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orangelex44 posted:
So speaking as someone who was stupid enough to think that making a 4x as an indy thing was a good idea this hits the nail on the head. In our case too an issue was we started when literally nothing was out (No Stellaris, MOO2016, ES2). Even more asset intensive things like a action game that has some voice acting is actually more manageable. Ironically we had the graphics part handled although even those assets for the "expected" number of species and monsters turned out to be more intensive than doing a straightforward action game where there's asset sets we'd construct for environments or say a space fighter game with fewer assets of similar detail in general. On the AI discussion it definitely needs to be tailored to the systems you've constructed. When starting in Unity we made the mistake of "build all systems and then... yeah figure out AI!" and one of the big things that took a while was sitting down and mapping out how to make the AI function which was building utility scores and functions for basically every system the player can interact with so it'd make "decisions" and some personality tweaks so decisions would be more or less optimal for certain things based on personality (i.e. be aggressive, tit for tat, or friendly in diplomacy, two of which are technically suboptimal due to defectors). Also if anyone is interested in a tester key, PM me. But you will actually need to test and play: https://store.steampowered.com/app/...20the%20galaxy.
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May 1, 2022 18:20
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Atarask posted:So speaking as someone who was stupid enough to think that making a 4x as an indy thing was a good idea this hits the nail on the head. In our case too an issue was we started when literally nothing was out (No Stellaris, MOO2016, ES2). This has been on my wishlist so long I thought it had been cancelled. Good luck with your game.
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May 1, 2022 18:41
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Worf posted:Which of these games has the best star trek and or star wars mods homeworld
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May 1, 2022 19:34
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Atarask posted:So speaking as someone who was stupid enough to think that making a 4x as an indy thing was a good idea this hits the nail on the head. In our case too an issue was we started when literally nothing was out (No Stellaris, MOO2016, ES2).
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May 1, 2022 20:05
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Lady Radia posted:im not after the game style you want, but i definitely sympathize with the forbidden fruit of a game that you know will never exist, and just constantly chasing the dragon. carry on This is all of 4X.
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May 1, 2022 20:31
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What if I love trash though???
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May 1, 2022 20:52
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RandomBlue posted:This has been on my wishlist so long I thought it had been cancelled. Good luck with your game. We basically went Thanos on the project in late 2019 and redid the codebase from scratch in UE. So from a certain point of view it was 4 years of pre production and only two years of development! (not really it's been development hell all along). We've been very quiet because every timetable has blown up. But barring major game breakers hiding in there EA and a demo with the tutorial is on the horizon. @Splicer no multiplayer planned, from the very start. We want to let players have crazy overpowered stuff that wouldn't work if we needed to worry about multiplayer balancing. But challenges have been- AI systems and a lot of things like tutorials and space monsters are unique enough rules (even though at face value it doesn't seem that way) wise that they make special cases that can be tricky. Atarask fucked around with this message at 21:46 on May 1, 2022 |
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May 1, 2022 21:42
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Atarask posted:@Splicer no multiplayer planned, from the very start. We want to let players have crazy overpowered stuff that wouldn't work if we needed to worry about multiplayer balancing. 
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May 1, 2022 23:10
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Me and my friends just homerule that poo poo. I really like just exploring the map, engaging with systems, screwing around with warships, etc, but a game can take 12 hours or w/e. And you can frequently just start losing on turn 50 and stay losing forever, and spending 12 hours losing is enough to make anybody lose their temper. So we just say 'gently caress it, just ignore the other person' and play as if we were on the same team. It's way more fun than trying to compete.
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May 2, 2022 00:12
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Agent355 posted:Me and my friends just homerule that poo poo. I really like just exploring the map, engaging with systems, screwing around with warships, etc, but a game can take 12 hours or w/e. And you can frequently just start losing on turn 50 and stay losing forever, and spending 12 hours losing is enough to make anybody lose their temper.
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May 2, 2022 00:28
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Splicer posted:No that's what I mean. We do play regular 4Xs co-op as a team, but those 4Xs are designed around being competitive 4Xs so it's not the same experience as a game designed for player vs AI. I want the bespoke single player 4x experience, but co-op. Crusader Kings 2 coop as dynastic allies was fun for us.
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May 2, 2022 00:41
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Splicer posted:This isn't directed at you specifically and is really a continuation of stuff I said earlier but it really sucks that everything is either single player or boring. My wife and I want to put a big mirror behind the sun and use it to obliterate our enemies together goddammit. Why isn't 4x co-op vs AI a genre AI War 2
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May 2, 2022 02:38
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Is AI War 2 turn based or real time? Even paradox games stress me out a bit because I always feel like I am playing too slow. The pause helps, obviously but it is what it is.
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May 2, 2022 02:47
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Theotus posted:Is AI War 2 turn based or real time? Even paradox games stress me out a bit because I always feel like I am playing too slow. I feel like turn based is really annoying in multiplayer, unless it's pbem.
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May 2, 2022 03:00
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Theotus posted:Is AI War 2 turn based or real time? Even paradox games stress me out a bit because I always feel like I am playing too slow. real time
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May 2, 2022 03:04
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Theotus posted:Is AI War 2 turn based or real time? Even paradox games stress me out a bit because I always feel like I am playing too slow. Real time but you can pause, adjust the speed and also it's a fairly slow game.
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May 2, 2022 03:04
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Splicer posted:really sucks that everything is either single player or boring. I don't know that it helps for your specific use case, but Dominions is right there.
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May 2, 2022 04:27
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I play "coop" Stellaris with a friend a lot too. It's kind of built for roleplaying over just mechanical gameplay too so there's a bunch of interesting stuff you can do there. It's in a particularly good place right now because the last big patch has finally made AI not be complete garbage. They're actually able to expand their economy all the way to late-game now, which is impressive.
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May 2, 2022 04:35
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Jack Trades posted:Real time but you can pause, adjust the speed and also it's a fairly slow game. AI War 2 is even better, you can take it as slow as you want or if you like it and keep playing more experience just make each individual run go faster and faster. Once you know what you're doing you can bang out a difficult and complicated game in just a few hours. AI War has a clear cycle where you can set a few orders than max out the speed and let the game run with no major risk of needing to pause and do something every few seconds (like research, random attack, whatever). Some stuff does come up but the idea behind the game is you generally know what's coming (or are the actual instigator) and plan to deal with it so the actual event itself is fairly hands off. And the few things that really can come up unexpectedly that you need to deal with are usually on specific timers and can be turned off when you create a map. Something I hate about a lot of modern 4x games, being good at the game means you don't take as much time to make a decision but the actual game is still a slog between interesting worthwhile gameplay. Sure old games had that but it used to be a lot easier to roll through turns than it is now (combination of weaker optimization and more complicated games).
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May 2, 2022 07:17
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PerniciousKnid posted:I feel like turn based is really annoying in multiplayer, unless it's pbem. MOO2 had the perfect LAN multiplayer setup. Everybody inputs their non combat stuff at the same time. Then the game processes everything once all the turns are in. The only thing you can race to do is conduct diplomacy with other species. Dominions has this going for it too, but there is way more stuff to fiddle with there.
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May 2, 2022 10:14
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Corbeau posted:I don't know that it helps for your specific use case, but Dominions is right there. I miss Dominions, however playing a couple simultaneous games in Dominions 3 where each (lategame) turn took 2 hours kinda broke my spirit.
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May 2, 2022 13:37
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I'm probably about to win my current 12 player Dominions multiplayer game, it's the final turn of a throne rush. Here's a summary of that game's final turns:
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May 2, 2022 13:57
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Angry Lobster posted:I miss Dominions, however playing a couple simultaneous games in Dominions 3 where each (lategame) turn took 2 hours kinda broke my spirit. Cataclysm and thrones help a lot with that in Dominions 5, as long as the game creator sets them properly. Still can be time consuming if you're playing a blood or freespawn nation, or if the game creator actively likes horrible endgame micromanagement hell and assigns game settings accordingly.
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May 2, 2022 19:45
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Atarask posted:We basically went Thanos on the project in late 2019 and redid the codebase from scratch in UE. So from a certain point of view it was 4 years of pre production and only two years of development! (not really it's been development hell all along). No poo poo I also thought your game was cancelled and I'm stoked you're still going, I always liked the look of it
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May 2, 2022 20:35
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Atarask posted:On the AI discussion it definitely needs to be tailored to the systems you've constructed. When starting in Unity we made the mistake of "build all systems and then... yeah figure out AI!" and one of the big things that took a while was sitting down and mapping out how to make the AI function which was building utility scores and functions for basically every system the player can interact with so it'd make "decisions" and some personality tweaks so decisions would be more or less optimal for certain things based on personality (i.e. be aggressive, tit for tat, or friendly in diplomacy, two of which are technically suboptimal due to defectors). This might be too much under-the-hood talk, but it sounds like you're approaching strategic AI in a similar way to a thing I've been tinkering with, and I'm curious: we've gotten really good results using weighted utility scores, but the constant challenge has been keeping the search space scalable- as empires expand and potential smart objects increase, you hit a point where the reasoning logic has to at least briefly glance at hundreds of objects when it seeks a new goal. I've been planning to solve this with influence mapping (essentially building a worldwide heatmap of which needs are likeliest to be fulfilled in which hexes), but I'd be curious to know if you tripped over a simpler, better solution while solving the same problem.
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May 3, 2022 01:13
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Omi no Kami posted:This might be too much under-the-hood talk, but it sounds like you're approaching strategic AI in a similar way to a thing I've been tinkering with, and I'm curious: we've gotten really good results using weighted utility scores, but the constant challenge has been keeping the search space scalable- as empires expand and potential smart objects increase, you hit a point where the reasoning logic has to at least briefly glance at hundreds of objects when it seeks a new goal. Each star system is basically a node and has utility values for things like colonization and threat which get handled differently by AI personalities and species traits (ex the Synth don't farm but eat production so only care about minerals and not food production). One way that we helped speed things up was borrowing an idea from Hearts of Iron and creating AI "fronts" one for expansion and the other for war so it basically generates a heatmap of utilities with distances from centroids. So instead of on a huge galaxy every faction calculating multiple weights for 1024 star systems every turn it's a more reasonable number. So end game turns are more on part with say Warhammer 2 in how long they take. There's a few other weird tricks where we're using the collision system to help generate some of our lists for the AI which means offloading some stuff from the CPU into the GPU. It also has the side effect of making it seems like the AI has definite focuses on various regions of the map at the time. The one downside is you could theoretically get an AI stalling out over turf wars in a game wanting to keep flipping one system over unless an outside context problem (a monster or YOU) changes the calculus. Then again we see in real life polities being focused like that. It's also a case where we don't want to go too nuts on the AI because while on paper it's making decisions similar to a player would, a bad seed or neighbor with too strong a start starving off areas will mean some factions won't thrive and people will just see a non or minimally expanding AI and decide that the game's AI is bad even if utility wise it's decided turtling is optimal 
Atarask fucked around with this message at 00:12 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 00:05
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Atarask posted:Each star system is basically a node... That's really neat, thank you for taking the time to do that writeup! How do you determine where to position new fronts or offensive pushes once a current area has been resolved, do you just query adjacent (or adjacent + n) nodes for their utility? Because that's the one I always find interesting- in real life (or, well, simulated real life) there are tons of situations where lovely territory that has nothing anybody wants is the gateway to something good, but I'm betting a lot of players would interpret that sort of thing as buggy behavior unless the strategic value was immediately apparent.
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May 7, 2022 09:01
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Atarask posted:Each star system is basically a node and has utility values for things like colonization and threat which get handled differently by AI personalities and species traits (ex the Synth don't farm but eat production so only care about minerals and not food production). One way that we helped speed things up was borrowing an idea from Hearts of Iron and creating AI "fronts" one for expansion and the other for war so it basically generates a heatmap of utilities with distances from centroids. So instead of on a huge galaxy every faction calculating multiple weights for 1024 star systems every turn it's a more reasonable number. So end game turns are more on part with say Warhammer 2 in how long they take. There's a few other weird tricks where we're using the collision system to help generate some of our lists for the AI which means offloading some stuff from the CPU into the GPU. Or just a debug mode.
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May 7, 2022 11:21
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habituallyred posted:MOO2 had the perfect LAN multiplayer setup. Everybody inputs their non combat stuff at the same time. Then the game processes everything once all the turns are in. The only thing you can race to do is conduct diplomacy with other species. Dominions has this going for it too, but there is way more stuff to fiddle with there. MoO2 also has a hot-seat mode. Which isn't a big deal today, but whoo boy back in the day as kids we spent hours and hours on that stuff. We did have to house-rule to "play nice" with each other, since you can see what the other person is doing, and planning a surprise war really isn't in the cards.
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May 7, 2022 14:53
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Did any of you guys play the Terra Invicta demo?
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Jun 13, 2022 16:45
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I started the demo and did a chunk of the tutorial, and I was impressed but I'm going to try it again when I have more time to approach it. I didn't follow the development since the initial announcement, I kinda thought they were making an indie Long War + original XCOM fusion, but it's a whole..."The Expanse" style solar system 4X with 3D fleet combat and a heavy focus on espionage and such. I love what I've seen it's just very full on, almost like a whole new style of strategy game. I like how smooth the UI is, the zooming in and out between a country on Earth and the whole solar system is almost seamless.
Brendan Rodgers fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Jun 13, 2022 |
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Jun 13, 2022 19:48
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i didn't even know there was a demo for that so thanks for posting about it .
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Jun 13, 2022 20:10
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Lawman 0 posted:Did any of you guys play the Terra Invicta demo? I started to over my lunch hour but the demo doesn't let you save and it's a 4X and I'm not just gonna leave it running in the background when I'm not playing so nope.
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Jun 13, 2022 21:32
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It has ~15 gigabytes, you can't save, and it's prone to crashing.
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Jun 13, 2022 23:47
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Watched a streamer play some Terra Invicta and it looks like weaponized tedium. A million stats, research projects, factions, possible actions, provinces, agents, just a ridiculous amount of things to keep track of. All of that before even making it into space. I can't imagine what late game looks like.
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Jun 14, 2022 00:38
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Lawman 0 posted:Did any of you guys play the Terra Invicta demo? Yes, and I'm having a good time. That being said... caedwalla posted:Watched a streamer play some Terra Invicta and it looks like weaponized tedium. A million stats, research projects, factions, possible actions, provinces, agents, just a ridiculous amount of things to keep track of. All of that before even making it into space. I can't imagine what late game looks like. ... I can very much see that it's not for everyone, since... Brendan Rodgers posted:almost like a whole new style of strategy game. .. this is exactly true. The game isn't really a clone of anything that's come before it, it's quite complicated, and to top it off it has that indie dev "charm" of weird UI decisions that hide important poo poo behind three menus and/or eight clicks. The flavor, though, is Alpha Centauri-levels with every random tech getting a couple paragraphs of fluff and a surprisingly great voiceover. The early game we get to play so far is actually a very tense slow burn - there's nothing quite like fighting over geopolitics for ten turns then accidentally scrolling out too far... just to realize that suddenly the aliens have a dozen bases and 10k power fleets up there so holy poo poo are we boned because while it felt nice to finally punt the Protectorate out of Israel that isn't doing a drat thing to address the real problem, and oh gently caress the Servants now own all of India and China and who the gently caress knows what they're getting up to why can't these other factions DO SOMETHING WORTHWHI- oh, hey, my Mars probe is done that's cool! There's a lot going on once you get that game-mechanics understanding, is my point. It's glorious if you're the right type of nerd. I haven't run into any obvious AI weirdness yet. I haven't looked at the battle skirmish mode either, which will presumably be a game mechanic that matters a lot. There's still a chance this runs into the same problem as Stellaris where after a fun early game, the midgame and endgame kinda suck to experience. But the demo was certainly worth what I paid for it.
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Jun 14, 2022 00:57
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It's pretty jank at this stage but I'm digging it. I have not gotten anywhere near actually fighting the aliens though
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Jun 14, 2022 01:00
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Take over western europe, unify as EU superstate. Take over russia, unify eurasion union, purge out servants, ally EU, conquer neighbors. Stack some +admin +persuasion on a single councillor, take over USA, ally EU and the EAU Stack even more +admin +persuasion on a single concillor, take over China, ally EU, USA, and EAU let the servants take either india or pakistan, encourage humanity first to take the other, and watch the fireworks switch focus to space. get all the best spots by virtue of autopausing the game the second the relevant research comes online and calling dibs watch the game crash before interacting with aliens in any major way e: "but i'll be bleeding influence from controlling so many control points" if you aren't bleeding influence from controlling too many, you're controlling too few. use some of that research you get from having so many control points to get the tech that lets you have even more control points. my dad fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jun 14, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 01:06
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So I’ve tapped out after a lot of hours in the game and my one takeaway is that this is a turn based game. It’s an extremely odd way to structure the game in that you re basically just watching the planet spin for for a minute and then doing your actions again. I don’t understand why they decided to have a real time engine and then made every action a succeed/fail when their nation model 100% looks like it was designed for assigning your agents and their skills would apply a daily bonus of some kind. The game pacing is also incredibly bad. They’ve designed it around setting up your core holdings and then sitting on them and developing them while stealing poo poo and breaking other factions stuff while you get into space. But the lunar resource deposits are loving randomised so you end up spending your whole boost budget on upkeep if another faction got the crater with water and fuel in it. It’s insanely stupid. It’s also impossible to build a viable space ship with stock parts. There is no viable combo that you can build. A lunar mining module costs 56 boost and a spaceship with stock parts with enough delta v to do an orbit transfer is so insanely large as to be absurd. I made a 600kg ship and just to get to Luna it needed ten tons of fuel. It can’t get back. It costs 128 boost. Before I gave up around 2026 I was generating 40 science per day and 48 boost per year. I don’t know what they were thinking with this pacing. Demiurge4 fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Jun 14, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 01:53
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Guess I'll wait.
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Jun 14, 2022 02:35
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