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HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


I hope we see a revolution in diplomacy in games. I don’t want to have to talk to, say, every member of my royal court in Crusader Kings, but it would be wonderful to communicate with faction leaders and negotiate deals with spoken language rather than just clicking options.

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Panzeh
Nov 27, 2006

"..The high ground"

HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

I hope we see a revolution in diplomacy in games. I don’t want to have to talk to, say, every member of my royal court in Crusader Kings, but it would be wonderful to communicate with faction leaders and negotiate deals with spoken language rather than just clicking options.

I'm not too sure i'd want that- it'd kinda feel tedious, trying to negotiate with ChatGPT in real negotiating terms. It would be akin to having an interface where in this strategy game you have to walk around in a 3d world to different parts of the ministry or whatever. Just sort of a barrier between the player and the object that has little to do with the thing i play strategy games for. It definitely feels more impersonal when you're just selecting items on either side and getting a vibe check in the interface, but more and more, i'm fine with that.

SIGSEGV
Nov 4, 2010


A Wizard of Goatse posted:

There's definitely exactly equal odds of either of these outcomes, just like with the blockchain, or the metaverse, or any of the other dumb-sounding crap the same bunch of guys were prognosticating exponentially world-changing big numbers for

I have to say that unlike with the blockchain and metaverse poo poo, at least there's an existing underlying technology that exists here.


HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

I hope we see a revolution in diplomacy in games. I don’t want to have to talk to, say, every member of my royal court in Crusader Kings, but it would be wonderful to communicate with faction leaders and negotiate deals with spoken language rather than just clicking options.

That sounds like absolute hell, negotiating with a machine has always been annoying but when cloaked by a chatbot it gets infinitely worse.

Also there's a place for deeply diegetic and deeply skeumorphic UI and it's in the ten works of arts that will use it well this century and the rest of the time, it's in the garbage.

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


Strong disagree with you guys, diplomacy with AI being poo poo has always been the main reason why multiplayer has always been better. Only games like Star Ruler 2 that devoted serious attention to making diplomacy a whole different game have had properly good diplomacy with AI.

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!
If a bit of text is too tedious and inconsequential for the devs to hire a writer to write, it's too tedious and inconsequential for them to expect me as a player to read it.

Just give me a conversation tree written by a real person.

Don't make me spend hours writing literal brown-nosing dialogue and then lose because the AI decides for some unexplainable reason I'm not fawning in the right way.

Fangz fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Apr 10, 2023

Hughlander
May 11, 2005

Fangz posted:

I can imagine it being absolutely loving terrible. What I want out of diplomatic AI is explainable decisions and predictable responses to my actions, as well as lore-relevant flavour in text conversations. All of these are things AI text generation is worse at than the status quo.

Curious what you mean by that, since when I read it, it sounds like you are saying "I want completely deterministic gameplay." Which sounds boring as gently caress if as long as I do the same Initial 30 game turns the board proceeds in the exact same way every time. Almost all games have an element of randomness even if it's the decisions of the opponent human that you can't control.

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!

Hughlander posted:

Curious what you mean by that, since when I read it, it sounds like you are saying "I want completely deterministic gameplay." Which sounds boring as gently caress if as long as I do the same Initial 30 game turns the board proceeds in the exact same way every time. Almost all games have an element of randomness even if it's the decisions of the opponent human that you can't control.

Completely deterministic is taking it too far but I want to be able to understand the meaning of actions I take and the AI takes. For example, if I want to march my army across this AI's territory, is this just going to be a minor annoyance to them or do they consider this an act of war? When they blockade my ports, are they doing it because they don't care about blockading, or is this revenge because they hate my guts? When I break a military treaty because two of my allies declare war on each other, are the other factions going to like me for upholding peace, or hate my guts for not following treaty provisions no matter what? This sort of clarity is really important.

SIGSEGV
Nov 4, 2010


The funny thing is that we've already tried the "CPU controlled players are mysterious and require you to think hard to understand them" and the average players hated it, the tryhards hated it, the mp mafia hated it, the simulationist complexity lovers hated it, the people who pretended to like it were very happy when a patch made the AI display why it liked and disliked you are your action.

And I agree, I don't mind it if the AI takes random tacks, I don't mind it if it tries to surprise me, I don't care if something representing a fundamentally incapable of human communication alien empire sends me gibberish, I do mind being told that the thing supposed to act like another player is mysterious and unknowable and I have to figure it out sends me gibberish and tells me I have to handle it, I can just have the foreign affairs ministry have a crack team of analysts to tell me they are angered by my claiming tiles too close to their empire. (It's the ones in my cap circle.)

LordSloth
Mar 7, 2008

Disgruntled (IT) Employee
Dear ChatGPT, update all Alpha Centauri lore in the style of Civilization 6’s.
“As it turns out, Mount Planet is not wi-fi enabled, so I had to spend two decades on Alpha Centauri talking to the mind worms on my trip.”

Moonshine Rhyme
Mar 26, 2010

Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate

LordSloth posted:

Dear ChatGPT, update all Alpha Centauri lore in the style of Civilization 6’s.
“As it turns out, Mount Planet is not wi-fi enabled, so I had to spend two decades on Alpha Centauri talking to the mind worms on my trip.”

code:
Sure, here is an update to Alpha Centauri lore in the style of Civilization 6's lore:

In the year 2100, humanity was on the brink of extinction. The world was ravaged by war, famine, and pollution. In a last-ditch effort to save the human race, the United Nations launched the starship Unity, carrying with it the best and brightest minds from around the world.

The Unity traveled for 80 years before reaching the Alpha Centauri star system. There, they found a planet called Chiron, which was hospitable to human life. The colonists established a new home for humanity on Chiron, and they began to rebuild their civilization.

However, Chiron was not without its dangers. The planet was home to a race of alien creatures called the Progenitors, who had long since abandoned the planet. The Progenitors had left behind a number of artifacts on Chiron, which the colonists began to study.

The colonists soon discovered that the Progenitors were a highly advanced race, and that their technology was far superior to anything that humanity had ever seen. The colonists began to use the Progenitors' technology to improve their own lives, and they soon began to make great strides in science and technology.

However, the Progenitors' technology also had a dark side. The colonists soon learned that the Progenitors had been experimenting on the planet's native lifeforms, and that they had created a number of dangerous creatures, including the Mindworms.

The Mindworms were a race of parasitic creatures that could control the minds of other creatures. The colonists soon found themselves under attack from the Mindworms, and they were forced to fight for their very survival.

The colonists eventually defeated the Mindworms, but the war took a heavy toll on their civilization. The colonists were forced to rebuild their society from scratch, and they were left with a deep distrust of alien technology.

In the years that followed, the colonists continued to rebuild their civilization. They made great strides in science and technology, and they soon became a powerful force in the Alpha Centauri star system.

However, the colonists never forgot the dangers of alien technology. They vowed to never let themselves be controlled by alien forces again, and they worked to develop their own unique brand of technology.

The colonists eventually became known as the Alpha Centaurians, and they became a major player in the galactic community. They were a peaceful people, but they were also a proud people, and they were determined to protect their way of life.

The Alpha Centaurians were a diverse people, with a wide range of cultures and beliefs. However, they were all united by a common goal: to create a better future for humanity.

The Alpha Centaurians were a force for good in the galaxy, and they were always willing to help those in need. They were a beacon of hope for all who knew them, and they were a shining example of what humanity could achieve when it worked together.

LLSix
Jan 20, 2010

The real power behind countless overlords

nrook posted:

Out of curiosity, do you think Civ IV has been surpassed? I personally don’t really feel 4X game design has moved forward since then. The quality bar for the genre is really low— tons of developers, including even well-known series like Civ itself, release games that don’t function as serious, interesting games because their AI opponents can’t actually compete with the player. But then, these games are enough of a commitment that I can only play a small fraction of them, so I can easily imagine I could have missed bigger trends.

Old world maybe?

Old World is a well balanced and challenging game, but that same challenge makes it less relaxing than old favorites like SMAC.

KPC_Mammon
Jan 23, 2004

Ready for the fashy circle jerk

LLSix posted:

Old world maybe?

Old World is a well balanced and challenging game, but that same challenge makes it less relaxing than old favorites like SMAC.

How much of SMAC's cozy feeling is from knowing it really well, including things like crawler exploits?

I've not played Old World yet but is there a chance it might feel relaxing looking back at it decades later?

I really liked AoW2 and briefly played AoW3 multiplayer competitively but bounced off Planetfall really hard because everything being so different visually overwhelmed my brain at the time. If I had stuck with it I doubt it would've stayed a problem.

Veryslightlymad
Jun 3, 2007

I fight with
my brain
and with an
underlying
hatred of the
Erebonian
Noble Faction
There are zero genres of games that would benefit from a chat bot.

Diplomacy in these games absolutely needs a rework, but through what options are allowed and how things like territory are modeled.

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

Making an AI pretend to be human is about the worst possible application of AI I can think of, and also simultaneously the one application people are actually excited about. That is not an encouraging sign.

Trying to engage in real person-to-person diplomacy with a machine during a game sounds like a hell that no one in the world would enjoy more than once as a novelty.

The Chad Jihad
Feb 24, 2007


Theres some pretty cool proof of concept mods for CK3 and Bannerlord that use AI bots for chatter with nobles and peasants

LordSloth
Mar 7, 2008

Disgruntled (IT) Employee

Veryslightlymad posted:

There are zero genres of games that would benefit from a chat bot.

The Sims?

Back on topic, I’m curious if anyone has hands-on experience with Stellar Sovereigns. It has a pretty lukewarm reception on steam (60% positive of a uselessly small sample of 10 reviews) and no metacritic coverage despite a March 8th release date.

From what I’ve gathered it has turn-based 4x and real-time combat, with some inspiration from Sword of the Stars. It’s been out on itch.io for two or so years, has more emphasis on the 4x side than SotS, and is lacking in quality of life. This summary is all very third-hand. I might poke around YouTube for curiosity’s sake but I’m surprised by the lack of written reviews.

Atarask
Mar 8, 2008

Lord of Rigel Developer
Well I can't speak to Stellar Sovereigns but they're kinda doing the same thing we are trying to do with LoR with the MOO2 type economy and SotS styled combat:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/437440/Lord_of_Rigel/

But super tiny team (two coders, an artist) plugging away at it part time for a while...

At this point we're trying to do a lot of user feedback input before more major additions (AI tuning, Elder Species, and adjustments to tactical).

So to weigh in on AI in 4x: It's hard. A lot harder than people realize as even with laying out various modules at different levels for utility AIs and individual utility scores that make consistent sense you can have:
*Differences in what is "optimal" between developer and players. You might think a balance of food output and mineral output is what the AI should weigh but players might decide one or the other is what they expect an AI t do.
*How to communicate what the AI is doing.
*Unexpected behaviors. For instance we had an issue where balanced AIs weighted expansion above getting into conflicts because larger galaxies had lots of potential resources and it decided that make more sense and tried very hard to avoid wars. This made it seem like it was passive because it'd only begin wars after the player attacked and tried very hard to sue for peace and/or raise relations. If tied in with a "building tall" AI it'd come off as an AI stalling and being passive although from its own perspective it was going "hey I got lots of places to expand to, no reason to get angry, and I should just happily turtle" even though it was a more "balanced" AI.

In some cases gutting out things and making it simple and very predictable in a clearly communicated way is the best thing to do.

Definitely building a 4x is more like a deck of cards and all it can take is a rounding issue on inputted data, or different assumptions when building a system to get very different outcoms.

Atarask fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Apr 11, 2023

Lowen
Mar 16, 2007

Adorable.

Veryslightlymad posted:

Separate the AI victory condition from the player's, entirely.

No thanks.

I like 4X games in general, and part of the formula (for me) is there are different nations that are all playing the same game, more or less.

The only way I want AI players to play a different game is: they're the antagonists and supporting cast for the main character that I'm playing in my 4X game. That's what I want a 4X game to be, a kind of procedural epic drama between characters that are entire civilizations personified.

I'm not saying that's my fantasy dream 4X, I'm saying that's how I play actual existing 4X games and why I generally enjoy them so much. I just want a good epic story where I'm playing the main hero, or villain, or just some average nation caught up in all the drama of history, trying to survive and stay independent. Most of my favorite 4X games have given me the widest variety of stories, the most dramatic, or both.

If the AI opponents are playing a completely different game, or just cheating in specific unfun ways (like being extra hostile to the player, or getting huge advantages at the start that compound too much), then they can't feel like they're characters. At that point it's not a 4X game anymore, it's just some other kind of strategy game.

I think there's room for more fun victory conditions in 4X games. I like the idea of secret, unique objectives each player (including computer players) drafts before the game. I think I've heard this idea mentioned by others a few times in this thread. I think it could work with AI players in a conventional 4X game well enough, they've already been made to have different feeling personalities and tendencies to go for different conventional victory conditions.

Veryslightlymad posted:

Make the game continue after the AI has "won" to see if you also win, and make the AI player absolutely insufferable with gloating if they achieve their victory. Then make a separate mode of difficulty that, in addition to your normal victory conditions, also requires you preventing every AI from reaching their objectives.

Yeah! I would love to be able to continue 4X games to the very end and have multiple players finish in different goals or different places in the same goal. Even if the human player is eliminated they should be able to watch the rest of the game played by the remaining AI. Being able to respawn as barbarians or rebels somewhere or take over one of the AI players could also be fun options.

Lowen fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Apr 11, 2023

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


The Chad Jihad posted:

Theres some pretty cool proof of concept mods for CK3 and Bannerlord that use AI bots for chatter with nobles and peasants

See, I think that’s too much. I just want that interaction with a very limited number of AI.

Veryslightlymad posted:

There are zero genres of games that would benefit from a chat bot.

Diplomacy in these games absolutely needs a rework, but through what options are allowed and how things like territory are modeled.

The literal game of Diplomacy has benefited from having a chat bot. If you’ve ever played that against a regular CPU opponent, you’d get why a chat bot is important there. Anyone who says there are zero use cases, or that it’s always bad, really just have no imagination or just want the same old poo poo forever. I want something new.

Theswarms
Dec 20, 2005
Did the game benefit from having a chat bot or did the chat bot just do well at the game?

Panzeh
Nov 27, 2006

"..The high ground"
To be fair, for Diplomacy, there really isn't much to it other than diplomacy. The actual game mechanics have been trivially adapted, but none of the adaptations have produced a decent way to do diplomacy with AI opponents. A lot of them end up just having pre-baked icons where you can make basic proposals to the AI opponents, like mutual bounces, proposed supports, etc. This is one application where a decent chatbot would probably improve the possibility space. That being said, i don't know how interesting an experience chatbot diplomacy would be like.

I'm just not sure it's a very good technology or mechanic for opponents in a 4x game.

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!
I guess the theory is that chatbots would enable players to play Diplomacy without having to get other players together which I guess enables other sorts of play.

But AI Diplomacy seems like a really pointless game. The point of Diplomacy isn't the very basic deterministic strategy game, it's the social gaming, picking up on cues, tricking and being tricked and so on.

Whereas an AI (at least in the way Cicero does it) just entirely separates away the chat layer from the strategy layer. It's not tricking you about its intentions, the chat AI simply doesn't know what the strategy AI's intentions are. There can be no cues, everything in there is just an obfuscated version of PLAYER X, DO THIS.

Really Cicero could probably work without the chatbot at all, just giving standard PLAYER X, DO THIS type output. Though I suspect the very fact that the chat output wastes other players time is of benefit to it in winning Blitz games.

Veryslightlymad
Jun 3, 2007

I fight with
my brain
and with an
underlying
hatred of the
Erebonian
Noble Faction
The diplomacy used in Diplomacy is nothing I want in a 4x game.

The less 4x games need to depend on "war, only war" to get things done, the better.

A Wizard of Goatse
Dec 14, 2014

yeah idk I accept immediately that there's going to be a large and enthusiastic audience for a game that trains guys with no friends to talk like they're trying to brute-force your activation codephrase, but I'm not sure "strategy games" use the s-word in the same way as "dating strategy"

That Guy Bob
Apr 30, 2009
Let's not make APM into WPM.

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

Lowen posted:

No thanks.

Do you dislike Stellaris for this reason, considering many of the AI's explicitly playing a different game from the players in some way, with more or less variance? Fallen Empires, Prethoryns, Extradimensionals, machine empires, genocide civs, contingency,

Honestly, I feel like it creates a very fun dynamic and is, mechanically, one of the few things I genuinely love about the game. There are are a variety of obstacles that must be dealt with in different ways if my civilization wants to thrive and succeed.

There are also some civs who are playing roughly the same game, which is nice, but I appreciate the variety.

Fangz posted:

But AI Diplomacy seems like a really pointless game. The point of Diplomacy isn't the very basic deterministic strategy game, it's the social gaming, picking up on cues, tricking and being tricked and so on.

Just AI diplomacy is pointless, sure, but you don't see the fun potential in being able to fill a game with AI stand-ins if you can only get one or two friends to play?

Also, in my personal experience it absolutely does lie. It doesn't lie often, at all, which makes it all the worse when it catches you with one, but it definitely seems to sometimes say things that it considers to be useful for prompting desired responses regardless of whether or not they are true. Maybe that's just it making "useful mistakes" rather than intentional lying, but based on what I understand of the model I'm not so sure. From what I understand, the "almost never lying" situation is a place it eventually ended up at because it worked the best, not because it was incapable of deceit, and it lied a lot earlier on in development.

I wonder moreso how good it is at detecting whether or not a player is lying to it - it certainly doesn't seem to take agreements at face value and trust completely, but it also does seem to take them into account to some extent. It's hard to tell what's going on behind the mask, of course, but that is honestly what makes it useful here?

GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Apr 11, 2023

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!
The developer explicitly said it's designed to never intentionally lie. The chat part of the program can potentially *miscommunicate* due to language generation being a crapshoot, but it doesn't have a notion of manipulation.

The developers did try implementing deception but abandoned the approach because the system was not able to do it effectively.

quote:

Just AI diplomacy is pointless, sure, but you don't see the fun potential in being able to fill a game with AI stand-ins if you can only get one or two friends to play?

Yes, it's still pointless once you get over the novelty value. The entire game becomes largely a matter of RNG. Go play another game instead.

Fangz fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Apr 11, 2023

Super Jay Mann
Nov 6, 2008

Deception in general is an integral part of human (hell, any animal) communication that just can’t be done with current or future ML models of its ilk. They can lie, sure, and they can to an extent “verify” if something a user inputs into them conflicts with their training data, but that’s not really what “deception” in communication entails. It’s a huge, massive blind spot in language modeling in particular that can’t be addressed with just more time and more data.

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


It can intentionally not reply to people and excuse it with being distracted, like real people do in a Blitz game

Orange Devil
Oct 1, 2010

Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Panzeh posted:

This is generally why you don't see companies try to use experience to develop the AI post-release, it's really not all that good a selling point. Most people seem to be playing these games more as elaborate sim city-type sims than as competitive games.

I think 4X players, significantly more than those of other genres, haven't the faintest clue what exactly it is they actually enjoy about the game they are playing.

And to be fair, I think the vast msjority have sn extremely poor grasp on how the game mechanics actually function and don't particularly care to find out.

I'm not going to judge how others have fun, but it makes it very difficult to take seriously thougths on game design.

Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Apr 11, 2023

A Wizard of Goatse
Dec 14, 2014

it's not that hard bro I want little dudes and they find an iron vein or a million year old space monolith or something and fight other little dudes over it, and my guys win cause I told em to do something clever like mug the other guys' support guy first and then they build a little fort on the thing. that's the good poo poo, if you're doing stuff that isn't in service to that you're wasting my time

if you really wanna revolutionize the medium you can let me plot a little choo choo train between the iron mine and the smelter later but most games aren't that sophisticated so they just tell you to click a button that adds +4% tedium per turn and that's fine too, I guess

Veryslightlymad
Jun 3, 2007

I fight with
my brain
and with an
underlying
hatred of the
Erebonian
Noble Faction

Orange Devil posted:

I think 4X players, significantly more than those of other genres, haven't the faintest clue what exactly it is they actually enjoy about the game they are playing.

And to be fair, I think the vast msjority have sn extremely poor grasp on how the game mechanics actually function and don't particularly care to find out.

I'm not going to judge how others have fun, but it makes it very difficult to take seriously thougths on game design.

What if I told you.... I think Civilization is pretty bad and backward, and the things I thought I would like about other games actually are the things I like about other games.

It's me, I'm the guy who earnestly loves the system Humankind has for changing cultures, and my biggest problems with the game stems from how it deals with other systems entirely.

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


I’m more a fan of your Solium Infernums, Twilight Imperiums, multiplayer Paradox games, things of that sort. I also love Koei’s strategy games, like specifically Pacific Theatre of Operations 2 (which is not a 4X but has that card system similar to what we’d later see in Star Ruler 2, but for meetings within your country determining goals and resource allocations) and the Romance of the Three Kingdom series, particularly the ones with the wonderful debate mini games. While I do really enjoy those mechanics and never want to see them go away entirely, I would see literally anything replace the lovely old drop down list of terms and items with the loving numerical indicator of how good this deal is.

Infidelicious
Apr 9, 2013

Orange Devil posted:

I think 4X players, significantly more than those of other genres, haven't the faintest clue what exactly it is they actually enjoy about the game they are playing.

And to be fair, I think the vast msjority have sn extremely poor grasp on how the game mechanics actually function and don't particularly care to find out.

Fairly certain it's a combination of number go up and a little story going on where your plucky little civ has some struggles, overcomes adversity and then you run away with the game due to your superior planning and strategic acumen.

Frankly, very few people want to play a game for 6-10 hours and lose.


OctaMurk
Jun 21, 2013
I want to play a game where I play for 6 to 10 hours, feel like i might lose but then I pull a massive comeback like a strategix genius

Make ai good but then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

A Wizard of Goatse
Dec 14, 2014

Losing can be OK in the right game, like you said they're little story generators and "everything goes to hell" is a valid story, but you gotta make it interesting not just 10 hours of getting slowly but inevitably ground into dust by bigger numbers and none of the big constantly-imitated 4x games can even make winning interesting lmao

part of the reason I'm so gung ho about SOTS is the emphasis on micro and bullshit tricks you don't need the biggest number to pull off means it's one of the few where a losing player can be relevant right up to the end, and consequently it's possible to persuade a normal person to play it with you more than once

A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Apr 12, 2023

Lowen
Mar 16, 2007

Adorable.

GlyphGryph posted:

Do you dislike Stellaris for this reason, considering many of the AI's explicitly playing a different game from the players in some way, with more or less variance? Fallen Empires, Prethoryns, Extradimensionals, machine empires, genocide civs, contingency,

If by this reason you mean do I dislike Stellaris for reasons related to something I mentioned in my post, then yes.
If you mean any of the specific reasons you wrote down, then no. Or maybe kind of?

Stellaris has AI empires that are made with the same rules the player uses, engage with the same diplomatic systems that the player can use, colonize and develop their empires more or less like a player, etc. So in that respect it is exactly what I said I need an 4X to be like. Fallen Empires, endgame crisises and similar doesn't make it fundamentally different from other 4x games, because those games do something similar with barbarians (Civ), minor nations(Imperialism 2), or space eels(Moo2). Or just other similar stuff. Whereas if it just didn't have the standard, human like AI empires, then that would be fundamentally different from what a 4X game must be for me.

So how does my post relate to disliking Stellaris? Well, as I was saying - competing or cooperating for different win conditions seems to naturally, procedurally create drama and different dramatic roles for AI players to jump into during 4X games. Stellaris doesn't have any win conditions for anyone at all. So I would expect it to really suffer on the drama front as a direct consequence, and it does. Here's an example of an actual game of Civ4 I played for comparison:

It's late in the game. My tiny 3 city empire has fought off hoards of enemy tanks from a runaway military AI player, using the entrance to my home peninsula as a chokepoint. Eventually it becomes too much and my defenses crumble! Enemy tanks started pouring in and are going to assault my capital city next turn. But my spaceship is done just in time. I launch it and win a science victory. Wow! Heroic sacrifice against incredible odds, followed by a last minute escape! That's exactly why I spend hundreds of hours playing these games.

If I manage to do the same kind of chokepoint defense in Stellaris, my only reward is I go to chokepoint jail. I can't even try to do anything interesting in that game at all and should probably just throw away the hours and hours I've spent playing it to start a new one. Without win conditions the only real way to advance an empire to any definite end is to expand, and none of the Stellaris AIs are actively trying to do that, or anything else, as near as I can tell. There's no drama, just slow snowballing, or stalemates that can't go anywhere, because there's nowhere to go.

GlyphGryph posted:

Honestly, I feel like it creates a very fun dynamic and is, mechanically, one of the few things I genuinely love about the game. There are are a variety of obstacles that must be dealt with in different ways if my civilization wants to thrive and succeed.

It's not really what I was talking about in my post, see above. But my estimation of the end game crisises in Stellaris is they aren't very good. I've seen and defeated all 3 and personally didn't enjoy them very much.

I think there are existing space 4X games that do something similar, but better. The escalating Antarian raids in MoO2 for example don't just spawn in the endgame - they start small relatively early on and well, escalate. They could attack anywhere next with no warning, so they don't just ruin one player in particular unless that player is unlucky or really ahead in expansion.

Then there are the various SotS crisises that did each something totally unique and would actually change in threat level based on how regular players interacted with events, like the VN Berserker. Stellaris endgame threats all want to take over the galaxy, and the way they try to do that is by using fleets that they spawn in. The fleets they spawn in do the exact same things normal empire fleets do, in the exact same way, and have the same mix of 4 (5 now?) different ship sizes that normal empires also use.

The crisisis in Stellaris don't really have any special mechanics that I can actually engage with. The contingency subverts synths and bots, but that's something that just kind of happens until I fix it, not something I can play around with. They don't do anything special like blow up entire stars or subvert fleets like any of the SotS endgame threats can. If I keep beating them they won't start to see me as a threat and counter attack like the AI wars threat mechanic does. In FFH2, players can summon and ally with the forces of heaven or hell, and there are special win conditions tied doing so. No one can summon or make any kind of deals with the end game crisises in Stellaris. They're all so boring!

GlyphGryph posted:

There are also some civs who are playing roughly the same game, which is nice, but I appreciate the variety.

That's true. Some of the special faction events in Stellaris are actually kind good, like the War in Heaven and the Khan. I do feel like 4X games (including Stellaris) are too time consuming to play through them just so you can play through a static scripted event once.

To clarify - I don't hate Stellaris, I've had some a few good times with it and is has generated some drama. It has some neat ideas nothing else has done and which might be fine. I've enjoyed Victoria 2/EU3/CK2 in the past but playing Stellaris has really soured me on the whole formula and I haven't touched any grand strategy games since.

SIGSEGV
Nov 4, 2010


A thing I like about the SotS independent random attacks is that if the game detects that you've spent too long without a fight, and that's like two rounds of peace after a ten round grace at game start, it'll start launching random events and attacks at you. Also, if you modify the game files to get sensor coverage of the entire play area, independents don't stop spawning, both unlike Stellaris.


Man, imagine if the SotS people had made a second SotS, the wonders we could have seen, or even, what if space 4X, or really, any 4X designers had integrated lessons from SotS in their games, the future would be a brighter, kinder place.

SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Apr 12, 2023

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

Lowen posted:

To clarify - I don't hate Stellaris, I've had some a few good times with it and is has generated some drama. It has some neat ideas nothing else has done and which might be fine. I've enjoyed Victoria 2/EU3/CK2 in the past but playing Stellaris has really soured me on the whole formula and I haven't touched any grand strategy games since.

I agree with pretty much everything you said here, so I think we're maybe miscommunicating somehow?

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Lowen
Mar 16, 2007

Adorable.

GlyphGryph posted:

I agree with pretty much everything you said here, so I think we're maybe miscommunicating somehow?

Not at all! Just sharing my opinions, I wasn't sure if they agreed with yours or not.

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