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sirtommygunn posted:Have you tried Before We Leave? The closest thing to conflict is feeding the space whales that occasionally show up to eat a piece of your planets. Checkin this out. Panzeh posted:I always thought Imperialism's approach was ideal- there's a decent amount of economic management to be had, but it's all in one screen- the capital, where all industry happens(in both games, industry outside the capital is modeled by developed areas sending home intermediate/finished materials based on the raw resources in the province). A lot of the micro in Imperialism is using international trade- you don't really have to all that often in normal for anything but selling for cash, but on nigh-on impossible you need the injection of raw resources through international trade to keep up with the AI development cheats. Yeah I was thinking of this too. Although it was a very long time ago that I played it, and I was not competent in managing my empire, there was no floating from city to city making tedious adjustments. Every turn, you’d check a maximum of 3-4 screens to manage production, foreign relations, and international trade.
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Jul 5, 2021 15:49
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There was a time in the early to mid 2000s where space 4x browser games where plentiful and very popular. I'm wondering if such a boom might come again with cheaper hosting.
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Jul 5, 2021 15:53
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Hot take, sliders are bad, and they abstract away the fun of micromanaging an empire
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Jul 5, 2021 15:54
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ikanreed posted:fun of micromanaging an empire citation needed
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Jul 5, 2021 15:55
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ikanreed posted:Hot take, sliders are bad, and they abstract away the fun of micromanaging an empire the designer who finds the happy medium between sliders and individual buildings will be crowned king.
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Jul 5, 2021 15:57
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I think from a purely empire management view (and not war or whatever), it's more interesting to spend 90% of your time on developing colonies/cities/whatever. After some point, they should be pretty much self-sustaining unless there's an event or a special building or whatever that you choose to build there. You can always shake this dynamic up for the mid or endgame from tech or society or whatever. In the original Colonization, it was fun to shift from developing your colonies to getting everything ready for a war with your home country.
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Jul 5, 2021 17:07
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ikanreed posted:Hot take, sliders are bad, and they abstract away the fun of micromanaging an empire Micromanaging two dozen planets isn't fun for me. Hell, most of the time I find the ship designers every 4x game insists on having tedious. I want to focus on the big picture, not whether or not the backwater of Tau Ceti Alpha V has parks and recreation set up.
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Jul 5, 2021 17:10
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Glass of Milk posted:I think from a purely empire management view (and not war or whatever), it's more interesting to spend 90% of your time on developing colonies/cities/whatever. After some point, they should be pretty much self-sustaining unless there's an event or a special building or whatever that you choose to build there. That's fine if there's some kind of complex gameplay or decision-making involved in development but there never is, it's clicking the button to queue up a factory worth +10 industry points in each of your 600 cities, because after your first city where you can't initially afford it it's always the optimal choice to build that factory, then doing it all again once you've researched Factory II Cow Clicker mighta demonstrated that people are willing to call that playing a game, but I don't think we can jump from there to calling it good game design A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 17:51
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I think having building queues is fun and engaging in the early game, as it does feel like it's meaningful for both the 'story' of the game, and mechanically. In much the same way that founding a single city / settling a single planet is a big deal early on and just busywork painting later on. Late / midgame, it should just get FATE fractaled - invent a tech that instantly doubles all production of everything (compared to a fully built-up city specialized in 1 thing) and completely eliminates city level build queues, just have you pick one specialization in science, money, balanced, whatever. That way it doesn't feel bad to not be manually min-maxing. Call the tech Autonomous AGI, Actually Good Governors, whatever. Then instead of sending out single colony ships, send out colony fleets that gobble up a whole blob of stars / provinces at once. Further techs that improve things just get automatically applied, or get installed after drawing out of an empire wide public works pool or something. I honestly kinda scratch my head at why someone hasn't already done something like this, it's not like having single tech advances drastically shaking up the game isn't an established tradition in the genre.
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Jul 5, 2021 18:51
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uber_stoat posted:the first master of orion was just sliders. That's why it's the goat. Planet sliders and research sliders and spy sliders. In an ideal world MOO2 would've just added sliders to diplomacy and ships, and MOO3 would've been a box with a slide whistle in it.
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Jul 5, 2021 18:53
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:the problem is AI governors always suck tremendous rear end and build queues can only slightly alleviate the tedium of micromanaging 400 mostly lovely production centers There's always how Warlock 2 did it - you could have up to x major cities, and the cap slowly increased with tech, and then the rest of your cities would be minor cities (I may be getting the names wrong, it's been awhile). Minor cities had no buildings or upkeep, it was simply based on their population. So a Farming minor city might produce 2 food per population, a Temple minor city might produce 2 mana per population, etc. If you wanted to do a 4x game in a similar style you could start with an empire having the cap for one major world where you pick buildings and stuff, while going around colonizing planets to create minor colonies, which would slowly build their population up while producing a trickle of resources, then eventually they'd unlock the ability to transform one or more minor colonies into more major ones and want to pick the best worlds they had found. After transforming they'd use the population of the world for buildings or whatever the game uses. It makes the minor worlds/planets over your cap straight up worse than full colonies, but as long as that's true for everyone equally it's not really a balance issue and even a balance factor for wide vs tall. Bremen fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 18:56
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LLSix posted:Yes. Buildings are fun. Buildings tell a story. See Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (bases, not planets, but the idea still applies). I didn't mind buildings as much in civ 2/smac. I don't know if it's because the buildings were more interesting (certainly placing historical milestones is more evocative than Xenbrubium Mines), or because it was less annoying compared to moving units around, or I just had more time on my hands.
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Jul 5, 2021 20:37
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:That's fine if there's some kind of complex gameplay or decision-making involved in development but there never is, it's clicking the button to queue up a factory worth +10 industry points in each of your 600 cities, because after your first city where you can't initially afford it it's always the optimal choice to build that factory, then doing it all again once you've researched Factory II Well, if it's colony/city development in a vacuum, that's one thing, but hopefully there are other things that are interesting as well- exploration, combat, etc. And you're right- variation and unique development choices make for more interesting gameplay. I think people get a little wary when they feel like they're sacrificing general prosperity for some specific path (i.e. this industrial-built city doesn't make food, as an example), so that balance is important too.
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Jul 5, 2021 22:35
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metasynthetic posted:
This is pretty much an idle game mechanic, isn't it? Advance to a tier, automate the one below. Wouldn't take a whole load of tweaking to make it fit 4x, with room to fiddle if you happen to enjoy micromanaging/want to do something special with a particular planet
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Jul 5, 2021 22:38
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Yeah, whoever brought up Imperialism 1 & 2 has the right of it. You get to make interesting building decisions in your capital, get to feel that neat sense of building up the world as you take territory and resource hexes and lay out transport routes to bring them back home, but at the same time you're not building granaries/libraries/temples in every single town or city you build or conquer. Just your capital, and arranging the world so wealth funnels into it. Yes, problematic, but of course the game's name gives it away. On a related note, I wish AoW: Planetfall did that with its city model. Having to manage multiple cities on a sector by sector basis gets tiring once you start conquering past your "borders," and they didn't add in vassal cities from AoW3 to simplify conquered city management. Ah well.
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Jul 5, 2021 22:38
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PerniciousKnid posted:I didn't mind buildings as much in civ 2/smac. I don't know if it's because the buildings were more interesting (certainly placing historical milestones is more evocative than Xenbrubium Mines), or because it was less annoying compared to moving units around, or I just had more time on my hands. This is a big issue in some games, especially ones that lean more heavily on either obscure history, or full fantasy. Age of Wonders Planetfall had this problem, the factions and planetary stuff were all unique, but a consequence of this was losing all familiarity with all aspects of the game, creating a much higher barrier to entry and ease of comprehension. Are laser Amazon tyrannosaurs better or worse against space mecha knights? Spearman vs cavalry might be unexciting, but it shorthands a ton of explanation. Similarly, fantasy tropes like tough dwarves and magical elves are boring, but they also leave plenty of room for exploring other aspects of the game. There are of course benefits to going fullly off the beaten path, exploring the new concepts can be fun (Endless Legend), and it can give more design space to play with, but I think it's a risk. Even in normal historical games, depending on how obscure the devs want to get with technology names and game concepts, it can be really hard to map what you're seeing in game to meaningful decisions that feel good, and are learned quickly (in some cases intuitively).
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Jul 5, 2021 22:45
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Does anyone know of/remember an ancient Mac 4x space game, 'Starbound II'? I remember dicking around with the demo as a kid on my family's iMac around the turn of the century, but I never got the full version (Space Empires IV and MoO 2 were my full 4xs of choice) and it always kind of stuck with me as super interesting and neat in some of the stuff it did. Real time space combat and I think even ground combat although the latter wasn't in the game. Hex-grid planets for terraforming, development, and ground army movements! Customizable ships! Like I have no idea how well it played or how it aged, but I distinctly remember child me and honestly even adult-me-in-the-back-of-their-head-kinda thinking the ideal space 4X would be basically the fusion of SE4 and Starbound 2. EDIT: I also remember lusting over the pre-release info and screenshots of Stars! Supernova Genesis. RIP.
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Jul 6, 2021 03:23
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What if you had only one building queue for the entire empire, and they affected all the cities at once? Like some kind of large-scale project that everyone is working together on? And then you can have sliders or whatever for optimizing each individual colony. Or maybe if your empire is big enough you get like 2-5 queues, one for each large administrative region? ...Although I guess that just turns construction into a second research.
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Jul 6, 2021 03:53
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sirtommygunn posted:Have you tried Before We Leave? The closest thing to conflict is feeding the space whales that occasionally show up to eat a piece of your planets. Yeah, it was cute but just didn’t really grab me a ton, sadly. 
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Jul 6, 2021 04:12
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Clarste posted:What if you had only one building queue for the entire empire, and they affected all the cities at once? Like some kind of large-scale project that everyone is working together on? And then you can have sliders or whatever for optimizing each individual colony. Or maybe if your empire is big enough you get like 2-5 queues, one for each large administrative region? This is the kind of thing that annoys me with civ games on normal speeds. The build times tend to go so much slower than it takes for new research so I'll have a bunch of cities with laboratories or something but none of them even have windmills. It feels like after a certain point you should just have the buildings in all your cities. Maybe once you've built 3 or 4 it should just automatically propagate to the rest, or get way cheaper, or a bar starts filling once you've researched it that gets a boost each time you build one and one it fills the rest of the cities get it. Could be influenced by nearby neighbors too.
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Jul 6, 2021 08:27
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uber_stoat posted:the designer who finds the happy medium between sliders and individual buildings will be crowned king. just set a slider so the player can customise the sliders vs queues bing bong so simple Bremen posted:There's always how Warlock 2 did it - you could have up to x major cities, and the cap slowly increased with tech, and then the rest of your cities would be minor cities (I may be getting the names wrong, it's been awhile). Minor cities had no buildings or upkeep, it was simply based on their population. So a Farming minor city might produce 2 food per population, a Temple minor city might produce 2 mana per population, etc. This sounds like Humankind a little. You make an outpost to claim a territory and it starts growing pops until you get to 4. You can attach it to an adjacent city, which will exploit the tiles covered by it and can build in that territory. Then you can spin them off into their own cities if you want or you can keep adding territories to the original city. Clarste posted:What if you had only one building queue for the entire empire, and they affected all the cities at once? Like some kind of large-scale project that everyone is working together on? And then you can have sliders or whatever for optimizing each individual colony. Or maybe if your empire is big enough you get like 2-5 queues, one for each large administrative region? This is also kind of a thing in Humankind, all of the cities can add their production to wonders and holy sites. The cities and their territories are kind of like administrative regions in a way too.
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Jul 6, 2021 12:47
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Unfortunately, the latest iteration of Humankind makes combining all of your territories into one mega-city less than optimal.
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Jul 6, 2021 13:26
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Any disagreements here? https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-strategy-games/ I'm phone posting, otherwise I'd list them as well.
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Jul 20, 2021 17:58
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Mayveena posted:Any disagreements here? https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-strategy-games/ Well, they had Alpha Centauri on there, so to quote doctor Pauli, "it's not even wrong". Although they prefaced it with "best", so, eh 
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Jul 20, 2021 18:18
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So when the list said best strategy games they just meant all strategy games right because it seems like they just listed all strategy games
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Jul 20, 2021 19:24
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Mayveena posted:Any disagreements here? https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-strategy-games/ It has Iron Harvest but no Shadow Empire, complete BS!
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Jul 20, 2021 19:25
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Mayveena posted:Any disagreements here? https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-strategy-games/ They thought the linear encounters added in the XCOM2 expansion was a good thing, making the entire list faulty.
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Jul 20, 2021 19:30
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Psycho Landlord posted:So when the list said best strategy games they just meant all strategy games right because it seems like they just listed all strategy games I take it you've never run the Strategy filter on Steam? 😐
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Jul 20, 2021 20:57
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looks like thats what that article did
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Jul 20, 2021 20:59
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Psycho Landlord posted:So when the list said best strategy games they just meant all strategy games right because it seems like they just listed all strategy games Strategy games are the best thats why they listed all of them
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Jul 20, 2021 21:12
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Has anyone figured out a strategy game where instead of being eliminated losing players get vassalized or some poo poo and have a role into the end of the game? It was just about feasible to get a handful of people together to play a 10-hour-long turnbased game most of them would get kicked out of halfway through back when new games regularly came with PBEM multiplayer, but nowadays lmao no
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jul 20, 2021 |
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Jul 20, 2021 21:19
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Mayveena posted:Any disagreements here? https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-strategy-games/ Lol, I have worked on 5 of these games. Or maybe 6 if any of my CK2 stuff made it into 3 and you count that.
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Jul 20, 2021 21:22
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Mayveena posted:Any disagreements here? https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-strategy-games/
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Jul 20, 2021 21:51
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Poil posted:Best thing on that list is that the Warcraft 3 screenshot is from the old and actually good version. And they point out that the new version is poo poo
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Jul 20, 2021 23:28
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1481170/ZEPHON/ I really enjoyed Gladius and this setting is extremely my poo poo
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Jul 26, 2021 17:26
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In case anyone isinterested i'm starting up a Stellar Monarch Lets Play!
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Jul 28, 2021 11:54
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Games need a city designer like some space 4x's have a ship designer. Save a template and in the later game when you capture your nth city instead of clicking factory 10 times followed by factory 2 and so on, just decide pick one of your templates and the queue autopopulates.
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Jul 28, 2021 12:25
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Kvlt! posted:Return of the Precursors, a ftp MoO1 remake with some minor changes and QoL updates. Its excellent, and all done by one dude I tried playing this and realized I wanted a moo2 remake instead
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Jul 28, 2021 14:51
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Jarvisi posted:I tried playing this and realized I wanted a moo2 remake instead Isn't that every single space 4X made since then?
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Jul 28, 2021 14:57
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Clarste posted:Isn't that every single space 4X made since then? They keep loving up moo2 remakes by putting crap like starlanes in the game, or making colony management too finicky.
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Jul 28, 2021 15:28
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