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Corbeau posted:All this talk of 4X games and the importance of systems existing for a reason without a single post mentioning Old World. Disappointed in you, thread. ~~~~~ To that end, I have been thinking about horses. It's not true of every 4x game, but so many of them do this thing with horses, and it makes no sense. You have areas of vast, open prairies, and there, in one tile or hex among dozens exactly like it, is a spot Where the Horses Are, and control of this spot is crucial to a country's production of the ever important strategic resource of horses. Luckily, most continents have a few such spots. This is nonsense. Animal husbandry, or whatever the name the tech is in a given 4x game, does the exact opposite of what it claims to. Domestication of animals is a thing done so that we could raise them ourselves, wheresoever we want. It makes negative sense for these strange horse nodes to exist in scattered enclaves around the world. A ranch shouldn't need a specific ultra rare spot, it just needs space and grass. Horses are extremely adaptive creatures. We've recently discovered that our earlier assumptions on when horses came (back) to the Americas was off by a couple hundred years. A far smaller amount of contact was enough to begin seeding the land with huge, culturally transformative numbers of horses, a couple centuries earlier than our old, patronizing understanding. But that goes to show how these things actually happen. The horse node is ridiculous. Once there is contact, even the tiniest bit of contact, which, on connected land-mass, is nothing so much as the space to roam, there are horses. Once contact is made with another land mass, horses very rapidly take over. And plants–another thing that some games, looking at you with anger in my heart, Civ, you, who use your powers to establish lovely accepted trends–plants work roughly the same way. These big plant resources spread fast and can completely change the course of history wheresoever they wind up. Much of celebrated Italian Cuisine relies upon plants that are very much not native to Europe. The Great Hunger of Ireland involved a blight of a crop that didn't originate in Ireland. (Before anyone corrects me on the cause of the Great Hunger being more a matter of deliberate neglect and mismanagement, there still needed to be a crisis that was mismanaged.) Colonization of islands and coastlines was often as much about finding suitable places to raise known profitable crops as finding existing ones to exploit. This was met with varying degrees of success. The point is: organic resources are less a thing that has nodes and more a thing that has potential places they can grow. Some of these resources require much less specific environments than others. Access to them shouldn't be subject to the same on/off switch. This got me thinking about tech trees, and how they work. Civ distinguishes between culture and science trees, but the culture tree is still a tech tree. For some things, it makes sense that a scientific process could be kept secret from rival nations, with varying success, but, especially for cultural advancements, it's remarkably silly: Oh, Rome has built this embassy thing in my capital, and that seems to confer them some kind of benefit and information about me. It's a shame we haven't learned how to do that, and we can't, you know, just copy the clear example that exists in our capital. But it's also silly for a lot of tech, too. Native Americans didn't need to learn the chemical processes of developing gunpowder from niter, and then mine or trade for niter before they could train armies with guns. They traded for guns. "That's already modeled by gifting units" -- that's an accident. It's only modeling if the design is deliberate. If that's the intent, then production of units using the higher technology nation needs to be added to trade agreements. At any rate, winding it down: I have major problems with how games handle resources, and I have major problems with tech trees. Making resources make sense is a harder problem to tackle, but for tech trees, I propose something like how Humankind handles changing culture between eras. 1)Some tech, namely what civ chucks in the culture tree should be limited in how many people can research it. Sometimes to as few as one player. 2)Interaction with this tech should make it immediately available for adoption. However, the player that actually developed it should have a unique bonus advantage for doing so, to incentivize being the one who gets there first, and to reflect a cultural value. Why do you need to research tech to build trade caravans? If someone sends you a caravan, you can conclude: "hey, this kind of journey is possible. I should also do that." As an afterthought, this would have an added effect of making snowballing research much less possible. Circling back round to resources, the best I have is: 1)Once contact with a non-mineral resource is made, you should be able to produce your own. This means that the trade off for space needs to be made more important. Thus, benefit of a luxury resource or food resource should scale against the number of places that choose to build them. In places especially suited for developing these resources, once contact is made, perhaps a new wild source has a chance to appear, cluing you in that maybe this is a good place to grow it. 2)To feed into this, I propose a necessary core mechanic of surveying. If any old place can produce potatoes or grapes or whatever, then gently caress it. You have space and money, then you have potatoes and grapes. If it turns out in this procedural world, only one or two places are viable to produce coffee, or maybe only a few places choose to cultivate coffee, then the demand and benefit for having the coffee should be made significant. There needs to be a unit, or other system you can invest resources into, that can tell you what spaces are viable for producing what resources, and how many you'll get. Perhaps there should be a way for this to be wrong, but I am not married to that concept. 3)It should be possible to extinct an animal or plant resource through overuse and/or insufficient cultivation and developing over its native sources. Like with the African forest elephant or silphium. While we're at it, add silphium to games as a resource. Big game food sources like deer or cattle or bison, should be a thing that you can benefit from having in your territory whether you deliberately ranch them or not. Maybe you don't need to ranch your bison because so many of them roam the undeveloped plains. Or they did, until these other assholes started building poo poo over their ranges. 4)Very early on, surveying should be tied to discovering these resources at all. "We have determined the yellow ones are delicious" "this wood floats", etc. It would make a lot of sense to just build this into early scouting units. (And is similar to what they do, already) Give it a chance to discover if a useful thing exists natively, and then raise this chance if they leave movement on the table. If you have resources that can be produced, then you should be able to tell the scout/surveyor to find out how good a spot is for growing/raising it. This will also give your scouts something to do after you've found your shores, and keep them relevant for much longer. Within your own territory, perhaps this could be done by spending money, instead. This makes a lot more sense than building a city because it's near the only two places that grow a plant that you magically know is going to be valuable one day, just as soon as your scientists learn it smells nice if it's burned. 5)Trees should have properties that confer distinct bonuses, so long as you don't extinct them from your territory. Surveying trees for their most useful properties should be made important. It's weird that important trees, like apple or chestnut or cork aren't on the list of luxury or strategic resources in any game I have played. You don't even necessarily need to name them, just proclaim what benefits an individual forest tile yields, if inside your territory. Tl;dr: Thinking about horses made me think that agriculture and technology in 4x games makes no goddamn sense and needs to be much more abstract and fluid.
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Apr 5, 2023 17:39
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SIGSEGV posted:I find it particularly funny in for example Stellaris when there's like three special resource spots in half of the map and it's just a regular mining spot. It should be a Dune style murder spot with half the map space being devoted to the intricacies of the partial control of those nodes. Oh, don't get me started on the problems I have with hard borders everyone agrees to, or the lack of intricacy in diplomatic agreements. Disputed territory should be literally that. Disputed. And if the AI happens to start building poo poo within "your borders", it's on you to stop them. Territorial lines shouldn't default to everyone accepting the same terms, borders should be a result of diplomatic agreements, which may or may not reflect what you actually currently control.
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Apr 5, 2023 17:56
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Clarste posted:Is that in a good sense or a bad sense? All games are janky until they define or redefine a genre. A Wizard of Goatse posted:also is that what Old World is actually about? I had it written off as a Civ clone that had picked being only the first half of Civ as its defining gimmick Old World is a game I haven't yet bought, but I have watched quite a few people stream. It doesn't attack the same core ideas that I am, but it does attack a few. Everything ties into individual characters being distinct, but this is largely just bonuses you can move around, and another set of people to keep happy in your country. The most creative of its newer systems, to my eye, is the orders system. As your character rules over time, you accumulate legitimacy, which determines a number of orders you can give your units. Essentially, a reflection of one's bureaucratic strength. You might have a much larger army, but you can't organize them. Or you might have to tell your workers to pound sand for a few turns, because the Sumerians are on your borders, and your army needs to move. When you die, you will take a legitimacy hit. The biggest selling point is this: It has a bloody undo button. A repeatable undo button.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:56
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GlyphGryph posted:I'm not sure any of that is a good fit for the 4x genre, at least the way they are currently designed Have you considered that the same thing every time is also incredibly boring? Simulation is just an excuse to finally innovate.
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Apr 5, 2023 19:25
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tehinternet posted:I mean they can be cool or could be at least if it doesn’t get min-maxed to the point that one build is better than everything else you could make. Hate games where min-maxing is mandatory to be remotely competitive (in a matchmaking sense, not actual competition). It'd be fine if anyone ever made the drat math line up. "This will win 75% of the time" needs "And fail utterly the other quarter of the time." The more likely a positive outcome is in this kind of gamble, the more catastrophic the penalty for failure ought to be.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:56
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Separate the AI victory condition from the player's, entirely. Make the game continue after the AI has "won" to see if you also win, and make the AI player absolutely insufferable with gloating if they achieve their victory. Then make a separate mode of difficulty that, in addition to your normal victory conditions, also requires you preventing every AI from reaching their objectives.
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Apr 10, 2023 15:59
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There are zero genres of games that would benefit from a chat bot. Diplomacy in these games absolutely needs a rework, but through what options are allowed and how things like territory are modeled.
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Apr 10, 2023 17:53
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The diplomacy used in Diplomacy is nothing I want in a 4x game. The less 4x games need to depend on "war, only war" to get things done, the better.
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Apr 11, 2023 15:45
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Orange Devil posted:I think 4X players, significantly more than those of other genres, haven't the faintest clue what exactly it is they actually enjoy about the game they are playing. What if I told you.... I think Civilization is pretty bad and backward, and the things I thought I would like about other games actually are the things I like about other games. It's me, I'm the guy who earnestly loves the system Humankind has for changing cultures, and my biggest problems with the game stems from how it deals with other systems entirely.
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Apr 11, 2023 23:34
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Murgos posted:Randomized tech tree was cool too. Also that there were several OP systems so even if you got locked out of one branch you could usually recover. Stellaris used to have that, and then the developers decided they would rather have terrain. In space. So they kept the most boring one and then made an interesting 4x into yet another bad loving board game. Every 4x dev ultimately wants to make a board game. But it's the abstract, chaotic nature of 4x games that make them interesting in the first place.
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May 1, 2023 15:38
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Jack Trades posted:Stellaris is in an infinitely better shape right now than it has ever been, actually. That's because everyone who disagreed stopped playing entirely. There's no reason to go to the thread. So I am happy you have a game you like now, but I don't.
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May 1, 2023 15:48
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Contrasts is fair. There's two approaches: You can't please everyone all the time, so you pick an audience and make them happy. Or You make the game that YOU want, and accept you'll have a smaller audience. The first option almost always wins out because it makes more money, and we haven't made all the important poo poo free yet.
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May 1, 2023 16:13
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I suppose bringing joy to as many people as possible is a fine aspiration. I lack the capacity to express what is missing from your well meaning sentiment. An innocuous, good natured post about something that matters as little as a type of video game shouldn't fill me with unspeakable sadness, but it does just the same. I am not many. I am one. Game design, like everything else, makes me feel lonely.
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May 1, 2023 16:36
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Zurai posted:Stellaris is vastly better for the FTL change. Fighting wars before was just completely frustrating, there was literally no way to defend yourself or force an engagement. Now at least there's some pale semblance of strategy to the military part of the game. You had to know how your opponents moved. You could absolutely engage them, but you had to solve a fairly complicated logistical puzzle to do it. That's what made it interesting, and at times, quite difficult. I quit playing partly because of this change. I've come back to the game several times over the years, a lot of the changes since (how planets work being the biggest one) feel like huge improvements, but I have never enjoyed the game as much as the earlier days. If they HAD to pick one, they could have at least kept the Wormhole generators, since they were the most fun, and they created terrain (in a way that actually makes sense, no less) by virtue of forcing empires to defend around big objectives with huge, glowing targets on their back.
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May 1, 2023 21:57
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papasyhotcakes posted:I would argue against the storm covers at least 3 of the 4 x, the only one not covered would be exterminate as the game lacks a military system, but the exploring of the forest and the glades, the exploitation of the resources you find inside and the expansion of your settlement are all in there. If we can suddenly recommend our favorite three x games (not to be confused with triple x) I would highly recommend Terraformers, which is a really addictive game about terraforming Mars (not to be confused with any board games that cover this concept) Terraformers might be my current game of the year. Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Oct 27, 2023 |
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Oct 27, 2023 16:27
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Tell me more about these alternative FTL systems. Stellaris killing theirs for the shittiest one wounded me deeply.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:11
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I still think Humankind actually IS better despite all its flaws, (and the biggest ones, to me, were all civ hold-overs.) but Civilization increasingly represents a lot of what I hate in this genre, and that doesn't seem poised to change anytime soon.
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Jan 19, 2024 15:35
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Did they do away with the Horse Node, the most brain-dead concept in 4x games? And the animal husbandry tech which does the opposite of what animal Husbandry is? I have a lit of beef with Civilization, somewhat fewer with Humankind, but one of the biggest ones is The Horse Node.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:24
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Click on the lil [?] under that guy's post to instantly discover The Horse Node Rant. Hahaha. Oof. A bit surprised that was somehow my first post in this thread. I still stand by it. Horses as a strategic resource isn't gameplay enhancing, it's "actually just kind of stupid". Both tech trees and resource management have needed huge overhauls for years. Millenia is trying something different, at least, with the age system, so I am definitely keeping tabs on it. Can't fix every problem with a genre at once, and we're honestly kind of spoiled lately for 4x development, and I hope that sticks around.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:59
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Spartans should be ruined. The mythology there almost certainly has a net negative on society.
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Feb 23, 2024 23:34
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Megazver posted:someone is probably already working on a game that does to 4X what Against the Storm did to town builders Would you settle for 3 out of 4 Xs? Terraformers does this, but there's no "Exterminate" because there's no opponent. Nonetheless it's very much a "grow out your empire and hit major objectives" in the way that 4Xs are. Your enemy is basically random events and the clock.
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Mar 16, 2024 03:58
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Megazver posted:This was vaguely on my radar (I wishlisted it at some point). I'll give it a look before long, thanks! Just for the sake of clarity, when you said "What Against the Storm did for townbuilders" I assume what you meant was "You do all the fun 'early game' challenging stuff and then leave the map before it gets monotonous and start a new run with different objectives." Because that's what I took it to mean when I posted. I adore Terraformers, but I wanna make sure I'm describing what it actually is. It deserves a space to be talked about in detail, but I'm not sure it's big enough to have its own thread and it doesn't really fit another genre neatly.
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Mar 16, 2024 11:43
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Megazver posted:Terraformers is currently 45% off, so I bought it and played a few games. Glad to hear it! This ate an entire month of mine last year, and I am likely to come back to it several times going forward. I never got to insanity difficulty, but I never lost, and I was cycling through the various different objectives. One thing I liked about it was how hard it was for me to predict how a game would go. The run I thought for sure would be my first failure wound up beating my previous best score by about eight turns. Hahaha.
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Mar 19, 2024 14:25
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On paper, ship designers are meant to be a fluid rock-paper-scissors type system, where you can tailor make your own fleet to counteract the very specific challenges that your glorious space armada is likely to face, and having to change your design plans to something new could be the thing that ultimately spells your doom. In practice, this has never once actually happened.
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Mar 26, 2024 00:17
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FishMcCool posted:Distant Worlds is another exception, in a weird niche where you can play the game as a pure ship/station designer and automate everything else. Ok, fair. Distant Worlds letting you decide precisely which parts of the game to interact with was always its own kind of treat. But by and large.... Can't say ship design has ever felt super impactful in the way designers clearly feel like it ought to be. I think a fundamental problem (problem as in "design question" rather than "bad thing") of 4x games is ultimately which parts are simulation and which parts are gameplay.
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Mar 26, 2024 14:33
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TheHoosier posted:What are some decent 4x games with actual campaigns? My journey through the C&C series reminded me I like clicking little men, which led me back to an old love of 4x and city-builder games. I've been playing Master of Magic again (CoM for Windows naturally) and it rules, but I'd like some chunky single-player content that isn't just straight skirmishes. Setting doesn't really matter but I prefer fantasy slightly. I'll eventually get brave enough to venture into Dominions multi-player. AoW4 is very good and has a campaign that I enjoyed, but it's pretty short. Dunno if the DLC has added to the campaign. I should check it out. I really loved that game on release.
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May 1, 2024 21:47
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