|
Fuligin posted:I loving hate paradox 'fans' lol As a true hardcore fan I know that Paradox *really* stopped caring about making good games back in 2006 when they decided to start making 3D games.
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2023 20:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 12:48 |
|
|
Played some CK2 GoT after HotD aired and remembered “oh yea I like CK” And at this point I’m kinda done with EU/HoI dlcs. Mods do flavour content better, and I don’t need more designers or EU’s “invent a feature to say we’re not making a 15 buck mod” Like I mentioned in HoI thread it’s hilarious how much of the patch notes now are designer tweaks to the tune of -1 but +1 and -3% cost”. I design my poo poo purely based on flavour and RP, and still have no problem beating the AI. I might rather subscription at this point so there can be more polish and less churning out crap to fund really long lifespans.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2023 20:55
|
|
|
Hard agree on the 3d models being a good choice. Honestly it really does help my immersion when the dipshit failson of a second cousin who just assassinated my pride and joy of an heir looks like exactly the kind of insufferably smug prick I'd love to hate. Feuding with the NPCs never had quite the same impact for me in ck2. And yes I absolutely needed dollhouse dress up, thank you very much.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2023 22:10
|
|
|
I played EU1, loved EU2 and thought EU3 was awful because I had zero confidence that anyone could make programmatic events fun and I wanted my history back. Never been happier to be completely wrong about something.
|
|
#
?
Feb 15, 2023 23:57
|
|
|
What does the thread think of the 'Open Vic II' project? They already have some project managers on the team who have made project and coding specifications, like an actual company would do, and it's one of the first things they did. Since missing those is a big reason why a lot of community projects fail I feel that eventually they'll produce an open source Victoria 2.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 00:30
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:I played EU1, loved EU2 and thought EU3 was awful because I had zero confidence that anyone could make programmatic events fun and I wanted my history back. Never been happier to be completely wrong about something. I've always been against using events instead of systems to control the flow and outcome of a game, but I don't think the argument is actually settled. The big problem with the old event-driven games was you needed a lot of meta-knowledge to play countries effectively (like knowing which specific USSR provinces needed to be captured to trigger the bitter peace event in HOI, or what level you needed to keep your stability at to avoid the Time of Troubles event chain in EU). What made it worse was a lot of the important events would only fire randomly after you met the conditions so if you didn't look up the triggers on the forums or in a guide or wiki or something beforehand you might never know why your game as Austria stopped getting events after 1550 or whatever and your game suddenly went off the tracks and became really inert and boring. The mission/decision tree system that's been added to HOI4 and EU4 on the other hand shows you exactly what you need to do to fulfill every step in the chain from the beginning so there aren't any surprises, and many of the links in the tree have powerful positive effects so you're incentivized to follow them as efficiently as possible. Paradox has also been good about adding lots of hand-crafted alt-history paths so that every playthrough of a country isn't exactly the same (in HOI at least. I haven't seen as much of that in the mission trees for EU4). I still think it's a lot less interesting than a game with a lot of mechanical uncertainty where anything can happen, but I can't deny that they've made it a lot more fun and rewarding.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 00:54
|
|
|
I feel like there's a lot of gameplay systems we've settled on as basically ubiquitous in modern strategy games that definitely, like, work, but probably aren't the only way games could be made. I've been wondering a lot about transparency lately too, since it seems to be the current consensus that Transparent Is Better, both for judging AI decisions but also for getting to see literally everything going in on your country. It'd definitely make for a different game if you couldn't, and one that would have to be designed more centrally around, but it'd also be one that mimics way more closely the actual experience of a ruler in history in a way I wish more games might capture.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 01:05
|
|
|
Yeah I'm of the opinion that the maximum transparency thing is one of the core drivers of what makes the modern game so easy; you learn things the AI does not, and get warnings they don't seem to respond to. To reference the one example, it'd be interesting if the major disasters like Time Of Troubles couldn't be formulaically avoided because the thresholds are randomized every game and it only tells you the range, rather than the value.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 01:18
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
Communist Zombie posted:What does the thread think of the 'Open Vic II' project? They already have some project managers on the team who have made project and coding specifications, like an actual company would do, and it's one of the first things they did. Since missing those is a big reason why a lot of community projects fail I feel that eventually they'll produce an open source Victoria 2. I've seen that it exists and various projects to the sort have been cooking on and off for like ~6 years iirc? I wish them the best and look forward to some sort of product before I actually look into it tho lmao
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 01:22
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:Yeah I'm of the opinion that the maximum transparency thing is one of the core drivers of what makes the modern game so easy; you learn things the AI does not, and get warnings they don't seem to respond to. !! That is actually a very good solution: a lot of political blunders that led to extreme upheaval have often come to pass because of a miscalculated gamble and not because the people in power where blind to the looming problem. They pushed their luck just a biiiiiiit too far. A game system in which the player would see "if discontent reaches somewhere unknown between 3 to 9, bad things might happen" could have the player hedging their bet as they reach 3 discontent that "maaaaybe I can push it to 4. Should be fine I think. *queue bloody coup* 
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 01:31
|
|
|
Popoto posted:!! That is actually a very good solution: a lot of political blunders that led to extreme upheaval have often come to pass because of a miscalculated gamble and not because the people in power where blind to the looming problem. They pushed their luck just a biiiiiiit too far. A game system in which the player would see "if discontent reaches somewhere unknown between 3 to 9, bad things might happen" could have the player hedging their bet as they reach 3 discontent that "maaaaybe I can push it to 4. Should be fine I think. they would just reload and still call it easy, or more likely figure out how to know better about what is obscured from them and then you’ve created a skill floor without a corresponding skill ceiling increase I think there IS something here, to be clear, but not in the traditional Paradox game at all. You need to be ready to fully embrace asymmetry to begin this designing
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 01:44
|
|
|
Popoto posted:!! That is actually a very good solution: a lot of political blunders that led to extreme upheaval have often come to pass because of a miscalculated gamble and not because the people in power where blind to the looming problem. They pushed their luck just a biiiiiiit too far. A game system in which the player would see "if discontent reaches somewhere unknown between 3 to 9, bad things might happen" could have the player hedging their bet as they reach 3 discontent that "maaaaybe I can push it to 4. Should be fine I think. The Stellaris "situation" system works like this sometimes. You can try risky plays with unknown consequences. Some allow you to invest resources to improve/mitigate the result but others are just random chance, often with a gradually escalating series of chances to bail out with increasing chance of Bad Things happening.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 01:47
|
|
|
Koramei posted:I feel like there's a lot of gameplay systems we've settled on as basically ubiquitous in modern strategy games that definitely, like, work, but probably aren't the only way games could be made. I've been wondering a lot about transparency lately too, since it seems to be the current consensus that Transparent Is Better, both for judging AI decisions but also for getting to see literally everything going in on your country. It'd definitely make for a different game if you couldn't, and one that would have to be designed more centrally around, but it'd also be one that mimics way more closely the actual experience of a ruler in history in a way I wish more games might capture. ive thought that someone could probably make a big breakthrough incorporating elements of card-driven strategy games to Paradox style games but im way too stupid to even start posting about it
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 02:01
|
|
|
I definitely think there's something out there that nobody's hit on yet that can break strategy games like these out of their niche at least for a bit. I've been wondering about a roguelike-style one; people are a lot less averse to gently caress-ups if each playthrough is only an hour long, whereas they (I say they; me too, to be fair) get a lot angrier about them in a longform campaign.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 02:09
|
|
|
The Football Manager / Motorsport Manager games definitely lean on the side of giving you very little reliable feedback for your decisions. I don't mind a bit of guesswork but it can be frustrating when you implement a new strategy and get bad results and can't tell if it's because you hosed something up or other factors or just random chance. It also makes it harder to spot bugs. I still love Motorsport Manager actually but trying to optimize and get really good at it beyond a surface level definitely involves some hair-pulling and trial and error (or just looking up what the numbers and buttons actually do).
Randallteal fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Feb 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 02:22
|
|
|
Koramei posted:I definitely think there's something out there that nobody's hit on yet that can break strategy games like these out of their niche at least for a bit. I've been wondering about a roguelike-style one; people are a lot less averse to gently caress-ups if each playthrough is only an hour long, whereas they (I say they; me too, to be fair) get a lot angrier about them in a longform campaign. The lack of competition in the GSG space is the big underlying issue yeah. I feel like some things like the Viceroy at least kinda came close?
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 02:24
|
|
|
Is it even that much of a niche anymore? At least using the “small number of players” definition of niche. Their games are now launching to 70k-90k concurrent players and selling millions of copies. They’re only niche compared to, like, Elden Ring-levels of success. I’m generally happy with them now doing like 1 big or 1big/1small DLC a year per game, with two-three other free patches in between so long as the technical quality is generally better (and I think it has been for CK3 and Stellaris at least - I don’t play EU or HoI). For CK though I’m…curious about how they choose what to do for those expansions. Like it seems they’re trying to go for new stuff (not to just the game but even Paradox as a whole) for the larger expansions, which I applaud and probably contributes to the significant amount of time. But so far they’re only really aiming them at the RP-players, and I feel like the game probably needs a lot more focus on the strategy game players. Or maybe it doesn’t. CK3 still has a consistent playerbase and is the best-reviewed PDS game, so maybe it has its fan base and it just generally isn’t (I assume) a lot of players here. Anno fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Feb 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 02:30
|
|
|
Lady Radia posted:they would just reload and still call it easy, or more likely figure out how to know better about what is obscured from them and then you’ve created a skill floor without a corresponding skill ceiling increase As for the issue of people reloading, I feel like you could get around that by having bad events get locked in but not fire right away. So for the Time of Troubles, something like: - There's a page with possible disasters, which shows the visible factors affecting the likelihood of the event, things like legitimacy, number of heirs, how happy the nobles are, how many possible pretenders there are, and so on. - Hidden from the player there's a counter that counts up to the disaster each month, based on the above factors - AND - a hidden randomized variable that reduces how much it ticks up each month or even makes it tick down. - If the counter reaches 50%, the event gets locked in at level 1, where it triggers if the ruler dies, whether it's in a week or ten years. - If the counter reaches 100%, the event gets locked in at level 2, where it will also just trigger within a random number of months - After an event gets locked in, it can still be averted if the player manages to get the situation under control and the counter back down to 0% before the ruler dies. The above system would make it transparent to the player what they need to care about, but not how much, and make it so you'd have to undo a lot more stuff to reload before things got locked in. Obviously "forcing" events on the player like this would probably necessitate making them more interesting challenges, with clear goals for how you make them stop. So like, in the above scenario, the player chooses from one of the pretenders and then gets clear instructions on what actions will help calm things down again. Like capturing/killing rivals, proving their martial prowess by beating up invaders and so on.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 08:27
|
|
|
Randallteal posted:I've always been against using events instead of systems to control the flow and outcome of a game, but I don't think the argument is actually settled. The big problem with the old event-driven games was you needed a lot of meta-knowledge to play countries effectively (like knowing which specific USSR provinces needed to be captured to trigger the bitter peace event in HOI, or what level you needed to keep your stability at to avoid the Time of Troubles event chain in EU). What made it worse was a lot of the important events would only fire randomly after you met the conditions so if you didn't look up the triggers on the forums or in a guide or wiki or something beforehand you might never know why your game as Austria stopped getting events after 1550 or whatever and your game suddenly went off the tracks and became really inert and boring. All of those points immediately reminded me of playing Darkest Hour Kaiserreich. You got absolute loads of events (most of them hardcoded to a specific date IIRC) and it's pretty great to just play along being guided by them. But then if you wanna play something specific, you either need the meta-knowledge you mentioned or you just do nothing for years in case more events are coming. Stuff like - hey there's an event here in the future that moves me to full Free Market so it's just a waste to touch that slider manually at all - when will I go to war against this potential expansion target? - the AI actually folded to my ultimatum, I'll reload my save (this is a wargame, I wanna fight this war) because I looked up that it can erupt into war
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 10:12
|
|
|
Randallteal posted:The mission/decision tree system that's been added to HOI4 and EU4 on the other hand shows you exactly what you need to do to fulfill every step in the chain from the beginning so there aren't any surprises, and many of the links in the tree have powerful positive effects so you're incentivized to follow them as efficiently as possible. Paradox has also been good about adding lots of hand-crafted alt-history paths so that every playthrough of a country isn't exactly the same (in HOI at least. I haven't seen as much of that in the mission trees for EU4). I still think it's a lot less interesting than a game with a lot of mechanical uncertainty where anything can happen, but I can't deny that they've made it a lot more fun and rewarding. I think it's also clear that a lot of players don't want transparency. Lots of players consider the game done as soon as they learn all the mechanics. You can often hear that the game is not deep cause you can quickly grasp what is it about [insert obvious comparisons to chess here]. PDX games suffer from that cause almost all of the modern games are more complex than what came before (HoI3->HoI4 might be an exception but I haven't played this games much to know enough), and also AI knows how to use most features and is in general more competent, but readable UI and predictable outcomes make it feel easy. Popular mods like Anbennar attract a lot of people by going to the older style of PDX events in a way. They use Mision Trees, but there are often hidden, there are formable countries and very unexpected outcomes of your decisions. Koramei posted:I definitely think there's something out there that nobody's hit on yet that can break strategy games like these out of their niche at least for a bit. I've been wondering about a roguelike-style one; people are a lot less averse to gently caress-ups if each playthrough is only an hour long, whereas they (I say they; me too, to be fair) get a lot angrier about them in a longform campaign. Here, like this. Strategy games look like they sell you a fantasy of being a ruler, but they clearly don't. Rulers have very different focus compared to what you do in any 4X, and very different considerations, different access to information and capacity to influence stuff. If you want a ruler simulator there are games like Sovereign, Six Ages and its predecessor King of Dragon Pass. This are more of role-playing games and this approach makes more sense for such fantasy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 11:12
|
|
|
I remember playing EU1 with a history book on my lap because almost all the meaningful events were hardcoded real historical events. When they changed away from that (was that in eu2 or eu3?) it was like a whole new world had opened up
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 11:14
|
|
|
EricBauman posted:I remember playing EU1 with a history book on my lap because almost all the meaningful events were hardcoded real historical events. EU3 was the one that changed it for good. Before that, Crusader Kings 1 kinda had this sandbox mentality too, having very few historical events. And Hearts of Iron was a little different, focusing on a very short time period. Victoria 1 was like EU1/2 too, lots of historical events and railroading. EU3 started a new era in PDX development cause it was both switch to 3D and to sandbox gameplay we still have. One of the selling points of EU4 was bringing back Dynamic Historical Events, but they were never anywhere close to EU2 level of importance.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 11:40
|
|
|
I wasn't a big fan of the last CK3 DLC, and I'm not playing the game much anymore right now. This may change if they release a big expansion that's worth it. I'm quite a bit more active in Stellaris now, and the Custodian team is just such a godsend for the game. I feel good every new DLC when I play two or three games, because the free changes are generally in the right direction, and the DLC content is usually fun. EU4 I only play with big Anbennar updates.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 11:53
|
|
|
Ive been thinking to get back to Stellaris for a while (I never went very far on it) but Im so many DLCs behind it would probably be very expensive
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 11:57
|
|
|
Elias_Maluco posted:Ive been thinking to get back to Stellaris for a while (I never went very far on it) but Im so many DLCs behind it would probably be very expensive I like Stellaris but the last couple expansions haven't done much for me. They've messed around with a bunch of systems like espionage, federations, and vassals but they didn't really affect my enjoyment of the game much. Just new things to adapt to. The best things they've added recently were a menu option to pick a crisis or turn on all of the crises and retooled psychic and cyborg ascension paths, but I think both of those came in free updates, not paid DLC. Basically I would just check the DLC descriptions and think about whether the additions actually sound like something you're interested in. If you aren't going to play a vassal herder or psycho warmongerer you probably won't get much from the DLCs focused specifically on those gameplay styles (duh).
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 12:19
|
|
|
This is why I kind of like the idea of the subscription model they tried at one point. (Is that still an option?) No matter how many DLCs behind you are, $5 and you're all caught up, and by the time it expires you're probably bored with the game and ready to put it down until the next time you decide to come back to it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 12:21
|
|
|
A Buttery Pastry posted:The skill ceiling increase would be how you deal with the disasters that it's now harder to avoid. this isnt any different from what mods or even some EU4 event chains do today, except that it hides more from the player. in fact it’s just Worse because players will remember across replays, so again it is just a knowledge check, it’s not actually fleshing out or adding a system
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2023 21:04
|
|
|
Koramei posted:I feel like there's a lot of gameplay systems we've settled on as basically ubiquitous in modern strategy games that definitely, like, work, but probably aren't the only way games could be made. I've been wondering a lot about transparency lately too, since it seems to be the current consensus that Transparent Is Better, both for judging AI decisions but also for getting to see literally everything going in on your country. It'd definitely make for a different game if you couldn't, and one that would have to be designed more centrally around, but it'd also be one that mimics way more closely the actual experience of a ruler in history in a way I wish more games might capture. The problem is that if you hide information from the player, and the player doesn't have some way of figuring that information out through clues, then they don't really have control over the results of their actions. They're just at the mercy of random factors, and that's generally unfun. But if you do give them clues, then either they'll memorize all the best and worst outcomes over time or they'll open up the game's wiki and check a list of which clues mean what. That's not unsolvable, but it does mean that this information asymmetry has to be incorporated pretty heavily into the gameplay in some way.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 04:37
|
|
|
I mean, that's basically the reasoning behind it becoming practically settled that all strategy games have to be fully transparent now. But I really don't agree it's necessarily better, or that everything you're pointing out has to be bad. Being at the mercy of opaque randomness can be irritating at times, but I disagree that it's always or even usually unfun. Like was mentioned upthread, it can also make the game's systems feel richer and deeper. Even if in actuality they aren't, often the feeling of it is what actually matters. For the people that powergame or stringently check wikis yeah opacity is probably just gonna be a worse option, but not everyone plays like that, and as I think has been alluded to, it's a common thread in comments about modern strategy games that there's an emptiness about them compared to ones from back in the day, and imo this is a big part of why. Now I do think the culture surrounding these games is such now (with checking the wikis practically being expected) that it's basically impossible to pivot away from transparency at this point, but I think that's a shame. A strategy game that made fog of war / misinformation the central mechanic would be dope as hell but I don't think it has to go that far.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 05:10
|
|
|
Even in these fully transparent games, people seem to tolerate AI nation behaviour being merely something they can influence (through specific game mechanics) while still not being entirely predictable. I think there's scope for making other parts of the game similarly unpredictable without turning people off entirely.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 05:30
|
|
|
Koramei posted:I mean, that's basically the reasoning behind it becoming practically settled that all strategy games have to be fully transparent now. But I really don't agree it's necessarily better, or that everything you're pointing out has to be bad. Being at the mercy of opaque randomness can be irritating at times, but I disagree that it's always or even usually unfun. Like was mentioned upthread, it can also make the game's systems feel richer and deeper. Even if in actuality they aren't, often the feeling of it is what actually matters. For the people that powergame or stringently check wikis yeah opacity is probably just gonna be a worse option, but not everyone plays like that, and as I think has been alluded to, it's a common thread in comments about modern strategy games that there's an emptiness about them compared to ones from back in the day, and imo this is a big part of why. Alpha Centauri is always a prime exemple of a strategy game with piss poor AI that feels oh so deep thanks to a masterful display of ambiance and guided narrative. It feels so much more than what it really is. Crusader King and EU to an extent try to fill that void with emergent narratives, but I’m not sure they always succeed. The early game of Stellaris is another place where you can find interesting narratives. What I’m saying is that I want to feel a narration, emergent or guided, between the empires of victoria 3 so that it might become the perfect game.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 06:10
|
|
|
So at a fundamental level I feel like the trick here is this: Players make decisions based on information, but introducing opacity into information makes that unreliable - so how do you tune the opacity so that it doesn't occlude so much information that players feel they can't make any meaningful decisions, vs making it so transparent that even though it's occluded a player who knows the trick to it can figure out the shape behind the veil accurately enough to make judgements just as well as if it was purely transparent? It's a very narrow sweet spot, and one that varies for each individual player and their ability to see past the veil, I think. Aside, as long as we're talking about this I might as well go off on a tangent and talk about my ~*GaMe DeSiGnS*~ back from when I was younger. When I was a kid I read a lot of comic books featuring anecdotes from Chinese history and those are packed with stories about the importance of identifying, cultivating, and maintaining the loyalty of talented officials - as well as how easy it was to screw up that process. There's all kinds of stories about fatuous rulers ignoring great minds and promoting incompetent toadies, or cunning agents sowing discord between a ruler and his best officials, or wise rulers who ignored slander and trusted people worth trusting. Now I liked the KOEI Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, but they were and are RUTHLESSLY mechanical in how their characters work and how loyalty is tracked. You always know the exact value of the character you're getting, and you can always tell exactly when and how you need to give them a little something to goose their loyalty enough that there's no risk of betrayal whatsoever. There's basically no sense of the dynamic I described from history, and it's all because of total transparency. So one idea I had was "ROTK, but set during the Warring States period with randomly generated characters and a bigger focus on generations, and critically, no ability to actually see the exact stats of any character - you had to interview them, try to get a feel for what they can accomplish, and then actually put them to work and see if their abilities matched up to what they said about themselves, trying to feel your way towards building up a court of genuinely talented people." Which sounded neat to teenage me, but in retrospect that would have led to players memorizing which kind of interview responses corresponded to which bands of abilities and would have required careful notekeeping to come up with useful information about which characters were capable of what over time since otherwise it'd be easy to forget. Thinking about it now, if I were to try and make that game I think what I might do is to give every ruler a "judge of character" stat that determines how wide a band they estimate a character's abilities to be in - someone who's a poor judge might gauge someone as having between 20-93 out of 100 ability points in the military or whatnot, while a good judge might gauge him as being between 85-93. Initial estimates could be firmed up by spending more time on interviews and probing specific abilities, but rulers are limited by how many actions they can take per turn and won't have enough time to finely gauge everyone - so at some point you need to bite the bullet and say "OK, I'm not ENTIRELY sure how well you'll do but I need butts in positions so I guess I'll stick you in and hope you don't screw everything up." And if you were steadily evaluating everyone over time eventually you might end up with a pretty good idea what your court is capable of and keep things that way - except loyalty is a value that needs monitoring and can change, and people get pissy if you replace them with a more talented member, or promote someone who's been hired for less time than they have, or feel they haven't been rewarded commensurate with their talent or seniority, etc. etc. Thus, you'd spend the entire game trying to evaluate trying to get a handle on what everyone is capable of and what they're thinking and juggling the demands of loyalty against the needs of administration, and if your current ruler is a poor judge of character - well, better hope your heir is capable of fixing the chaos nexus your court has become!
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 07:00
|
|
|
Koramei posted:I mean, that's basically the reasoning behind it becoming practically settled that all strategy games have to be fully transparent now. But I really don't agree it's necessarily better, or that everything you're pointing out has to be bad. Being at the mercy of opaque randomness can be irritating at times, but I disagree that it's always or even usually unfun. Like was mentioned upthread, it can also make the game's systems feel richer and deeper. Even if in actuality they aren't, often the feeling of it is what actually matters. For the people that powergame or stringently check wikis yeah opacity is probably just gonna be a worse option, but not everyone plays like that, and as I think has been alluded to, it's a common thread in comments about modern strategy games that there's an emptiness about them compared to ones from back in the day, and imo this is a big part of why. Being at the mercy of opaque randomness can make the game's systems feel richer and deeper if the game has been specifically designed around having the player manage and hedge against the RNG's whims. Otherwise, it just feels like you lack control. And Paradox stuff is very much not designed for that. There's way too much Stuff in each game to pay close and consistent attention to everything you need to know, you don't actually interact with any individual entity all that often, and the consequences for making a really bad pick can be fairly disastrous. That doesn't mean Paradox hasn't tried to take a crack at replicating the "sometimes a ruler appoints a huge dumbass to an important position and has just has to deal with their terrible skills" dynamic that happens in history, though. Things like the CK council system and Vicky 3's generals system both try to pit political considerations against stats considerations, pressuring the player to consider factors besides statistics when appointing these important positions. Even though the player has perfect information, the mechanics are designed to try to exert pressure from different directions so that there isn't always one clear optimal choice. It's not always successful, but they're trying.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 16:45
|
|
|
Lady Radia posted:this isnt any different from what mods or even some EU4 event chains do today, except that it hides more from the player. in fact it’s just Worse because players will remember across replays, so again it is just a knowledge check, it’s not actually fleshing out or adding a system Obviously you can just keep going back through your saves, but you can't really get around that as a developer except by like removing manual saves. As long as beating up the rebellion actually comes with some upsides*, I think just a slight bit of resistance to the act of simply reloading, would go a long way towards making people just play that poo poo out. *it's mechanically engaging, and possibly mechanically rewarding if you do it really well. Like giving the winning dynasty a long-lasting legitimacy boost and your country a stability to boost because the civil war made it very obvious who was on top.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 18:14
|
|
|
There has to be some level of obfuscation or things that are out of players hands to make these games interesting. It’s why pops in Vicky are always talked about glowingly. It’s a system that you can clearly manipulate but cannot have total control over. Honestly CK2 and EU4 were tough games to get into. but because of that toughness, made the experience more rewarding and personal. You had to explore and figure things out and it made the games feel like they were YOUR discoveries, your custom playgrounds. I’m not saying CK3 and Vicky 3 won’t get to the same level as EU4 and CK2 (two of the best games ever created in my opinion) but I just don’t think that era of paradox exists anymore. I am still playing the above two games, and am looking at the newer ones from the outside cautiously.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 20:33
|
|
|
I believe any information we have in CK3 we also had in CK2, its just that it was scattered all over the place in multiple screens, and the ledger and what not
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 21:41
|
|
|
CK3 to me feels less like “I have all the information so I can play this with no issues” and more “Pretty much no matter how I play, after getting myself established, the balance of the game ensures I don’t face much adversity”. It’s just too easy to keep too many people happy with you, and even when they aren’t it’s unlikely they actually get together and do much about it. The last big AI patch made it better, though, so I think it’s doable. Or maybe they’re just pretty happy with it that way.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 21:46
|
|
|
That was a problem in CK2 too, but yeah, is worst in CK3 Firstly because in CK3 the AI is much more passive. Theres always that dangerous stage when you are still growing but have big, stronger neighbors that can attack you and wreck you poo poo at any time. But in CK3 they will rarely do it, while in CK2 it was much more common. So you get to that established stage sooner and easier Second because, once you learn about the good lifestyle perks, you can very easily keep your vassals friendly and/or too scared of you to try anything. So internal politics are a non issue most of the time Third because, if all else fails, if you know how to use MaA you are unbeatable anyway
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2023 22:01
|
|
|
Sure easy, just make a decision space that is well-defined and contains enough tools to let a player handle randomness; but not too much randomness, and not too many tools. But not too few, either, otherwise it'll be too predictable, or the tool to use too trivial. You know, just make a game in the goldilocks zone of decision space problems, delivered straight to your monitor on demand. Applicable to a wide range of preferences on what a decision space should look like, or feel like, or act like. The golden decision space that appeals to you specifically. The golden decision space doesn't actually exist: because if you spend the time to learn a game, its tools and randomness fall into the 'well known enough' category that they seem simple. And if you pick up a new game and it has too much randomness or too many tools, you might bounce off of it. So you're chasing that sweet hit of mid-game stride where you know "enough, but not nearly enough" to make the decision space interesting. Chasing that golden dragon like a junkie looking for a fix.
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2023 02:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 12:48 |
|
|
Koramei posted:I mean, that's basically the reasoning behind it becoming practically settled that all strategy games have to be fully transparent now. But I really don't agree it's necessarily better, or that everything you're pointing out has to be bad. Being at the mercy of opaque randomness can be irritating at times, but I disagree that it's always or even usually unfun. Like was mentioned upthread, it can also make the game's systems feel richer and deeper. Even if in actuality they aren't, often the feeling of it is what actually matters. For the people that powergame or stringently check wikis yeah opacity is probably just gonna be a worse option, but not everyone plays like that, and as I think has been alluded to, it's a common thread in comments about modern strategy games that there's an emptiness about them compared to ones from back in the day, and imo this is a big part of why. One other thing that strikes me about the transparency position is that it seems to implicitly accept that the information you have when you play for a fifth time should not be fundamentally different from playing it the first time, with the argument that a big problem that must be overcome is player memorisation of what the obfuscation means. I remember my first game of Stellaris, where I had basically no idea what was going on, I was just out exploring, doing these little event chains not knowing what the outcomes would be and it was great fun! Now of course when I play Stellaris I know what all those chains do, I click the “correct” options with nary a thought to what the event text says, and it is less mysterious and magical than that first game was, but that doesn’t cheapen the first experience. If you go way out to the extreme in other genres, it’s effectively impossible to play a game like Return of the Obra Dinn or The Outer Wilds twice, because working out all the hidden information is the entire point of the game, and you really can only learn that stuff once. Despite that those games are generally regarded as some of the best games of the last few years. Paradox games shouldn’t go that far, but the point is that you could theoretically even make a strategy game you only play once! There’s this notion that strategy games should be sort of infinitely replayable, and I think that’s one of the notions underpinning the transparency position, that if the game relies on obfuscation, once the obfuscation is solved the challenge drops and the game becomes too easy to be worth replaying. But what I’ve noticed is that as the years have gone by I find myself playing paradox games less and less because my previous experience with them causes me to look at the new ones and see systems, not countries. Each playthrough feels less and less like guiding a country or a family and more like just picking a colour and starting position. Sure, my fourth playthrough of Russia won’t be less fun than the first because I’ve already learned all the hidden tricks in their campaign, but my first playthrough of Russia won’t be particularly compelling to begin with, because if I’m experienced with Paradox games I’ll parse all the necessary information to win right at the start and proceed through with practically no surprises. The fact that Anbennar has practically taken over the EU4 thread is I think testament to the idea that maybe we’re getting a little bored of always knowing what’s coming up. Your second time through the Rianvisa or the Hoardcurse will be nowhere near as hard as the first, but so what?
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2023 14:16
|
|
