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I was going to suggest Stellaris even though it's not *quite* the same thing but you have it already The Trek full conversion mod makes my nerd heart happy
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Feb 21, 2023 23:28
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StrixNebulosa posted:Also, to forestall more recs, here's what I own on steam! I wanted Driftland to be good so bad, like Majesty but with blimps, but it turned out a horribly boring slog.
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Feb 21, 2023 23:34
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I'd suggest just continuing trying to grok Civ IV, tbh. Once you understand the basic mechanics, you'll be able to play the rest of these fairly easily.
Megazver fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Feb 21, 2023 |
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Feb 21, 2023 23:35
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I also liked the Warlock games, how are the Eador titles? I've never touched them.
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Feb 22, 2023 01:08
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Deptfordx posted:I also liked the Warlock games, how are the Eador titles? I've never touched them. HoMM + eurojank I'd recommend Spellforce over Eador, but Eador is fun if you're looking for that specific niche Hero's Hour is a modern indie version of HoMM that's really charming, real time pausable combat instead of grid based tbs, so it's a silly mash of bouncing pixel dragons and dwarves
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Feb 22, 2023 01:14
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Eador Genesis is really, really, really good if you're looking for its specific niche, but it's, well, not something everyone can enjoy.
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Feb 22, 2023 01:20
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victrix posted:Hero's Hour is a modern indie version of HoMM that's really charming, real time pausable combat instead of grid based tbs, so it's a silly mash of bouncing pixel dragons and dwarves Just don't look for any tactical challenge. You're less out-maneuvering your opponent, and more drowning him in units or using some downright broken spells in a chaotic melee. Think Dungeon Keeper's combat without possess; it's a big brawl and you're just trying to tip the scales with good hero stats or spell usage. E: It's still a very enjoyable game, although it suffers from some horrible memory leakage this current patch. Music's fantastic too, and it's supremely moddable.
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Feb 22, 2023 01:21
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:controversial on both the “lots of folks don’t like it” and “the bee guy gets money from it”, but I recommend Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King for that kinda vibe This has been supplanted by Conquest of Eo in my mind. Does the concept better, and no bees. Also nthing the recommendation for Eador. Eador Genesis is the most stable and arguably has the best interface. Each one further down the line has more and more fancy stuff at the cost of stability. But you have to really love tactical combat and getting the perfect ranged caracole going.
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Feb 22, 2023 08:08
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:“the bee guy gets money from it” habituallyred posted:and no bees. Do I want to know?
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Feb 22, 2023 08:51
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Deptfordx posted:I also liked the Warlock games, how are the Eador titles? I've never touched them. Eador Genesis: New Horizons is completely free, and I love it. You can sink 100s or 1000s of hours in the campaign. Not a true 4x, as it misses research. More focused on tactical combat, but nevertheless awesome.
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Feb 22, 2023 08:55
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Do I want to know? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_a_mountain_out_of_a_molehill
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Feb 22, 2023 09:16
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I prefer to think of it as a running joke.  Q: An employee at your company has told you they are deathly allergic to bees. Do you: a: Make a note not to invite them to see your bee colony b: Fill a jar full of stingerless bee drones and bring them to work c: Solicit bad bee puns to try and make them feel better d: Park in the handicapped employee parking spot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPc9Z2Dn94U is apparently the video this links back to. This particular one is labeled as a skit, with knowing participants.
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Feb 22, 2023 10:16
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I'm late to the party, but rambling thoughts: 4X's in general are a bit of a mess. Hence the thread title, I suppose. I grew up playing Master of Orion 2 and I think that game really nailed down what makes a 4X fun. Of course the game can, and merrily will, gently caress you over by you discovering around turn 150 that there's a massive Sakkra or Klackon empire on the other side of the galaxy and you can't really break those guys over your knee, but the game-play itself is fun. (And you could play it multiplayer over hot-seat, which was great in the 90's) That fun argument goes for Master of Magic too, even though that game is way more broken and nowadays I just rage-quit when I see Jafar and his freaking illusions. I've been playing some Civ 5 lately, but a) I suck at it b) I'm not really a fan of the way the game has multiple ways for a snow-balling empire to just crush everyone, and you obviously have to race to be the crusher, but the game also has all the dumb mechanics that are supposed to keep you from snowballing and it's a lot of tedium to work around. It seems like a lot of 4X game design since the 90's has taken the wrong lessons about how to make the games engaging, even if the balance is off or whatever. Less importantly (or more?), the little icons for your dudes in Master of Orion 2 are adorable.
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Feb 22, 2023 11:04
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There's a new story pack for Stellaris coming out on the 14th, and I may be the only guy here who is still into Stellaris, but I am looking forward to the origin where you're 30 different species with a crashed slave ship trying to make it work
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Feb 22, 2023 11:25
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:There's a new story pack for Stellaris coming out on the 14th, and I may be the only guy here who is still into Stellaris, but I am looking forward to the origin where you're 30 different species with a crashed slave ship trying to make it work Stellaris loving owns. I love how it mixes all the fun parts of 4X and Grand Strategy genres. I always make sure to do at least one campaign every single patch since launch.
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Feb 22, 2023 11:28
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Rappaport posted:I'm late to the party, but rambling thoughts: 4X's in general are a bit of a mess. Hence the thread title, I suppose. Give Spellforce: Conquest a try imo 4xs are never going to break out of their shackles, anything that pushes the genre forward will be kind of... genre adjacent (like what Against the Storm is doing for city builders), or what Spellforce is trying to do - I don't think it's revolutionary or perfect by any means, but asymmetrical engagement is one of the few ways the AI can be anything more than a punching bag once you know how to play <4x #4324> I'd probably put Warlock 2 and Gladius in that category as well, they're closer to wargames than 4xs though (the Gladius devs are working on a super funky cool 4x? that has a setting entirely my jam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1481170/ZEPHON/) - but simply covering the map with unit producing cities and building up your forces to smash the enemy on a big map is pretty fun, turns out (Warlock's world hopping, like Master of Magic was always a huge draw to me also - Eador has that, but it's uh... it has its own issues) I think ultimately the decision webs that 4x games spawn are just utterly anathema to where we're at with AI opponents, so the best polished games make them pleasant punching bags, the worst make them empty unit shufflers also pretty important to note you can generally get anywhere from hundreds to thousands of hours out of 'just ok' AI in 4xs, so it's really a self inflicted complaint for hardcore strategy nerds 
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Feb 22, 2023 11:56
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HopperUK posted:I was going to suggest Stellaris even though it's not *quite* the same thing but you have it already It really is incredible how detailed that mod is, so much extremely high quality content
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Feb 22, 2023 12:09
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OperaMouse posted:You can sink 100s or 1000s of hours in the campaign Note that this isn't flowery language. The campaign is really long.
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Feb 22, 2023 12:35
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I think the basic design most 4Xs use make it really drat hard to make AI that is appropriately challenging, even leaving aside bad ai coding. Most 4x have a basic cycle of strong economy -> more research -> stronger economy/military. This means that when the coders slam the "Hard AI Gets More Money" button they are also screwing with the game pace. Too much and the AI just has a huge army of units that are all better than yours and there's not a lot you can do. And it sucks because often you just can't realize this until its turn 132 and you went to war and discovered they're gonna wreck you. Or almost as bad you discover that all the AIs are paper tigers with lovely armies and you might as well declare victory and quit now. it's insane how rare it is in 4x games to get that one AI enemy who manages to be perfectly paced with you to function as a nemesis and generate awesome gameplay. Everyone's always chasing that high but its so rarely achieved.
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Feb 22, 2023 18:15
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This just crossed my mind, to give you a sense of scale for Eador: There's a dude on youtube who has been playing Eador's campaign on Overlord difficulty for years by this point, has 250+ videos roughly average two hours in length in the playlist, and he hasn't finished the playthrough yet. (and before someone asks, no, I didn't watch the whole playlist, just gave a few videos a quick glance to see his playstyle, and the dude does seem competent)
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Feb 22, 2023 18:31
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my dad posted:This just crossed my mind, to give you a sense of scale for Eador: Lotaeri is awesome!!! And yes, I have the vast majority of those vids...
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Feb 22, 2023 18:35
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I do have to note that the game has a much, much faster pace at lower difficulties if you're semi-decent at it. It hits that sweet spot where you win an average campaign map at roughly the moment where the game would start getting tedious if it went on for longer, giving you a bit of a victory lap when you finally break an enemy's main army and start smashing everything between you and their capital city. Despite the "easy" difficulty, the final missions against rival astral masters are still quite difficult and will punish you if you drop your guard. In higher difficulties, well... it's tuned towards making everything a huge slog where you need to deal with a cheating ai and horrible penalties that require you to cheese things in a way that gets really boring really fast unless that cheese is what you actually enjoy in the game. There is no victory lap, everything is a brutal slugfest from start to finish.
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Feb 22, 2023 19:23
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I want to try Eador but I think I'll watch the videos first - I'm midway through my Civ4 game and having a good time. I've also started the tutorial campaign of Age of Wonders 3, too, and this is neat! I don't know if I'm ready to commit to a full game of this - learning the 4X gameplay AND the tactical gameplay is going to be a lot of mental investment - but I know I want to eventually. Speaking of, I haven't tried it yet. Why do people not like Fallen Enchantress, outside of bees?
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Feb 22, 2023 19:31
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Age of Wonders 3 is fun. Feel free to ask any questions you have about the campaign, my memory isn't perfect and it's been a while, but I've beaten most campaigns on hard and probably remember some useful stuff. I'd advise playing it over Eador, honestly, unless the videos convince you that Eador is 100% something you'd enjoy.
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Feb 22, 2023 19:35
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i don't enjoy Stellaris at all as a map painter game and i kinda hate doing wars in it. but it's great as a sci fi RPG story generator, at least until you run through all the content. the new dlc is adding more story and rpg stuff so i'm looking forward to it. when i was a wee child i would play master of orion and record the significant events of the game in a little notebook, like i was recording the history of some great nation. wish i still had the notebook, probably would be hilarious.
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Feb 22, 2023 19:38
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my dad posted:Age of Wonders 3 is fun. Feel free to ask any questions you have about the campaign, my memory isn't perfect and it's been a while, but I've beaten most campaigns on hard and probably remember some useful stuff. I'd advise playing it over Eador, honestly, unless the videos convince you that Eador is 100% something you'd enjoy. I'm currently in the install-play-decide phase of my hyperfixation, where I'm trying everything. Eador looks like advanced level jank, but I'm enjoying the first video of Lotaeri's playlist so  Dunno if I'll get to playing it anytime soon though!As for age of wonders... What I expected from Age of Wonders 3 lore: generic fantasy stuff What I got: the elves are SUPER racist against the humans, and practice eugenics
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Feb 22, 2023 19:49
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HopperUK posted:The Trek full conversion mod makes my nerd heart happy Which one? I only found out a few weeks ago that there are two in active development.
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Feb 22, 2023 20:00
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StrixNebulosa posted:
If you haven't already you should try MOO1, which had more tactical and "gamier" combat on an 8x8 grid instead of the MOO2 firing lines, and with a limited number of ship designs you have to make decisions about when to upgrade instead of just building the biggest ship with the best numbers at all times.
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Feb 22, 2023 20:05
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StrixNebulosa posted:Why do people not like Fallen Enchantress, outside of bees? I remember it as Elemental, but without all the absurdly broken stuff (in both design and as software) that made Elemental fascinating to explore. Turns out the core game is the most aggressively bland thing that I've ever encountered in the genre. There's just nothing it does better than other games, and plenty that it does the same way but worse.
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Feb 22, 2023 20:06
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Elemental has the one-two punch of being intensely boring and being dev'd by a company run by a real mother fucker. he's a lovely ring wing libertarian and IN ADDITION he tried to steal the intellectual property of my #1 favorite game of all time, Star Control 2.
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Feb 22, 2023 20:15
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Thom12255 posted:Which one? I only found out a few weeks ago that there are two in active development. New Horizons, the other is a bit closer to vanilla Stellaris in terms of mechanics.
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Feb 22, 2023 20:38
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:I think the basic design most 4Xs use make it really drat hard to make AI that is appropriately challenging, even leaving aside bad ai coding. It’s acknowledged the AI needs to cheat a ton just to be competitive when it’s bound by the same rules. IMO, more 4Xs need to abandon that approach and embrace asymmetric gameplay where they don’t even try to pretend the AI plays by the same rules. I also want more 4Xs to stop feeling obligated to include certain features just because the classics like Civ and MoO had them. Not every Space 4X needs a bloody ship designer (which is usually poorly balanced and, again, rife with AI cheating) and not every 4X needs in depth colony management to the point I’m mandating individual building improvements. Just personal preference, ofc, but I miss the sliders from SotS1. That and maybe a bit more detail would be nice.
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Feb 22, 2023 20:49
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we're all just living in the box that MOO and Civ made.
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Feb 22, 2023 20:59
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StrixNebulosa posted:What I expected from Age of Wonders 3 lore: generic fantasy stuff Elves, humans, and wizards (doubly so for human and elven wizards) being huge assholes in different ways is a running theme of the series. tl;dr of age of wonders storyline up to AoW3: There was a big kingdom of which the elves were in charge, ruled by the Elven Court from the Valley of Wonders. How good this period was for everyone depends on whether you ask an elf, but it was relatively stable. Goblins presumably didn't enjoy the choice between "live in stinky goon caves hidden from everyone" and "be slaves". There's... implications shown later that elves are not native to the world, and were brought in to do some sort of a job, but forgot about it and went native after a while. At some point, humans, of both the regular and "high" variety (basically angels, called "Archons" in later games because highmen is an unfortunate word) start showing up from across the sea. Elves are super happy about the visitors and open up to them, helping the humans settle into a few places, and discussing fancy things with the archons who they saw themselves as having more in common with. This turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea, and what follows is a never-ending cycle of "humans burn down a bunch of poo poo, kill all the inhabitants and move in, and then the high men sweet talk the elves into not doing anything while also aggressively protecting humans from any retaliation" that eventually results in humans storming the Valley of Wonders and ending the millenia long rule of elven king Inioch (as in, "House of Inioch" - Sundren from AoW3 is his grandkid) by repeatedly stabbing him. Elves take this extremely poorly. After a long retreat, and some kind of magical disaster that splits them into 'wood' elves and 'dark' elves, they also split into two factions along mostly the same lines, the Keepers who go gently caress it, the kingdom is gone, we're better off rebuilding our strength and improving our ties to our allies in order to survive, and the Cult of Storms who go gently caress it, kill all humans, take the kingdom back, whatever it takes. The factions aren't really outliers to previous elf behavior either way, they're just not in a position of strength that lets them still have reliable allies while also being huge dicks to them. Age of Wonders (1): Inioch has two kids, wood elf Julia (Sundren's future mom) who joins the Keepers, and dark elf Meandor who founds the Cult of Storms. There are two campaigns (with varying paths each), in which you get to create a character who is a high ranking commander in one of these two factions. Both campaigns canonicaly happen for the most part. Keeper protagonist stays with Keepers until the end and wins, but is so bland that he's never mentioned again and what he did is usually attributed to Julia. Cult of Storms protagonist defects to the undead near the end, and loses, but gets an actual canon name for the valiant effort. What undead you ask? The Cult of Storm had the brilliant idea to raise King Inioch from the dead as a lich of some sort, figuring he'd help them rebuild the Elven Kingdom. Wrong. Cue zombie apocalypse. Luckily for the elves, he does genuinely want to murder the humans first, causing the high men to spend all their military might on slowing down the undead horde. In this entire clusterfuck, with the Cult of the Storms successfully wrecking both the humans and themselves, an undead problem on the loose, and all the factions having a big clash over the new human capital in the Valley of Wonders, Julia and the Keepers show up after having worked their rear end off to rebuild their strength and alliances and go hmmmmm... You know, I think we can actually kick all your asses now. Which they proceed to do, breaking the power of the Cult of Storms, putting Inioch into the ground again, killing the leader of the Archons, Gabriel (who apparently planned for a glorious death to ascend him... which does in fact work, but more on that later), and kicking the humans out of the Valley of Wonders and shattering the strength of their kingdoms. While the Keepers didn't take (much) revenge on the humans, humans had more than enough enemies by that point that it ended up almost wiping them out. The different non-canon paths give you some interesting info, like both the archons and elves being originally part of a plan to prepare the land for the humans, and that the plan in question included wiping out all non-humans, but gathering elven souls to give them new bodies elsewhere so they can continue their job in a new world. As an aside, I love the Cult of Storms protagonist, he's an unapologetic dickwad who's in it for the sake of power, and it's pretty much outright stated that he cucks Meandor. (speaking of which, Meandor's wife Melenis gets killed during the campaign by the Keeper protagonist, but you'll see her undead form eventually in AoW3) In the non-canon path where he defects to the Archons, he gets increasingly annoyed by the holier-than-thou high men who ask him to kill people for them but then theatrically feel bad about it:  Age of Wonders 2: You get this stuff mostly explained in AoW3. Magic gets stronger, powerful immortal wizard kings rise, humans get second wind because Gabriel (not so dead after all) teaches Merlin how to become the most powerful mage ever, and they rebuild their strength, and things escalate from there. Merlin managed to reconcile humans and elves with the help of Julia. Weird poo poo from other dimension invades, Merlin and Julia stop it. After the events of the game and the expansion, Jullia marries a dark elf and with Merlin's help they magically fix the elves back into being a single species. Basically, the sorcerous parts of the elf faction you get are dark elf (and Cult of Storms) flavored, and the unicorn forest stuff is wood elf flavor. So, yes, they're huge assholes who practice eugenics, among other things. This stuff all gets explained in AoW3 along the way, I just put it here to connect the AoW plot to the situation you start off with in AoW3. my dad fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Feb 22, 2023 |
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Feb 22, 2023 21:06
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my dad, that is an excellent post. I love this. I love reading 4X lore, it's always all the grandiose parts of tabletop rpgs but without the "and now the player characters enter the scene" because it has to stay at the scale of kingdoms and armies.
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Feb 22, 2023 21:08
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:I think the basic design most 4Xs use make it really drat hard to make AI that is appropriately challenging, even leaving aside bad ai coding. It’s the Civ problem. You design game systems to be interesting for players, where everyone starts at the same point (1 city) and proceeds from there. You can’t write the AI before all the systems are in place. Then you’re stuck. You can’t design the gameplay around AI because players aren’t AIs. If you boost the AI so it can keep up with or outpace the player, it is obviously “cheating.” If it runs under the same rules, it gets outpaced. If you set it to be “perfectly paced” as a challenge, it’s even more of a cheat and it invalidates your own performance: the quality of your play has no relation to the challenge. Asymmetric play is one way to break this cycle. I think differing and compatible victory conditions are the other. Have AI sides playing for objectives that aren’t player objectives, and allow for multiple game winners. Warlock 2 claimed to do the asymmetric thing; Spellforce: Conquest of Eo mostly is, but not fully. Let AI play its own game and then overlap the results. My dream 4x was a Master of Magic sequel. It would have a campaign or a grand scenario. The MoM would be chosen by the player or randomly. The game would be set well after the casting of the spell of mastery. The player starts in a remote and hidden college where ‘casters have developed a new system of magic not controlled through the Spell of Mastery, based on drawing power from things: wood, iron, blood, bone, etc. The AIs are either similar groups of casters in hiding which might compete with or support you, and one or two agents of the MoM (drawn mostly from the MoM heroes roster) who use a mixture of mortal troops and agents matching the MoM’s schools. You have to expand and research while keeping a low profile until you’re ready to strike. In the grand scenario, the MoM turns out to be casting an ascension spell and you can cut a deal to help them and replace them at the cost of betraying the other hidden casters, or try to take them out and replace them, or try to break the Spell of Mastery once and for all.
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Feb 22, 2023 21:57
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Narsham posted:My dream 4x was a Master of Magic sequel. It would have a campaign or a grand scenario. The MoM would be chosen by the player or randomly. The game would be set well after the casting of the spell of mastery. The player starts in a remote and hidden college where ‘casters have developed a new system of magic not controlled through the Spell of Mastery, based on drawing power from things: wood, iron, blood, bone, etc. The AIs are either similar groups of casters in hiding which might compete with or support you, and one or two agents of the MoM (drawn mostly from the MoM heroes roster) who use a mixture of mortal troops and agents matching the MoM’s schools. You have to expand and research while keeping a low profile until you’re ready to strike. In the grand scenario, the MoM turns out to be casting an ascension spell and you can cut a deal to help them and replace them at the cost of betraying the other hidden casters, or try to take them out and replace them, or try to break the Spell of Mastery once and for all. They made this game (or one pretty similar). It's called Sorcerer King. It was... ok, I guess.
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Feb 22, 2023 22:51
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:I think the basic design most 4Xs use make it really drat hard to make AI that is appropriately challenging, even leaving aside bad ai coding. The problem isn't AI. The problem is much more fundamental: virtually all the gameplay loops in 4Xs are self-reinforcing, aka snowballing. This means that whoever gets an advantage, barring making mistakes, is only going to continue to get even further ahead. Combine that with these games not really offering much of a way to quickly try to sabotage an opponent (it can take many turns to even get to an opponent, for instance) and the victor is often decided very early on. This means a 4X played multiplayer is going to show very, very obviously which player is better at the game (usually meaning, better understands how to fuel most optimally the systems with the strongest feedback loops) and other players are going to have little (maybe, if they gang up) to no (more likely) chance against them. It also means that if the players are equally skilled the starting seed is probably the biggest predictor of eventual victor. Even really complex 4Xs like Shadow Empire suffer from exactly this problem.
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Feb 22, 2023 23:00
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asymmetric design answers that, by having the AI play a different game than the player - with the intent not being to play the same snowball 4x ICS as the player, but instead to present an interesting and enjoyable challenge (cf. AI War) the baked in assumption that the CPU players must play the same game as the player without cheating (screeching from the 4x audience), hamstrings so many 4x games from the word go some of the grand strategy games do this to some extent, but I find those entirely boring so
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Feb 22, 2023 23:23
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So as someone who liked the idea of Eador: Genesis, but found it got really plodding, really quickly, does New Horizons solve that on the lower difficulties (obviously we've been talking about how that is... not the case for the higher ones)? Or if I found Genesis plodding is it never really going to click?
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Feb 23, 2023 00:30
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