|
Koramei posted:I mean, that's basically the reasoning behind it becoming practically settled that all strategy games have to be fully transparent now. But I really don't agree it's necessarily better, or that everything you're pointing out has to be bad. Being at the mercy of opaque randomness can be irritating at times, but I disagree that it's always or even usually unfun. Like was mentioned upthread, it can also make the game's systems feel richer and deeper. Even if in actuality they aren't, often the feeling of it is what actually matters. For the people that powergame or stringently check wikis yeah opacity is probably just gonna be a worse option, but not everyone plays like that, and as I think has been alluded to, it's a common thread in comments about modern strategy games that there's an emptiness about them compared to ones from back in the day, and imo this is a big part of why. One other thing that strikes me about the transparency position is that it seems to implicitly accept that the information you have when you play for a fifth time should not be fundamentally different from playing it the first time, with the argument that a big problem that must be overcome is player memorisation of what the obfuscation means. I remember my first game of Stellaris, where I had basically no idea what was going on, I was just out exploring, doing these little event chains not knowing what the outcomes would be and it was great fun! Now of course when I play Stellaris I know what all those chains do, I click the “correct” options with nary a thought to what the event text says, and it is less mysterious and magical than that first game was, but that doesn’t cheapen the first experience. If you go way out to the extreme in other genres, it’s effectively impossible to play a game like Return of the Obra Dinn or The Outer Wilds twice, because working out all the hidden information is the entire point of the game, and you really can only learn that stuff once. Despite that those games are generally regarded as some of the best games of the last few years. Paradox games shouldn’t go that far, but the point is that you could theoretically even make a strategy game you only play once! There’s this notion that strategy games should be sort of infinitely replayable, and I think that’s one of the notions underpinning the transparency position, that if the game relies on obfuscation, once the obfuscation is solved the challenge drops and the game becomes too easy to be worth replaying. But what I’ve noticed is that as the years have gone by I find myself playing paradox games less and less because my previous experience with them causes me to look at the new ones and see systems, not countries. Each playthrough feels less and less like guiding a country or a family and more like just picking a colour and starting position. Sure, my fourth playthrough of Russia won’t be less fun than the first because I’ve already learned all the hidden tricks in their campaign, but my first playthrough of Russia won’t be particularly compelling to begin with, because if I’m experienced with Paradox games I’ll parse all the necessary information to win right at the start and proceed through with practically no surprises. The fact that Anbennar has practically taken over the EU4 thread is I think testament to the idea that maybe we’re getting a little bored of always knowing what’s coming up. Your second time through the Rianvisa or the Hoardcurse will be nowhere near as hard as the first, but so what?
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2023 14:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 08:16 |
|
|
StashAugustine posted:Tbf I think the crucial difference between Paradox games and puzzle games like Outer Wilds is that Paradox games by necessity have a huge variety of possible starts, and thus replaying the game is sorta baked into the premise. I do think it'd be interesting to do a strategy game along these lines (like, say, a take on the fall of the Roman republic where you just play an individual general) but it wouldn't really be a Paradox game Sure, but that’s part of my point here, transparency is less important for replayability when there’s that huge variety of starts. If the Time of Troubles has vague, partially randomised starting conditions and then a detailed narrative event chain, and that makes your first playthrough as Russia more engaging, one of the trade offs supposedly would be that later playthroughs will be less enjoyable because the player will eventually work out what the conditions are or look up which options are best to pick in the events. Which is a genuine trade-off that games like the Outer Wilds make, and those games are still excellent, so one half of my point is that we shouldn’t take it as a given that making that trade off is necessarily a bad thing. But the other half of my point is that in a paradox game you’re not even making that trade off to the same degree. OK sure your second playthrough as Russia might be less impactful, less challenging because you know how to handle the Time of Troubles, but your next game of Europa Universalis almost certainly isn’t even going to be as Russia. Or the next, or the next. So is it all that much of a problem that the player could eventually work out the hidden information that influences the Time of Troubles disaster?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2023 13:30
|
|
|
In my head at least, the key difference between grand strategy games and 4X games are that grand strategy games have fixed, heavily asymmetric starts while 4X games have near symmetric, randomised starts. There's other secondary components (simulationist focus, for example), but I think that's the core of it. That's why stellaris was pitched as a "4X with grand strategy elements" or something along those lines rather than the other way around, and why in the early days when Stellaris was announced there were people who were hoping that they might include a mode that had a fixed galaxy which was already pre-populated with space empires of varying sizes. I realise that by this metric the Total War games are Grand Strategy, which is not how we tend to think of them but also, I think, not exactly wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2023 11:53
|
|
|
Eiba posted:Man, a game with the scope of Civ and the simulationist style of Paradox games would be wild. The thing is, over the whole arc of human history, you'll have to actually allow for, and basically ensure that empires fall apart. Maybe you're playing a game as tight as historical China, and you're more or less the same empire for thousands of years, but even they fell apart repeatedly and had to be reconstituted. I think the one game I can think of that actually achieves the whole “empire collapse as an enjoyable game mechanic” is the board game Small World. You pick a fantasy race and explode onto the map conquering territory left and right, but eventually hit the peak of your expansion and find it hard to take new territory or hold your current land. And so part of the skill of being a good player is knowing when to flip your current empire into decline and switch to a new group. Maybe something of that is what’s needed to make empire collapse enjoyable, a tension between building a large empire and getting a tangible reward of some sort for deliberately crashing it into pieces at the exact right moment. I’m thinking like, imagine if you were playing as Persia, and then chose to swap to being Alexander, a dude with incredible bonuses to empire building but with an unshakeable trait that no matter what the empire you’d build would immediately explode on death, with some benefit to your next character/empire the larger you could make the explosion? Something like that, anyway, I’m no game designer. But I think the principle is sound, that empire collapse could be fun if you switch it from disaster to deliberate decision by the player somehow.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2023 10:41
|
|
|
Koramei posted:I don't know if I agree with this. The timing might be pure coincidence but Mission Trees were pretty controversial when they launched, and while I don't wanna claim they specifically drove away a chunk of the playerbase, it's somewhere around that time that EU4 started to turn into people playing Anbennar or just putting it down, whereas before then it'd been pretty constant buzz. A whole bunch of things were happening at around that time so maybe it's not fair to fault the trees specifically as much as what seemed like kind of a philosophical shift in the game's development in general. Mission trees were released in early 2018, and at least if this thread is anything to go by Anbennar didn't really take off in popularity until early 2021 (before this it got about one post a month in the thread on average), though. My recollection is the exact opposite, for what it's worth, that mission trees were widely loved because they replaced the old system where the missions all still existed, but you had to draw them at random from a list and you couldn't see the conditions. So unless you looked it up you could never know as France that in order to pull the mission to annex Savoy you had to first complete the mission to sieze Burgundy, whereas now the tree clearly spelled that relationship out. In the old system if you were allied to Burgundy and waiting for the Savoy mission to appear, you'd be waiting forever and might never realise what's wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2023 23:19
|
|
|
I wonder how they’ll model the early warfare situation for England. It’s notable that in EU4 Great Britain pretty much always forms by England conquering Scotland very early on and then just waiting for Admin tech 10, and it usually stomps all over Ireland similarly early despite the challenges of actually ruling Ireland meaning they couldn’t actually make any conquest stick until the late 16th century. 1337 nominally starts with England in an even more commanding position—sure, they’re losing a war to effectively vassalise Scotland, but will the AI actually accept defeat or just turn around and win that war most of the time, starting the unification of the isles even earlier than in EU4? If England does vassalise Scotland, in EU4 this would effectively create a docile client, but in practice all it ever did was create a constant rebellious ulcer as Scotland just kept trying to win its independence over and over and over again. Any attempt to subdue the Irish Lords mostly just led to them saying “OK, yes England, you’re in charge” and then going right back to ignoring them the second the armies were gone. In neither case could England just annex a bit of Scotland or Ireland in one war, then another bit in a second war, then finish them off in a third war, which is exactly what happens in EU4 almost every time. Not to say that these problems of simulation are unique to Britain and Ireland, they’re just the area I’m familiar with. Mostly I just worry that all the reasons why European monarchies couldn’t get larger before the birth of the administrative state won’t be adequately modelled and we’ll just see the map painting shifted back a century.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 13:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 08:16 |
|
|
A Buttery Pastry posted:IIRC, England (possibly the British Isles in general) were very overdeveloped in EU4 compared to where it should be at the time, basically as if you pulled the early 18th century version back in time. Even if that imbalance was uniform across the islands, the fact that it skewed the balance between France and England might've done a lot to let England run wild. Based on the numbers I find doing a quick Google, the population disparity between England and the rest of the British Isles should be much much smaller than it is today, which combined with France being more of a threat (and prize!) might be enough to keep Scotland free. One of the other factors, I think, are the game’s truce mechanics. If England fights off France, they’ve then got 5+ years of an uninterrupted free hand in Ireland and Scotland because trucebreaking costs loads of stability and aggressive expansion (and as far as I know, the AI never does it). But historically if France and England signed a peace treaty and the next year the English king then got tangled up in Ireland, France would be invading England’s continental holdings within a month or two, peace treaty be damned, and neither French society nor the wider diplomatic world would much think him the lesser for it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 17:00
|
|