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I mean, historically these sorts of simulationist game systems often end up feeling random and opaque in-game, with player input being marginal and indirect at best. So you end up with a bunch of totally arbitrary and zany political happenings occurring outside your control, and then because you can't control them you start to ignore them too, and so the whole thing becomes irrelevant. I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised, but eh.
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May 13, 2022 09:36
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Clarste posted:I mean, historically these sorts of simulationist game systems often end up feeling random and opaque in-game, with player input being marginal and indirect at best. So you end up with a bunch of totally arbitrary and zany political happenings occurring outside your control, and then because you can't control them you start to ignore them too, and so the whole thing becomes irrelevant. I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised, but eh.
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May 13, 2022 09:55
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Clarste posted:I mean, historically these sorts of simulationist game systems often end up feeling random and opaque in-game, with player input being marginal and indirect at best. So you end up with a bunch of totally arbitrary and zany political happenings occurring outside your control, and then because you can't control them you start to ignore them too, and so the whole thing becomes irrelevant. I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised, but eh. Political developments definitely are a direct result of the player's decisions with regards to how the develop the nation, and the results of your actions are direct and easy to see. But admittedly, there's only one real way to actively develop a nation.
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May 13, 2022 10:09
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Clarste posted:I mean, historically these sorts of simulationist game systems often end up feeling random and opaque in-game, with player input being marginal and indirect at best. So you end up with a bunch of totally arbitrary and zany political happenings occurring outside your control, and then because you can't control them you start to ignore them too, and so the whole thing becomes irrelevant. I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised, but eh. It can go different ways. If you erase my memory of Stellaris and read its feature list to me I'll do anything to play it. But when you actually play it you can ignore whole layers of mechanics and get bogged down in repetitive parts of the game that are the same no matter who you play. There's a lot of nuances somewhere in there but it often doesn't feel important or impactful, and some of it, like ship designer, is better left automated. I look at Victoria 3 ambition and I just can't believe it can all work as described. It sounds too good. I'll be very surprised if on release half of those mechanics won't be "solvable". But I want to believe! And in any way, it's not me or people in a thread like this devs have to persuade to buy the game. We here are all already subjugated. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 10:24 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 10:22
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ilitarist posted:The cooler the stuff they describe the less I believe it can all work correctly and come together. I mean, it'll have some kind of economic model, I guess.
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May 13, 2022 11:53
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ilitarist posted:If you erase my memory of Stellaris and read its feature list to me I'll do anything to play it. But when you actually play it you can ignore whole layers of mechanics and get bogged down in repetitive parts of the game that are the same no matter who you play. There's a lot of nuances somewhere in there but it often doesn't feel important or impactful, and some of it, like ship designer, is better left automated. Not because I am one of those nerds that has to have the ship designer in my space grand strategy RTS, but because the autogenerator is *that bad*. I'd rather just pick a pre-built design and not have the ship designer, but the auto-designer is bad so if we have to have an in-game designer, it doesnt get automated.
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May 13, 2022 12:38
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I've seen people with just as strong opinions about automation being necessary. I can see why automation is bad here. Half of the techs are about new ship components. Technological differences between empires is the most visible there. But I couldn't be arsed to manually update 5 types of ships. It also feels unnecessary, like many other aspects of Stellaris. When I have 40 planets in midgame I don't care about any particular cool decision I can make on one of them, more effective component placement might give me some advantage but I will barely register it. In a game like Endless Space 2 I too don't really get what happens during the combat, but thanks to a more sensible scale I can have specialized ships, I can evaluate whether the upgrade is necessary or not, and so on. Edit: I don't want to sound like I'm calling Stellaris an objectively bad game. I just don't enjoy the way its decisions are structured and presented. A lot of people clearly do like exactly that kind of stuff. For me it doesn't come together. I want internal factions to pressure for me to declare wars or face internal instability, or the chase for specific technology force me to do special operations (this actually happens if you get on the bad side of an ascended empire). But in the end all those mechanics that sounds like elements in a great story become noise in the background, cause the really important thing is how many outposts did I build and how big is the number on my fleet of AI-designed ships. I live in fear the same happen with Victoria 3. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 12:52 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 12:45
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ilitarist posted:I've seen people with just as strong opinions about automation being necessary. And the thing about the ship designer is that you design a ship once then click the "auto upgrade" button and never look at the screen again. its really not that bad.
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May 13, 2022 13:03
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:And the thing about the ship designer is that you design a ship once then click the "auto upgrade" button and never look at the screen again. its really not that bad. What
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May 13, 2022 13:28
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If you can have any real impact on the Vicky economy then the game has failed
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May 13, 2022 15:07
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:I dont think you need to live in that much fear because Stellaris was an experimental game that did not have very good direction when it was first designed, while Vicky3 is of course the third game in a series that has a very specific scope and very clearly stated design goals. With a lead dev that knows what he's doing. and if you remember, wiz went straight from his position fixing stellaris's flawed design to v3. if anyone can avoid the pitfalls of stellaris while designing a new set of systems it's wiz imo ilitarist posted:What assuming you're playing without any mods that add extra ship components, you can design a ship once, and click a checkbox labeled "auto upgrade". this is different from the regular autodesigner because it retains your design and just updates to better components as they become available. it's not flawless but if you're really uninterested in updating ship designs when you get new techs it's serviceable.
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May 13, 2022 15:27
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i think the question is not "should stellaris as is force you to automate ship design" but rather "should manual ship design have been an intended feature at all"
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May 13, 2022 16:37
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I still hope there's a train designer.
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May 13, 2022 17:05
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Raenir Salazar posted:I still hope there's a train designer.
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May 13, 2022 17:17
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StashAugustine posted:i think the question is not "should stellaris as is force you to automate ship design" but rather "should manual ship design have been an intended feature at all" I think it was just added in because it's been a staple of the genre since alpha centauri. Or early, did MOO 1 or 2 have it? Should it have been there? That's a much better question.
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May 13, 2022 17:18
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It's been a bad decision to have it from the get go and the dev/fans thinking it must be there has dragged down scores of games.
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May 13, 2022 17:21
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Pakled posted:https://twitter.com/PDXVictoria/status/1524781697551814657 Hmm, I wonder if certain parties will be hard-coded to only become available after certain historical conditions are met? It'd feel very weird to have a Fascist party emerge and rule a country in like 1840 or something, since Fascism only really came into existence and took power in what would historically be very close to the game's end date.
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May 13, 2022 17:29
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Gaius Marius posted:It's been a bad decision to have it from the get go and the dev/fans thinking it must be there has dragged down scores of games. The 4x unit / ship designer is my go to example of how sometimes the fanbase for a genre specifically asks for features which make a game worse.
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May 13, 2022 17:45
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DrSunshine posted:Hmm, I wonder if certain parties will be hard-coded to only become available after certain historical conditions are met? It'd feel very weird to have a Fascist party emerge and rule a country in like 1840 or something, since Fascism only really came into existence and took power in what would historically be very close to the game's end date. The parties are probably coded to depend on the IGs that form them and certain IGs will only pop up later in the playthrough.
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May 13, 2022 17:47
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What would the conditions be? In Victoria 2 it was tied to technology but it always felt wierd in a granular game like Victoria, it's more of a Civ approach. Maybe industrialization is bound to bring socialism in power somewhere, and once there is enough of reds in the world fascism is born?..
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May 13, 2022 17:47
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my train is gonna go zoom zoom, wee!!
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May 13, 2022 17:47
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RabidWeasel posted:The 4x unit / ship designer is my go to example of how sometimes the fanbase for a genre specifically asks for features which make a game worse. Hey, SMAC's unit designer was great!
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May 13, 2022 18:21
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TwoQuestions posted:Hey, SMAC's unit designer was great! Yes but did you ever use anything besides X Plasma Steel Fusion Laser Rovers and/or Gunships? 
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May 13, 2022 18:24
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DrSunshine posted:Yes but did you ever use anything besides X Plasma Steel Fusion Laser Rovers and/or Gunships? Yes, I used garrison units, artillery units, psi units, all that good stuff. Top-of-the-line units were expensive!
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May 13, 2022 18:32
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DrSunshine posted:Hmm, I wonder if certain parties will be hard-coded to only become available after certain historical conditions are met? It'd feel very weird to have a Fascist party emerge and rule a country in like 1840 or something, since Fascism only really came into existence and took power in what would historically be very close to the game's end date. Presumably for a Fascist party to appear, you'd need powerful industrialist and petite bourgeois IGs to exist, and that requires a certain level of industrialization. Likewise for socialism you'd need industrial workers with sufficient political participation (which seems to be V3's version of Consciousness). At least that's how I'd imagine it working if the devs want to make it organic.
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May 13, 2022 19:14
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In general a developed tactical low-level mechanic disrupts an empire builder game. Any imbalance on that level might mean that you can ignore the great picture cause you can create an objectively better army than AI. MoO2 had a perfect ship design against AI, Civ5 and 6 allow for player beating the opponent's they have no right to beat. It kinda works in a war game like Age of Wonders Planet fall where tactical layer is as important as the strategic one, but in an empire game you can usually win without wars at all.
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May 13, 2022 19:18
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TwoQuestions posted:Hey, SMAC's unit designer was great! Worth noting ofc that it was literally just attack vs defense vs movement vs cost plus a few memorable special abilities; rather than trying to balance like five different types of attack and four types of defense
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May 13, 2022 19:20
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the ship designer everyone copies is the one from MOO2, and it's terrible not sure what that has to do with victoria 3 though
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May 13, 2022 19:25
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Cease to Hope posted:the ship designer everyone copies is the one from MOO2, and it's terrible The fact that Victoria 3 wisely decides that if my job is to rule the country, decide international relations, build up new economies - that instead of manually hiring every artillery brigade and telling them exactly where to stand I should just give directions to my generals. This gives me hope. Devs could add complex model for gas deployment and the best drat ground around modifiers but they knew it all should be removed. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 19:44 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 19:35
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Map over the "Ship Designer" concept onto a "Industrial Policy Designer". 
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May 13, 2022 19:46
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Snooze Cruise posted:my train is gonna go zoom zoom, wee!! Hell yeah buddy! 
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May 13, 2022 19:48
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Cease to Hope posted:the ship designer everyone copies is the one from MOO2, and it's terrible If I don't get a ship designer how I am I meant to roleplay Kaiser Bill? Game literally unplayable
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May 13, 2022 20:06
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Highly intricate designer for bespoke cinder block walls for use during violent revolutions
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May 13, 2022 20:19
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I'm pretty negative when it comes to any expectations from Paradox, but for some reason I got a good feeling about V3. I've generally assumed the worst with a lot of their releases and been right, but I just got this weird vibe about V3 that it's going to somehow all come together. There will be bugs, but I think the core game design is really good. Compared to something like Stellaris where it's not just the countless longstanding fixable bugs they refuse to fix, but the core design is bad and it's a jumbled mess of disjointed attempts to fix the game over the years. They didn't quite know how to do a 4X, they didn't have a solid vision for the game, and they didn't really have a cohesive long term vision for how to fix or expand the game. I really do get a sense that V3 has a LOT more thought put into it, and it's building off the lessons of 2 previous games plus I'm reading a lot of design based on the failures of Stellaris, like how they're handling pops. Maybe I'll be proved totally wrong but I got a good feeling.
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May 13, 2022 20:37
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Fray posted:Presumably for a Fascist party to appear, you'd need powerful industrialist and petite bourgeois IGs to exist, and that requires a certain level of industrialization. Likewise for socialism you'd need industrial workers with sufficient political participation (which seems to be V3's version of Consciousness). At least that's how I'd imagine it working if the devs want to make it organic. Though, what the socialism tech actually unlocks is new interest groups. Trade unions, specifically. According to this dev diary, fascism doesn't seem to be represented by a specific interest group, rather it's a party that various interest groups could join. It seems like the personality of individual leaders might come into play here too, and I think tech can unlock new leader traits- like the feminism tech might get you feminist leaders.
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May 13, 2022 20:59
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DrSunshine posted:Map over the "Ship Designer" concept onto a "Industrial Policy Designer". This honestly makes a lot of sense to me.
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May 13, 2022 21:15
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TwoQuestions posted:Hey, SMAC's unit designer was great! I was actually going to mention this in my first post but I thought that maybe some other game made in the past 23 loving years which I haven't played might have done it right (apparently this was optimistic). But also: StashAugustine posted:Worth noting ofc that it was literally just attack vs defense vs movement vs cost plus a few memorable special abilities; rather than trying to balance like five different types of attack and four types of defense
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May 13, 2022 21:56
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A lot of space 4x games (Stellaris included) suffer greatly from having the unit of production/force be "one {building/pop/ship}", a very early game where each {building/pop/ship} matters, and then another 80% of the game where the individuals stop mattering. They then give you either no tools, or very bad ones, for managing your 100s of individuals. IMO they would benefit from having something closer to V3 where you set up a strategic military-industrial stance and then pour resources into the furnace. If you're going to have me manage individual ships, they had better be some kind of hero super-unit and not just Corvette #7659 "CSS Dauntless", vaporized in one blast. eta: Civ (and co) falls into this same trap, but keeps you in the "each individual thing matters" phase substantially longer, generally well into the mid-game. They still give you absolutely crap tools to manage an end-game empire, and that combines really poorly with the game often being a forgone conclusion by then. CrypticTriptych fucked around with this message at 00:52 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 00:42
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Hero super-building.
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May 14, 2022 00:48
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Clarste posted:Hero super-building. Exactly -- this is just Civ's "world wonders," which is actually a fun game mechanic.
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May 14, 2022 00:56
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