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Yes it's worth playing, but you might want to wait for a sale on it. It's unique and interesting but also has one of the shittiest GUIs in 4x history and is clunky and a mess in general. Good for a few playthroughs but it's problems will probably drive you up a wall, given enough time.
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Sep 29, 2015 01:17
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:Oh no! Being able to automate different parts of your empire sounds like an interesting idea, but I've always thought that it is probably something that works better in theory than in practice. I've never been one for wars in my strategy games, so leaving that to the computer while I focus on expansion or the economy is right in my wheel house. I've never tried leaving the military entirely under automation (which you can do, including the ability to let the AI handle starting/ending wars for you), but all my experience playing the game basically made it pretty clear that the military automation is generally pretty terrible, while the economy, ship design, and civilian stuff is all generally pretty decent. The big problem is that the automation is extremely sluggish to respond to anything. It doesn't try to intercept pirates before they get to your systems reliably, for example. Fleets don't handle ships being damaged well (and the refueling is a pain as well), the automation of 'defend this area, attack this area' stuff doesn't work at all for the most part. It's rough and I think it's the part that really drags the game down the most. You just can't rely on the automation of anything military related, which means you get to micro everything. As far as resources go, yeah most of the normal stuff is pretty pointless. There's a few things you can prioritize to make sure you can crank out ships as fast as possible though, if you're planning where to put your mining stations or colonize first. The special resources are a little better though, they give you fair significant bonuses to your empire and there are very limited sources of them. There's a decent GUI mod that color codes the resources so you can filter what's important easier.
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Sep 29, 2015 01:39
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I probably missed it somewhere, did they talk about how Order of Battle mechanics will work in HOI4 yet? Just kind of curious what level of detail it goes into, for assigning officers and organizing things.
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Oct 2, 2015 19:43
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I was assuming it meant 'requires an event', as in you can't directly research along a dotted line until something fires that allows you to. Like Air Innovations, for example, is probably one of those ones where you have to get lucky and have it pop after researching something else (like some of the secret techs in HoI2). And the political ones like Befriend Bulgaria is dependent on other political factors at the time.
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Oct 2, 2015 21:21
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Rincewind posted:This one's on weather and terrain. As usually, I'm struck by how absurdly pretty the map is. Even if I wind not getting too into HoI IV beyond whatever's necessary to wrestle ByzLP into some sort of conclusion, I'll enjoy just looking at the map, probably. The mapmodes in particular were a thing that always annoyed me even up through EU4. There was so little represented on a single map mode and you had to toggle between them constantly to get information. You've got Political + Terrain + Weather + Time of Day already in HOI4, plus Capital Icons (though those were on the map in previous games, they could be hard to see zoomed out), major cities, and it looks like maybe airports and seaports as well. Don't think I mentioned it when I saw it, but I noticed in a previous diary there are road grids drawn on the map too, I'm wondering if that's dynamic (ie based on IC or Infrastructure or something) or just represents where developed cities already were. I'd kind of like to see how this style of map layering would look in EU4 or CK2.
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Oct 9, 2015 16:22
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Yeah I get that. I feel like Political + Terrain + Weather would be pretty practical for EU4 at least. Maybe you could also have it switch to a Supply overlay when you have a unit selected, that along with the fort level icons and a Capital icon would give you most everything you need for military on the same map layer.
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Oct 9, 2015 17:57
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Yeah, they are actually. You can sort of emulate the same idea of Political+Terrain+Weather now using that Transparent Political mapmode thing, but it's obviously not ideal since it makes stuff look weird, especially with snow.
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Oct 9, 2015 21:31
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Gamerofthegame posted:The counter measure seems to be "and then they're trapped there until they make a wormhole back home." Yeah, from the sound of it though since wormholes are 2 way, you can "recall" a fleet by just opening a portal back to another system of yours, but you have to wait for them to charge up. Also I wouldn't be surprised if there were researchable FTL radar stations so you can get alerts when someone is jumping into one of your systems. Nothing real out of the ordinary with these styles of FTL but they sound good mechanically. I wonder if the game restricts you on which you can use based on Race or having to find the technology? Or if you just always have the option to choose between them? Glad we're starting to get into some real gameplay stuff now, though it's going to make the wait even more painful.
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Oct 12, 2015 20:40
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Well, now that's seriously cool.
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Oct 19, 2015 16:21
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Bort Bortles posted:I am still really scared about planet tiles. Same but also ship design.
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Oct 19, 2015 17:23
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Bort Bortles posted:I am almost as worried about that as I am about planet tiles. I just dont see how either can be a fun mechanic in a game that they are trying to design to have a fun lategame because they will both be a pain in the rear end to deal with late game, especially in large empires. For ship design I'm hoping for something where it's pretty simple to design and you just make small incremental changes over the course of the game based on what technologies you research or find. Something more akin to something like an RPG where you level up and get to assign a skill point to something you want, where it's kind of a fun feedback loop that ties into the rest of the gameplay. Endless Legend did something kind of like that (Skill Points from leveling up, and Equipment from research or quests) and it was reasonably alright because it didn't involve tons of fiddling around. Or maybe something like what it sounds like HOI4 is doing with it's division design, where you want to make changes and improvements to the designs but it costs some kind of points to do so. For planet tiles I'm almost certain there will be some kind of delegation of authority. Either Warlock 2 style (where you have a limit to the number of things you can directly control, and assign extra planets 'roles' on what to produce but otherwise have no direct control), or CK2 style (tiered hierarchy where you only directly control a few things and have to deal with power struggles amongst your Space Kings and such).
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Oct 19, 2015 17:55
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Ship design isn't bad because it's scary or intimidating. It's bad because it's lovely busywork that adds nothing to the actual gameplay of the game. Hope this helps.
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Oct 19, 2015 19:29
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Rakthar posted:A ship designer simply means "some way to make my units different than the other guy's" and I just see that as a good thing. If it's been done in tedious or cumbersome ways before, who cares? The ability to make units different between empires and playthroughs is a big one to me. That's literally the exact thing I was talking about so I'm not sure if you just missed my post or something? And yeah when I say 'ship design is lovely garbage' I'm referring to every single space 4x game that exists currently, not saying it can't be decent with a good implementation or it will be bad even in Stellaris. But considering the history of the feature as being terrible and the fact that we have literally nothing to go on other than 'this feature is in the game' I think it's pretty reasonable for anyone to be worried about it until we hear more.
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Oct 19, 2015 19:57
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RabidWeasel posted:The reason that they traditionally suck is that they come at it way too hard from a simulationist perspective, where really all you need is ways to make interesting decisions about their capabilities in combat. I always liked the designer from SMAC since it was literally just choosing your attack/defense/movement and a couple of special abilities for each unit, I don't see why anything substantially more complex than that is needed for a game with automated combat (p.s. thank Wiz that they haven't fallen down the bottomless pit of game runining by having tactical combat). Yeah that's what I was talking about above when I mentioned something like Endless Legend. Very quick and easy to do, with some choices based on your opponents or map situation (ie what resources you have available to you), and a Skill system that lets you periodically buy upgrades for your heroes as well. That kind of thing I think would work well in this kind of game as well. SotS1 was actually pretty decent as far as ship design goes, probably the best space 4x I've played in that regard (and not too dissimilar to something like SMAC or Endless Legend). Couldn't stand the actual tactical combat in it though, largely due to the interface and some serious pacing and jank issues. But if you can learn to deal with them you'll probably love the game.
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Oct 19, 2015 20:26
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There are some 4x games out there where the AI does actually get smarter on harder difficulties. AoW3 and HoMM series come to mind, but they also cheat on top of making better decisions.
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Oct 21, 2015 23:10
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Koramei posted:It'd help a lot of Firaxis actually had a post-release attitude towards expansions and patches that wasn't straight out of 2005. I don't think it's like they need to be watching streams all day long, but especially with Beyond Earth they just seemed so completely out of touch. Tbf personally I don't think AI cheating is a bad thing at all as long as it isn't super obvious, but actually balancing your game around strategies that happen after launch shouldn't be some unattainable thing. To be fair to Firaxis on that part, I wouldn't want to touch the AI either considering they need to completely fix the rest of the mess that is Beyond Earth before they even start looking into what would make for a good AI. Panzeh posted:Typically difficulty increases AI aggression which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. It's really hard to justify hiding your best AI behaviors behind a difficulty curve, though- if you have a good AI you want to show it off. Definitely does depend though, for example in some of the early HOMM games the AI will actually play smarter defensively as well, keeping tabs on how far the player is from it's castles and such. I agree about not hiding your best AI, especially if harder difficulties also cheat resources and such. It was kind of funny though with AoW3, seeing that many players thought the game was actually too hard even on the easier difficulty settings. Apparently a decent number of people wanted a mode where the AI did literally nothing but sit in town and occasionally build units, the idea of not doing the same themselves being a foreign concept.
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Oct 22, 2015 00:13
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I like the character system, it sounds fairly similar to how Endless Space/Legend allowed your heroes to be either be military leaders or governors (probably done in some 4x's before then but those were the first that came to mind). I see there's a Slavery checkbox, I wonder if that's just all encompassing or if you have the ability to specify 'us vs them' at all. Getting unreasonably excited for this game now and that's real bad considering how far off it probably still is.
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Oct 26, 2015 18:30
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DStecks posted:Total War has done that at least since Medieval 2. Good call. I want to say some of the Rot3K games have the same mechanic as well don't they? Probably could find a dozen other games that do as well. I'm generally a fan of the mechanic, and I like the sound of how it works in Stellaris so far. Pharnakes posted:Q1 2016 isn't it? I'm sure it'll be delayed 6 months to a year though. That was the 'leaked' release date but they haven't said anything official about it from what I've seen. I hope you are right and that's still the targeted release, I'm maybe a bit pessimistic when it comes to video games getting delayed.
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Oct 26, 2015 19:10
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I assume the inclusion of 24 year old admirals means there's Anime-inspired technologies/ideologies too?? The only question is which Anime will get the first total conversion mod? Legend of the Galactic Heroes? Macross?
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Oct 26, 2015 19:29
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Bort Bortles posted:The bolded bothers me and the bolded italicized scares me. Needing to juggle leaders and having opportunity cost for having governors or admirals feels like an outdated train of thought to me. When in history has someone said "well the Pacific fleet can have an admiral OR we can put a governor in the Phillipines, but not both"?!? It's a video game, I think you can probably assume it's an abstraction for the sake of play-ability. Limitations on how many Characters you can have leads to more decision making and less micromanagement. I don't know if you've ever played Dominions 4 or not, but I'd use that as an example of why unlimited numbers of leaders is potentially a horrifying thing for a 4x.
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Oct 26, 2015 20:51
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Slime Bro Helpdesk posted:https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/hearts-of-iron-iv-31th-development-diary-30th-of-october-2015.889096/ End Turn button spotted  I think one of the biggest things that always stops me from going back to CK2 is the peace mechanics, having to figure out which option to pick when going to war (will this person become my vassal or not???) and then not having anything other than Win/White Peace/Lose options. Did they ever change those at any point? Been a while since I played it.
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Oct 30, 2015 16:25
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zedprime posted:That's CK2's schtick. Everything is bound by some international religious rule of law so you either prove your point, agree to disagree, or outright lose. Aggression is less total war and more legal trial by fire and God will let the true owner of the province prevail. Did they at least add a tooltip for pressing someone else's claims to say if they will become your vassal or not? That's the one that always drove me crazy the most. But yeah I guess I see the point about it the war mechanics, I guess I just like the EU4 mechanics better even if they wouldn't make sense in CK2.
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Oct 30, 2015 16:41
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I think there's a pretty clear distinction between 'I don't like this mechanic because it doesn't sound fun and I haven't enjoyed it in other games' and 'I don't like this mechanic because IT'S NOT REALISTIC ENOUGH'. Though I suppose from a grodnard's perspective, anything less than perfectly realistic is 'less fun' somehow. As far as Tiles go, I have no idea what to think about them because the diary is far too vague and we don't really have any understanding of the real scope of the game or how the scope changes as it progresses still. I feel like these dev diaries are a lot less helpful (and a lot more prone to confusion) when we're looking at a brand new game where we don't even really have a basic concept of the game flow or mechanics.
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Nov 17, 2015 18:21
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Demiurge4 posted:This is further exasperated in games like Galciv where civilization wonders exist that give a flat 50% bonus to one production type on that planet. I would much rather colonize a planet and develop it in a variety of ways, not because it's realistic, but because it's enjoyable. If a planet has a tile bonus that gives extra research then great, I can plop a lab down on it but I'd rather make use of the generic tiles around it for the role I had intended. I outlined on an earlier page how adjacency bonuses can be tolerable (to me) by giving adjacency tiles "slots" so that a mine can only boost one adjacent tile and a factory can at most eat two bonuses from a mine. This discourages chaining one bonus across the entire planet and lets the player diversify. Yeah I get where you're coming from, though I guess specialized cities or planets have never bothered me too much personally. Looking at it from the other direction, I could see the base tile being the most important number for things like Research and Minerals, and adjacency bonuses give very diminishing returns for tiles that don't provide any themselves. So for example in the first screenshot, even though the planet is giving a +25% Society Research bonus, it's only going to apply to that 1 single tile, so you might build a research facility there, and you have the option to get adjacency next to it, but since nothing adjacent has Society Research you're getting significantly less bonuses, not very optimal. So it looks less about 'figure out how to stack bonuses into infinity' and more about 'figure out the optimal layout so that you can maximize the usefulness of everything the planet has'. And you can tweak your layout based on what things you need the most of, so maybe you would cram in an adjacency bonus building for research if you really needed it, but if you didn't you can instead build a power plant there if you want more energy instead. Some planets you find might be very fixed in what they are good for (nothing but Mineral tiles on this type of planet, for example), but planets like the one in the screenshot look pretty flexible. As far as stacking food bonuses goes, it looks like Food is a non-export so you only need to provide as much for your planet as it needs itself. So kind of a balancing act to get enough food to grow, without getting happiness penalties, but still extracting as many resources from the planet as possible. Well, that could be completely off base from reality, but that's kind of how I was reading it as. More like a puzzle to solve, and be optimized based on your needs than it is 'stack bonuses stack bonuses stack bonuses'.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:15
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Elias_Maluco posted:AI War: Fleet Command This is an RTS with Tower Defense sensibilities and a handful of 4x-like things. It's a pretty cool game though, great for comp-stomp (it's built entirely around that). Kind of an absurdly obtuse number of keyboard commands you need to learn though, and it's got a lot of counter-intuitive mechanics. Definitely worth a look if it sounds fun to you, especially if you've got some friends to play with.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:24
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Demiurge4 posted:Yeah I get you. I don't mind specialization but absolute percentage bonuses to an entire planets tiles builds into overspecialization because if every tile gets 20% (with a lab) and every lab gives adjacent ones even more tech, there's very little reason to build anything else. It also skews balance because one civ might find a ridiculous science planet and while the AI might develop it in a balanced way the player can overspecialize it and leap light years ahead in tech in just 20 turns. I do want production planets that have super productive factories but I want to decide whether building another factory in this tile is better than another city or lab because it'll give a significant boost to the planet. I think you're assuming that stuff like Labs give you a flat increase to research, which might not be the case. Because yeah if labs are just +5 Research then it's how you say. But if they're just +50% to Tile, then it doesn't really benefit you to build a lab on a tile that doesn't have any Research already except for an adjacency bonus. So there's no point in filling up a planet with Labs just because the planet gets a +% bonus to Research, because most of those tiles couldn't generate research anyway. I would also assume research will be Time Ahead capped like EU4 or CK2, you've got to pay dramatically more if you're starting to get well ahead of the curve. They've talked about having anti-snowball mechanics like this so I would be very surprised if research didn't work something like this.
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Nov 17, 2015 21:26
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Demiurge4 posted:Chaining labs all around would therefore give you 3 to 11 science per tile, of course not accounting for mandatory farms for food. The 25% bonus to tech objectively becomes more powerful the more science you produce on the planet, which encourages overspecialization. Yeah, if it's a flat bonus then definitely. Farms would make sense to be a flat + bonus to production, which is fine because Food is not an exportable resource and required for the planet to develop at all. But maybe the other ones aren't? Minerals wouldn't make sense to be a flat bonus, if you build a mine where there isn't any resources there doesn't magically become some. You could run with the same concept for Research (studying weird things found at the tile) and Power (represents having natural resources specific to generating power on those tiles). I dunno, guess we'll see.
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Nov 17, 2015 21:55
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Sort of related to the planet grid from last week actually, I noticed there's a green icon at the top with a 1/4 next to it, looks like a planet cap? I wonder if that's supposed to be a direct control cap (like CK2 demesne or Warlock 2 city limits), or a soft cap (can't settle more than this without penalties). Maybe it was already discussed and I missed it?Oberleutnant posted:I don't remember if it's been addressed in previous DDs but wil there be megastructures like Dyson Spheres, matrioshka brains, ringworlds, etc? Yeah, starbases sound like they are for colonized planets only but I wonder if there are also things like defensive bases, repair/refueling stations, or artificial planetoids and that like.
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Nov 23, 2015 17:03
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Westminster System posted:Wasn't building Science Outposts and stuff around non-usable or uncolonized worlds already mentioned? Yeah, there are orbital slots and such for planets you can't colonize. But I was talking more in terms of things not tied to planets, deep space stations between systems and such.
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Nov 23, 2015 19:29
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Darkrenown posted:You can't stop or do anything between systems, but you can build bases not in orbit of a planet. Okay gotcha. The structure of the game universe sounds something like Space Empires 4 then, in that the playing field is only systems that you warp between.
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Nov 23, 2015 21:10
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Funky Valentine posted:
Paradox wants you to be an active member of their community in order to get into beta tests for their games, and every time I think about that my brain just says NOPE.
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Nov 23, 2015 21:57
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Also people who are neo-confederates and people who think it's funny to troll an internet forum by pretending to be one both fall into 'people I don't want to interact with,' so the difference isn't really meaningful.
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Nov 23, 2015 23:25
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Rakthar posted:
Doesn't look bad from what we can see, looks pretty simple and there's even an Auto-Complete button and Auto-Generate toggle there. Game is looking real, real good.
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Dec 4, 2015 22:45
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vyelkin posted:Are you going to actually have to build ground troops like in Space Empires, which adds a really unnecessary extra layer of production and logistics, or will it be more Endless Space-style where troops are abstracted by just having an invasion value on a space ship? There's definitely a tab for Armies on planets. I don't think we've gotten a look at what's in there yet though, but I suspect if it's worth a whole tab on the planetary screen there's probably a gameplay layer there of some sort.
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Dec 7, 2015 17:12
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Have they mentioned what those Theater Groups are or what the icons mean? I probably missed it in a diary or video somewhere. e: Oh I see, they're exactly what they sound like, they group up all the generals leading troops in a particular theater you define, part of setting up OOB. Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 22:10
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DrSunshine posted:Personally, I like that they're not whitewashing it or playing it coyly by calling it "Planetary Bombardment" or "Expel the Natives" or whatever. It's just a plain straight-up "genocide" button. Planetary Bombardment is presumably a separate thing. You Genocide pops on a planet you already control, you bombard the planet if you want to just glass it without conquering it.
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Dec 14, 2015 05:20
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Gort posted:I'm a little worried by that last World War Wednesday actually. Germany declared war on Poland and didn't do anything. Neither side's divisions moved for like a year. (then the player quit) Yeah, may have just been a fluke or something but there's obviously some poor decision making going on by the AI there. The vid also kind of emphasizes something I don't like about HOI, which is spending 45 minutes playing the game on 4 speed, constantly picking techs to research, waiting for something to actually happen. Does this game have Tech Queuing of any sort? I feel like that would help a lot to just be able to queue up the next 3 things when you're obviously just firing straight down a line. I'm interested in how the actual strategy in that scenario could have gone though. If you conquer enemy territory do you gain any immediate benefit out of it (like get use of their AA sites, factories, forts, and so on)? I'm mostly wondering if there's possibility of having a small war with a neighbor to grab a bunch of factories and then start making use of those to crank things out. Or if you do something like snipe Moscow as happened there, does that cause actual serious problems for the Soviets or do they just take it back a week later and everything is fine? Looking at that Leningrad fiasco, I guess even if he cut off their supply from land, they're still adjacent to water so they'd still probably be in decent supply. Would it be sufficient to take all the ports along the gulf to shut that down? Or would he need to establish a naval presence as well? I suppose that's also assuming Leningrad isn't producing enough supply of it's own to hold out too, since there is a base level for big cities.
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Dec 16, 2015 21:58
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Gort posted:He never cut Leningrad off completely. He left a little bit to the North-west open, which gave me conniptions. Yeah that's what I was asking. Had he even done that, how much supply could they have provided via sea or how much does the city itself provide? Actually that sort of hits on another problem from earlier I was having. Since division size seems to be variable (considering you can add/remove/change stuff in the designer), does that mean supply consumption is variable per division too? They said they made it easy to tell supply usage so I'm guessing this is something that's really obvious once you actually get your hands on it, but I couldn't tell by looking at the video. I guess you would hover over the province and see 'N supply usage from 15 divisions, X supply from city, Y supply from land, Z supply from sea."
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Dec 16, 2015 22:55
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I seem to recall they mentioned they were adding some improved debugging capabilities for HOI4, so hopefully instead of just getting hard crashes so much you'll just be seeing Debug Dog instead.
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Jan 11, 2016 18:58
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Ship design looks almost as fun and exciting as last week's World War Wednesday.
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Jan 18, 2016 19:15
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