4X strategy games: i have no complaints but the genocide is too complicated

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > 4X strategy games: i have no complaints but the genocide is too complicated

«‹›114 »

Captain Beans: Aug 5, 2004; Whar be the beans?; Hair Elf

How long did multiplayer games of Solium Infernum take back in the day?

Or was it a asynchronous type thing?

# ? Sep 25, 2022 15:49

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 31, 2024 12:27

KOGAHAZAN!!: Apr 29, 2013; a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

SI was PBEM only, so yeah async.

# ? Sep 25, 2022 15:53

Loddfafnir: Mar 27, 2021

Captain Beans posted:

How long did multiplayer games of Solium Infernum take back in the day?

Or was it a asynchronous type thing?

I would say 1turn/day, around 30 turns (there were game length options)

# ? Sep 25, 2022 16:12

orangelex44: Oct 11, 2012; Definition of orange:

Any of a group of colors that are between red and yellow in hue. Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Old Occitan, from Arabic, from Persian, from Sanskrit.

Definition of lex:

Law. Latin.

As a reminder, Terra Invicta comes out tomorrow. Pretty sure the demo is still up for anyone who's undecided.

# ? Sep 26, 2022 03:26

Pirate Radar: Apr 18, 2008; You're not my Ruthie!
You're not my Debbie!
You're not my Sherry!

Their post on what the early access will be like:

quote:

Why Early Access?
Because we think game is playable and a lot of fun, and our fans in general and our Kickstarter backers in particular have waited long enough to start playing it, but it isn't done yet.

EA Release Price
$39.99/�39.99/�34.99/�4980

Product Notes:
This is the full game. You can play any of the seven human factions from start to finish of the base campaign. No cut content or features we're holding back. You'll get new stuff as we get it in a working state.

Initial EA release will be PC only.
Will be Available on Steam and GOG.

We continue to hope to do a Mac release. We've made Mac builds but they aren't sufficiently tested for us to feel comfortable making them available yet. We only have so many team members and hours in the day, and it's also a lot of extra time dealing with Apple's requirements to post even private test builds, so we've made the decision to focus on getting our PC build where we want it first and then rather than constantly re-verify we didn't break our Mac build with one fix or another.

We are not planning a separate Linux release at this time. In testing, we found Proton users had a better experience than on native Linux builds, so we're encouraging Linux players to use Proton to play TI.

The EA build will have our draft translations into the six languages we've announced: Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese. These are undergoing a separate QA process with professionals who know the game and those languages. The game has a couple novels worth of text, and we know there will be some grammar issues that will be in this release because we need to have the code handle string substitution better in some cases -- this is due to things like gendered nouns than aren't really an issue in English. This is on us, not the translators.

The Cold War and Foothold scenarios aren't going to be in the EA release. We're still determining how big a feature set we want to add to support those.

Modding and Steam Workshop support is coming along nicely and we expect it to be ready sooner rather than later, but it may not be there in initial release. It's currently functional but needs some manual workarounds until we get some issues fixed. Stay tuned.

Beyond all that, there will be bugs. There are probably CTDs out there we don't know about. We hate them too. The game has periodic autosaves you can roll back to, but occasionally a bug can't be avoided until we post a patch. Let us know about them with saves and logs and we'll get after them. No doubt we'll make all new and frustrating bugs as we add features and content after release.

There are balance issues. We've provided gameplay tools that are too effective for their cost, or not effective enough. Let us know about them and we'll work on them. We're aware of a few ship designs that bust some systems we don't want busted. We try not to design puzzles with a dominant strategy to solve, so if something is just too darn strong we'll nerf it.

There are simulation-related things to keep an eye on. China and India's military strength. The war in Ukraine. Ireland's per-capita GDP. It takes some finesse to fit those things into our game's various abstractions.

We'll be adding small features here and there if we can get them working satisfactory. Like tankers to refuel your ships.

There is still content coming in -- event illustrations and music tracks, in particular. We'd like to add more events and projects, too.

There are places we need to improve the AI. It can be a bit suicidal in combat, exposing its flanks when it shouldn't be. Maneuver needs to be more important at certain stages of the game. AI factions other than the Servants aren't great at pursuing their final win objectives. The AI humans don't build fleets as quickly as we'd like, but this has been a major focus and they are getting better at it.

We're also working on performance -- in the late game, when the AI has a lot to manage, the game can get choppy on high time compression as its list of decisions to make gets longer. This obviously depends on the system you're playing on, but the CPU needs to do some rocket science for dozens of fleets while managing Earth and its colonies: It's a lot, and coding it is a balancing act between smooth gameplay and a challenging AI. There are some big summary UIs with tons of data that take a noticeable amount of time to load. Also on the list.

Finally, there's more QOL stuff to do. We've definitely focused on this based on demo feedback. But we still need to reduce clicks to move your armies, build habs, and handle your fleets. We need to provide better feedback on the nations you are managing and why a particular value is changing. We want to add formation-keeping to combat. We want to see what we can do with text scaling and notification controls.

If this stuff is going to drive you nuts and get in the way of your enjoyment of the game, please wait to purchase it! Different people have different tolerances, and that's fine. We're acknowledging all these issues so you're informed. We'll get there.

We'll keep multiple builds available. A stable default one. Ones with newer stuff that we're less sure about. And a rollback to an older stable build in case something goes wrong or we have to break saves to fix the game at some point and you don't want to lose your progress.

We encourage lively discussion; we read it and learn from it. We'll have dedicated Discord channels for feedback that we'll monitor. We'll also watch our forums here for longer-form feedback. We'll set up a mechanism to report bugs and balance issues directly -- probably keep using our issues Github from the Beta test.

We'll post patch notes. We'll do our best to communicate our plans as they evolve. We can't communicate constantly because that does take time away from making the game.

A more specific roadmap will be along soon.

I�m on the fence about picking TI up during EA, but I�ll definitely snag it at some point.

# ? Sep 26, 2022 03:42

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Has anybody played Ozymandius? Is it any good?

# ? Oct 12, 2022 09:22

Beefeater1980: Sep 12, 2008; My God, it's full of Horatios!

TI owns, and the thread is pretty active. There�s an LP too.

# ? Oct 12, 2022 10:47

RandomBlue: Dec 30, 2012; hay guys!; Biscuit Hider

Started playing Lord of Rigel and I'm liking it quite a bit so far. It's a fun combination of Endless Space 2 and MOO2. Though so far it feels like the AI isn't really doing poo poo but I've only got a couple hours into it and only explored a small section of the galaxy and it's still pretty early game.

My only major complaint is the UI is buggy as hell, I lost count of the number of times I got it into a bad state where you'd have things break and there'd be invisible menus open on the screen or multiple levels of overlapping menus when one hidden behind the other or everything just stops working on the galaxy map until you open and close some other menu. There's also inconsistent ways of closing windows throughout the game, tab usually backs out of menus but sometimes you need to hit escape instead and sometimes neither works and yo have to click close. The build menu also requires confirmation and if you make changes and close the window with tab the changes are silently discarded.

# ? Oct 14, 2022 15:40

The Chad Jihad: Feb 24, 2007

Random question, back when strategy guides were a thing, does anyone remember any particularly good ones? I kinda collect them; for example the Imperialism 2 one is great

# ? Oct 14, 2022 16:10

Mayveena: Dec 27, 2006; People keep vandalizing my ID photo; I've lodged a complaint with HR

The Chad Jihad posted:

Random question, back when strategy guides were a thing, does anyone remember any particularly good ones? I kinda collect them; for example the Imperialism 2 one is great

The classic one is Alan Emrich's Master of Orion. He did a few more as well, you can probably find his titles on Wikipedia.

# ? Oct 14, 2022 16:17

Jarvisi: Apr 17, 2001; Green is still best.

I still remember the ascendancy guide as a work of art even though the game barely had an ai.

# ? Oct 14, 2022 16:18

uber_stoat: Jan 21, 2001; Pillbug

Mayveena posted:

The classic one is Alan Emrich's Master of Orion. He did a few more as well, you can probably find his titles on Wikipedia.

then he went on to lead moo3 :negative:

# ? Oct 14, 2022 16:18

Mayveena: Dec 27, 2006; People keep vandalizing my ID photo; I've lodged a complaint with HR

uber_stoat posted:

then he went on to lead moo3

Well he's not good at EVERYTHING

# ? Oct 14, 2022 16:59

Megazver: Jan 13, 2006

The Chad Jihad posted:

Random question, back when strategy guides were a thing, does anyone remember any particularly good ones? I kinda collect them; for example the Imperialism 2 one is great

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/96102-sid-meiers-alpha-centauri/faqs/2480

# ? Oct 14, 2022 17:08

Jinnigan: Feb 12, 2007; We shall pay him a visit. There will be a picnic. Tea shall be served.

its not a strategy guide but i always found the manual for Homeworld incredibly engrossing and i still have it on my lil bathroom reading shelf. better than twitter on most days

# ? Oct 14, 2022 17:21

metasynthetic: Dec 2, 2005; in one moment, Earth

in the next, Heaven; Megamarm

Yeah I remember that thing, was rad as hell. One of the few bits of video game memorabilia I wouldn't mind displaying... if I still had it.

# ? Oct 14, 2022 17:40

Kitfox88: Aug 21, 2007; Anybody lose their glasses?

Same but my mechwarrior 2 manual

# ? Oct 14, 2022 20:58

Alkydere: Jun 7, 2010; Capitol: A building or complex of buildings in which any legislature meets.
Capital: A city designated as a legislative seat by the government or some other authority, often the city in which the government is located; otherwise the most important city within a country or a subdivision of it.

Jinnigan posted:

its not a strategy guide but i always found the manual for Homeworld incredibly engrossing and i still have it on my lil bathroom reading shelf. better than twitter on most days

I asked for Civ III for Christmas as a kid. We then went to the grandparent's house for like a week and a half and I read the manual the entire car trip before bogarting their computer the entire time.

My dad, a senior IBM engineer, looks at this massive tome and starts flipping through it because he's amused that a game would have something so dense. The day after we get back from seeing the grandparents he asks for a turn...only for my mom to get him and ask why he's still awake and playing at 5 AM.

That manual turned my dad into a Civ addict who still plays to this day (albeit with far better ability to manage his time). Though he apparently pouted and moped around a lot when I went to college and took my Alpha Centauri disk with me.

# ? Oct 14, 2022 21:24

Ogdred Weary: Jul 1, 2007; A is for Amy who fell down the stairs

Orange Devil posted:

Has anybody played Ozymandius? Is it any good?

I've played three games now, and I really like it. The power mechanic takes some figuring out, but here's a tip: after selecting the Power tab, hover over the four different tabs to get a breakdowns of where your points come from.

Edit: The story mode is the tutorial. I'm not sure why they didn't just call it that.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 08:25

Google Butt: Oct 4, 2005; Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption...

that an alien race would be psychologically human.

Missed this thread when I asked a bit ago, what are some 4x games that are fun with a gamepad?

# ? Oct 15, 2022 09:42

HopperUK: Apr 29, 2007; Why would an ambulance be leaving the hospital?

Simcity 2000 had a amazing book as its manual with a bunch of essays and articles about urban planning.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 10:57

Rappaport: Oct 2, 2013

The SimAnt manual was like 30% just various ant facts and stuff. In an age before wikipedia, how thoughtful of them. Ants :allears:

# ? Oct 15, 2022 12:34

alcaras: Oct 3, 2013; noli timere

For a modern 4x game with an old school manual, check out Old World.

Here�s the 100+ page manual, a delightful blast from the past:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hb4dmDKxpf3pJJtpdFA4y4OOY-d2yrz1/view

(The author is the same guy who wrote the SMAC strategy guide back in the day!)

# ? Oct 15, 2022 16:13

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Google Butt posted:

Missed this thread when I asked a bit ago, what are some 4x games that are fun with a gamepad?

With a gamepad

Uh... I guess Civ II? I played the horrible PSX-port, but the many problems of that version were not in the control-department, it played perfectly fine with gamepad.

Sim City on the SNES (though you could cheat by using the Nintendo-mouse instead) was good.

If we want to stay closer to the 4x-genre, Utopia: The Creation of a Nation was also fun to play. Though again I switched to my Nintendo-mouse to play most of it.

Any modern 4x-games though, ha ha hell no :lol:

# ? Oct 15, 2022 16:48

FishMcCool: Apr 9, 2021; lolcats are still funny; Fallen Rib

Libluini posted:

If we want to stay closer to the 4x-genre, Utopia: The Creation of a Nation was also fun to play. Though again I switched to my Nintendo-mouse to play most of it.

TIL that Utopia got consoles releases. :eek:

Great game. I played the poo poo out of it on DOS while a friend was at it on his Atari ST. Pretty amazing the flavour they managed to extract from a relatively static building game. The colourful buildings, varied planet tilesets and spying lore bits carried the game well beyond its otherwise standard-ish building gameplay.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 17:01

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Alkydere posted:

Though he apparently pouted and moped around a lot when I went to college and took my Alpha Centauri disk with me

awww that's adorable :3:

I am playing Endless Legend again, it scratches something on that direction (of Alpha Centauri). I don't know why Endless Space 2 feels like a step back somehow, though.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 17:30

doctorfrog: Mar 14, 2007; Great.

Google Butt posted:

Missed this thread when I asked a bit ago, what are some 4x games that are fun with a gamepad?

only one I can think of is Civilization: Revolutions, which was designed for gamepads. (consoles only)

Not a 4X, but consider Tooth and Tail, an RTS designed for gamepads.

doctorfrog fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Oct 15, 2022

# ? Oct 15, 2022 18:00

feller: Jul 5, 2006

Stellaris has a console version. I don�t know if the control scheme is there on the PC version though.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 18:24

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

dead gay comedy forums posted:

I am playing Endless Legend again, it scratches something on that direction (of Alpha Centauri). I don't know why Endless Space 2 feels like a step back somehow, though.

I found Endless Legend to be an incredibly ugly game in a weird way. The design is kind of overwhelming on the eyes, and feels like it lacked direction and went for saturation instead.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 18:41

chaosapiant: Oct 10, 2012; White Line Fever

yeti friend posted:

Stellaris has a console version. I don�t know if the control scheme is there on the PC version though.

How does it play on console? Is it feature complete/on parity with the PC version and all expansions?

# ? Oct 15, 2022 18:47

THE BAR: Oct 20, 2011; You know what might look better on your nose?

my dad posted:

I found Endless Legend to be an incredibly ugly game in a weird way. The design is kind of overwhelming on the eyes, and feels like it lacked direction and went for saturation instead.

The models always look like they're trying to load in, but never do.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 18:57

chaosapiant: Oct 10, 2012; White Line Fever

I definitely feel the opposite and feel that one thing Amplitude has down to a science is a strong aesthetic and visual style. ES2 and EL are some of the most gorgeous 4Xs I�ve played.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 19:02

Anno: May 10, 2017; I'm going to drown! For no reason at all!

chaosapiant posted:

How does it play on console? Is it feature complete/on parity with the PC version and all expansions?

It�s a bit behind on expansions, but I think has slowly trended towards catching up. The Overlord expansion is set for early 2023 on consoles and that�s the most recent major Stellaris expansion.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 19:43

metasynthetic: Dec 2, 2005; in one moment, Earth

in the next, Heaven; Megamarm

alcaras posted:

For a modern 4x game with an old school manual, check out Old World.

Here�s the 100+ page manual, a delightful blast from the past:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hb4dmDKxpf3pJJtpdFA4y4OOY-d2yrz1/view

(The author is the same guy who wrote the SMAC strategy guide back in the day!)

Just wanna say I remember Velocyrix' guide from back then, and it definitely helped me develop as a strategic thinker, in SMAC and in general.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 19:58

Atarask: Mar 8, 2008; Lord of Rigel Developer

RandomBlue posted:

Started playing Lord of Rigel and I'm liking it quite a bit so far. It's a fun combination of Endless Space 2 and MOO2. Though so far it feels like the AI isn't really doing poo poo but I've only got a couple hours into it and only explored a small section of the galaxy and it's still pretty early game.

My only major complaint is the UI is buggy as hell, I lost count of the number of times I got it into a bad state where you'd have things break and there'd be invisible menus open on the screen or multiple levels of overlapping menus when one hidden behind the other or everything just stops working on the galaxy map until you open and close some other menu. There's also inconsistent ways of closing windows throughout the game, tab usually backs out of menus but sometimes you need to hit escape instead and sometimes neither works and yo have to click close. The build menu also requires confirmation and if you make changes and close the window with tab the changes are silently discarded.

Hi Random Blue, if there's bugs especially with the UI let us know on the Steam forums for LoR. We've been doing a lot of hotfixes but one consistent issue has been UI focus on Unreal getting lost and sometimes requiring clicking on the screen for hotkeys to work. If there's conditions causing phantom menus or the galaxy map locking let us know.

Based on user feedback escape should bring up the top menu, tab and right click always close menus or go back a screen up to galaxy (also acting as cancel), and enter acts as an accept button.

AI wise we're using EA to work on balance. We've had complaints in some games of the AI being too aggressive and others where it's passive so working on that tuning based on feedback but right now the big thing has been UI issues so saves and steps that cause issues really help!

We are keeping issues in a tracker so build not requiring confirmation is a quality of life thing we can add in if there's enough of a push from that. We're trying to be pretty data driven as to be honest some of the feedback from closed beta took us the opposite direction of what people wanted when the demo came out.

Atarask fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Oct 15, 2022

# ? Oct 15, 2022 23:48

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

my dad posted:

I found Endless Legend to be an incredibly ugly game in a weird way. The design is kind of overwhelming on the eyes, and feels like it lacked direction and went for saturation instead.

imho Amplitude�s design is incredibly strong, but I get what you mean. I think it�s especially noticeable in Humankind, but in Endless Legend it helps to make every civ distinctive (even if it can be �too much�)

# ? Oct 15, 2022 23:59

Google Butt: Oct 4, 2005; Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption...

that an alien race would be psychologically human.

Libluini posted:

With a gamepad

Uh... I guess Civ II? I played the horrible PSX-port, but the many problems of that version were not in the control-department, it played perfectly fine with gamepad.

Sim City on the SNES (though you could cheat by using the Nintendo-mouse instead) was good.

If we want to stay closer to the 4x-genre, Utopia: The Creation of a Nation was also fun to play. Though again I switched to my Nintendo-mouse to play most of it.

Any modern 4x-games though, ha ha hell no

Hmmm I see, would I be able to get by with a keyboard that has a somewhat lovely track pad attached to it for a modern 4x? Basically I want to stream to my new big rear end OLED tv and play from my couch without a mouse.

Google Butt fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Oct 16, 2022

# ? Oct 16, 2022 00:56

Peanut Butler: Jul 25, 2003

dead gay comedy forums posted:

imho Amplitude�s design is incredibly strong, but I get what you mean. I think it�s especially noticeable in Humankind, but in Endless Legend it helps to make every civ distinctive (even if it can be �too much�)

EL looks absolutely gorgeous imo and was my favorite civ-like for a while- buuut I'll say the visual style distracted me from quickly understanding the field, like I can with more iconographic games

# ? Oct 16, 2022 01:10

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Peanut Butler posted:

EL looks absolutely gorgeous imo and was my favorite civ-like for a while- buuut I'll say the visual style distracted me from quickly understanding the field, like I can with more iconographic games

like with the FIDS layout and stuff?

# ? Oct 16, 2022 01:40

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 31, 2024 12:27

The Human Crouton: Sep 20, 2002

One thing I really like about Amplitude's methods is that they respect your need for information. I'm talking specifically about diplomacy pop ups. When another faction proposes a deal, I can minimize it and then have access to the full interface and get everything I need to consider the deal.

Compare that to Civilization where the AI proposes a treaty and you're locked in a data-barren screen until you make a decision. Oh, you don't have the entire map and each deal between each other faction memorized? Too bad, gently caress you. Maybe check and memorize the diplomacy screen between each and every turn next game.

# ? Oct 16, 2022 02:37

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > 4X strategy games: i have no complaints but the genocide is too complicated

«‹›114 »