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

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

GamingHyena posted:

Unfortunately, what Stellaris does NOT do is have a solution to the micromanagement hell most 4x space games find themselves in. Managing one planet is fun but managing 100 planets is a chore. MOO2's solution was to just have fewer planets which worked for the time. Stellaris lets you put planets in sectors but the crap AI means they'll never run as efficiently as they would if you ran them yourself. Is there a 4x that ever managed to square that circle?

Master of Orion. I've always found it to be better than MoO2 for the simple reason that when you unlock new industry tech, you don't have to gently caress around with a buildings screen - you just up industrial spending and your governors build the industry. The UI in MoO is ancient, and honestly a modern take on MoO where the economy was dead simple would be fantastic. Just have settings where you task a planet with a focus on an output, and then abstract the economic layer so that the strategic decision of creating a research/industry/etc. world is there, but without the fiddly micromanagement.

Granted, if you want to min/max MoO to the same degree you can min/max Civ IV with slavery, then it gets incredibly tedious, as optimal play requires shuttling pops around between worlds constantly, and adjusting spending empire wide can be a pain because, again, the UI/game is ancient. It does give nice convenient buttons for things like adjusting industrial/ecological spending automatically when appropriate techs change the number.

The upshot of this is that then the AI can actually play the economic game too. If the game is designed with the economics being simple, and the grand strategic layer being the focus, then you don't have to worry about the AI being unable to actually play the economic side of the game.

I also can't stand when space 4X games insist on having ground troops. They're completely irrelevant the vast majority of the time, although, again, MoO does it well by making your population into ground troops/settlers. Sending an invasion force is an investment, and an investment that can be shot down if the enemy has control of the system. You can also steal technology by capturing worlds, which again makes the investment more interesting and enticing. Better ground combat tech reduces the cost for you and increases the cost for the enemy, and you can get situations where you force the enemy to bomb out your planets, denying them the ability to steal your technology and stalling their fleets in orbits for precious turns while you get a chance to build up a counterattack.

Compare that to Stellaris ground units where you have to go to individual planet screens and build troops at a relatively trivial cost, and then they exist on the space layer and have to be ordered around. It's tedious, boring, and there's not really any interaction. Sure, you get techs to get cool armies, but it's just for flavor's sake, as you end up making sure that your number is bigger than the enemy's number.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 05:21

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:37

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

toasterwarrior posted:

Funnily enough, the one game I would pick above all 4Xs as the platonic ideal of "game that is too complex for its AI to play legit," I would pick Sid Meier's Colonization. I love it for going all management/logistical sim in a civ-like, but lmao if the AI even experiences a semblance of what the player does in that game

The kind of neat thing about it is that the AI explicitly doesn't need to engage with the same mechanics as the player. The other factions are explicitly different from yours, and how they deal with their economy can be handwaved away, so that the only real major interactions you have are diplomacy when relations are okay, and war when they are not.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2020 10:30

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

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.

Not that I was ever really sure why they were so committed to making an exploration phase a thing. It's not uninteresting as a concept but in the context of an empire building game it exists mostly as a speedbump.

Star Trek.

The problem is that you run out of stuff to explore in Stellaris, where in Star Trek they have lots and lots and lots of places to continue to explore, even when the Federation has already nominally settled the area. If science ships could effectively go off-map to explore, then exploration would continue to be something that could happen over time.

Of course, to make that work, they'd need to limit science ships in some way, and write significantly more events.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2020 16:17

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Bug Squash posted:

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...

It likely means you will be able to download ship packages on a workshop so that you can get star trek ships, firefly ships, wing commander ships, etc. It's kind of a neat feature to be able to do stuff like that, and while I personally don't spend time with the cosmetic doodads, I do enjoy playing with the cosmetic packages that other people put together.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2020 23:17

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

PerniciousKnid posted:

I really enjoyed MOO1 ai but that was probably just a product of being before most other games. They had just enough personality and artwork to seem believable.

It also helps that the game is pretty simple, so the AI can actually play it to some degree. It needs bonuses to compete with a player that works hard to min-max things, and its tactical AI leaves something to be desired, but it definitely can put up a fight, and the personality traits as well as the biases built into the species creates legitimate threats and alliance blocs. The blocs are also quite dangerous because of how easy it is to lose via diplomacy if you piss everyone else in the galaxy off.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2021 05:22

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Mandatory Assembly posted:

This isn't _exactly_ a 4X game but I figured this was the best thread for it:

I'm trying to remember the name of a relatively recent game (from within the last 5 years or so) from an Eastern European studio. Fantasy medieval setting with Slavic flavour: there was some kind of great titanomachy and the gods are all dead. You run a settlement of characters and set them to work in various jobs, but also mount expeditions out into the world. When you get into combat, it's card-driven and your deck is built out of the characters you brought.

This ringing any bells for anybody?

Thea and Thea 2, I imagine.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2021 20:30

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Bug Squash posted:

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 would argue that this isn't necessarily true. If the game's economy is relatively simple, like the original MoO, then it's relatively easy to program an AI that can optimize the economy of a planet or planets. Give that tool to the player, and let the player optimize the empire by selecting how much production of what type they want where with some simple controls, and you have an empire building game where you get the optimization you crave (squeaking out just that little bit of extra science or ship construction), without needing to deal with fiddly planet level optimization.

# ¿ May 13, 2021 12:36

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

I think 100% suffers from overcrowding and ofc the corruption that's already modelled. It creates this state where at a certain point, it's better to get those people migrating to new lands - literally moving from the Old Worlds to the New Worlds. I think that makes sense, even if it goes against typical game logic.

Sure, but that should be modeled as a diminishing return. There should never be a point where you are actively penalized for growing your planets, which appears to be the current case and a consequence of improperly tuning the diminishing returns on population growth. This is especially true when the player doesn't really have any tools to actually control the population level of a given planet.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2022 06:26

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

LLSix posted:

I've got a weird maybe bug in Distant Worlds 2.
I just built a new colony ship and it decided to try to pick up colonists from my homeworld, instead of the world I built it one like I want it to. When I hold right click on the world I built it on, there's no option to load colonists, just move to and stop. The world has ~100m Naxxilians who like the planet and ~100 million Ackdarians who hate it there despite having moved themselves there somehow. Any ideas on what I should try changing to get the game to let me rescue the dumb idiot otters who decided to live on an ice ball instead of one of my several ocean worlds?

So I think the way colony ships work, you can't actually load colonists until you have some minimum pop threshold.

As far as moving pops, if you click around on the information panel in the lower left (I think there's an icon of 3 people?), you can open up a population management screen. From there you can tell the colony what species to allow or disallow by species. Your passenger ships will automatically move population around and resettle from planets where pops are not allowed to planets where pops are allowed.

Yes, it's very silly. Yes, it needs an overhaul or to be automatic because holy poo poo are the penalties extreme. But that's currently how it works.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2022 04:40

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

LLSix posted:

Thanks, I guess I'll just wait for the pop on that planet to go up enough to let me "rescue" the unhappy pops.

You can't evacuate pops with a colony ship, but if you set the population controls the way I mentioned, then your empire's passenger ships will do it for you. Eventually. It can take a long time, especially since the pops on the planet will be growing, but they do eventually equalize out.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2022 01:23

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Psycho Landlord posted:

it beginnnnnssssss

but for real it sounds like galciv 4 sucks, which is not surprising when the other galcivs have also sucked

Fortunately we have many good 4Xs such as the aforementioned Planetfall that I need to play more of since I have yet to try the lizard dudes or the space paladins

I mean, Endless Space had a functional fleet invasion system where your fleets had an invasion power stat that was compared to the enemy's defense stat. It was rudimentary, but an effective way to ensure that the attacker had to commit a fleet of a certain size to a certain area for a length of time, which would give the defender time to respond. The defender could increase the time required by spending resources on defense as well.

Just being able to conquer a planet because a scout ship gets in orbit is kind of poo poo in comparison. Of course people are going to complain about it; it's not a properly thought out mechanic.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2022 01:42

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

It had a very buggy release though. Glad to hear that�s fixed.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2022 14:19

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

I liked how Endless Space had tactics cards for combat. It's a nice way to both have some influence on a battle (fight defensively if you have an overwhelming advantage, fight recklessly if you just need to do as much damage as possible, fight from long range then retreat later, etc.), but not have to do a full-blown tactical combat every single engagement. It's a very nice and elegant system in a lot of ways.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2023 18:23

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

There are also factory games, if you're into logistics.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2023 08:50

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

toasterwarrior posted:

I have a particular dislike of Galactic Civilizations too because people like to point at it as an example of "actually good 4x AI" when the game itself is so shallow. No poo poo the AI looks "competent," there isn't much to be competent about

To be fair, I am a big fan of the games being simplified to the point where the AI can actually handle it. MoO had a lot of strategic decisions with respect to how much to direct towards research, towards shipbuilding, towards setting up new planets, towards generating funds, towards spying, etc. Its planet management, however, is dead simple compared even to MoO2. But MoO2 didn't really add a lot of complexity, it mostly just added a lot of tedium in having to add things to a build queue to build buildings.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2023 22:14

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

manero posted:

Always play Old World.

One of the things I particularly love is that you're not forced do to something with every unit. Because of the order system, you can do whatever you want, as long as you've got the orders. So you can focus more on military vs workers, or do a ton of scouting, or deal with whatever else in the game.

Yeah, the order system is brilliant. Wars have a real cost in that you're not able to develop your empire as well with workers. And while a big army is good to have, it gets unwieldy to move around, and again cuts into economic development, scouting, or both. Just a really neat system overall.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2023 16:23

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

chglcu posted:

Given the option, I turn off all victory conditions and just sandbox until I get bored. There�s nothing lamer than a game suddenly ending with an arbitrary points victory.

It can be a lot of fun to win an eco victory or science victory narrowly by burning down your empire in the process. I'm a fairly big fan of euro board games though, so that's partially to blame.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2023 18:11

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:37

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

The other issue with 4x ship designers is that you tend to unlock new tech fairly frequently, which then means that you want to update your ships fairly frequently, but then that means that playing optimally is a pain in the rear end.

As usual, MoO had an interesting way of dealing with this, though it was admittedly much more a memory constraint. You could only have a handful of ship designs at any time, colony ships included. If you wanted to replace a ship design, you had to destroy all active ships of that type. It made the decision of when to upgrade more impactful, as you ran the risk of needing to delete existing ships if you upgraded too frequently.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2023 06:27

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