned vehicles/robots and such, expensive to build but individually strong. Morgan would probably be the one to focus on indirect fire,and be another high-cost unit faction- high cost in money but keep your people happy by avoiding casualties. Lal would be combined arms/versaitility- the most earth-style army,wide variety of units available but no standout strength.
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Feb 15, 2020 02:59
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I could also see Morgan hiring mercenaries from all the other factions, maybe a baseline of generic units but then being able to pay for a few specialities from the factions he has good relations with.
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Feb 15, 2020 04:07
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Deirdre seems obvious- high on worm boils, low on machines.
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Feb 15, 2020 06:12
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I have a lot of time for unit designers and SMAC's in particular but this is a rad idea. I don't know if it'd make much sense for the genre in general but it would have worked great in SMAC. Isn't that what Endless Legend does? Different units for different factions. I know you can buy some off the marketplace but they end up with pretty different armies regardless. I assume other 4X's do the same (or maybe they just do different visuals for the same units, I haven't played many to be honest). Whether it would work for a historical TBS 4X is another matter... probably not I guess. Some unique units is probably about as far as that would get.
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Feb 15, 2020 20:23
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For all of the game's other faults, I think Civ:BE had the best implementation of modular unit design in a modern 4X. Each class of unit was subdivided into several variants based on your affinity levels along with a sprinkling of more exclusive unique affinity units. And when you reached certain affinity levels and gained stronger variants you had the opportunity to apply one of several permanent bonuses to all units of a specific class (a choice between two bonuses, the choices being determined by the affinity you leveled up in). So you could customize the capabilities of your army as you progress without relying on silly "unit designer" interfaces that provide too many options that don't mean anything and can't be easily compared with each other.
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Feb 15, 2020 20:37
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Anyway it turns out there's been quite a fair bit of content on the twitter I'd missed, so here's some. Mostly just really pretty art, showing off the terrain and cities  but also some UI / mechanics hints, like this one of Vesuvius. I wonder what the little "moon" icon is in the bottom right corner? I mean I assume that's the next turn button, but what's the moon about, and the other moon+city icon next to it?  And this one showing the technology tracker. What is with that icon next to the faction name? In the screenshot above it's swords, in this one a pick-axe. Empire-wide focus or something?  There's also this video from last week, mostly interviews but does have some game snippets, and some oblique angle shots of their tech tree wireframe (mostly unreadable). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlfUtaxkEKE Very intrigued by that military outpost there. I suspect that does not behave like a Civ 6 Encampment. In fact I can't even see a city in that huge stretch of territory surrounding that encampment  
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Feb 15, 2020 20:39
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It seems to be following the EL thing where regions are pre-defined by the world generator and you can only have one city per region. I'd imagine an outpost is something like a pre-city where the city is in a vulnerable state before it becomes a city proper. Since that's exactly what they were in ES2.
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Feb 15, 2020 20:56
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Clarste posted:It seems to be following the EL thing where regions are pre-defined by the world generator and you can only have one city per region. I'd imagine an outpost is something like a pre-city where the city is in a vulnerable state before it becomes a city proper. Since that's exactly what they were in ES2. And exactly what CBE did.
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Feb 15, 2020 20:58
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The hex grid is masked really well. Looks a lot more fluid and natural in terms of mimicking geography than EL, at least from my recollection.
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Feb 16, 2020 03:07
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This is probably too obvious but I'm pretty sure that those urban areas in the screenshots are our districts and the farms/working camps are a visual representation of tiles being exploited for resources. Although at least this time the connection between that is more causal than EL I guess.
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Feb 16, 2020 07:07
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Are there going to be ages in this like Civ? Like can you reach modern/future era?
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Feb 16, 2020 07:30
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Popete posted:Are there going to be ages in this like Civ? Like can you reach modern/future era? This screenshot (and early descriptions, come to think of it) shows there will be 6 eras  And from the latest video, the first four are Bronze, Classical, Medieval and Renaissance. That leaves two, I'm guessing Industrial and Modern.
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Feb 16, 2020 09:24
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I was at the London science museum today for their cipher exhibit and it occurred to me that the way combat works in EL could be ripe for some codebreaking abstraction (i don't mean actual codebreaking, but a simple "player A's codebreaking number is bigger than player B's because A put more money into it") I say this because in combat you queue up actions, without knowing what your enemy is gonna do, and then it all plays out. Would be cool if you could unveil your enemy's actions like this, and conceal your own. Not sure what kinda difference that would make though, guess you'd have to shake up how combat works a little bit (e.g. artillery fires at where you think the enemy will be, instead of where it is) Speaking of combat, i wonder how airplanes will work. I'm guessing you can't just do find-replace for flying units in EL because that would look like garbage
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Feb 16, 2020 15:08
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The world ends before airplanes are invented.
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Feb 19, 2020 07:15
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Popete posted:Are there going to be ages in this like Civ? Like can you reach modern/future era? Yes, but it also works such that for each era or age you play as a new culture, while retaining the bonuses and abilities from all previous cultures you’ve played. So you could pick a couple of early food/economy cultures and aim to crush your enemies in the mid game with a military culture. Or just go straight diplomatic with every pick. Apparently you can also opt out of adding a new culture for the new era, increasing your bonuses from earlier eras - so a risk, but one that might pay off in terms of Fame or whatever their Victory Points are called.
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Feb 19, 2020 07:30
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I hope they make a good video game instead of a bad one but I won’t hold my breath.
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Feb 20, 2020 05:52
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