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ilitarist posted:When I was a kid and launched Civilization 1 I was blown away by how big the history of the world is. Just imagine, fro all this time life changed for millions of people, there were great empires I have never heard of. Then I was blown away but Europe Universalis 2 detailed map explaining me what exactly is HRE, or Rome Total War showing huge marching armies up close. Nowadays I look at Total War and feel repulsed by misrepresentation of ancient combat. And the scale is so off! Europa Universalis simplifies so much and presents tribes and bueracratic empires as extremely similar entities, giving countries some sort of "ideas" that insist on England being a naval power even if it conquers half of Europe and is content on staying home. And Civilization... Well, you know. It has always pushing the idea that no matter what are your roots, every civilization could walk the path of becoming USA. Yeah I've had a similar evolution, though for me it was Age of Empires 1 where I got completely lost in the manual, reading up their little two page summaries of the Hittites and Shang. I still adore the art for the game, the stone age town center is legitimately one of my favorite art assets from any video game. But now the flatness of it feels so off to me. The things I really love about studying the past, the incredible alien texture that only becomes more complex and intricate as you dig deeper, is something basically no game ever does justice to (well, maybe King of Dragon Pass/Six Ages, but those are HIGH fantasy). And so far nearly every game has nestled awkwardly on the issue of contingency. Like you said - England just "is" a naval power in EU, even if you neglect your navy for generations. This rests on the idea that England's naval power in the early modern was not contingent on historical events, but was a supra-historic attribute, even in the midst of a game that exists to explore contingency. If the Spanish obliterate the English navy, the English still chant about ra ra rule the waves. Of course the game that probably did the most to try to explore this kind of contingent development gameplay would be, I guess, Beyond Earth. And...didn't pan out so well.
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Apr 1, 2021 15:57
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:41 |
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Tree Bucket posted:Ahh, the AoE2 Mongols campagin. "Behold, the horde of Genghis Khan approaches!" (3 horse archers and 2 camels appear.) Admittedly my objections so far are mostly on matters of taste, I think it's worth being a little more critical. Partially because like 90% of studying history is criticizing. Some of why it's worth being critical is because some games are very badly researched and it's worth at least laughing at. I remember the official AOE2 strategy guide had an interview with a designer, who nearly shipped the game before a member from the Japan team pointed out that the scenario they had to represent the Sengoku Jidai made no sense: the plan (that was amended before shipping) was that you'd be rescuing a captured Oda Nobunaga. But, like nearly all members of his caste at that time, Oda committed suicide when capture was imminent. In Oda's case it was very famous, involving betrayal and burning down a temple! I know Wikipedia didn't exist but it's like one of the first things you learn about the guy. But to be a bit more serious, it matters that a lot of the groups that get flattened into often pretty bad stereotypes are still alive today. Mongolia's a sovereign country, for example. And we're probably a few years out from it but we could very well have a president who grew up on these games, and we've almost certainly had executive and congressional aides who did. Classic Westerns often had awful portrayals of Comanche and other native groups, and the people who grew up on those movies included a lot of very powerful people.
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Apr 2, 2021 01:58
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Rise of nations is such a king and one of those things i really like is that, even without having to fiddle with stupid AOE transport ships, contested naval landings are extremely dangerous and deadly. AIs are also famously terrible at navigating multidimensional spaces, and the more variables go into evaluating a transit route that includes potential counterplay, the worse they get, which is part of why movement bonuses in 4Xs tend to shatter AIs.
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Oct 6, 2021 00:54
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The fundamental connected lore is that Endless Legend takes place in the dying days of the Endless Empire - Auriga is a laboratory planet of the Endless and the winters are the result of the planet basically going haywire as the lack of maintenance causes the whole thing to fall apart. Endless Space 2 takes place not super long after - the Endless are all gone but the Cravers and Vodyani at a minimum have some knowledge of the Endless, though most of the other factions seem to treat the Endless as more or less mythological and they've developed their own spacefaring tech so either the Endless spent a decent amount of time dwindled very far down or they developed that tech crazy fast. The Vaulters are the same faction: basically they canonically "won" EL and got off before it turned into a complete snowball. I forget how explicit it is but the Cravers are (probably) Necrophage derived. ES2 basically completely overwrites ES1. I don't know how DOTE fits in really. chaosapiant posted:Any good screenshot LPs of this on these forums? Seems like there’s a lot to dive into with this game. I briefly did an SSLP but I never finished it because I got burnt out on fixing uploads (apparently what I thought were legible uploads gave readers headaches). I hope somebody else does the game justice because I am not confident about either my abilities to write a decent LP nor my ability to follow through enough to do it justice.
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Jan 20, 2022 18:57
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mitochondritom posted:Ditto on disabling Prenumbra, the hacking stuff is just a bit naff really. I didn't even bother with Awakening after the negative feedback. Shame, because the theme song for the hacking species is amazing. It's my favorite song. I'd actually say for at least one game disable also Vaulters and Supremacy. Vaulters isn't too taxing but Supremacy adds a frankly even more gameplay warping layer to the game than Penumbra, it's just not obvious what that is until you're like 60 turns in an going "what the gently caress."
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Jan 21, 2022 13:31
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ZearothK posted:So, I finally grabbed Endless Legends Definitive. Is there any DLC I should disable for my first few games? Also what are the recommended starter factions? TBH I think the game is near-complete in its base state and that the DLCs are pretty specialized. I recommend disabling all the significant gameplay altering DLCs (Guardians, Shadows, Shifters, Tempest, Inferno, Symbiosis) for one game. Different players have different opinions about which DLCs are good or bad (I think Shifters is basically always good and Shadows is basically always bad, there are people here who have nearly the opposite opinion). The most-commonly-recommended starter faction is Wild Walkers, followed by Drakken. Both of those engage with functionally every gameplay system, are highly flexible, and have mechanics that make both city placement and military engagement more forgiving. Vaulters I think is the most canonical and they do also have a mechanism to make military fuckups a lot more recoverable, but I personally find science focused factions really tough in Endless games.
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Jan 21, 2022 14:51
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The crude metric is "1 city per empire plan." Obviously does not apply to all factions.
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Apr 29, 2022 02:37
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A major problem for Humankind, and why I didn't even bother picking it up, is that Amplitude's strength is above all else worldbuilding. The Cultists and Cravers and Riftborn and such are just so characterful, and even with some pretty cringe writing there's some real sense of...something difficult to capture in the various factions and the universe. It's great. Humankind doesn't even attempt to leverage this strength.
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Jan 13, 2023 20:01
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Huh. That's actually the first time I've heard somebody even allude to Humankind having any good features. I don't really think it was any specific repulsion about great person narratives - people love EU4, a game that doesn't even really feature people in any meaningful sense - but that it seems to have just been exceptionally poorly executed. The dominant thing I heard from around release was that it was an amplitude game that didn't use any of amplitude's strengths but used all of their weaknesses. Just a generally incompetent, amateurish 4x.
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Jan 5, 2024 11:10
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TBH the single thing I hate the most in many strategy games is the creepy cultural essentialism, and the way the culture switching in Humanity was framed pushed it to the level of just completely repulsive to me. I don't know that having fewer of them would have helped. Perhaps it would have been better to functionally reverse it: instead of the cultures having essential bonuses, the cultures are blank slates, and every age or so you make a choice about what path your country is going to pursue and that makes the modifiers. This would make it possible for you and your rivals to feel consistent and coherent across any individual playthrough, would make it less historically gross, and would make it less jarring when you make those decisions.
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Jan 8, 2024 11:28
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TBH I think no small part of this is that I've read too much actual history and the way strategy games present history is just utterly infuriating to me to the point where I massively prefer fantasy settings because then I don't have to go "what the gently caress is wrong with you shitbags Mongolians are perfectly capable of making good art why did you give them a penalty to art." Humankind just felt like the furthest extent of it to me. And IDK I think my idea is salvageable but would need workshopping. Part of what I'm thinking about is cultural stereotypes around Germans. In the 20th and 21st century, Germans are stereotyped as efficient and martial. But I have absolutely read older works (18th and 19th century) where the common stereotypes about Germans were that they were lazy and happy. This stereotype isn't 100% dead in the current day - we still think of the silly goofy Bavarian oktoberfest - but I can definitely think of times over the last few hundred years that a culture has functionally "class switched." De Tocqueville's portrait of Americans as collaborative and collectivist feels like a fever dream today, Japan has gone from a total technological backwater to an expansionist military terror to the leader of exporting computers and cartoons, the British have gone from durable colonialists to whiny isolationists. By contrast I can't think of a single instance where Civilization's style of cultural essences made any loving sense, and that's even with the sometimes choosing a "culture" that was a specific diplomatic treaty that lasted less than 100 years. All of which is to walk back to the incredibly cold take of "man I can't wait for ES3 and EL2."
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Jan 8, 2024 11:55
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:41 |
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Oh yeah I'm 100% on train "Total Warhammer is the best Total War because it doesn't even try to be historical." Nothing about how Total War has modeled things has ever made sense for the historical periods its portrayed (Napoleonic Style regiments for medieval armies? Centuries worth of casualties every year? No military operation is ever shorter than multiple years???), but if its demons summoned from the aether into a universe where there's no people no culture only war, sure lets go. And to pivot to other Amplitude projects - Endless Dungeon is sitting on a miserable "Mixed" on steam reviews. I am generally OK with waiting for games to be out for a while to 'settle' so to speak, has ED gotten good or is it really just worse DOTE?
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Jan 8, 2024 12:30
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