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Wizard and Warlords is pretty interesting, although I'm not sure if I like the game or I like the concept of that game or both. It does have bits that suck, such as the raiding not getting autorepaired and so on, it's really easy to completely miss a group of raiding idiots messing up my farms and so on and fixing them afterwards is busywork. I really wish I could automate that. (So far my best economic policy appears to just build as many cities as possible and enjoy the fact that they generate cash and regenerate garrisons in sites that border them. It's a bit of busywork, but not Stellaris angling towards task saturation levels of busywork. This sort of approach also leaves entire swathes of undeveloped terrain between my core and the few cities I use to expand, which amuses me somewhat.) Shadows, however, is plenty fine as is and I've had a lot of fun with it already. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Mar 19, 2022 |
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Mar 19, 2022 21:00
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Splicer posted:SotS1 has a weird bug where pre-loading fights is somehow bottlenecked by your fps of the loading screen spinning planet graphic. It can take 10-15 minutes to load a late-game fight but tabbing out makes them load instantly. Oh my loving god how the gently caress did they manage that? I am seriously impressed by the raw skill it would take to accidentaly program that in. (Also thanks for telling me how to skip loading screens in the year of our common and affordable SSD lords 8 or something.)
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Apr 23, 2022 22:34
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Hughlander posted:Ground combat seems even less than gal civ 2/3. If you're fighting a colony world you just have a fleet in orbit over the planet for 3ish turns then you ttake it. If you're fighting a Core world, you... Have a fleet with troop pods in orbit for 3-9 turns then you take it. I didn't see any loss conditions for it. That seems entirely reasonable actually. Unless the game is a remake of Emperor Of The Fading Suns or something, then ground combat is less important than space combat. Unless the game is a Dune 4X or similar in which case there should be more focus on Dune than on the rest of the entire universe.
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Apr 26, 2022 00:30
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:OTOH if you're gonna be goofing around on the scale of multiple entire planets it might be cool to actually do something with that for once instead of focusing exclusively on the tracts of absolutely fuckin nothing in between. The genre hasn't really come up with much new to do with it since 1997. Game Idea on which I will release about as much game as the That Which Sleep kickstarter: first industrial revolution to world war 1 era magical technology flavor 4X which works on individual islands of floating rock and sea connected by naturally occuring teleporters. Far future medieval nonsense in which survivors of the singularity apocalypse who only partially understand what their tech does, let alone how it does it, do entirely planetary surface combat across the few worlds still connected to the old galatic gates.
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Apr 27, 2022 04:52
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Hey now, Sword of the Stars went on to do perfectly beautiful things with its ship designer. But I will say that, yes, many other games put in a unit designer for no good reason and their main contribution was busywork, same as planets in 4X asking Megatyrant Tigal-Phalazar the Fourth to sign off on the daycare for the fifth hab station around gssv-3349 C VII-4, it's just a staple of the genre, like cycling through all your units in an RTS and hammering the shortcuts for the abilities "breathe", "reload" and "fire". Cynically I could say it exists to task saturate the player over those long long winter nights, keeping them busy enough so they don't drop the game.
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Feb 23, 2023 04:40
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Also, chess is extremely simple, you just crush decision trees and call it a day, making a good AI for chess isn't complex and doesn't require special consideration, it's a project you can shove onto a year 2 or 3 CS student, give a week while regular courses are ongoing, and expect something decent, after that, it's all about having a big enough computer to solve it entirely.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:42
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Regular RTS AI is less taxing than 1upt AI because it doesn't require the AI to engage with the higher number of positions, the fuzyness at player scale allows it to just gently caress about and ignore most of that. Interlocking is mostly negated by halfway decent map design that can be demanded from the random generator's parameters. Civ5 AI for example doesn't have the option of being good, at all, it's just shoved into a tarpit that requires a fundamentally different approach, and that different approach wasn't used.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:58
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Old world, if I recall correctly, also has a slightly larger tiles to units ratio, which makes 1upt easier to handle for everyone, but yes, the civ5 and civ6 AIs were plainly wretched.
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Mar 22, 2023 04:38
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Starting to wonder why Excel doesn't have a vibrant modding community, it's got all of the numbers and they go up and there's none of that tiresome game bullshit getting in the way of the numbers I believe we do, in fact, have an idle game thread around the place.
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Apr 4, 2023 04:38
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:i think this is still unfair to SMAC, if anything modern games have demonstrated that raw computing power was never the limitation. Exponentially expanding filesizes and 8G of RAM and 10000 gigaflops and the best you can manage in 20 years is... funnier city shapes? You packed in a few more superfluous dudes, and they do little idle animations now? None of this would have been a noteworthy improvement if they came out in the same year. The bigger numbers have made it a lot easier to do those things. AI wars and Distant Worlds have a lot of background complexity, and in DW's case it fuels the fuzziness that makes the decision making interesting, and those would completely choke a 2003 gamer PC with blinking LEDs. Better hardware, far better OS support, working abstractions, these turn crying forced marches into pleasant strolls. Also, ahem, chess sucks, and so does Stellaris, and did it take me 500 hours of playing it to accept it? Steam says yes. E: All those things above make sense as Game Design Objects in that they are strategic objectives, those specific examples I consider a board game disease initially and then copied endlessly, because it kinda worked. 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. EE: There's a Dune kinda 4X out there right now, Spice Wars, and it forbids painting the entire map your color, mana costs for taking territory rise above the cap. So a warning to the wise, don't buy until that can be modded out, came out of nowhere when I was finishing the Harkonnen. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 17:42
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Uneasy standoff in the Nine Dash Starlane, admirals sweating because their fleets designed for extreme long range are parked in unaided visual range of each other.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:07
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:yeah that's what I mean, those two represent novel designs and mechanics that could not exist in the early 2000s, whereas I do not believe that there's much of anything about Planetfall save the graphics that you could not have reasonably done (and someone wasn't already doing) in 1999. Its specific configuration of old ideas might hit your sweet spot but it does not innovate, and it doesn't really improve upon, other than by mashing together chunks of two or three older games into a new hybrid one. Oh yeah, I am really good at reading. Another example would be Sword of the Stars, there's a version of SotS that is perfectly doable in 1999 tech and Total Annihilation proves that the space battles would not be a feasibility concern. SMAC had terrain elevation and terrain elevation changes, which PF hasn't got. And so on. I guess Aurora 4X does new things too. Personally I prefer at least a little simulationism, emergent properties are little wonders I delight in finding and, more often, being painfully surprised by. For as much as 4X games have in large parts embraced the board game aesthetic as an inspiration for the game design itself, I find I dislike it.
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Apr 5, 2023 19:10
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ChatGPT is a really fun technology that costs 2200 beakers and allows you to have some great fun watching a lot of people absolutely critically fail a Turing Test.
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Apr 8, 2023 22:48
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Mayveena posted:Somebody read it and tell us what it says It quotes some a16z people without mocking their boss for buying in Theranos and calling for the end of the scientific method, which is already a good sign. It's about AI generation of assets, replacing composers by AI, replacing object artists by AI, replacing the NPC idle chatter writers by AI, how it will all make everything much easier and faster to make and all that. It's surprisingly not bad for the economist, they mention that workers fear it may take their jobs, that there is union action against it and that there's also some copyright legal mess inbound, and it doesn't say to send in the marines to shoot those past loving losers.
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Apr 9, 2023 16:54
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:There's definitely exactly equal odds of either of these outcomes, just like with the blockchain, or the metaverse, or any of the other dumb-sounding crap the same bunch of guys were prognosticating exponentially world-changing big numbers for I have to say that unlike with the blockchain and metaverse poo poo, at least there's an existing underlying technology that exists here. HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:I hope we see a revolution in diplomacy in games. I don’t want to have to talk to, say, every member of my royal court in Crusader Kings, but it would be wonderful to communicate with faction leaders and negotiate deals with spoken language rather than just clicking options. That sounds like absolute hell, negotiating with a machine has always been annoying but when cloaked by a chatbot it gets infinitely worse. Also there's a place for deeply diegetic and deeply skeumorphic UI and it's in the ten works of arts that will use it well this century and the rest of the time, it's in the garbage.
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Apr 10, 2023 16:20
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The funny thing is that we've already tried the "CPU controlled players are mysterious and require you to think hard to understand them" and the average players hated it, the tryhards hated it, the mp mafia hated it, the simulationist complexity lovers hated it, the people who pretended to like it were very happy when a patch made the AI display why it liked and disliked you are your action. And I agree, I don't mind it if the AI takes random tacks, I don't mind it if it tries to surprise me, I don't care if something representing a fundamentally incapable of human communication alien empire sends me gibberish, I do mind being told that the thing supposed to act like another player is mysterious and unknowable and I have to figure it out sends me gibberish and tells me I have to handle it, I can just have the foreign affairs ministry have a crack team of analysts to tell me they are angered by my claiming tiles too close to their empire. (It's the ones in my cap circle.)
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Apr 10, 2023 16:53
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A thing I like about the SotS independent random attacks is that if the game detects that you've spent too long without a fight, and that's like two rounds of peace after a ten round grace at game start, it'll start launching random events and attacks at you. Also, if you modify the game files to get sensor coverage of the entire play area, independents don't stop spawning, both unlike Stellaris. Man, imagine if the SotS people had made a second SotS, the wonders we could have seen, or even, what if space 4X, or really, any 4X designers had integrated lessons from SotS in their games, the future would be a brighter, kinder place. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Apr 12, 2023 |
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Apr 12, 2023 01:22
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Can't even imagine what kind of stuff those guys could have come with given a second shot You can actually mod your game to make them happen consistently despite the other fights you are getting in, it's really nice that the game is almost entirely configurable like that, you can change the size of the trade cubes, you can make them all 1 ly across and not have to secure several planets just to make one trade, and it is very nice that very little is shoved away in a DLL or other poo poo. (I tell a lie, the events are all locked away in a DLL, still.) Can you imagine if they had taken a second shot at making SotS, again, after all they had learned, and with a new baseline of modern hardware? It would have been amazing.
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Apr 12, 2023 02:58
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Half-wit posted:SoTS2 is proof that the developer had no idea what made SoTS1 good. The funny thing is that they did know what made it good, they just decided not to make the next one good.
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May 1, 2023 02:47
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I think Stellaris traded one problem for another when they made the switch from multiple travel methods to lanes only, before lanes you could only actually hold a system if you owned a planet in it and that was stupid because the mechanic dictating that was a form of culture push and not, for example, plonking down a ten metres tall, sixty metres side concrete pad centered on a scuttled ship on the worn out nub of coral that once was an atoll. So they introduced the starbase to fix that, and fix it it did, but the switch to lanes made things a bit boring, I'll admit. I think the error started elsewhere though, when they made systems like provinces, maybe they should have abstracted non interesting systems far more and just brought up systems of interest (including choke points, critical resources, populations and industrial centers, anomalies and megastructure sites and whatnot), gave starbases siege like characteristics, "The starbase was hurling hypergravel at us so we dumped out early and are finishing the journey with sub light drives.", and that gives you the time to act and react. Or perhaps even the ability to set fleets to a reactive area guard posture.
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May 1, 2023 18:18
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Slipways is entirely a 4X without extermination, you scout, specialize found planets and link them to generate cash and happiness. Also the nightmare festival of lane collisions makes me slowly go mad.
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Jun 7, 2023 14:37
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Well, it would sound more human and have more personality, but I'm not sure those games deserve that.
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Jun 24, 2023 18:44
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toasterwarrior posted:Reposting here since I might as well, even if maaaaybe the genre is a mismatch: anyone been playing Dune Spice Wars? They just came out with a big update adding a run-based campaign mode and I'm interested in finally picking it up. I'm familiar with Northgard so I know their style of game. As far as I know it still has escalating authority mana costs to claim territories and a very low cap on that mana, so if you pick a map size larger than small and you want to seriously get on the case of opponents on the other side of the map without extreme supply issues you're going to need to abandon territory (somehow in the abstraction, pulling out of Arakis and letting down local allies makes your authority rise) to create a land snake that'll let you try to knock on the doors of Carthag. So, no, it's not playable until we're able to mod that out.
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Jun 25, 2023 00:20
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I know, and it still bothers me, I took out the other powers by various treachery and wanted to remove the Harkonnen in a good old straight up liberation (*) war, instead I got to get grumpy at the game. By the way, Atreides diplo-annexation still bounces off the mana limit. E: as an aside, on high map sizes, Even being competitive with another empire on the other side of the map was tricky without hitting the province cap, even if you dump the comparatively bad provinces, they will simply do the same and be leaner and meaner. (And more fragile.) SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 00:55
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Lamplighter's League was either going to make some numbers and get turned into a printer for 20USD DLCs that fix a basic design mistake in order to slot in another or just die on landing, because that's what Paradox does now and has for at least 10 years.
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Oct 13, 2023 21:51
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It was a culture thing, men past a certain age are all supposed to be spacers culturally and all have to be in orbit or in ships, children and women are allowed on ships on occasion but are mostly meant to be limited to planet surfaces, the sexual dimorphism present with the Morrigi is mostly based on growing up in microgravity vs full gravity, also their entire culture had a very big shitfit when the evil space dolphins, morally equivalent to the regular perfect and blissful dolphins, used psychic powers in space to gently caress the warships crewed by Morrigi men, the Eternal Shame Of The People and Fleet is that warships crewed by women, who have an innate psychic defence field they can activate, managed to give the dolphins a drubbing, and then the entire Morrigi society slipped into rabid reactionary fascism at this violation of norms. They still trade, though, because money is nice to have.
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Oct 27, 2023 02:19
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It appealed to my disgust at the idea of having to manually build buildings on planets and also enabled my dolphin murder addiction. Also I liked the Morrigi ship designs, they had semi sane turret and point defence placement.
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Oct 27, 2023 02:23
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My guess is that they were lost and then recovered when the surprise waffleimages recovery happened.
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Nov 9, 2023 01:34
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The one actual question is if we have to go through and log in to three dozen EA launchers or if we can just natively launch it from steam.
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Mar 7, 2024 23:40
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Unexpectedly well behaved of them.
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Mar 8, 2024 00:04
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algebra testes posted:I saw Mandalore Gaming's Sins of Solar Empire: Rebellion video and I'm intrigued. Worth the 20bux for a 10 year old game? I personally find that it is but also I'm the weirdo who has six installs with different mod sets and reverse engineered part of the game to make a publicly accessible modding tool I was missing while I was without internet for a week so maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt.
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Mar 16, 2024 23:57
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I played an unwise amount of hours on Endless Space 2 this weekend, since it was one sale, and for the most part I have no complaints aside from the fact that genocide is too complicated, there's no real straightforward way of removing Craver pops which is annoying because they damage planets over time.
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Mar 18, 2024 20:12
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That does sound useful, it'll teach them not to damage the environment while I'm using it.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:44
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Once you shove all your undesirables onto ships to a full system you can set some ships as privateers and have then hang out there as well, the privateers, so long as they are size small or medium, will hide their nationality and will shoot civilian ships including the refugee boats. This is very helpful.
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Mar 19, 2024 01:49
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At least civilian ships with the pops on them are blowing up, might be my opponents blowing them up, I am like 5 hours in and not observing or thinking much, so it might be either. Cravers are great for the same reason the Zuul were great, but also, it sucks when you can't commend that with government forms for example.
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Mar 19, 2024 03:17
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It's incredibly funny to me that SotS had a ship designer and Stellaris crowbarred that out without understanding why the ship designer was good to have. (It had tactical combat, I still think a preset doctrine or Dominions style task groups with preset missions and a reactive doctrine set could have worked perfectly but I didn't design Stellaris, I'm not sure anyone actually did. One day I'm gonna have to make a 4X to exorcise that game's damage from my skull.) E: Constructing improvements half the time is an APM sink to make the player not realize they aren't enjoying themselves, the other half is designers not having anything else to put there and not even imagining not putting anything there, once in a blue moon they are actual decisions work making, like in Shadow Empire, somehow those games generally don't make those choice exclusive and instead just have the opportunity cost of not having all the things at once. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Mar 26, 2024 |
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Mar 26, 2024 00:34
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Yeah, they just need to be implemented in a context that can make them have a purpose, Most 4Xs don't have that and don't even attempt it, even in purely async games, a unit designer in Dominions would be something special. (Even if everyone would instantly create a default set of medium armor spear and shield guys before going on onto special flavor stuff, that's just the rules.)
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Mar 26, 2024 03:03
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Xlorp posted:Having bought it, I'm not liking ES2 much at all. If feels less like riding bikes and more like hastily navigating a room full of traps while hating the AI competitor personae. ES2, much like ES1 has that strange thing were it is incredibly clinically cold but also weirdly grandiose when it comes to battles, they don't really feel like they fit. And after playing it some more I must say I dislike the quests as a concept, heroes as separate ships, the strategic and luxury resources which sit between important and negligible without getting into either, at least without cranking up the difficulty, but mostly I mind the new technologies from anomalies, both as an in game fiction thing, I just reshaped a system, I should figure out more and better Dust powered repair nanobots about when I rebuild an entire system to fit my preferences, and also from a gameplay standpoint. It adds a little early game flavor at the cost of ensuring an early game of raiding other empires to loot and probe their anomalies across the vast gulfs of two turns of non lane travel, and then once that is done systems are once again a sub puzzle to be optimized for purpose. Once again, I look at SotS in which the early game flavor of a new system was in getting dunked on by a monitor, big boss space suit fragment, swarm of bees or colony trap, there is no permanent benefit to it, you seize the system first, you get to use it first, the loser eats the opportunity cost. The flavor has wisely gone away, no matter who popped it, the system has become either a springboard or just strategic depth. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Mar 26, 2024 |
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Mar 26, 2024 15:16
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Libluini posted:Re: Ship designers. I wish Aurora let me move my entire population and industry onto spaceships later on, I want to be the locust swarm moving across the galaxy and strip mining systems. Just a few added functionalities from being the crisis simulator. Perhaps a GM linter function to delete depleted systems.
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Mar 29, 2024 14:39
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Oh, entirely, but I want to run the factories and labs and population in the ships.
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Mar 29, 2024 15:34
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