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I love this genre, but it makes me sad that so many games hamstring themselves by adding in needless systems that wind up being unfun time sinks. Spicy hot take, in 90% of space games the ship designer is the biggest offender for this and they'd have been better off with predesigned ships rather than expecting me to change out my armour mk.3 to mk. 4 every 15 minutes.
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Aug 19, 2020 09:31
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I'm definitely intrigued by it but at £45 it's gonna take one hell of a sale before I dip my toe in that. I'll add it to the OP though for sure. I played a whole lot of it back in the day. It's got some incredibly good ideas in it, but it's just lacking some little bit of crunch to make it really excellent. The main thing I wish more games would borrow from it is the civilian economy. It makes having a reactive and dispersed military essential to protect your freighters from pirates, and it's just drat satisfying to see a live universe growing under your protection. Getting past the early game resource bottleneck is massively tedious though.
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Aug 20, 2020 22:51
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Only very debatably a 4X, but AI Wars takes a great approach by having the computer not even remotely be playing the same game as the player. Always struck me as Gordion knot solution that should be picked up more.
Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Aug 22, 2020 |
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Aug 21, 2020 10:35
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Khorne posted:AI War & AI War 2 are great. They're the only video game 4x I've really gotten into, and they're pretty good games as long as your objective isn't to win or understand anything at all without a lot of effort. It's hamstrung by being made by Arcen games, whose MO is to make some of the most interesting games in existence and then wreck them by fundamentally misunderstanding how to make them any good. Main problem with AI War 1, for instance, is that it front loads too much complexity making it unapproachable to new players. People complained that the tutorial was too complex for instance, and the dev response was that it was fine because established players enjoy replaying the tutorial repeatedly.  The concept that this was completely orthogonal to the purpose of a tutorial seemed irrelevant to them. I think they might be the most self defeating team I've ever known except for Kerberos. Which is a shame because they undoubtedly have tremendous talent (unlike Kerberos). Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Aug 22, 2020 |
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Aug 22, 2020 19:35
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Relax Or DIE posted:But it reminds me: did anyone else get into Armageddon Empires? I never got a great hold on it but remember having a good time I tried very hard with Armageddon Empires, but in the end I have to say I think it's just a bad game. The strategy layer might be ok, but the combat has too much randomness in it to feel rewarding, and it never misses a chance to make you take six mouse clicks when one would have done.
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Aug 23, 2020 16:14
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mfcrocker posted:I'm glad to not be the only person holding a candle for Space Empires! SE4 was probably my favourite and we dumped massive hours into it as kids The amount of astounding bullshit you could get up to in that game was egregious. Rearrange every wormhole to your advantage? Stealthed regenerating planet destroyer? Trinary Dyson sphere systems? Capture an enemy colony ship to get colonists that breath a different atmosphere to get better use out of your planets? Espionage subvert an enemy psychic ship with mind control powers, leading to a cascade of them mind controlling more and more ships? Wish more of it came early enough in the tech tree to actually matter in a game.
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Sep 4, 2020 11:15
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teokarp posted:How is the AI? Does it use some of the schemes you described? Don't be ridiculous, the AI is dreadful! All this stuff is mostly endgame clown on the AI time wasting. There are mods to improve the AI and add in really well designed races (United Floral Empire are amazingly well designed), but the underlying AI engine is much too primitive for anything clever.
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Sep 4, 2020 13:36
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Knightsoul posted:Anyone tried the demo for Star Dynasties ? This sounds like what I hoped Stellaris would be before rather than the 100th attempt to recapture that MOO2 magic. I'll give the demo a whirl tonight and report back how much it sucks (hopefully in an interesting way at least).
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Oct 19, 2020 14:20
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Snail Information posted:Stellaris was going to be like ck2 in space originally. They were taking Dune as inspiration, and have all human noble houses in space everywhere. You'd start the game in an established galaxy. I remember when they did a dev blog saying they were going to instead go for a game full of aliens and discovery and add in an exploration phase to the game. Stellaris is fine, its good even, but thinking of what could have been just hurts. This post murdered a tiny piece of my soul from sheer lost potential.
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Oct 20, 2020 15:22
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Y'know, they could have had both. Humanity starts off established in some isolated nook of the galaxy, lots of different feuding space dukes or whatever, and as the game goes on technological development makes longer range exploration feasible and brings them into contact with a broader galactic community. Like the arc of EU4 transplanted into space. I think I asked a dev this once. Iirc, the answer is basically that they realised they would sell far more as a traditional 4x. This then prompted them to shoe horn in all the 4x laundry list that the fans demand (exploration, ship designer, tactical planetary battles), even though they knew it would make the game worse because fans wouldn't buy it without those things. As a market, 4x fans are incredibly intolerant of innovation in the genre. It's like the rogue like genre before Binding of Isaac and Spelunky showed the world you could do something radically different and great in that space (and even then, you get weird gatekeepers who despise those games).
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Oct 20, 2020 16:36
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Knightsoul posted:Anyone tried the demo for Star Dynasties ? So tried out the demo, and sorry to say it's very much an opaque mess with very little fun to be had. The UI is actively unpleasant to interact with, and even after going through the tutorial I wasn't able to interact with the moving parts in any meaningful way.
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Oct 24, 2020 13:27
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Wipfmetz posted:Wow, not only is that project still alive (as of X-Mas 2019), there's even a 2020 Release announced. Best of luck to them, but from the posts it looks like they've decided to make it more complicated without any consideration of whether or not those extra complications let you make meaning choices. Like, the fully modelled 3d ship designer is neat, but unless I can do something meaningful all you've done is double or triple the time it takes to design a ship. Edit: in all fairness, I think I've misread the post on first pass. These changes are mostly cosmetic and cause neat model changes. Which you'll probably be too far zoomed out to notice... Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Nov 2, 2020 |
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Nov 2, 2020 11:49
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Mayveena posted:No question in my mind Agreed. Most of the original founders felt immensely real in play, even though it was mostly smoke and mirrors. Everyone hates Miriam, Yang is always an entrenched North Korea, Morgan gets steamrolled every time (  ) and the peacekeepers are always lovable ineffectual doofuses.
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Mar 15, 2021 19:55
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Alpha Centuari
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THE BAR posted:I liked GalCiv 2's, except that it really, really loved surrendering itself to another AI if you were beating it in combat. GalCiv2 devs always talked up it's ai, but to be honest I don't think I ever saw it do anything all that clever, or heard anything particularly clever from other people. There's probably an impressive engine behind the scenes, but as for actually being a competent ai I suspect it might be mostly marketing.
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Mar 15, 2021 20:02
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Panzeh posted:Not turning that into a game is one of the things that ended up putting Arcen in bad times financially. Arcen have never understood the difference between a game and a wrapper for all the interesting ideas they had in the last two years. Ideally there would be a fund to give them a million a year to churn out weird projects, but instead it'll be bankruptcy or endless sequels to ai war.
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Apr 24, 2021 15:41
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I'm not holding much hope. It's a sequel to a not great game, taking inspiration from two other not great games. Is the CEO still that guy that keeps harassing his female employees or am I thinking of a different monster?
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May 11, 2021 18:54
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grate deceiver posted:I don't know what anyone sees in GalCiv, it's incredibly generic with terrible incremental tech tree. Just imagine the most average and boring space 4x, turned up to 5 It had good ai, but yes the rest of it was fairly dull.
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May 11, 2021 20:51
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The trouble with scaling up empires that these games have is that delegating something to an ai governor is always going to be worse than being human controlled, so the optimal move is not to do it. You can complain that players should embrace non-optimal play in order to maintain fun, but that just isn't how human brains like to do things. We crave that sweet sweet optimisation. I think the best way to do things would be to have a finite number of "human" actions you can take a turn and everything after that gets ai controlled. Not only would this stop games slowing to a crawl in the late stages, but it gives a natural malus to large empires, and opens up a new dimension of decision making to players in choosing ai behaviours, and creates novel strategies for underdog players to attack a much larger player. Kinda similar to how Starsector does fleet battles once you ignore the player ship, where you can only issue a set number of orders at a time and rely on ai captains to work around those. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 12:05 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 12:03
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grate deceiver posted:I would actually want the opposite from a 4x space game - scale it down to just the solar system, but make it possible to act and build both on the surface and in space. Turn up the intrigue and character driven narrative ck2-style. You could control a corporation, nationstate or some other group, and you need to balance external threats and challengers from inside. Maybe make communication delay a gameplay element - so that the game tracks everything in 'absolute time', but knowledge of events propagates radially at lightspeed. That's my dream game too. Kinda like season 1 of the Expanse or Children of a Dead Earth.
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May 13, 2021 14:34
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Zurai posted:I genuinely really want a CK-style space empire game. Call it not a real 4X if you want, I don't care, but IMO CK2&3 are the best map painting games precisely because they take away so much of the control from the player and force you to interact with internal factions as a matter of absolute "they'll murder me/secede from the country if I don't" necessity. Something like the universe of Dune just before the events of the first book go down would be fabulous. Dozens of competing houses trying to accumulate planets and power, and weirdo factions trying to breed superman or corner a market. All held together with mad social science and drugs.
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May 14, 2021 22:05
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PerniciousKnid posted:Has any 4x game been improved by the inclusion of a list of buildings you have to build on planets? Just give my some sliders I can use to allocate production priorities, and a copy-paste key on the colony list. Sword of the Stars doesn't even have a slider. If a planet has a lot of resources, it's a forge world, if it's big then it's a economic/research world. Your only option is whether to start over-harvesting. Brilliant in its simplicity, and lets players spend the majority of their time in the kickass tactical battles. Endless Space does it really well too. Just choose a specialisation for a planet, and it applies the appropriate boons/maluses on every population unit there, with extra boosts from planet type and research. Absolutely genius idea, and really satisfying to pull off min-maxing with. Planetary build queues are a relic of the past, in my opinion, and just waste everyone's time. At the end of the day, you just have a build queue for a few kinds of worlds, so you might as well just abstract away all that noise. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 13:22
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:hosed it up a little with all the lategame fiddliness with trade and balancing planets for multiple races and all but by then it's usually pretty much over anyway loving it up is the Kerberos company motto. Trade micro is alleviated by a mod that just multiplies trade ship cost and effectiveness by 5. Still bad design, but slashes the slog.
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Jul 5, 2021 14:18
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LLSix posted:Yes. Buildings are fun. Buildings tell a story. See Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (bases, not planets, but the idea still applies). The leader quotes for SMAC's buildings are fun, building a recycling centre 100 times isn't. A 4X building should be rare, impactful and involve a choice. If everytime I plop down a colony I then create the exact same production list of 4 or 5 buildings then that is just busy work.
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Jul 5, 2021 15:16
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Mayveena posted:AI Wars/AI Wars 2 doesn't cheat and will kick your rear end eventually. Note that the game is not like a typical 4x with even sides, the AI start is very different from the player start. I enjoyed AI Wars and now enjoy AI Wars 2. I don't think that's a real answer, AI War ai isn't even playing the same game, it's just directing increasing magically generated waves at hot points. It's more an ai dungeon master than an enemy player.
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Aug 10, 2021 19:09
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Mans posted:the first time i found out about the peacekeeper was in a MP game and we were all shocked, doubly so when someone called the cop's bluff and got his entire fleed smashed. The real pro strat is to see 20 or so locusts heading towards your planets, but get the win screen next turn on account of them wiping out every other race.
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Aug 13, 2021 16:32
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Once victory is assured in DW I just add more add more to automation, usually just leaving military movements to human control. Hell, you can happily toggle that and do the dishes for a bit and hopefully come back to slightly fewer enemy planets. My particular brainworms are that I can't quit before the win screen though.
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Aug 16, 2021 11:40
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I don't think DW or Stellaris are good games, but Distant World's is at least doing things with are interesting. Stellaris is deeply derivative, on top of being a boring slog.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:47
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Zurai posted:Isn't Matrix the company that was famous for refusing to ever put games on sale? IIRC they used to be the publisher for Illwinter's games (Dominions, etc) and that was one of the reasons Illwinter split from them. They seem allergic to anything approaching marketing. Their business model was to price their games to sell only to the five richest kings of Europe. It was some grognard ideology about the "value" of the games, or some such, and sales were anathema to this as well. Obviously the fact that you sell 100 times more at half the price (numbers estimated) made this fairly stupid and self sabotaging, so anyone with any audience gtfo's as soon as they can unless they've drunk the koolade. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Aug 16, 2021 |
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Aug 16, 2021 19:01
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orangelex44 posted:Anyone tried out the Galactic Civilizations 4 alpha? Its been mentioned a few times in the thread already, but do not give money to Stardock.
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Dec 5, 2021 16:59
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The exclusive methods are also vital to the balance of the game, and massively boost the flavour. I'm also not too concerned about the realism aspect of tech trading in a game where one of the environmental enemies is the discarded space helmet of a giant psychic whale lich. In fact, avoiding having any tech trading is one of the smartest moves a 4x can make. There's no way you can avoid it becoming massively unbalanced as you shadow broker the galaxy, but also incredibly tedious busy work. GalCiv2 was incredibly bad for this. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Feb 23, 2022 |
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Feb 23, 2022 13:16
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Kanos posted:SotS has a whole lot of racial attributes that are completely divorced from the tech tree and the FTL methods each race uses is simply one of them. It's what helps give each race their character and identity and makes them each so unique. I occasionally get tempted to try a Morrigi run, but then I remember that the trade system is astonishingly poorly implemented and micro heavy. I think that probably should have been an early warning that Kerberos had no idea what they were doing. I did make it to Morrigi endgame once though. A single dreadnought scout ship was able to beat the entire von Neumann homeworld.
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Feb 24, 2022 09:28
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In practice you never really reached that far into the tech tree in a normal game. The beauty of the Liir is that they could relatively easily build cloaked ships that launched biowarfare missiles at planets, erasing a homeworld from existence in a single volley. Naturally the Zuul were immune to this, since the Zuul were OP as gently caress.
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Feb 24, 2022 11:50
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And the AI for those crybaby dolphins had no sense of proportion. If they see you trimming back an enemy planet they will switch from best friends to total genocidal crusade instantly. Very nicely implemented alien psychology I say, not at all crying as a dozen cruisers decloak to launch zombie virus missiles at my forge worlds.
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Feb 24, 2022 12:03
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chairface posted:I'm fond of space empires 4 with the devnull 1.8 mod. It's a very mild rebalance and not a total conversion. I think they are part of Devnull, but be sure to include the United Floral Empire in your games. They are far and away the most challenging AI race created for the game, and have fairly nice ship art as well.
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Feb 27, 2022 08:44
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Splicer posted:I broke my no preorders rule for DW2 and now I see this thread is talking about Sword of the Stars on the same page. That's not a good omen. No company is as incompetent as Kerberos, so don't make that connection. And at least if something goes wrong you're not going to get a transparently absurd series of lies about why it's not their fault the game is crap
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Mar 9, 2022 15:06
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Clarste posted:I don't remember the lies, I just remember the game being bad. What were the lies? Kerberos was more or less forced to release SotS2 by the publisher after ages of development hell, and it was obviously a buggy unfinished unplayable mess with systems that fundamentally were bad game design. Rather than admit that they hadn't finished the game, Mekron gave this shaggy dog story about how he released the game from a traffic jam over the phone, and it had somehow been an old version that had been released, and they could now only release updates from this bad version which would be painfully slow. When asked why they couldn't just remove the old version and upload the mythical working version, they responded with silence (since it was obvious they were just lying out their asses). They've maintained this charade ever since. While the game has eventually become playable, the fundantally bad systems mean it will never be "fun". In it's defence the combat system is meant to be genuinely pretty good. Guess which part Kerberos outsourced?
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Mar 9, 2022 18:37
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grate deceiver posted:I think Stellaris' biggest sin is throwing away all the character-based stuff from CK. Without it it's mostly just another bog standard MoO clone. Either that, or a Victoria-style politics and economy simulation would liven it up. I suggested that once and the devs laughed at me. I guess they are right though, the boring stasis is irrelevant because people keep handing them fistfulls of cash.
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Mar 10, 2022 12:24
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PerniciousKnid posted:Judging by how often I see Stellaris on Humble Bundle, it can't be doing that well. Is that the base game only by any chance? They make the real money with the dlc. The base game is to try and rope people in.
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Mar 10, 2022 17:19
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:Yea I didn't realize the original was that either. It's too bad, it sounded like it had some interesting ideas. 
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Mar 10, 2022 19:08
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Flipswitch posted:Not sure if it comes under either 4x or strategy but I started playing Starsector and its very good. It's definitely not a 4x, but it is a masterpiece with about a hundred years of mods available too. Here's the thread.
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Mar 11, 2022 13:27
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