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Drone posted:I don't think you understand what fundamental design means. I don't think Stellaris is fundamentally terribly interesting. In fact it's a very rote copy of other space 4x games in many many ways but done worse. Yes, there are random species but it doesn't amount to much- the bonuses aren't terribly significant one way or the other and most of them tend to not be very interesting anyway. The sector mechanics are a bad fix for the problem they have, the combat is uninteresting, the diplomacy doesn't work that well, the AI is bad, and the game is super easy.
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Jun 5, 2016 11:43
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Antti posted:I think this is spot on. I also think this is why the AI is a little "dumb" out of the box. They aimed to balance it so that people who can't or won't micromanage their front can have a good time in the base game from day one. But it also means that a human player who knows what he's doing can crush the AI, leading to people complaining about the game being too "casual." Mind you this is not an excuse for the AI completely misprioritizing fronts or leaving them entirely empty, but they couldn't balance the game around someone who's played every single HOI game since HOI1 either if they wanted to sell more than 5000 copies. They do need to improve the battleplanner if they're going to work it this way, though, particularly in making it so you can get units to break through instead of dressing the lines endlessly. Right now if you want to do anything except broad pushes you have to use manual control because even if you get breakthroughs it will sometimes poo poo itself making new mini-fronts and assigning units weirdly.
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Jun 15, 2016 11:06
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Gort posted:Was the alpha any good? I had a vague interest in it a couple of years back. I got it, there's some interesting stuff with it, but it's tied to about five influences and it doesn't work very well past the very beginning. If you were to ask me, it has way too many tries to have 'characters' which tends to add micromanagement that the game doesn't need. The clans being interchangable is a lot better than them having feuds and going crazy so you have to change their jobs a lot, etc. It also, as has been said, has no late/middle game.
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Nov 24, 2017 16:49
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There hasnt been a good victorian era game since Imperialism.
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Nov 28, 2017 20:58
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:I bought Imperialism 1 & 2 from GOG recently and quite enjoyed them, but there's a lot of 90s game design in them, meaning plenty of busy work that really could be automated. A new version would be fantastic. Yeah, like, when you play optimally using trade, it takes a lot of work between turns, but otherwise the game has not a lot of micro just due to the way production works. Everything's on one screen, clean, and the rest is just connecting it to your capital.
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Nov 29, 2017 00:57
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DrSunshine posted:I like Victoria 2 because it's the only strategy game I've ever played where I can institute Full Communism Now and feel like it actually means something. Other games like Civ and Alpha Centauri had stuff labeled "Planned Economy" or "Communism", but it was all just sort of abstract bonuses. The problem is, it kinda turns out, full communism now is probably the most interesting kind of gameplay in a strict sense. I mean, victoria 2 is interesting in its own way, and it's a interesting give/take. If capitalism means an AI plays your economic game for you, it's really hard to make it good or interesting. A good economic gameplay with different sets of bonuses is probably more interesting in game terms than having varied levels of economic gaameplay, some good, some not.
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Nov 29, 2017 18:55
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RabidWeasel posted:This doesn't necessarily have to be the case, if there was more sophisticated modelling of government policy used to influence capitalist behaviour it could be very interesting. And potentially, full state planned economics doesn't have to mean "just click here to build factory", depending on how the game is structured. Well, the modelling of government policy to influence capitalist(and state-planned project) behavior is yet another thing- adding more buttons and mechanics made to kinda work, which is by design, and definitely realistic, but not particularly fun in gameplay. Even the USSR, when they wanted to start a project, had a bureaucracy to go to that diffused control- idea to implenetation was a uncertain process. Imagine playing Hearts of Iron and clicking to move your division to a province? That's a very video game way of simulating the role at the highest level. In reality, it would be someone up top choosing a commander who chooses to do this and that and at the end of this big, bureaucratic process.. that division ends up being a reserve for another operation. Fintilgin posted:I'd gut Victoria and design a fun game in its place instead of a broken simulation, and every one would hate me forever. Same.
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Nov 29, 2017 19:10
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Actually building a bunch of buildings on planets in games where you should be able to control three digit numbers of them is wasteful and it'd be better off as moo1 style sliders.
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May 23, 2018 12:05
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I get so much poo poo on the pdox forums for suggesting that european technological domination wrt asia was neither inevitable nor overwhelming in the eu4 time period.
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Jun 3, 2018 12:17
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Tomn posted:There's an indie game called Stellar Monarch whose mission statement is basically this. "You're an Emperor, you don't have to give a poo poo about all the details, your underlings will handle that while you do the big picture." Yeah, it's a good game and probably the best at making running a big empire fun because it looks at things in the big picture.
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Jun 6, 2018 10:49
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V2's economics is a fine example of why you actually have to design mechanics and use abstraction, making something actually player-facing rather than a black box that doesn't really work.
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Jun 8, 2018 11:32
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Jazerus posted:why, exactly? i think v2's economic system does a pretty great job of simulating the way nations were tossed and turned by grand forces beyond their full control. the specifics of how it works inside the black box are a weird libertarian-ish nightmare (that laissez faire *still* fails within, which is funny) but the idea of a black box economy is a perfect fit for the period. abstraction and simplification aren't always good, even if they usually are. CharlestheHammer posted:Yeah if you perfectly understood what is happening and can min max it then Vicky would lose everything that made it interesting. It creates systems that a profoundly uninteresting to actually play. It's fun to talk about, but it's not really interesting to play. You can min max it- the epitome of a good system is when you min max it, and it's actually fun to work with- it gives you different solutions at different times, you have to adapt. This is nothing like what Vicky 2 has on offer. It's a lot like distant worlds in a bunch of stuff happening but it's not interesting as a player at all- it boils down to one thing.
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Jun 8, 2018 19:09
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Jazerus posted:the economy isn't there to be fiddled with and min-maxed though. it's there so that due to the random vagaries of the world market you end up wanting to be in a stupid war just to seize the prussians' goddamn artillery monopoly, or whatever. it's an outside force that shapes your desires and leads you on idiotic military ventures for tea. that's a lot of work to end up with that CharlestheHammer posted:It was interesting to play. vicky is insanely uninteresting as it is
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Jun 8, 2018 20:04
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Crazycryodude posted:Wow this is a really bad series of opinions can't account for people's taste in lovely game mechanics ThatBasqueGuy posted:Min-maxing the economy is finding the one province in China thats RGO is the lynchpin of the entire world economy, and occupying it for three years. Rise to GP status off the back of fifty bankrupcies i will say that's cool as gently caress though- it's a play straight out of 1830 or something
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Jun 8, 2018 20:25
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A Buttery Pastry posted:If you consider things in a ludonarrative sense, the difference between the "solved" game of EU4 vs. the opaque economy of Vicky II, perfectly matches the ideological landscapes of the periods covered. During the EU4 period, there was broad consensus about the structure of society, so having the player be certain in how their actions affect the world makes a lot of sense. In contrast, the Vicky period is one where that consensus truly breaks down - and thus forcing the player to make ideological choices is entirely appropriate. To reduce the economy to a structured and predictable system would be a massive disservice to the period - you might as well just get an EU4 mod that expands the game into the 20th century. That's one of the dumbest things i've ever heard. And tbqh EU4's trade system isn't all that good, either.
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Jun 8, 2018 23:09
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SnoochtotheNooch posted:“Paradox should make a grand strategy game that just gives me text interrogatives and no actual control in the game! This is what everyone wants!” ITT The vicky3 crew Hot Dog Day #82 posted:I basically want an historical version of kings of dragon pass so I can play it on my phone, is that too much to ask?? KoDP is a game that gets a lot worse the more you know of it and that IMO is why it fails to be all that good a game.
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Jun 21, 2018 19:01
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Alchenar posted:The best thing about AGEOD was when someone calculated that given the turn calculations times in their Victorian era game it would take something like 10 years to complete a game. I did something like that. I was kinda hyped for Pride of Nations because it had some clever mechanics but went nowhere fast. It also had a lot of things that straight up didn't really work. Private capital and state funds as separate but usable resources is a really clever thing and a better game in this era should use it.
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Jun 30, 2018 16:05
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Yeah even ancient societies that though the sun revolved around the earth still had otherwise pretty accurate tracking of stars and planets. Hell it was only from examination of those records that people eventually realized that the only thing that didn't fit the model was the sun/earth relationship itself. Steel, rifling and many other things were well known before industrialization, but it took the ability to mass produce steel and fabricate it in a big way, to say, make large rifled cannons or modern turreted armored warships, even though many of these things could exist beforehand. Technology is a very multifaceted thing.
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Jul 20, 2018 16:35
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Communist Walrus posted:Victoria 2 but all the lovely parts taken out That's pretty much all of it though. I mean i'd play a vicky 3 that was a good game but people who like vicky 2 aren't looking for good games, just more dumb black boxes. Now i'm going to be regaled about how black boxes are actually great game design.
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Aug 14, 2018 12:54
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I think the idea of interest groups is to make a more granular way of handling politics than the weird poles that Vicky 2 had so they could get rid of things like 'anarcho-liberalism' just to fill a spot.
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May 21, 2021 20:13
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Star posted:Think it was called East vs West or something but I don't remember why they cancelled it in the end. It was a cold war game touting its ship designer. Enough said.
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May 24, 2021 11:12
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Beamed posted:cant believe paradox is investing in a tank designer no one wants instead of creating a vicky 3 expansion with a political party designer EVERYONE wants What we're all waiting for is the factory designer tetris minigame.
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May 25, 2021 01:51
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Sampatrick posted:yeah the thing with china in v2, and especially in all the random v2 mods, is that china is fundamentally massively broken so you end up having to try to balance it by not letting china literally break the game as soon as it presses westernize. vicky kinda struggles with showing the kind of modernization china engaged in- they got plenty of modern arms but since modernization was such a decentralized scheme, it pretty much led the provincial governors to be warlords(it also somewhat struggles with the US federal system)
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May 30, 2021 16:22
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If the criteria is 'countries that do genocides shouldn't be playable' welp.. Sorry, Vicky3, Eu4, CK3, etc.
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Sep 13, 2021 21:41
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BBJoey posted:It's really funny that people consistently bring up Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa as a good example of acknowledging war crimes because if you read the actual text of the game, it's basically perpetrating the clean Wehrmacht. The military officers you deal with, in particular your immediate superior von Brauchitsch, are represented as being various levels of appalled to disquieted by the war crimes they become aware of. Brauchitsch is a particularly good example because there's multiple events where he offers to run interference, or even recommends for example being more humane to PoWs; in real life, he was a spineless aristocrat who actively took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poland. The game explicitly presents the war as the bad guys (Nazis who want to do bad things) and the good guys (Wehrmacht officers who just want a good clean war). also the guy you're explicitly playing as in the game crafted the Commissar and Barbarossa Decrees. This is true- the hunger plan, while it was never truly implemented to the full degree, was devised by OKH itself, and there was no meaningful opposition to it in principle. This was quite literally a plan for mass death- to starve out most of the urban population of the occupied USSR so the food produced there could be used by Germans instead of feeding urban population. It was basically universally supported among the German officer corps at all levels as part of the whole ideological project, even past the Nazis themselves. The only reason it stopped to some extent was a need for slave labor and the impracticality of actually completely cutting off food shipments to major cities(it just scattered people into the countryside instead). I think this is why most games avoid the topic entirely, trying to operate at a higher level of abstraction so as not to necessarily need to depict it in detail. The need of games to have 'interesting decisions' runs against accurate portrayals of things of this sort. For example, I believe in a HOI4 mod the Holocaust is represented by an event where either you do it and lose manpower or don't and lose stability. But this kind of framing, while making it a game decision, implies that the Jewish population of Germany was a destabilizing force, which is an incredibly Nazi viewpoint. It's probably, in this case, better not to go there at all.
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Sep 14, 2021 11:00
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OddObserver posted:Having a single identity like that is probably good game design even if it's awful history, though, especially in a game that needs to give flavor to so many different countries. Yeah, to me this is one of those times game design butts up against history and game design wins. There are a lot of ahistorical design decisions reflective of that and i don't think it's evidence of someone adopting fascist whig history or being a wehraboo or whatever.
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Nov 17, 2021 16:45
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I don't think looking at the numbers alone does complete justice to the story of the war. There is plenty, plenty of GPW-centric material on ww2, and there's even plenty of pop-history documentary material on it. I don't think this is some conspiracy to deny the Soviets their due in winning the war. That being said, I think the focus on the numbers does a bad job of showing the linkages involved in the different parts of the war. One of the reasons the Germans didn't have sufficient airlift to help the Stalingrad pocket is that they needed that airlift capability to shop in troops to stop the Allies marching on Tunis. The transfer had been made before Uranus because of the belief that they would be better in the winter months in Sicily, but that's significant. When Hitler re-commits to Tunisia, those are forces that, many of which, could have been sent to help in Ukraine, but were not. Was the surrender at Tunis as consequential as the 6th Army's at Stalingrad? No, but they certainly had some effects on each other. In the Soviet offensives in Ukraine from 1943-44, the Germans had to maintain a significant and disproportionate amount of armored divisions in France to be ready to parry a potential invasion. OKH was begging to be able to transfer them to Ukraine to stop the bleeding, but Hitler stood pat- only in April 44 did he allow a very temporary transfer of three divisions to take part in a counteroffensive in Galicia, but this was sent back as soon as possible. This, then, forces the Germans to put a disproportionate number of their remaining armored divisions in the east in Romania to protect it, leaving Belarus and Poland open for Bagration. The other fronts make a difference in this one, it's a very linked together kind of war. And Overlord was important for obvious reasons. It seems like people just want it to be a 2 minute footnote or something.
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Nov 22, 2021 13:10
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Massive debt financed arms and consumer spending for the home front from the US was not a given, and in fact was something of an article of debate. Keynes even recognized that taking on war debts would change the balance of financial power decisively and suggested the British and the Entente in general try to get it done without taking on massive US War debt. However, this ran against the notion of One More Big Push that Wins the War so, the thought of going without was dismissed. Wilson even toyed with trying to turn off the spigot of war debt to enhance his bargaining power while the US was neutral, but backed off.
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Nov 22, 2021 16:45
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reignonyourparade posted:Europa Universalis the actual board game Empires in Arms, the game it cribbed a LOT of basic mechanics from.
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Jun 10, 2023 03:21
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