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Lady Radia posted:justinian was only successful in the map painting sense, not in the "building a vibrant empire" sense, which was a pretty big failure. but this is definitely off topic. You speak as if there was any other measure of success...
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Jan 15, 2022 21:46
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DrSunshine posted:You speak as if there was any other measure of success...
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Jan 15, 2022 21:51
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Raenir Salazar posted:IIRC things like smuggling in silkworms from China and other reforms are widely cited as the reasons why the Empire lasted so much longer after his death. But on the other hand (temporarily) regaining North Africa/Italia/etc might've also further contributed to their decline, its hard to say. Regaining Africa was definitely a good move. They provided the empire with much needed grain and manpower.
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Jan 15, 2022 22:17
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Getting slammed with the bubonic plague was kinda outside his control. If you rack up a bunch of overextension and then get ravaged with a disaster that saps tax and manpower, you're gonna have a bad time.
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Jan 15, 2022 22:53
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Who can resist invading everywhere when you roll a 6/6/6 general.
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Jan 15, 2022 22:58
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Fellblade posted:Who can resist invading everywhere when you roll a 6/6/6 general. Not just that, but a reasonably loyal one. Centuries pass without emperors being so lucky.
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Jan 15, 2022 23:14
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Koramei posted:This sounds like a fantastic concept for an indie strategy game along the lines of Predynastic Egypt with a simple core to it. Like, you’re a monarch shut in your palace and have to rely on your ministers to relay information to you, and over the course of the game you have to deduce / get more tools to figure out who you can actually rely on. Maybe it’s a countdown as half of them want to depose you and you have to get rid of them all before it’s too late. The scope is a lot smaller than this but there is a Vietnam war game based on the concept of imperfect information. All you have is a radio, a map, and the ability to put counters on the map wherever you want. The entire game is played through sending orders through the radio and requesting intel updates from your squads (who of course need to be alive to send said updates): https://store.steampowered.com/app/871530/Radio_Commander/ The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Jan 15, 2022 |
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Jan 15, 2022 23:22
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It's sorta what I imagine in my dream space 4x game. Pretty much perfect knowledge of your homeworld, but your colonies are going to be a bit foggy, and the colonies of your colonies will be barely connected. They're probably the most likely to have high ideological drift, more likely to want independence, and also most likely to be the ones to make first contact with alien races. It has a lot of potential for neat scenarios, because your fringe colonies are probably total weirdos, and the aliens they encounter are also likely to be very different from their home planet. All that said, it's a bad fit for the era of Victoria 3. The world is shrinking in this era, and uncertainty can probably be represented better with random events for bureaucratic screwups and Potemkin factories.
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Jan 16, 2022 03:35
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Yeah a 4X game where you're basically playing as a Culture and not so much an empire would be great. You start off sending out sublight colony ships and then later as tech and FTL improves you can try to form some kind of unity government, but you basically don't have any real control outside your home system. You can relocate your capital later on if you feel like switching tags and you can keep decent control of your immediate colonies with enough patrols, but eventually you're going to overstretch what your home system can support and have to give up more control outside the core worlds. Something like this based off Distant Worlds would probably be viable to some level. One might say "oh but why would you ever colonize anything you can't directly control" but that's easily countered by an easy game over by various crisis spawns if your tiny empire can't fight it, and those crisis would also be good opportunities to reform as a bigger entity out of political concerns and mutual protection from shared threats. Throw in a Vicky type economy with good and services to trade between planets/systems and you have reasons to control XYZ resources for stability. Alpha Centauri might be an agricultural world that's supplying all the basic level foods for six core systems and losing it would cause a massive food crisis that would shatter your empire.
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Jan 16, 2022 04:07
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A game with imperfect information would be quite interesting. And you can see in the niche success of Majesty that unconventional strategy games have a certain audience. But Vicky 3 is revolutionary enough, I don't think Paradox should experiment with imperfect information in this game.
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Jan 16, 2022 10:03
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I’d rather see imperfect information in CK3, and have reports be based on the characters involved. It’s suitable there, but not so much for Vicky.
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Jan 16, 2022 11:21
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Koramei posted:I agree the map would have to be secondary yeah (I read a kind of convincing argument that CK would probably work better that way too) but I think one of the interesting things about the concept is how it could much better showcase to people how little historical monarchs actually knew about their land/how much they relied on people, which would be lost a little in sci fi. I still think this would be a fun way to do a VR version of a Paradox game. Play as the ruler, but you are constrained to your palace/offices/etc.
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Jan 16, 2022 13:36
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Koramei posted:This sounds like a fantastic concept for an indie strategy game along the lines of Predynastic Egypt with a simple core to it. Like, you’re a monarch shut in your palace and have to rely on your ministers to relay information to you, and over the course of the game you have to deduce / get more tools to figure out who you can actually rely on. Maybe it’s a countdown as half of them want to depose you and you have to get rid of them all before it’s too late. The game I can think of that’s probably closest to this is, funnily enough, Long Live the Queen, where you are the princess of Nova, attempting to survive for a year to reach your coronation as queen. You start off with essentially no idea what’s going on in your kingdom (or even your own palace), and make decisions each week on what to study to improve your knowledge, so studying economics will let you understand if the money in your treasury is actually a lot of money or not, while studying domestic affairs will give you some idea of the domestic politics of your country’s rural nobles. Oh and lots of people want to assassinate you.
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Jan 16, 2022 14:32
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Reveilled posted:The game I can think of that’s probably closest to this is, funnily enough, Long Live the Queen, where you are the princess of Nova, attempting to survive for a year to reach your coronation as queen. You start off with essentially no idea what’s going on in your kingdom (or even your own palace), and make decisions each week on what to study to improve your knowledge, so studying economics will let you understand if the money in your treasury is actually a lot of money or not, while studying domestic affairs will give you some idea of the domestic politics of your country’s rural nobles. Oh and lots of people want to assassinate you. there's a whole low-key genre of these hybrid management/VN games, and they seem to keep getting reinvented every so often. i know a lot of them are taking off directly from king of dragon pass or from princess maker (the often-skeevy game series that inspired long live the queen.) hanako games (the dev of LLTQ) made a bunch. more recently, there's been yes your grace and suzerain. you could probably find a hundred less-polished games that are vaguely similar on itch.io: some because they're traditional VNs with a lot of work put into their management aspects, and some because they've been inspired by princess maker, king of dragon pass, or papers please. the big difference between most of these games and a paradox game is that they're largely pre-made narratives, although occasionally they branch. so they're interesting and bracing challenges the first time, when you are trying to stay flexible and don't know what's going to happen, and lose a lot of that fun on subsequent playthroughs, where you have a pretty good idea what crises are coming and when. reigns is recognizably similar and mixes things up by randomizing almost everything, but it's also kinda mindless i think.
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Jan 16, 2022 15:17
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Cease to Hope posted:there's a whole low-key genre of these hybrid management/VN games, and they seem to keep getting reinvented every so often. i know a lot of them are taking off directly from king of dragon pass or from princess maker (the often-skeevy game series that inspired long live the queen.) hanako games (the dev of LLTQ) made a bunch. more recently, there's been yes your grace and suzerain. you could probably find a hundred less-polished games that are vaguely similar on itch.io: some because they're traditional VNs with a lot of work put into their management aspects, and some because they've been inspired by princess maker, king of dragon pass, or papers please. I'll chime in and say if you like Victoria 3, you'll probably like a playthrough of Suzerain. You play as the newly elected president of a troubled eastern European republic in a fictional world that obviously approximates the political conditions of the 1950s. Will you work to reform the broken constitution to democratize the country? Or gently caress with the rules to stay in power as a dictator? Lean capitalist or communist? Join NATO, the Warsaw Pact, or stay unaligned? Set your priorities to spend your limited budget, but don't forget you're trying to simultaneously pull your country out of a recession, keep a belligerent neighbor from declaring war for your poo poo, keep your uppity generals from doing a coup, and win election. A tough needle to thread.
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Jan 16, 2022 16:17
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You guys will probably love Hidden Agenda.
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Jan 16, 2022 16:19
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I want a game like these where you are actually walking around in first person. Of course there would be maps you have to look at, but it would be a whole different base. Not "pick any start" stuff, and a limited number of stories and scenarios that can play out.
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Jan 16, 2022 17:33
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Suzerain is great, basically the only thing I could complain about is that nobody actually tells you what some of the numbers on the UI mean so you have to basically guess on your first playthrough
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Jan 16, 2022 19:25
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Suzerain also has troubles accounting for all the combinations. My only playthrough had a very surprising moment where one economy meeting has listed how everything is great and then finished with proclamation of me failing to fix the economy and causing the great depression. What happened was probably me making all the right grand decisions but failing at small ones making overall economy score too low, but the game failed to explain it.
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Jan 16, 2022 19:33
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RabidWeasel posted:Suzerain is great, basically the only thing I could complain about is that nobody actually tells you what some of the numbers on the UI mean so you have to basically guess on your first playthrough I mean, the whole convo was about management games with imperfect and incomplete info.
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Jan 16, 2022 19:38
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Cease to Hope posted:I mean, the whole convo was about management games with imperfect and incomplete info. I mean I’m pretty sure numbers you don’t understand only on your first play through us not a good example of that
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Jan 16, 2022 20:27
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean I’m pretty sure numbers you don’t understand only on your first play through us not a good example of that It is if it's a game largely focused on telling a single story.
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Jan 16, 2022 20:45
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Cease to Hope posted:It is if it's a game largely focused on telling a single story. But it seems people in this thread aren’t really talking about that, the discussion seems to be they want a map game without the maps
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Jan 16, 2022 20:51
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CharlestheHammer posted:But it seems people in this thread aren’t really talking about that, the discussion seems to be they want a map game without the maps It's an example of a strategic management game where you play with imperfect information, which is what people were pining for above. It is, however, using a technique that would not be generalizable to a Paradox game meant to be played for many hundreds of hours.
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Jan 16, 2022 21:02
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The mod to display the “correct numbers/values” in this theoretical game would be more popular than nato counters
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Jan 17, 2022 00:29
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RestRoomLiterature- posted:The mod to display the “correct numbers/values” in this theoretical game would be more popular than nato counters I mean it could just be a check box at game start with Ironman mode. For people who want a more challenging game vs a more easier game for learning/sandboxing.
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Jan 17, 2022 00:33
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This idea is a classical case of intellectually kind of interesting, godawful to play. It's like when a classical literature proffesor designs a governmental building or Le Corbusier designs a city in India. The goal of the ideas guy is very different from the people who wants it to do something beyond existing. If you want to have better game dev ideas go make your first game.
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Jan 17, 2022 01:20
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean it could just be a check box at game start with Ironman mode. For people who want a more challenging game vs a more easier game for learning/sandboxing. it's not more challenging once you learn the constraints and how it changes and randomizes though. it's just a quick knowledge check. it doesn't add anything.
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Jan 17, 2022 02:07
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Lady Radia posted:it's not more challenging once you learn the constraints and how it changes and randomizes though. it's just a quick knowledge check. it doesn't add anything. I don't agree, think about the (3?) for troop strength estimates in Hoi4.
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Jan 17, 2022 03:19
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yeah it doesnt come into play at all because you initiate screening attacks and then you get the real troop strength. even if it didnt, you conduct your offense the same way regardless, and the AI is completely incapable of any sort of defense. so. you know.
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Jan 17, 2022 03:22
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It doesn't come into play at all because you take actions in the game that give you more information about the underlying truth? 
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Jan 17, 2022 03:34
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Lady Radia posted:yeah it doesnt come into play at all because you initiate screening attacks and then you get the real troop strength. even if it didnt, you conduct your offense the same way regardless, and the AI is completely incapable of any sort of defense. so. you know. I don't agree. There's plenty of situations where you aren't going to initiate screening attacks and in the context of Victoria III you can't game the system that way so it actually becomes even more important! Like McClellen in the Civil War refusing to press the advantage against Lee because his Intel misestimated Lee's force as being 3x the size it actually was.
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Jan 17, 2022 03:35
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Raenir Salazar posted:I don't agree. There's plenty of situations where you aren't going to initiate screening attacks and in the context of Victoria III you can't game the system that way so it actually becomes even more important! Like McClellen in the Civil War refusing to press the advantage against Lee because his Intel misestimated Lee's force as being 3x the size it actually was. McClellen didn't attack because he was a traitor, he was part of a pro-slavery faction of the northern elite that wanted "The Union as it was" (aka with slavery intact) https://www.c-span.org/video/?310049-1/general-mcclellan-colonel-key
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Jan 17, 2022 04:02
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You can ask the Mil Hist thread the consensus is a bit different there.
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Jan 17, 2022 04:04
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Jabor posted:It doesn't come into play at all because you take actions in the game that give you more information about the underlying truth? again im baffled by this idea that game design is good if you can solve it immediately with absolutely 0 negative consequence, just the attention tax you pay. that's literally what "bad game design" is defined as wtf Raenir Salazar posted:I don't agree. There's plenty of situations where you aren't going to initiate screening attacks and in the context of Victoria III you can't game the system that way so it actually becomes even more important! Like McClellen in the Civil War refusing to press the advantage against Lee because his Intel misestimated Lee's force as being 3x the size it actually was. ok. not agreeing because you dont like the example you picked is uh. a decision. but that's fine.
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Jan 17, 2022 10:04
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If you want a game that obscures information and makes you work for it, consider looking at this hacking-themed programming game: Bitburner (Also on Steam) It's a game where you gotta "hack" a bunch of servers to get money, but the game doesn't put the numbers or information needed to do so super-efficiently right in front of you. So as you progress through the game and do loops you will program QoL scripts to automate your hacking setups and give you information you need.
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Jan 17, 2022 15:17
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Raenir Salazar posted:I don't agree. There's plenty of situations where you aren't going to initiate screening attacks and in the context of Victoria III you can't game the system that way so it actually becomes even more important! Like McClellen in the Civil War refusing to press the advantage against Lee because his Intel misestimated Lee's force as being 3x the size it actually was. Honestly, bureaucratic capacity seems to be a good abstraction for most of this too. There's only so much a state can keep track of, and if you want to keep track of more, you'll have to invest in a bunch of people keeping track of it. I'm assuming there will also be techs that boost those kinds of things. It's not that the player themselves actually learns anything by researching a tech/gaining more information in either of these situations, but since the state learns more the player can do more things or do things more effectively. With the examples people gave it seems like 'imperfect information' as a concept probably actually works better in a narrative game more than a strategy game. So maybe it would work in CK4 (you'd still probably need to build a game based around this idea), but it's not something that would work in Vic3, even if the evolution of bureaucracy and state knowledge are important parts of this period. Those interesting concepts can be represented in other ways that don't mess with players trying to learn the game. It's going to be complicated enough without also obfuscating things on top of that.
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Jan 17, 2022 16:37
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I can definitely say the first time I played a Paradox grand strategy game, my issue was figuring out which of the torrent of data was actually useful and can be acted upon and which was something to be worried about later. There's already a good deal of obscurity via leaving everything in plain sight.
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Jan 17, 2022 17:17
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Command Ops 2 is extremely gorgnardy and its UI is flawed in many ways, but it has a good go at simulating uncertainty about information and command and control limitations at a smaller scale. You aren't quite sure where enemy units are or what they are, and there are penalties for trying to direct subunits below your direct subordinates. There are delays between orders being given and them actually being carried out. It's a pretty fun experience and fairly unique. Only thing that I can see being appropriate to Vicky is uncertainty about enemy strength, the command delays are probably more appropriately handled via abstracting warfare entirely
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Jan 17, 2022 17:40
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ilitarist posted:Suzerain also has troubles accounting for all the combinations. My only playthrough had a very surprising moment where one economy meeting has listed how everything is great and then finished with proclamation of me failing to fix the economy and causing the great depression. What happened was probably me making all the right grand decisions but failing at small ones making overall economy score too low, but the game failed to explain it. I had the exact same scenario occur in my second playthrough. Really soured me on picking it back up again which is a shame.
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Jan 17, 2022 18:14
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