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I once had the particular displeasure of working with a British redneck and at one point the conversation happened to turn to the EIC and VOC's struggle for supremacy in Southeast Asia, noting the wars that went on, and said redneck's response was to smugly say "Ah, so we won, of course." On having it explained to him by myself (Taiwanese) and a Chinese guy who was in the conversation that there was a reason why it was called the Dutch East Indies clear up to WW2, he got flustered and muttered "Well, you know, I mean I never studied history and that." That's my story on how well one specific British guy knows his history, thank you and God bless. (Note: The guy also believed that Islam forbade shaving because they hadn't invented shaving back then so this is really more about the idiot being an idiot rather than being a specifically British idiot. I think. I hope.)
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Jun 2, 2021 11:56
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 05:59 |
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Eimi posted:To go back more to talking about cultural context, something I find interesting is that Cao Cao is very much traditionally seen as the villain, see every Dynasty Warriors ever, but when I read Ro3K and especially watched the tv show, I can't see him as anything but the hero and the perfidious Liu Bei as a lying conman. My father always thought it was funny that if you paid attention to what actually happens to Liu Bei, you'll notice that for all his benevolence and righteousness he keeps ending up in situations where he becomes someone's subordinate and then somehow ends up lord of the region, often overthrowing or deposing his former overlord. As I understand it views on who the villain and the hero of the story is tends to vary based on the politics of the time. I've heard that the PRC transitioned from identifying with Liu Bei because of his status as a plucky, underdog hero of the people to noting that "Hey, Cao Cao wasn't such a bad guy you know, he brought peace, order, and prosperity to a troubled nation, yes maybe he did a few unpleasant things but really you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelette, right?"
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Jun 2, 2021 15:33
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GrossMurpel posted:I guess this is the right time for a very dumb question I've had for a long time: I don't know whether history classes are actively teaching that or not, but I have heard that part of those stories may have a certain basis in fact in that most of the famous officers were well-trained and equipped members of the old Imperial standing army, whereas most of the armies of the early Three Kingdoms period were hastily-raised local levies, often personally loyal to the specific officer who'd raised them. As such it wouldn't be uncommon for the levies to be unwilling to fight unless their officer led the way or dueled the enemy, and if their officer fell or ran it also wouldn't be uncommon for them to shatter as well. Later on in the stories as nations get more settled and armies get more regular you hear fewer stories of officers single-handedly routing or holding back armies. So it's less really that the officers are superhuman stone cold badasses and more that their early opponents were largely poorly-armed farmers who didn't really want to be there. Edit: And now that I bring that up I personally think that a KOEI Dynasty Warriors take on the US Civil War would be hilarious. Sherman throwing firebombs at Jackson who's summoning earthen ramparts or something. Tomn fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Jun 2, 2021 |
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Jun 2, 2021 16:52
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Protip: "US education" doesn't exist, you can only speak for the school/district you went to. Even state level is too broad. Hypothetically, the same person could do both, if you regarded taking the throne as a repudiation of Revolutionary ideals!
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Jun 2, 2021 23:59
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Drone posted:Tim Cook? How many divisions has he got? That feels like a thread title.
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Dec 21, 2021 11:45
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Also answer: Arguably quite a lot of divisions, but those divisions are more focused around marketing, developing variants of the iPhone, and so on instead of throwing the Hun out of the Rodina.
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Dec 21, 2021 17:08
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Vizuyos posted:I don't have high hopes. Those sound like extremely ambitious promises, and no matter how extensive their EU4 mod is, it's a far cry from making a game from scratch.. Yeah from the looks of it I doubt these guys are gonna break the "Paradox modding teams make bad developers" curse. Remember the good old days of Magna Mundi and EvW?
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Apr 3, 2022 04:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:you get this weird thing where a lot of bodies of water some state ruler decided to use as the barrier because it's a great place to mount a defense against invaders So here's the thing - after the ancient period and until relatively recently oceans DON'T always make a good defensive barrier. Almost the opposite, in fact - if your enemy has a fleet, it's relatively easy for them to load up a couple of boats full of angry lads and land wherever they want much faster than you can detect their invasion, muster your troops, and either form a counter-fleet or meet them at their landing site. Boats are fast-moving compared to marching on land and can carry a lot more stuff (and people) more efficiently than wagon trains, see, and pre-modern mobilization systems have trouble reacting fast enough to a fleet cruising down your coast idly picking landing spots. Consider the Viking invasions of England, for instance, which were rarely countered at sea or on the beaches but were ultimately decided by battles on land, or how 1066 was again decided after a series of invading armies landed and fought battles on terra firma. It takes until roughly the increasing growth of state power in the early modern period and the development of gunpowder (and consequent logistical limitations) before the sea became less a highway and more a barrier. That being said boats are and were super expensive and it'd take a mighty lord indeed to be able to afford (or conscript) a serious invasion fleet and not just raiders. Easy enough to make an invasion happen once you have them but it's a job of work getting there to begin with.
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Apr 21, 2022 22:25
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Picking Paradox games based on what's easiest to get into is a bit of a trap, I think - they're all complex, but they're all complex in different ways because they're focusing on different things, one game isn't really going to "ease you into" another. The real question is which kind of complexity and which subject you think will tickle your brain more. Like for me personally I'd stick Vicky 3 right up near the top of Paradox games right now because diving down into an endless series of nested tooltips to realize the effect of worker's cooperatives on dividends and tax incomes and the consumer economy does illegal things to my brain, but someone who's way more into interpersonal conflict and drama would find CK3 the brain sticker instead. Ask yourself what it is you think you'd like to do more in the context of a strategy game and then go with that, whether it's in-depth socio-economic analysis, map-painting, or planning how liberate Nazi Europe.
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Nov 4, 2022 01:06
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Cease to Hope posted:i do think there's a paradox-brained design thinking, even if that's fading as they get bigger and split into separate teams. for example, even if you know what that "casus belli" means you need to have a specific reason to go to war, it can be a shock to go from civilization where you keep what you kill, to paradox games where the stakes are (usually) laid out at the start of the war and (oftentimes) that's all you can take. True, but as you say I think that's starting to fade in the newer games, and regardless the similarities are subtle enough that I don't think picking up an "easy" Paradox game to prepare you for more "difficult" Paradox games is a particularly worthwhile investment. CK3 is going to do extremely little for preparing you for Stellaris or Victoria 3 on a functional level, for instance. Better to just grab what you like from the get go and let your natural enjoyment take over instead of picking games you might be more eh about as a form of training.
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Nov 4, 2022 01:45
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So at a fundamental level I feel like the trick here is this: Players make decisions based on information, but introducing opacity into information makes that unreliable - so how do you tune the opacity so that it doesn't occlude so much information that players feel they can't make any meaningful decisions, vs making it so transparent that even though it's occluded a player who knows the trick to it can figure out the shape behind the veil accurately enough to make judgements just as well as if it was purely transparent? It's a very narrow sweet spot, and one that varies for each individual player and their ability to see past the veil, I think. Aside, as long as we're talking about this I might as well go off on a tangent and talk about my ~*GaMe DeSiGnS*~ back from when I was younger. When I was a kid I read a lot of comic books featuring anecdotes from Chinese history and those are packed with stories about the importance of identifying, cultivating, and maintaining the loyalty of talented officials - as well as how easy it was to screw up that process. There's all kinds of stories about fatuous rulers ignoring great minds and promoting incompetent toadies, or cunning agents sowing discord between a ruler and his best officials, or wise rulers who ignored slander and trusted people worth trusting. Now I liked the KOEI Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, but they were and are RUTHLESSLY mechanical in how their characters work and how loyalty is tracked. You always know the exact value of the character you're getting, and you can always tell exactly when and how you need to give them a little something to goose their loyalty enough that there's no risk of betrayal whatsoever. There's basically no sense of the dynamic I described from history, and it's all because of total transparency. So one idea I had was "ROTK, but set during the Warring States period with randomly generated characters and a bigger focus on generations, and critically, no ability to actually see the exact stats of any character - you had to interview them, try to get a feel for what they can accomplish, and then actually put them to work and see if their abilities matched up to what they said about themselves, trying to feel your way towards building up a court of genuinely talented people." Which sounded neat to teenage me, but in retrospect that would have led to players memorizing which kind of interview responses corresponded to which bands of abilities and would have required careful notekeeping to come up with useful information about which characters were capable of what over time since otherwise it'd be easy to forget. Thinking about it now, if I were to try and make that game I think what I might do is to give every ruler a "judge of character" stat that determines how wide a band they estimate a character's abilities to be in - someone who's a poor judge might gauge someone as having between 20-93 out of 100 ability points in the military or whatnot, while a good judge might gauge him as being between 85-93. Initial estimates could be firmed up by spending more time on interviews and probing specific abilities, but rulers are limited by how many actions they can take per turn and won't have enough time to finely gauge everyone - so at some point you need to bite the bullet and say "OK, I'm not ENTIRELY sure how well you'll do but I need butts in positions so I guess I'll stick you in and hope you don't screw everything up." And if you were steadily evaluating everyone over time eventually you might end up with a pretty good idea what your court is capable of and keep things that way - except loyalty is a value that needs monitoring and can change, and people get pissy if you replace them with a more talented member, or promote someone who's been hired for less time than they have, or feel they haven't been rewarded commensurate with their talent or seniority, etc. etc. Thus, you'd spend the entire game trying to evaluate trying to get a handle on what everyone is capable of and what they're thinking and juggling the demands of loyalty against the needs of administration, and if your current ruler is a poor judge of character - well, better hope your heir is capable of fixing the chaos nexus your court has become!
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Feb 17, 2023 07:00
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Anno posted:On the website for the program it says HBS is going to “bring storytelling home”. Idk what that means but I’m going to guess it means it’ll be a Paradox IP, which would probably mean World of Darkness? The new HBS game is going to be a bleakly black comedy RPG. Nordic Noir: The RPG.
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Feb 28, 2023 01:08
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Anno posted:Idk, there’s not exactly a lot of story-heavy tactical combat games out there. And the aesthetic is pretty distinct I think. Final Fantasy Tactics and and Ogre Tactics as well as all the indie spin-offs based on them would like to have a word.
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Mar 6, 2023 19:46
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Speaking of EU3 I remember one of the things that really hosed with my friend's head getting into it was how annual census taxes worked vs monthly taxes and having to budget a year in advance and how you could really screw yourself if you spent everything in January. Neat system but I don't know if I miss it exactly.
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Apr 10, 2024 17:12
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 05:59 |
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Mandoric posted:If there's only value in deciding whether you want to gain burgher loyalty equilibrium at the cost of ducats or ducats at the cost of burgher loyalty, sure, you're right. But if there's value in deciding between gaining 20 ducats at the cost of 20 burgher loyalty equilibrium or 10 ducats at the cost of 10 burgher loyalty equilibrium, the latter to be chosen when your yearly deficit is only 10 ducats, then surely there's also value in being able to gain 15 ducats at the cost of 15 burgher loyalty equilibrium when your yearly deficit is 15 ducats? I think they've already covered that in their post: Vizuyos posted:if every single spot on the slider could potentially worth picking depending on the exact timing and circumstances, then congrats, you've probably damned the player to a confusing micromanagement hell In a perfectly spherical simulation in a vacuum, sure, maybe choosing between 20 or 15 or 10 or 19 ducats could be a worthwhile, valuable choice, but in the context of a larger simulation with a bunch of other moving parts for the player to focus on I'm not convinced that making it so that it's optimal to spend a bunch of time working out how to optimize a single slider and then checking and adjusting that constantly as the situation changes is worthwhile even if the choice itself is hypothetically valuable. The question is, what do you want the player to spend more time doing? How much of a percentage of their playtime should revolve around fiddling with sliders or buttons or what have you? Increased granularity can be valuable if that granularity is related to a central pillar of the game's design - but if that granularity is focused on something less important, it just ends up creating tedious busywork. So I suppose the question of whether sliders or buttons is better isn't actually one you can argue in the abstract, but needs to be discussed in the context of the specific game design and its goals. Which is going to result in a bit of mind-reading for a game that hasn't actually be released yet.
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Apr 11, 2024 09:48
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