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orangelex44 posted:I’d be willing to argue SMAC is below Civ IV. Maybe even below Civ II, it’s close. Civ IV had better modding support, UI, balance, and AI along with quietly excellent graphics/sound. SMAC is worse in every category outside of subjective flavor. Well, I don't agree with that. Civ 4 just felt extremely restrictive in terms of funneling you down specific development paths, and interesting units don't become available until waaaay late in the game at which point the situation is already settled. There's just a decided lack of options for expression. In SMAC I can be a dick by building a mountain range to dry out the lands of my allies. I can't do that in Civ. Edit: It does have a really good opening song though. Fangz fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Squiggle posted:If you didn't play Alpha Centauri before and have no affection for it, it's really not that special. It's absolutely not the pinnacle of 4x people evangelize it to be. I didn't play Alpha Centauri until I got it in a GOG sale like five years ago, it is fully sick as hell what the gently caress are you talking about. There's a reason people still obsess over it and they've been very clear, and correct, as to why this entire thread has gone completely goofy though, everyone trying to rate one game over another by comparing the one they want to say is bad unfavorably to chess (suboptimal balance! the AI is dumb!) and then declaring poo poo that is immensely worse by those standards superior because it has lots of models, or they like twiddling around in the unit editor (which are bad! except for this one!), or lots of people made mods for it, or whatever arbitrary vibes Civ IV can be said to be good by. Just go play chess, or admit you don't really wanna play chess you wanna mess around with your little dudes and be the king of Me-donia, which looks the most like whichever lovely game you got hooked on in high school so obvs that's the best. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 15:39
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orangelex44 posted:I’d be willing to argue SMAC is below Civ IV. Maybe even below Civ II, it’s close. Civ IV had better modding support, UI, balance, and AI along with quietly excellent graphics/sound. SMAC is worse in every category outside of subjective flavor. Take Civ IV and modernise it a bit. Add in some of the logistics and encirclement and entrenchment stuff Shadow Empire has that discourages multiple units stacking on the same tile, without forbidding it, and in some cases encourages it, and creates natural "fronts" in your war. Wait for people to make a sequel mod to FFH called "Rise From Hell". Perfect game. Well if someone makes an AI that can handle it. Perhaps allow the ability to design and simultaneously recruit multiple independent and mixed units that can spread out on hexes but are also all part of the same combined arms division under the same officer, like in Shadow Empire, but that might be too much. Brendan Rodgers fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 15:49
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Having had the amazing opportunity to work with Brian Reynolds on the development of SMAC, he wanted something totally different. Keep in mind pro/con folks that game generation was way different back then, and it's imo unfair to compare what Planetfall can do (Triumph Studios can assume that the player has access to a computer with at least 8GB, and GB wasn't even a term when SMAC was made). What Brian squeezed out of the computing power he had to work with was incredible, but it's not fair to compare it with what Triumph Studios can do in the 2020's. Hardware is not only speed, but also capability. You can only fit so much graphics into 128mb, and you still need to leave room for the actual code. HD sizes were less than 8GB. It would be super sad if a game developed under those limitations could compete with a game made today. I know 4x has been all over the place since SMAC, but I do think the genre at least can engage with better computing power.
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Apr 5, 2023 15:58
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Mayveena posted:Having had the amazing opportunity to work with Brian Reynolds on the development of SMAC, he wanted something totally different. Keep in mind pro/con folks that game generation was way different back then, and it's imo unfair to compare what Planetfall can do (Triumph Studios can assume that the player has access to a computer with at least 8GB, and GB wasn't even a term when SMAC was made). What Brian squeezed out of the computing power he had to work with was incredible, but it's not fair to compare it with what Triumph Studios can do in the 2020's. Hardware is not only speed, but also capability. You can only fit so much graphics into 128mb, and you still need to leave room for the actual code. HD sizes were less than 8GB. i think this is still unfair to SMAC, if anything modern games have demonstrated that raw computing power was never the limitation. Exponentially expanding filesizes and 8G of RAM and 10000 gigaflops and the best you can manage in 20 years is... funnier city shapes? You packed in a few more superfluous dudes, and they do little idle animations now? None of this would have been a noteworthy improvement if they came out in the same year. There are games coming out that actually do something with all that computing power, or improve on the formula beyond just loading it down with more numbers, but weirdly stuff like AI War and Distant Worlds all looks and plays like it was made decades ago and don't come up as Objectively Superior. Maybe in 20 years we'll get the knockoff versions of those that require a matrioshka brain around the sun in order to give each unit a favorite food and color A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 16:31
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All this talk of 4X games and the importance of systems existing for a reason without a single post mentioning Old World. Disappointed in you, thread.
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Apr 5, 2023 17:06
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Corbeau posted:All this talk of 4X games and the importance of systems existing for a reason without a single post mentioning Old World. Disappointed in you, thread. ~~~~~ To that end, I have been thinking about horses. It's not true of every 4x game, but so many of them do this thing with horses, and it makes no sense. You have areas of vast, open prairies, and there, in one tile or hex among dozens exactly like it, is a spot Where the Horses Are, and control of this spot is crucial to a country's production of the ever important strategic resource of horses. Luckily, most continents have a few such spots. This is nonsense. Animal husbandry, or whatever the name the tech is in a given 4x game, does the exact opposite of what it claims to. Domestication of animals is a thing done so that we could raise them ourselves, wheresoever we want. It makes negative sense for these strange horse nodes to exist in scattered enclaves around the world. A ranch shouldn't need a specific ultra rare spot, it just needs space and grass. Horses are extremely adaptive creatures. We've recently discovered that our earlier assumptions on when horses came (back) to the Americas was off by a couple hundred years. A far smaller amount of contact was enough to begin seeding the land with huge, culturally transformative numbers of horses, a couple centuries earlier than our old, patronizing understanding. But that goes to show how these things actually happen. The horse node is ridiculous. Once there is contact, even the tiniest bit of contact, which, on connected land-mass, is nothing so much as the space to roam, there are horses. Once contact is made with another land mass, horses very rapidly take over. And plants–another thing that some games, looking at you with anger in my heart, Civ, you, who use your powers to establish lovely accepted trends–plants work roughly the same way. These big plant resources spread fast and can completely change the course of history wheresoever they wind up. Much of celebrated Italian Cuisine relies upon plants that are very much not native to Europe. The Great Hunger of Ireland involved a blight of a crop that didn't originate in Ireland. (Before anyone corrects me on the cause of the Great Hunger being more a matter of deliberate neglect and mismanagement, there still needed to be a crisis that was mismanaged.) Colonization of islands and coastlines was often as much about finding suitable places to raise known profitable crops as finding existing ones to exploit. This was met with varying degrees of success. The point is: organic resources are less a thing that has nodes and more a thing that has potential places they can grow. Some of these resources require much less specific environments than others. Access to them shouldn't be subject to the same on/off switch. This got me thinking about tech trees, and how they work. Civ distinguishes between culture and science trees, but the culture tree is still a tech tree. For some things, it makes sense that a scientific process could be kept secret from rival nations, with varying success, but, especially for cultural advancements, it's remarkably silly: Oh, Rome has built this embassy thing in my capital, and that seems to confer them some kind of benefit and information about me. It's a shame we haven't learned how to do that, and we can't, you know, just copy the clear example that exists in our capital. But it's also silly for a lot of tech, too. Native Americans didn't need to learn the chemical processes of developing gunpowder from niter, and then mine or trade for niter before they could train armies with guns. They traded for guns. "That's already modeled by gifting units" -- that's an accident. It's only modeling if the design is deliberate. If that's the intent, then production of units using the higher technology nation needs to be added to trade agreements. At any rate, winding it down: I have major problems with how games handle resources, and I have major problems with tech trees. Making resources make sense is a harder problem to tackle, but for tech trees, I propose something like how Humankind handles changing culture between eras. 1)Some tech, namely what civ chucks in the culture tree should be limited in how many people can research it. Sometimes to as few as one player. 2)Interaction with this tech should make it immediately available for adoption. However, the player that actually developed it should have a unique bonus advantage for doing so, to incentivize being the one who gets there first, and to reflect a cultural value. Why do you need to research tech to build trade caravans? If someone sends you a caravan, you can conclude: "hey, this kind of journey is possible. I should also do that." As an afterthought, this would have an added effect of making snowballing research much less possible. Circling back round to resources, the best I have is: 1)Once contact with a non-mineral resource is made, you should be able to produce your own. This means that the trade off for space needs to be made more important. Thus, benefit of a luxury resource or food resource should scale against the number of places that choose to build them. In places especially suited for developing these resources, once contact is made, perhaps a new wild source has a chance to appear, cluing you in that maybe this is a good place to grow it. 2)To feed into this, I propose a necessary core mechanic of surveying. If any old place can produce potatoes or grapes or whatever, then gently caress it. You have space and money, then you have potatoes and grapes. If it turns out in this procedural world, only one or two places are viable to produce coffee, or maybe only a few places choose to cultivate coffee, then the demand and benefit for having the coffee should be made significant. There needs to be a unit, or other system you can invest resources into, that can tell you what spaces are viable for producing what resources, and how many you'll get. Perhaps there should be a way for this to be wrong, but I am not married to that concept. 3)It should be possible to extinct an animal or plant resource through overuse and/or insufficient cultivation and developing over its native sources. Like with the African forest elephant or silphium. While we're at it, add silphium to games as a resource. Big game food sources like deer or cattle or bison, should be a thing that you can benefit from having in your territory whether you deliberately ranch them or not. Maybe you don't need to ranch your bison because so many of them roam the undeveloped plains. Or they did, until these other assholes started building poo poo over their ranges. 4)Very early on, surveying should be tied to discovering these resources at all. "We have determined the yellow ones are delicious" "this wood floats", etc. It would make a lot of sense to just build this into early scouting units. (And is similar to what they do, already) Give it a chance to discover if a useful thing exists natively, and then raise this chance if they leave movement on the table. If you have resources that can be produced, then you should be able to tell the scout/surveyor to find out how good a spot is for growing/raising it. This will also give your scouts something to do after you've found your shores, and keep them relevant for much longer. Within your own territory, perhaps this could be done by spending money, instead. This makes a lot more sense than building a city because it's near the only two places that grow a plant that you magically know is going to be valuable one day, just as soon as your scientists learn it smells nice if it's burned. 5)Trees should have properties that confer distinct bonuses, so long as you don't extinct them from your territory. Surveying trees for their most useful properties should be made important. It's weird that important trees, like apple or chestnut or cork aren't on the list of luxury or strategic resources in any game I have played. You don't even necessarily need to name them, just proclaim what benefits an individual forest tile yields, if inside your territory. Tl;dr: Thinking about horses made me think that agriculture and technology in 4x games makes no goddamn sense and needs to be much more abstract and fluid.
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Apr 5, 2023 17:39
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:i think this is still unfair to SMAC, if anything modern games have demonstrated that raw computing power was never the limitation. Exponentially expanding filesizes and 8G of RAM and 10000 gigaflops and the best you can manage in 20 years is... funnier city shapes? You packed in a few more superfluous dudes, and they do little idle animations now? None of this would have been a noteworthy improvement if they came out in the same year. The bigger numbers have made it a lot easier to do those things. AI wars and Distant Worlds have a lot of background complexity, and in DW's case it fuels the fuzziness that makes the decision making interesting, and those would completely choke a 2003 gamer PC with blinking LEDs. Better hardware, far better OS support, working abstractions, these turn crying forced marches into pleasant strolls. Also, ahem, chess sucks, and so does Stellaris, and did it take me 500 hours of playing it to accept it? Steam says yes. E: All those things above make sense as Game Design Objects in that they are strategic objectives, those specific examples I consider a board game disease initially and then copied endlessly, because it kinda worked. I find it particularly funny in for example Stellaris when there's like three special resource spots in half of the map and it's just a regular mining spot. It should be a Dune style murder spot with half the map space being devoted to the intricacies of the partial control of those nodes. EE: There's a Dune kinda 4X out there right now, Spice Wars, and it forbids painting the entire map your color, mana costs for taking territory rise above the cap. So a warning to the wise, don't buy until that can be modded out, came out of nowhere when I was finishing the Harkonnen. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 17:42
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Perhaps the reason no 4x is good is the 4x fanbase is all idiosyncratic unpleasable cranks chasing after the nostalgic highs of their childhood, laced with the mad possibility of what that child thought the games of the now-present would be like. I will not be turning on my monitor
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Apr 5, 2023 17:55
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SIGSEGV posted:I find it particularly funny in for example Stellaris when there's like three special resource spots in half of the map and it's just a regular mining spot. It should be a Dune style murder spot with half the map space being devoted to the intricacies of the partial control of those nodes. Oh, don't get me started on the problems I have with hard borders everyone agrees to, or the lack of intricacy in diplomatic agreements. Disputed territory should be literally that. Disputed. And if the AI happens to start building poo poo within "your borders", it's on you to stop them. Territorial lines shouldn't default to everyone accepting the same terms, borders should be a result of diplomatic agreements, which may or may not reflect what you actually currently control.
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Apr 5, 2023 17:56
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I'm just waitin' for Imperialism 3 here. At the Gates was on the way there until Jon Shafer got a hold of Crusader Kings 2, which has been a pernicious influence on strategy games ever since- introducing family drama to games that didn't need it.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:05
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Uneasy standoff in the Nine Dash Starlane, admirals sweating because their fleets designed for extreme long range are parked in unaided visual range of each other.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:07
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Veryslightlymad posted:Tl;dr: this is a really good post and I wish more developers were out there going back to first principles of how things actually work, and the ways you can represent that in game mechanics. probably simpler mechanics, you're not gonna get Civ VI levels of features and ten bazillion units when you're reinventing the wheel, but there's plenty of huge convoluted games out there and very little that's actually new or creative also is that what Old World is actually about? I had it written off as a Civ clone that had picked being only the first half of Civ as its defining gimmick SIGSEGV posted:The bigger numbers have made it a lot easier to do those things. AI wars and Distant Worlds have a lot of background complexity, and in DW's case it fuels the fuzziness that makes the decision making interesting, and those would completely choke a 2003 gamer PC with blinking LEDs. Better hardware, far better OS support, working abstractions, these turn crying forced marches into pleasant strolls. yeah that's what I mean, those two represent novel designs and mechanics that could not exist in the early 2000s, whereas I do not believe that there's much of anything about Planetfall save the graphics that you could not have reasonably done (and someone wasn't already doing) in 1999. Its specific configuration of old ideas might hit your sweet spot but it does not innovate, and it doesn't really improve upon, other than by mashing together chunks of two or three older games into a new hybrid one. and agreed lol A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 18:30
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The Chad Jihad posted:Perhaps the reason no 4x is good is the 4x fanbase is all idiosyncratic unpleasable cranks chasing after the nostalgic highs of their childhood, laced with the mad possibility of what that child thought the games of the now-present would be like. I will not be turning on my monitor
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Apr 5, 2023 18:36
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Corbeau posted:All this talk of 4X games and the importance of systems existing for a reason without a single post mentioning Old World. Disappointed in you, thread. Is that in a good sense or a bad sense? Veryslightlymad posted:Tl;dr: I don't disagree, but I also think that realism and fun are not necessarily correlated. "Simulationist" logic is what gets us the jankiest games out there.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:36
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Clarste posted:I don't disagree, but I also think that realism and fun are not necessarily correlated. "Simulationist" logic is what gets us the jankiest games out there. wow if I was too square to appreciate Dwarf Fortress I would simply not admit it publicly
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Apr 5, 2023 18:38
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Clarste posted:Is that in a good sense or a bad sense? All games are janky until they define or redefine a genre. A Wizard of Goatse posted:also is that what Old World is actually about? I had it written off as a Civ clone that had picked being only the first half of Civ as its defining gimmick Old World is a game I haven't yet bought, but I have watched quite a few people stream. It doesn't attack the same core ideas that I am, but it does attack a few. Everything ties into individual characters being distinct, but this is largely just bonuses you can move around, and another set of people to keep happy in your country. The most creative of its newer systems, to my eye, is the orders system. As your character rules over time, you accumulate legitimacy, which determines a number of orders you can give your units. Essentially, a reflection of one's bureaucratic strength. You might have a much larger army, but you can't organize them. Or you might have to tell your workers to pound sand for a few turns, because the Sumerians are on your borders, and your army needs to move. When you die, you will take a legitimacy hit. The biggest selling point is this: It has a bloody undo button. A repeatable undo button.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:56
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Simulationist stuff can be fun, but generally the appeal comes from it being more playground than game, where you can have fun experimentaling and personalizing, and the best games in the genre minimize the fiddly bits and focus on being either super immersive or narrative generators or both. I'm not sure any of that is a good fit for the 4x genre, at least the way they are currently designed
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Apr 5, 2023 19:01
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:yeah that's what I mean, those two represent novel designs and mechanics that could not exist in the early 2000s, whereas I do not believe that there's much of anything about Planetfall save the graphics that you could not have reasonably done (and someone wasn't already doing) in 1999. Its specific configuration of old ideas might hit your sweet spot but it does not innovate, and it doesn't really improve upon, other than by mashing together chunks of two or three older games into a new hybrid one. Oh yeah, I am really good at reading. Another example would be Sword of the Stars, there's a version of SotS that is perfectly doable in 1999 tech and Total Annihilation proves that the space battles would not be a feasibility concern. SMAC had terrain elevation and terrain elevation changes, which PF hasn't got. And so on. I guess Aurora 4X does new things too. Personally I prefer at least a little simulationism, emergent properties are little wonders I delight in finding and, more often, being painfully surprised by. For as much as 4X games have in large parts embraced the board game aesthetic as an inspiration for the game design itself, I find I dislike it.
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Apr 5, 2023 19:10
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Love SMAC except for the playing it part lol, I just have low tolerance for old game clunkiness. Would kill for a remake
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Apr 5, 2023 19:12
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I want a remake with a similar art direction. The original SMAC character portraits are better burned into my brain than the faces of my friends or relatives.
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Apr 5, 2023 19:22
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GlyphGryph posted:I'm not sure any of that is a good fit for the 4x genre, at least the way they are currently designed Have you considered that the same thing every time is also incredibly boring? Simulation is just an excuse to finally innovate.
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Apr 5, 2023 19:25
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Fangz posted:Well, I don't agree with that. You can in Fall From Heaven! Well, not literally mountains with rain shadows, but you can terraform the world into a blighted hellscape that only your civ benefits from.
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Apr 5, 2023 19:56
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DaysBefore posted:Love SMAC except for the playing it part lol, I just have low tolerance for old game clunkiness. Would kill for a remake I know Beyond Earth was explicitly not intended to be this, but I'm convinced that everyone wanting this is a large part of why it bombed so massively.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:04
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It's funny reading a conversation that is a mix of people genuinely discussing pros, cons, and interesting trivia of games I've played (and some that I haven't), and also people straight up making poo poo up about these games and then also making poo poo up about what other people in the conversation said.  e: My 2 cents on Alpha Centauri are: The gameplay was fun, it's amazing for when it was made, especially taking its limitations into account, and also has a number of deep flaws that the genre mostly grew out of that people tend to forget about if they haven't played the game in a longass time and are mostly speaking from memory. (I also think the game's plot and writing has... serious issues, but that's not something I care about enough to discuss at length here) e2: The discussion of Planetfall mostly runs into the issue of people complaining that a hammer is not a spanner, but using the word tool for both. my dad fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 20:25
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Libluini posted:This may be a taste thing. I bought Stellaris day 1 and apart from a weird phase where the AI went braindead for 1-2 patch cycles, I had (and still have) great fun with it. Libluini posted:This may be a taste thing. I bought Stellaris day 1 and apart from a weird phase where the AI went braindead for 1-2 patch cycles, I had (and still have) great fun with it. Keep going, you’re almost to 150 days straight of gameplay
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Apr 5, 2023 20:26
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a substantial portion of my Stellaris playtime is forgetting to close it before going to bed and it just runs all night and day until i got home from work.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:35
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I'd like to mention the reason I started this whole argument is because some poster said Planetfall is a 6/10 tactics game with a 4/10 4X attached, or something similar. Even if they were just rating based on their personal enjoyment, they didn't disclose that, and I just think that's a lovely thing to say about a game just because you personally don't like it. That's the only reason I've been on a posting crusade about this. I've not been trying to argue that people are wrong to like playing SMAC or any other game in 2023, or wrong because they don't enjoy Planetfall, or anything like that. I've said this several times, but I think that message has been getting lost. Infidelicious posted:I can't flood the world via pollution and block efforts to stop it in the UN, or ruin someone's nutrient yields and cause a famine by terraforming a mountain next to them in Planetfall; so it's an objectively worse game. So I saw that you're disengaging from this conversation and that's cool, but for anyone else still reading: I look at the terraforming system in SMAC, and the way the UN works and award it a few _objectively_well_made_game_points_ that I wouldn't give to any other game. GlyphGryph posted:This criticism is weird to me, the SMAC unit designer specifically doesn't involve much in the way of "bigger numbers" because that part is all handled automatically, the designer is specifically there for you to change the other stuff that isn't just "bigger numbers". Balancing specializations against costs with conditional stuff and stuff that alters how a unit plays completely. I'm not gonna say it couldn't be better, just that this criticism doesn't work. I'm mainly talking about weapons/armor, or later chassis mostly just giving you a higher move speed (yeah I know that they also change what terrain you can move on, that's +points for SMAC too). A lot of the mods are things like "50% better vs aircraft" which is just one step removed from "number bigger", and it's honestly not much of a choice to add it or not to an experienced player. That's not really much of a problem though, if unit customization in SMAC was just the mods, I would have no issues with it. One of the problems the SMAC unit designer creates compared to Civ2 is: units tend to get minmaxed as just defenders or just attackers due to the cost system. If the unit designer didn't exist or didn't also decide what weapons/armor a unit got, then the designers could just put some balanced units in the game (balanced in the sense of not being all armor or all weapons) along with the attack specialists and defense specialists. Civ2 had plenty of units like that, but if I try that in SMAC the cost of my unit balloons beyond all reason. It just strikes me as kind of careless, like they wanted to give the player some freedom but didn't really know how to balance that, or provide a good mix of viable options, so we just end up with even less unit variety in the game than if they just put premade units in. quote:How does the Planetfall customizer work? You start with one of the premade units in the game, and then you add 1-3 mods to it. Mods need to be researched and cost a special resource to apply (the cost goes up with stronger mods or to apply them to stronger units). Each mod adds a special ability or trait to a unit that you can usually only get from that mod, and also has some secondary +stat effects like more defense or generally stronger attacks. Not every mod can be applied to every unit, and mod effects can interact with each other. Examples: Arc Extension Module can only be applied to units with arc (electricity) weapons, and makes it so attacks with those weapons "jump up to 1 enemy targets within 2 hexes on a successful hit, dealing 50% damage." "Additionally, this mod grants the unit 30% increased damage on all abilities.". Stun Module "Attacks from Arc weapons have a 8 strength chance( 4 for repeating attacks) to Stun non-Ethereal units for 1 . If resisted, Static Charge is applied instead." Additionally, this mod grants the unit 30% increased damage on all abilities." - I could use both of these mods, and then the stun effect from the second mod would also jump due to the first mod. A few mods add things like the ability to detect stealth units on the strategic map. It's a lot of fun finding synergies and good builds with various units and mods. quote:By modern standards it is still absolutely better than average and more than acceptable, but that's mostly because the modern 4x standard is "really goddamn bad". I haven't played PlanetFall in particular, but the ones I have played SMAC is still hands down better than them pretty much every single way. Yeah, this is why I said that thing at the start of the post. Lowen fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 20:40
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Remove tacked on unit designers from 4x Especially remove them from space 4x Only reason it should be in is if its like an absolutely core part of the game. Otherwise theyre total trash Thank you
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Apr 5, 2023 20:42
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OctaMurk posted:Remove tacked on unit designers from 4x I mean they can be cool or could be at least if it doesn’t get min-maxed to the point that one build is better than everything else you could make. Hate games where min-maxing is mandatory to be remotely competitive (in a matchmaking sense, not actual competition).
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Apr 5, 2023 20:50
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tehinternet posted:I mean they can be cool or could be at least if it doesn’t get min-maxed to the point that one build is better than everything else you could make. Hate games where min-maxing is mandatory to be remotely competitive (in a matchmaking sense, not actual competition). It'd be fine if anyone ever made the drat math line up. "This will win 75% of the time" needs "And fail utterly the other quarter of the time." The more likely a positive outcome is in this kind of gamble, the more catastrophic the penalty for failure ought to be.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:56
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Veryslightlymad posted:It'd be fine if anyone ever made the drat math line up. Balancing that stuff is a nightmare when you have other things going on in the game- it's a lot of really fiddly stuff that tends not to amount to much anyway. If you took out the ability to make clown units that broke the game, a lot of the appeal of such a mechanism would go away.
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Apr 5, 2023 21:04
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Lowen posted:I'm mainly talking about weapons/armor, or later chassis mostly just giving you a higher move speed (yeah I know that they also change what terrain you can move on, that's +points for SMAC too). A lot of the mods are things like "50% better vs aircraft" which is just one step removed from "number bigger", and it's honestly not much of a choice to add it or not to an experienced player. That's not really much of a problem though, if unit customization in SMAC was just the mods, I would have no issues with it. Unit customization in SMAC is effectively the mods, deciding if you want a specialist attacker/defender or if you want someone who can do both, and creating "specialty" units that do something other than standard fighting, like a psi-combat guy (which lets you focus almost solely on unit skill and morale instead of combat tech) or an espionage unit or a rover terraformer or something. Everything else is not only automated, but it even lets you automatically upgrade all future units and usually most of your existing units with no thought required at all. quote:One of the problems the SMAC unit designer creates compared to Civ2 is: units tend to get minmaxed as just defenders or just attackers due to the cost system. If the unit designer didn't exist or didn't also decide what weapons/armor a unit got, then the designers could just put some balanced units in the game (balanced in the sense of not being all armor or all weapons) along with the attack specialists and defense specialists. Civ2 had plenty of units like that, but if I try that in SMAC the cost of my unit balloons beyond all reason. I'm not saying this is advanced, top-tier strategy or anything, but I don't understand why it's supposed to be bad. (Now if you want to criticize SMAC's combat balancing, considering how broken stuff like gas chopper attacker spam is, by all means, but "you choose to build a mix of offensive and defensive units or you can minimize support by building better units who can do both" seems like a perfectly good strategic element so its weird that THAT is the part you criticize) quote:You start with one of the premade units in the game, and then you add 1-3 mods to it. This, the way you are describing it here, sounds absolutely miserable, btw. I trust it is better in the game than the explanation makes it sound like? Because that sounds simultaneously mind numbingly complex and completely worthless at the same time. What is the actual decision making element going into that sort of customization? That's the part that makes a customizer interesting, the stuff you're describing above seems like a good way to make a game worse depending on how its handled. Like if I were to try and talk about the SMAC unit design, I'd talk about the major early game decisions: Mobility and Versatility vs. Affordability and Maintenance, Traditional combat vs PSI, when you want to build artillery units, and how the mods play into tailoring your units to counter specific threats and how you should constantly be shifting your army makeup around specifically to prevent your opponent from adapting to your threats with those mods. Now, of course the balance is hosed up and things snowball easily enough that unless you are playing against a few other actual people none of that matters (and then its hosed up enough it usually doesn't), but that's not the fault of the unit designers fault. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 21:49
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Old World is a mind-bender because it looks like you know what it's doing and how it's doing it, because it has all the Civ aesthetics, but when you try to do those things you discover that the mechanics are (subtly or blatantly) almost entirely different - and every single difference exists for a reason. It's so much more refreshing than the theme suggests. If it had the name-brand popularity of Civ then it'd have an insane modding scene. I want to see something with FFH's creativity using Old World's total systemic rework.
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Apr 5, 2023 21:51
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The Chad Jihad posted:Perhaps the reason no 4x is good is the 4x fanbase is all idiosyncratic unpleasable cranks chasing after the nostalgic highs of their childhood, laced with the mad possibility of what that child thought the games of the now-present would be like. I will not be turning on my monitor
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Apr 5, 2023 22:00
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Cavemen to Cosmos, the Civ 4 mod, has a surprisingly large amount of "one strategic example lets your civ cultivate that resource through buildings." Its less good than it sounds, probably because its an insanely huge mod and not baked into the game. And yes it does have apples as a strategic resource, along with different types of wood.
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Apr 5, 2023 22:01
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GlyphGryph posted:Unit customization in SMAC is effectively the mods, deciding if you want a specialist attacker/defender or if you want someone who can do both, and creating "specialty" units that do something other than standard fighting, like a psi-combat guy (which lets you focus almost solely on unit skill and morale instead of combat tech) or an espionage unit or a rover terraformer or something. Everything else is not only automated, but it even lets you automatically upgrade all future units and usually most of your existing units with no thought required at all. Planetfall's customization works because you can't be strong against everything. You're either going to have weaknesses, or you're going to be mediocre across the board. So it's better to concentrate on your strengths, with an eye to identifying your enemies weaknesses and playing into them. An Arc unit with the mods Lowen identified would be very strong against certain enemies such as the Vanguard Drone Carrier, an giant walker that constantly spawns drones and has a weakness to Arc damage specifically. That Arc weakness means it both takes more damage and it is more susceptible to the Stun effect. But by doubling down on the Arc damage, it means that you are going to struggle with other units such as the Carnosaur, a dinosaur with laser guns that can easily access additional Arc protection - meaning less damage and a low chance to stun - and since it isn't spawning drones the damage-jump mechanic is much less effective. or to summarize, you're always looking to make your units stronger through synergies with mods and other units, but at the same time you have to be wary of being counter-built or just running into units that are tough for you to handle. If you're fighting random creeps, you might be able to just power through your disadvantage - but if you're fighting a pitched battle with another player's war stacks, being countered can be fatal.
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Apr 5, 2023 23:17
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GlyphGryph posted:Unit customization in SMAC is effectively the mods, deciding if you want a specialist attacker/defender or if you want someone who can do both, and creating "specialty" units that do something other than standard fighting, like a psi-combat guy (which lets you focus almost solely on unit skill and morale instead of combat tech) or an espionage unit or a rover terraformer or something. Everything else is not only automated, but it even lets you automatically upgrade all future units and usually most of your existing units with no thought required at all. It's bad because it makes the clear optimal strategy "spam best attacker + (optional) a few defenders as needed", and then you win the game after hours of mopping up. Your best attacker might be a weapon or psi unit, and might change from game to game based on your faction and evolve with tech or your civic choices, but whatever it is at the time, the best move is to spam building just that. Building balanced units is not the good strategy that you think it is, because a unit that attacks or defends loses HP from the same pool, which makes the next attack or defense less effective. Building two separate units is always the optimal choice because it gives you twice the HP in two different pools. One unit with balanced stats can not compete with two min-maxed units in SMAC, it's not even close. So because of the way the unit designer works, the strongest option in SMAC is also the cheapest one. Bad! quote:This, the way you are describing it here, sounds absolutely miserable, btw. I trust it is better in the game than the explanation makes it sound like? Because that sounds simultaneously mind numbingly complex and completely worthless at the same time. I love it and think it sounds awesome, but it's very different from anything in any other 4X game that I know of. It's not even in Age of Wonders 3, and I don't think they're bringing it back for 4. So I understand it doesn't appeal to everyone. quote:What is the actual decision making element going into that sort of customization? That's the part that makes a customizer interesting, the stuff you're describing above seems like a good way to make a game worse depending on how its handled. What do you mean? Because the mod system is nothing but decisions, and none of them are uninteresting ones because there are qualitative rather than quantitative differences. For example: Maybe (for the sake of argument) I've figured out the absolute mathematically best combination of units and mods possible, and say (again for the sake of argument) that this optimal strategy does NOT include putting rocket pack mods on battlemechs. Does that mean I will decide to never play the game by putting rocket pack mods on battlemechs? Obviously not! It may not be the mathematically best, but it is fun, and plays differently from other strategies I could follow, and the game won't massively shift in difficulty just because I am or am not doing the optimal thing. quote:Like if I were to try and talk about the SMAC unit design, I'd talk about the major early game decisions: Mobility and Versatility vs. Affordability and Maintenance, Traditional combat vs PSI, when you want to build artillery units, and how the mods play into tailoring your units to counter specific threats and how you should constantly be shifting your army makeup around specifically to prevent your opponent from adapting to your threats with those mods. The bad combat balance of the game is at least partially attributable to having a unit designer, because by creating it and including it in the game, the developers lost the ability (lost, if we're using civ2 as a reference point) to fine tune the costs of specific units as special cases (because costs have to be calculated according to universal rules to work with the designer rather than a per unit basis) and lost the ability to curate the specific combinations of attack/defense values/special abilities included in the game. These are all tools the designers could have used to balance the game, but that they just didn't have because they don't work with the unit designer present. Alternatively they could have done a better job with the designer (in terms of cost calculation or a different system of building units entirely), resulting in better balanced combat. Or they could change some other mechanics and fixed the problems that way, but they didn't.
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Apr 5, 2023 23:54
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It should also be noted that the base models for a unit in Planetfall vary drastically in capability and function. Whereas SMAC has 6-8 combat chassis, Planetfall has something like 300 units... and every single one has something to differentiate them. There are 15-20 general archetypes that the majority of the units can be bucketed into, but even among that majority basically every unit has a unique passive ability, a unique active ability, or both. This offers some amazing synergies and basically endless combinations to explore. It's also a learning cliff, especially for people who don't understand the challenge isn't to learn the units and mods, but to learn how to quickly learn about units and mods to determine how a new thing will interact. This is... not really something that comes up much in 4Xs, since they generally limit themselves to "bigger number is better" levels of complexity. It's one of the many reasons I think that 4X players often bounce off of the game, because Planetfall is actually a bad 4X. It's pretty drat good at being Planetfall, though. I tell people that Planetfall is more like a turn-based Total War game than a Civ game - the strategy layer is just an excuse to find interesting tactical fights, and past a certain skill level it's usually best to go find a human to play against.
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Apr 6, 2023 02:43
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Planetfall is 100% its own thing, and when that clicked for me I went from not really getting it to really enjoying it. The heart of the game is elaborate tactical battles and everything else in the game is there as an enabler for that. This is somewhat counterintuitive because usually you think of fighting battles to win the war, whereas in PF or Total War, the war is only there so you have a reason to fight the battles. I suspect this is also in part why Warhammer goes so incredibly well with TW.
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Apr 6, 2023 03:07
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