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I like espionage in HoI2 pre-doomsday. Your encryption, gained by techs, is compared to the enemy's encryption tech to see how much you know about their stacks, composition, tech research, etc. Now just add a slight RNG that you can boost or defund to represent the human factor instead of fancier computer = better than maybe, and bing bang boom, done.
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Mar 18, 2021 14:56
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Zeron posted:I can agree that I don't think I've ever seen an espionage system in a strategy game that I liked. It's like ship designer, but worse. You want it in your game cause it sounds cool and evokes all those movies and books. You can add a lot of complexity to those systems. But you will never make ship design or espionage *too* important in a game about ruling an empire. So it becomes a fiddly separate system with a very little value but you still need to use it. Master of Orion 2 is often cited as the best thing ever and usually I don't agree. But it had a nice espionage system. You produce spies. You put them on defense or on offense against enemies. Maybe sometimes they do something not too important. They were basically that game version of PDX random events. Not transparent, hard to use reliably, but that's what subterfuge should be about. Just putting several spies on defense is a valid strategy, just do that if you don't want to get involved much.
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Mar 18, 2021 15:06
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Looks like the DLC subscription thing for EU4 is available to everyone now similar to CK2. https://twitter.com/E_Universalis/status/1372493268269854722 Also Stellaris is still good even with all the jank. Exploring and RPing your space empire is a good enough time to make the other fiddly stuff worth it IMO.
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Mar 18, 2021 15:22
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Anno posted:Also Stellaris is still good even with all the jank. Exploring and RPing your space empire is a good enough time to make the other fiddly stuff worth it IMO. There's other fiddly stuff I don't like but they're easier to just not engage with. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Mar 18, 2021 |
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Mar 18, 2021 15:28
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Splicer posted:I absolutely feel you on the technical debt which is why last week's diary made my quite hopeful: Bold Robot posted:
also lmao at that emote
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Mar 18, 2021 15:28
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Splicer posted:I find the fiddlyness of the specifics of the current building unlock system interferes with my space rping too much, so I'm really looking forward to the new districts and the infrastructure changes. The infrastructure changes are very appealing for sure. I think it helps that I really only play at normal speed so it’s easy to just poke around addressing those things as they come up without it being every minute or something.
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Mar 18, 2021 15:38
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:The system in HoI4 is not nice. Its 100% RNG dependent tedious busywork for small yet useful bonuses that you need if you want to play optimally or win in a tough situation. Its overly complicated, expensive, and yet can net you *nothing* because the AI has perfect micro and RNG can easily gently caress you. It killed HoI4 for me and is another nail in the coffin of Stellaris. I agree with this post, these games are fiddlier than ever against AI with perfect micro and timer recall
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Mar 18, 2021 15:40
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ilitarist posted:It's like ship designer, but worse. I literally came here to post this, espionage is like the unit designer, a feature that fans will broadly say that they want even though it usually makes the game worse in strategy terms (both are generally just busy work filled with false choices)
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Mar 18, 2021 16:49
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:I agree with this post, these games are fiddlier than ever against AI with perfect micro and timer recall lol the AI isn't good at the game You can literally use the AI to move your troops for you in HoI4 and it doesn't do a good job
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Mar 18, 2021 16:56
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RabidWeasel posted:I literally came here to post this, espionage is like the unit designer, a feature that fans will broadly say that they want even though it usually makes the game worse in strategy terms (both are generally just busy work filled with false choices)
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Mar 18, 2021 17:11
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I'm not a fan of stellaris' ship designer because its full of busy work and no real choices. It doesn't really impact how you play the game and, choosing to field a carrier-centric fleet doesn't impact anything other than forcing your opponents to slap on some point defense. It's really just shifting around a bunch of numbers from one column to the other. In certain games like Star Drive 2, the way you design your ships will actually impact how you fight battles because they are real-time. Like obviously in a Total War game, being able to customize your army is central to the experience and a key determination of how you play. But in a game like stellaris, it would be better to just have set types and choose which to produce based on strategic and economic concerns. Choosing to have lasers or mass drivers on your corvettes isn't a meaningful choice in the game.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:32
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Dramicus posted:In certain games like Star Drive 2, the way you design your ships will actually impact how you fight battles because they are real-time. Like obviously in a Total War game, being able to customize your army is central to the experience and a key determination of how you play. But in a game like stellaris, it would be better to just have set types and choose which to produce based on strategic and economic concerns. Choosing to have lasers or mass drivers on your corvettes isn't a meaningful choice in the game. This doesn't mean you necessarily need a ship designer, you just need the game to contain ships with designs that differ in interesting ways. Unless the game has enough variety in its ship designer that it allows you to come up with entirely novel and exciting designs by combining multiple other aspects together in unexpected ways.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:46
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For a game like Stellaris your choices should be "I'm an energy weapons empire" or "I'm a big guns and missiles empire" not "Hmm do I want ship design number 14 to have two shields four armour or three shields three armour or four shields two armour"
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Mar 18, 2021 17:57
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Gort posted:lol the AI isn't good at the game The problem is like in EU4 where the AI can seamlessly shuttle its diplomats around to be able to constantly have one on your empire, so they have +10 Siege Ability and you are getting afflicted with +2 unrest, -10% trade income, -20% recruitment speed, ect ect AT ALL TIMES because the AI can flawlessly maintain its diplomats regardless of whatever else it is doing. Meanwhile me as a player - I need to set a reminder to not forget to re-activate something in 20 years' game time, which could be a session or two later. In HoI4 the AI can manage its spies perfectly, so whatever its flawed AI brain decides it wants to do, it does it exactly when and where it wants to do it. AAAAA! Real Muenster fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Mar 18, 2021 |
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Mar 18, 2021 18:10
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ilitarist posted:You want it in your game cause it sounds cool and evokes all those movies and books. You can add a lot of complexity to those systems. But you will never make ship design or espionage *too* important in a game about ruling an empire. Yes, I just want Stellaris 2 to push all kinds of extremes, no matter how unbalanced. Yes, please make it so your supreme leader can put all their effort into ascension, turning them into an actual physical unit within the game that can only be taken out by actual military might.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:22
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RabidWeasel posted:This doesn't mean you necessarily need a ship designer, you just need the game to contain ships with designs that differ in interesting ways. Unless the game has enough variety in its ship designer that it allows you to come up with entirely novel and exciting designs by combining multiple other aspects together in unexpected ways. Personally I would like a ship designer to stay, but with the decisions matching the benefits. Do cruisers and Dreadnaughts really need three distinct, freely mix-and-matchable sections when all most of them do is adjust your gun size?
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Mar 18, 2021 18:30
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Meanwhile me as a player - I need to set a reminder to not forget to re-activate something in 20 years' game time, which could be a session or two later. Is there a way to do this in EU4 that I've been overlooking? It would be really cool if I could set an alert for when a certain unit reaches its destination, like when I'm sending a fleet on a four-month voyage.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:37
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Under message settings you can set it up to present a popup and pause when a military unit reaches its destination, but that can be annoying to have on in the rest of the game.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:59
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Is there a way to do this in EU4 that I've been overlooking? It would be really cool if I could set an alert for when a certain unit reaches its destination, like when I'm sending a fleet on a four-month voyage.
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Mar 18, 2021 19:22
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RabidWeasel posted:This doesn't mean you necessarily need a ship designer, you just need the game to contain ships with designs that differ in interesting ways. Unless the game has enough variety in its ship designer that it allows you to come up with entirely novel and exciting designs by combining multiple other aspects together in unexpected ways. Well for example the game lets you make a ship that moves like a glacier, and has all its armor and weapons facing forward and is like a barely mobile bunker. Great for attacking planets and stations, but vulnerable to fast ships that can zip around and stay outside it's firing arcs. You can make glass cannons that have only one enormous cannon and you zip them to the rear of enemy ships where their armor is thinner and let loose. Or you can make anything in between. You can have a carrier task-force with durable screening escorts whose only job is to keep the enemy ships away from the carriers, not to actually win a fight. It's a quite flexible system. Hell you can set your ships to fight broad-side only, like old ships of the line.
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Mar 18, 2021 19:30
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The only shipbuilder games should have is one that only affects how loving sick your spaceships look.
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Mar 18, 2021 19:32
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Dramicus posted:Well for example the game lets you make a ship that moves like a glacier, and has all its armor and weapons facing forward and is like a barely mobile bunker. Great for attacking planets and stations, but vulnerable to fast ships that can zip around and stay outside it's firing arcs. I ask because that kind of gameplay sounds appealing to me after years of trying to find a way to enjoy Stellaris's wonky combat system.
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Mar 18, 2021 19:37
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Gort posted:lol the AI isn't good at the game
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Mar 18, 2021 20:21
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Is Stardrive2 still being supported? I had been on the hype train for Stardrive1 but when the dev had a meltdown in the SA thread then quit supporting 1 before it was done so he could make Stardrive2 I never bothered. Yeah, the dev has recently started patching and updating it again. Apparently he plans to continue updating it until it hits "remastered" status or whatever that means. Anyway, he's certainly been patching relatively frequently these past few weeks.
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Mar 18, 2021 21:14
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 In terms of knock on effects I think this is the most any of my paradox campaigns have ever changed history, and only two years in Also, "Ruma", yes I'm the one downloading all the "10,000+ dynamic localized province names!" mods for every paradox game.
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Mar 20, 2021 02:12
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I still can't get over just how bad that UI is.
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Mar 20, 2021 02:15
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Yeah the army markers on the map look terrible
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Mar 20, 2021 02:28
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Is this modded or does I:R really look like this? If so, 
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Mar 20, 2021 05:20
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Time to introduce Imperator: Dark Mode
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Mar 20, 2021 07:05
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I think the new UI is great but then I always hated EU and CK's UIs for mostly being different shades of brown. The army markers still suck though.
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Mar 20, 2021 10:31
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My only problem with Imperator's UI is that box selection prioritises fleets over armies for some reason.
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Mar 20, 2021 10:44
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YF-23 posted:My only problem with Imperator's UI is that box selection prioritises fleets over armies for some reason. It's so weird. Some Paradox games do this right, but others just don't care. What really fucks me off is, when you load an army on to a fleet, the game doesn't automatically select the fleet the way it does in EU. Anyway, I like the new UI for the most part. A lot of it is a sidegrade, to be sure, but I got so drat tired of looking at all that white marble.
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Mar 20, 2021 13:40
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:It's so weird. Some Paradox games do this right, but others just don't care. What really fucks me off is, when you load an army on to a fleet, the game doesn't automatically select the fleet the way it does in EU. I think it does if you load them via the embarkation button, but that requires the fleet to be in port. But yeah, super inconsistent.
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Mar 20, 2021 14:16
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The red bits should change to match your country colour
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Mar 20, 2021 14:17
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Stelllaris is a disaster and I hope the announcement is a second version. Every single time I've played that game and reached the "great Kahn" event, it just fizzled out without barely bothering anyone. The AI is also incredibly chicken poo poo and will refuse to invade you, and in the off chance it does declare war on you, it just refuses to defend its territory and will cross half the galaxy to hit your undefended, worthless border sectors on the other side of the empire. Which, to be fair, isn't a fault exclusive to stelllaris, it's just a general issue of paradox AI being terrible at playing the game.
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Mar 20, 2021 14:42
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Mans posted:Which, to be fair, isn't a fault exclusive to stelllaris, it's just a general issue of paradox AI being terrible at playing the game. It's the eternal problem where you have part of the player base who wants the AI to be there as a competitor and threat and the other part just wants them as a flavourful set of punching bags to beat up or backdrops to look at while you do your own thing.
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Mar 20, 2021 14:58
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There was a time very early on in Stellaris' lifecycle where the AI could at least field giants fleets that I could enjoy watching my ships tear through like paper. In later patches they never seem to scrape together enough more than a handful of battleships, and once you blow up their main fleet they never recover. Like, it was never a threat, but fighting it was at least a spectacle. With the Khan in particular, that boy spawns with hugeass stacks that will absolutely annihilate anything short of an FE at that point in the game, but seems to have this problem where he'll take one or two systems with it, then shuffle it over to the entire other side of his empire, take another two systems, then move it to a third front- the fleet spends 90% of its time moving from front to front. I think the AI is trained to be cautious in ways that make sense when you're fighting a peer threat but are maladaptive when you have overwhelming superiority.
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Mar 20, 2021 15:12
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RabidWeasel posted:It's the eternal problem where you have part of the player base who wants the AI to be there as a competitor and threat and the other part just wants them as a flavourful set of punching bags to beat up or backdrops to look at while you do your own thing. e: if you're making a poker game there's arguments for giving every AI player perfect knowledge vs coding a number of bots each with their own personality and betting strategy. Nobody wants to play a game of poker where the AI goes all in on a royal flush then immediately folds. Or one that thinks it's playing gin* *OK maybe Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Mar 20, 2021 |
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Mar 20, 2021 16:54
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The common problem with AI is the issue is often not the AI skill and mechanical sophistication but balancing. People often say that 4X games can't have good AI cause they're too complex. That's bullshit because 4X games are not chess. You don't care about AI using bad build orders or designing inferior ships. In 4X games you care about armies AI sends your way, their understanding of power dynamics, reacting to player actions. I remember how people were exciting by Galactic Civilizations 2 AI telling players "I see you gather fleets on my borders, what's up with that" which is a very simple logic. Perhaps on a higher level of play simple AIs are too exploitable and predictable for good players, but what we see today is often an impotent AI that can't present an interesting challenge even to a newb. Stellaris understands that by providing end game crisis, neutrals and Leviathans. My guess is that they needed multiplayer and thus most of the game is about interacting with those boring symmetrical empires.
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Mar 20, 2021 18:04
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no ai in any paradox game has ever been remotely good and it seems incredibly likely that they will never be remotely good because thats not a design priority for anyone involved in these games. the challenge in paradox games is always going to be the starting circumstances and then, in some games, some big event nation that spawns with essentially infinite units.
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Mar 20, 2021 18:23
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