4X strategy games: i have no complaints but the genocide is too complicated

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > 4X strategy games: i have no complaints but the genocide is too complicated

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

I think the whole "ai can't handle 1upt" thing tends to be exaggerated because of civ V/VI having much worse AI than civ IV across the board (not just in combat)

I haven't played a ton of it but the old world ai seems to handle 1upt combat fine

# ¿ Mar 22, 2023 04:34

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 10:43

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Jabor posted:

As a general game design thing, something being more complex means that it's worse. Your goal as a game designer is to ensure that any complexity you're adding is justified, that it brings upsides to the game that you literally couldn't get without bringing in that complexity.

yeah and this is 50% of why the person saying stellaris is garbage was right, paradox love to splurge their complexity budget on systems for barely any return in terms of interesting decisions

# ¿ Apr 5, 2023 08:01

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Dallan Invictus posted:

I know Beyond Earth was explicitly not intended to be this, but I'm convinced that everyone wanting this is a large part of why it bombed so massively.

it was really obviously intended to be this though, it's full of attempts to ape smac features. "beyond earth is it's own thing, how dare you compare it to smac" became a thing because the game sucked and so all those comparisons were unfavourable

imo smac doesn't hold up that well now but at the time it was clearly the best civ game yet, despite having some new bad ideas (the unit designer, not getting to choose techs, crawlers)

# ¿ Apr 6, 2023 03:46

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

wiegieman posted:

It could only repeat text descriptions of decisions that human beings had already posted to the internet.

GPT is a complex Markov chain, that's all.

this is either meaninglessly true or clearly false, depending how you define the state space of the supposed "markov chain"

# ¿ Apr 7, 2023 18:53

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

my dad posted:

While I don't like the dumb hype around ChatGPT, calling something a Chinese room isn't the diss you think it is because that particular thought experiment is bullshit.

yeah, I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of claims made about chatgpt but stuff like "it's just a model trained on text data" doesn't tell you anything

I've actually seen the chinese room though experiment raised more often by chatgpt super-optimists, because if the question is "does something that perfectly mimics a human count as intelligent if it works in a weird way" you're already talking about something amazing. the problem is that the premise isn't true and the way chatgpt works is very relevant to knowing if it will ever be true (I'd be surprised)

# ¿ Apr 7, 2023 19:34

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Super Jay Mann posted:

The fundamental philosophy underpinning all ML research is that these AIs will eventually be able to solve any problem so long as you throw enough data at it. No need for us to actually design algorithms to solve specific problems, the computer will figure that stuff out for us and we can just sit back and watch it all happen.

That sounds a hell of a lot like a �magic crutch� to me.

for anyone who is wondering, this is not in fact the fundamental philosophy underpinning all ML research

# ¿ Apr 10, 2023 04:48

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

LLSix posted:

Unsurprisingly, everyone still in the thread after several years likes the game.

Yeah, but as someone who does not like the game, the post-release changes (including starlanes-only travel) really have made the game better in my experience. It's just that the core problems with the game go beyond anything you could reasonably hope to be fixed after release.

# ¿ May 1, 2023 19:36

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Impermanent posted:

realtalk though paradox has always been bad it just also catered to a specific kind of map-poisoned politicscel that was willing to overlooks its flaws. same thing as creative assembly.

paradox the developer yeah but paradox was only the publisher on lamplighters league and they've published some pretty good stuff

e: and yeah, stellaris is still bad, it's just reached the point where you only hear from the people who kept on playing it

# ¿ Oct 14, 2023 01:20

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Psycho Landlord posted:

shocking revelations that people who like certain games continue to play and discuss those games, in this thread

sorry I meant to edit out "THIS IS SHOCKING:" from the start of my post

# ¿ Oct 14, 2023 02:08

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

THE BAR posted:

Those aren't mutually exclusive. The Civ6 modding community spun lots of gold from a stone.

it's mutually exclusive with the second half of the sentence at least

# ¿ Dec 4, 2023 14:34

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Microplastics posted:

Playing the Millennia demo and laughing out loud at the battle scenes with the enemy guys running out of their fort to take a little swipe at my guys before running back in

most of the game feels like it could be good or bad depending but that part just looks awful. both because it's a lot of waiting around watching something you can't control and because of how much the outcome depends on what your unit AI does, I lost multiple battles which would be easy wins if my archer acted at all sensibly

I might change my mind if the units turn out to follow clear rules that you can plan around but for now it feels very frustrating

# ¿ Feb 11, 2024 00:43

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Elias_Maluco posted:

I dont care much about automation in this kinda of stuff in these games because

1- the AI will be bad at choosing stuff to build and where

2- managing and building my cities is my favorite part of any 4X

That said, theres absolutely no reason we need workers as a unit you have to move around the map to build stuff. Eliminating that, I totally happy with improving my tiles and choosing what to build myself

if players want to automate something (outside of deterministic "do this each turn" stuf perhaps) that's a sign of an issue with the design. I like the idea of copying ctp public works for it

I'm not gonna get my hopes up for the game since "4x with cool sounding ideas" usually doesn't work out and the demo didn't move that much, but I'll certainly look to see what people think of it post-release

# ¿ Feb 23, 2024 18:33

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

I like the orders system a lot but I don't think it really achieves the goal of reducing micro, since using your orders optimally still becomes more and more complex the more stuff you have

# ¿ Feb 23, 2024 19:29

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

well he *was*

# ¿ Mar 1, 2024 06:27

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

orangelex44 posted:

Honestly one of my biggest gripes with AOW4 is that they went too far on the customization. I can be a fan of Planetfall's Amazons, I can't be a fan of Non-Descript Feudal Culture Nature Tome Nation.

yeah, 100%. I'm not surprised lots of people love the nation designer, it's a good implementation of a concept people get really excited about, but I find it way less interesting than factions explicitly designed to have strong mechanical/flavour themes. the cultures feel a bit different but much less so than full factions would (and they matter less and less as the game goes on anyway)

# ¿ Mar 20, 2024 04:32

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

the smac unit designer is pretty bad. in other civ games researching new units changes how your army functions, in smac that happens only a handful of times in the game (mostly because of finding a new chassis) and otherwise it's just identical army comp with higher numbers

stellaris is the worst ship designer though, because it's all of the usual problems but also the connection between design choices and outcomes is obscured by the typical paradox pseudo-simulationist bullshit

# ¿ Mar 26, 2024 05:11

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Microplastics posted:

Gimme a homeworld 4x

this was the idea behind the haegemonia games: homeworld-style combat but you controlled planets and so on. no idea if any of them were actually good though

# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 19:36

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 10:43

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

my dad posted:

Wouldn't really describe it as homeworld style combat, but it was a fun hybrid 4x.

oh I just meant in the sense that it's a 3d space combat rts, I only ever played a little of it

# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 19:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > 4X strategy games: i have no complaints but the genocide is too complicated