|
Jeza posted:Dollars to doughnuts that the combat is in the vein of Endless Legend, i.e. map traversal of units that jumps into a miniature hex battlefield which represents the surrounding area. Looks like they made some noise about it differing from EL because it uses 'armies' rather than units, but it's not really clear what that means. As long as they don't have a unit designer I can live with that.
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 18:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 20:29 |
|
|
Cythereal posted:As long as they don't have a unit designer I can live with that. Yeah that stuff was always needless busywork. It was always doubly a pain in Endless Space games where you couldn't even realistically 'counter' enemy fleets because each fleet you faced was just a total hodgepodge of Cruiser6, Cruiser14 with a completely random assortment of shields/hulls/weapons for no explicable reason.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 18:25
|
|
|
Jeza posted:Yeah that stuff was always needless busywork. It was always doubly a pain in Endless Space games where you couldn't even realistically 'counter' enemy fleets because each fleet you faced was just a total hodgepodge of Cruiser6, Cruiser14 with a completely random assortment of shields/hulls/weapons for no explicable reason. It's the biggest reason why I never got into any of the Endless games. Options upon options upon options, with no documentation as to when you'd want to use what and how/if you should mix your forces etc etc. Features for features' sake is not good game design, and the unit designer is a scourge on space 4Xes in particular.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 18:28
|
|
|
Jeza posted:Dollars to doughnuts that the combat is in the vein of Endless Legend, i.e. map traversal of units that jumps into a miniature hex battlefield which represents the surrounding area. Looks like they made some noise about it differing from EL because it uses 'armies' rather than units, but it's not really clear what that means. tactical combat in most games is a terrible idea full stop. unless battles are very rare but very impactful, or the game is explicitly designed around battles, battles should be abstracted away as a rough measure of terrain/tech/production. it really isnt interesting to cheese the AI with ranged units behind pikes or whatever as you slowly advance on them to ensure you take minimal losses. or worse having to chase down straggler armies of three units each that can somehow pillage your territory and capture cities while the ai retreats every time you engage them. early microprose games threaded the needle as best you could with both tactical combat and empire development in moo, moo2 and mom. and of course the heroes of might and magic series did tactical combat right because the focus was on your army development whereas empire development was abstracted away so you didnt need to manage your cities. The endless series has both complicated/time-consuming empire management as well as multiple battles a turn and spawning "barbarian" units all of which has to be dealt with in tactical combat and the tactical combat itself isnt interesting at all, its pointless.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 18:43
|
|
|
Jeza posted:Dollars to doughnuts that the combat is in the vein of Endless Legend, i.e. map traversal of units that jumps into a miniature hex battlefield which represents the surrounding area. Looks like they made some noise about it differing from EL because it uses 'armies' rather than units, but it's not really clear what that means. Oh, almost definitely. One of the unique units they showed had a buff to its first turn of combat. I just hope the autoresolve function is more robust, because in Endless Legend I just wouldn't bother playing factions that demanded tactical combat to work well.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 18:46
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:As long as they don't have a unit designer I can live with that. Same. EL had a pretty good (but opaque) combat system. I just don't want to design each unit's helmet.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 20:21
|
|
|
There's a few YouTube let's players who have been given a sneak peak, one described the combat as being like Endless Legend, but much simpler. Units have a single combat value ala Civ and there are special general units you can use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_ZxFMGN8RA This guy gives a decent summary of it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 20:40
|
|
|
This guy is my favorite youtuber. SB is a good guy.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 21:11
|
|
|
Yea, he's quite a chilled out bloke really. No like and subscribe bollocks or drama. Between SB and Marbozir I've enjoyed a lot of strategy games I wouldn't have tried or thought of getting. Plus they are great for insomnia, in the nicest possible way.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2020 21:14
|
|
|
I think you hit the real salient point that it is time-consuming. I don't hate the idea of tactical combat in a 4X, it can be done theoretically well. I remember enjoying King's Bounty hex based combat, so the model is sound enough. The issue comes in when you get stuck in the Catch-22 of: in order to make a fun and rewarding combat system, it should be deep enough and satisfying, and for that to be the case it can't be quick. 4X games are already basically the most time consuming of all games, and having a full on sub-game of combat chess or whatever makes it even longer and draining. I guess if I had to conjecture what a good middle-ground would entail, having battles over entire territory chunks would be the ideal, rather than two random map units clashing on a single tile. As you say, if the battles are going to be complex and not just tacked on, they should be rare and impactful. That, or: Mameluke posted:the autoresolve function is more robust In fairness, my memory of it in EL was terrible, but in ES I would autoresolve constantly without feeling cheated, so hopefully that's something they've learned to iron out.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 01:09
|
|
|
Jeza posted:In fairness, my memory of it in EL was terrible, but in ES I would autoresolve constantly without feeling cheated, so hopefully that's something they've learned to iron out. The auto-resolve in ES2 is specifically designed to always give you the exact same result as watching the battle, although they did that by removing your ability to control the battle in any way. Personally I liked that since I don't play 4X games for tactical combat, but obviously a lot of other people hated it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 01:12
|
|
|
I've only watched Potato McWhiskey's video of the various ones put out by youtubers, but the way he describes the combat system, it seems like it only lasts one round per turn, but can stretch out over multiple turns, allowing players to funnel reinforcements into the battles, but also meaning that single battles can be significantly impactful as they swallow up your troops. Apparently the devs compared late game combat to being a bit like WW1 where the war could be one massive long-running continuous battle. Initially my thought was "I don't know how that will work", but then after a few minutes I realised that's basically how combat works in Civ 5 and 6: one big long continuous battle where every unit in the fight gets (usually) one attack per turn. So I think they might be inadvertantly re-inventing the wheel here. Maybe that's appropriate for a game where you can literally invent the wheel.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 01:21
|
|
|
This looks like a Civ game I would quite enjoy, but I'm never sure on the Civ games anyway. It looks really sleek and polished which I do like. I did quite enjoy Amplitudes other games so that's a positive for it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 01:22
|
|
|
Jeza posted:In fairness, my memory of it in EL was terrible, but in ES I would autoresolve constantly without feeling cheated, so hopefully that's something they've learned to iron out. EL had tactical combat in a few rounds that you gave orders to units in. The Ardent Mages were borderline unplayable because their units are all glass cannons that need to use abilities during tactical combat properly.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 04:29
|
|
|
Ideally in a 4x game I still think wars should be abstracted in a way that, rather than having individual units, you have a frontline and you can commit resources like manpower or production every turn to make it shift if you commit more of it than your enemy. With shifting the frontline over a river or across an ocean requiring many more resources committed, and the deeper you go into enemy territory the more costly committing becomes whereas you get bonuses the closer the frontline moves to your capital. And then when all is said and done you sign a peace treaty where you negotiate who gets to keep what. It would avoid endless shuffling of troop types around while also simulating the idea that it gets progressively harder to hold territory the further you go beyond your own established frontier. The downside is that people will accuse me of wanting to play a spreadsheet, as if having a spreadsheet simulator for economy and science is somehow acceptable but war needs to be this intricate 4D chess board because reasons.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 12:31
|
|
|
Their press release timing is strange with this game. See next to nothing about the game. Then we hear it will slip to 2021, and now they release press stuff knowing it is a minimum of six months before we could have the game? I mean, they can do whatever they want, just seems like odd PR timing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 19:20
|
|
|
Deltasquid posted:Ideally in a 4x game I still think wars should be abstracted in a way that, rather than having individual units, you have a frontline and you can commit resources like manpower or production every turn to make it shift if you commit more of it than your enemy. With shifting the frontline over a river or across an ocean requiring many more resources committed, and the deeper you go into enemy territory the more costly committing becomes whereas you get bonuses the closer the frontline moves to your capital. I like the way you think.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 23:39
|
|
|
I too want to play a game where it's just a lever of "WAR" and "GROWTH"
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2020 23:41
|
|
|
War sucks in Civ, though. It sucked with doomstacks and it sucked with 1UPT. Combat in the Endless games sucks too, and the thing that usually makes me lose interest in games of EL and ES is having to spend a bunch of irl time in the unit design screen. I know some of this is just me, like I'd rather rearrange population units between planets than move warships around, but I also have several 4x board games that don't make me spend half my time clicking between unit and battle screens. Someone needs to normalize streamlined combat. Board games already did, so it's obviously possible.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 00:10
|
|
|
Really I'm still pretty on board with this game. A different twist on the kind of thing Civ does with really pretty graphics and hopefully a less annoying combat system sounds perfectly good to me. I like the apparent flexibility of having just one victory condition that you can chase by doing different things in each era, too. I'm not that well-versed in 4x games, though, really only having played Civ. I keep meaning to try Endless Legend one of these days.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 00:18
|
|
|
Harrow posted:Really I'm still pretty on board with this game. A different twist on the kind of thing Civ does with really pretty graphics and hopefully a less annoying combat system sounds perfectly good to me. I like the apparent flexibility of having just one victory condition that you can chase by doing different things in each era, too. Endless Legend was an interesting game with creative and diverse factions that I never figured out how to actually play.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 00:30
|
|
|
I trust Amplitude to put out an overall excellent game with a number of ideas that improve on Civ, and the game will be annoyingly granular in some places but we'll get used to it, and the spy expansion is going to be awful but the game will be a complete experience by the time that comes out anyway. The interface will take some getting used to. The change from bronze to iron to steel is going to be expensive and annoying. The point salad approach to victory will allow for tall strategies in theory but not necessarily in practice. The AI is going to suck. Some cultures are going to be way stronger than others, and racing to specific ones is going to be part of the game, for better and worse.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 00:49
|
|
|
This is pretty interesting, but I really hope Firaxis steals the idea for one unified civ score in their next iteration. I hate how game-y the idea of victory paths has become
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 03:30
|
|
|
Deltasquid posted:Ideally in a 4x game I still think wars should be abstracted in a way that, rather than having individual units, you have a frontline and you can commit resources like manpower or production every turn to make it shift if you commit more of it than your enemy. With shifting the frontline over a river or across an ocean requiring many more resources committed, and the deeper you go into enemy territory the more costly committing becomes whereas you get bonuses the closer the frontline moves to your capital. Although i dislike the idea of war being abstracted this far, this is the best description of how it might work that I've read so far. I'd definitely like to see it attempted in a game.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 07:26
|
|
|
I mean having dozens of immortal soldier chess pieces on another continent with no supply lines anything is also incredibly abstracted, just in a different way.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 07:33
|
|
|
JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Although i dislike the idea of war being abstracted this far, this is the best description of how it might work that I've read so far. I'd definitely like to see it attempted in a game. Rereading that post, it honestly sounds a lot like the culture and borders system in Civ4. Gain enough
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 09:11
|
|
|
Kassad posted:Rereading that post, it honestly sounds a lot like the culture and borders system in Civ4. Gain enough Now that you mention it, yeah it does. It sounds like it would be a little more involved though, with an ability to push hard on some tiles and relax on others. I'm not sure how it would play out in the naval/air arenas though. You can project force pretty far with that, i think you'd still need units of some kind.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 10:07
|
|
|
I mean, to elaborate for air power etc: once you unlock the relevant tech (eg horse riding unlocks raiding, aircraft unlocks bombing) you can commit resources to achieve different things. Not everything needs to be a pitched battle with a moving frontline, but a bread and butter invasion would be. But you could eg commit a certain amount of production, manpower and horses to "raiding" a neighbour every turn, and if they don't commit enough resources to guard their province/territory/border/city/whatever you want to call it, they "bleed" some resources like food or gold to the succesful raider. If you have a fleet or air force, you could commit planes to strategic bombing (damaging production and lowering population) or ground support (lower committed manpower requirements to push deeper into territory) and ships could be committed to naval invasions in a specific sea (lower resource requirements for ground troops to land ashore) or raiding a specific area (other players whose trade goes through that sea bleed gold to you per turn unless they match your naval power with escorts in that sea). You could simulate certain troops being deployed to an area without actually having a unit on a tile which you move around like a chess piece. This prevents the 1upt issue of traffic jams and has the advantage over stacks that you could theoretically redeploy your entire army from one end of the empire to another without actually moving the units, you just have to commit resources for that turn to a particular front/area. I'm not a game designer, and you'd probably have to tweak this idea somewhat to make it easier to understand and to prevent exploits like an army materializing on your border or from an enclave, but if buying a city improvement in civ VI is done by spending 200 gold from an abstracted empire-wide pool to erect a building in one turn rather than moving 200 individual gold pieces from one city's coffers to the other, and trade routes can be abstracted to an empire-wide gpt with a small unit moving between the cities as a graphical representation rather than requiring you to manually move the trader every turn to and from a city, then I don't see why committing 4 units of swordsmen to a front requires you to manually move them every turn until they get there rather than just letting you invest 200 swordsmen resources or what have you to a particular frontline and seeing how the front moves depending on units committed by the enemy, terrain etc? And if keeping track of individual unit types is too granular you could still abstract bombing as committing 200 "military resources" to lowering production in a certain city per turn until they match that with "military resources" committed to air interception every turn (assuming they have the fighter tech unlocked) I just find it weird how everybody is married to the idea of having individual units shuffling around in 4X games as if they were tactical wargames, when at such a scale wars are mostly decided by grand strategies and things which the games already abstract to a large degree like economy and production. And now that EL/Humankind has shown that you can work with a predetermined "province" system of sorts and Civ VI works can designate continents on the fly, which are generated at world generation, rather than being stuck with individual hexes, I just don't see the point in tactical combat marring down grand strategy when you could easily abstract it to certain units being "committed" to a certain province or area. Deltasquid fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Jun 20, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 10:23
|
|
|
One positive aspect of war in Civ 6, at least, was the move away from war being solely about conquest. Raiding is a lot more important with the district system. (Still a really, really imperfect system, but I dislike war boiling down to CITY CONQUERED=Y/N) As for the front system- I think that'd be excellent for wars in industrialised societies. I mean, a million times better than the stack/carpet of doom. Oddly enough, I feel like Mount and Blade: Bannerlord does a pretty good job of being a pre-industrial strategy game. Where are your allies? Where are your other armies? Where is the enemy? No one knows!!! Oh no we're out of grain, can we still eat our horses?
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 13:06
|
|
|
Kinda excited about this, because Civ4 was amazing but feels kinda dated today, whereas IMO Civ5/C:BE/Civ6 all sucked pretty hard. I'm hopeful that they pull it off and gave something good to scratch that Civ itch.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 20:03
|
|
|
Glass of Milk posted:This is pretty interesting, but I really hope Firaxis steals the idea for one unified civ score in their next iteration. I hate how game-y the idea of victory paths has become Absolutely. To paraphrase some game designer who guested on 3MA once- regardless of the other mechanics, regardless of whatever theme you think you're going for, it's the scoring system that ultimately defines what your game is about, because it's what contextualises everything else. There's nothing that kills the desire to play Civ in me quite like seeing people place civs into little boxes- oh, this is a culture civ, this is a science civ, this is a military civ. Anything that encourages more generalist/dynamic strategies is good in my book. Tree Bucket posted:Oddly enough, I feel like Mount and Blade: Bannerlord does a pretty good job of being a pre-industrial strategy game. Where are your allies? Where are your other armies? Where is the enemy? No one knows!!! Oh no we're out of grain, can we still eat our horses? Yeah, I think it succeeds because, ironically, it limits how effectively the player can strategise. It robs you of the omniscent god-perspective you're usually given in a strategy game and forces you to deal with the limitations of being a human being with a specific position in space. It's something I wish CK3 would take cues from, actually.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2020 23:55
|
|
|
All medieval civilizations have been revealed https://twitter.com/humankindgame/status/1272914404926017537 https://twitter.com/humankindgame/status/1275451078008426496 https://twitter.com/humankindgame/status/1277991569270943744 https://twitter.com/humankindgame/status/1278712610855227392
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2020 05:55
|
|
|
Once again, my reaction is "okay, so what? what do they do?"
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2020 07:25
|
|
|
Clarste posted:Once again, my reaction is "okay, so what? what do they do?"
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2020 07:38
|
|
|
If no-one picks the Aztecs, the game just ends midway through the Medieval
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2020 08:11
|
|
|
Clarste posted:Once again, my reaction is "okay, so what? what do they do?" For a while I've been thinking it reminds me of Star Citizen, where I don't think they actually know the ramifications of any system or feature or trait.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2020 08:37
|
|
|
Chronojam posted:For a while I've been thinking it reminds me of Star Citizen, where I don't think they actually know the ramifications of any system or feature or trait. well, at least we don't have to buy pictures of the civilization in advance
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2020 12:53
|
|
|
I don't know why, but that thinking emoji at the end of each tweet is really annoying to me.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2020 11:15
|
|
|
AG3 posted:I don't know why, but that thinking emoji at the end of each tweet is really annoying to me.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2020 11:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 20:29 |
|
|
The little video they did of chasing animals round with a cursor near a lake was more interesting than any of the reveals of civs. Because what does being a militarist civ mean, what's an emblematic unit etc etc etc etc blah.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2020 12:31
|
|
