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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. 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.
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Oct 20, 2020 16:06
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Dirk the Average posted:Star Trek. I don't even know if more events would help. When every wibbly space thing ends up flattening out to "+5 science production" there's not a lot you can do with that. Ultimately, pure fluff can only carry you so far- you need the system semantics to give players a tangible reason to care about this stuff.
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Oct 20, 2020 16:24
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Panzeh posted:I think if you're going to have a ship designer, you have to have tactical battles. It's kind of the only way in which that mechanic makes sense, and then that changes a lot about how the rest of the game plays out. Every sci-fi 4x having ship/unit designers is this really strange artifact. This is another system semantics problem, I think. Damage output, rate of fire, weapon range, evasion, damage resistance, hitpoints- these are all, for the most part, tactically interesting variables. They are given meaning by systems that operate on the tactical level, and if the game doesn't have those systems or the player has limited interaction with the game at that level then they end up being dangling references in the language of the game. So, yeah, a ship designer that centres on manipulating those variables is going to work best when it has a tactical combat system to interoperate with. But! There are other variables you could centre in a ship designer! Strategically interesting ones. Like, cost. Time to build. Upkeep, reliability and downtime requirements. Strategic mobility and endurance. Strike range. Combat characteristics, but now with a focus on what type of mission a ship is suited for- scouting, raiding, assault, pitched battle, escort duty, search and destroy. That sort of ship designer could, I think, be meaningful and engaging in a strategy game without needing to bolt tactical combat on to the side of it. Though of course that might not need to be a ship designer per se. Might make more sense as some sort of "doctrine designer".
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Oct 21, 2020 20:23
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Darkrenown posted:I made that event, and I like to think it's at least a bit cool. There's a little RNG war going on in the alt dimension and you'll get more or less trade depending on how your alt self is faring. Eventually they might even get wiped out by the Warp beasts which will give you a sad death message and some refugees. I did want to have the Warp beasts invade through the portal after that happened, but I ended up quitting Paradox instead because they are awful and kept doing increasingly lovely things. Hugs and love, DR. I hope you landed somewhere better.
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Oct 31, 2020 11:37
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http://www.silverlemurgames.com/2020/12/10/im-making-a-sequel-to-stellar-monarch/ Stellar Monarch 2. Neat. 
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Dec 11, 2020 12:19
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Mayveena posted:No question in my mind 
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Mar 15, 2021 21:01
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Alpha Centuari
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threelemmings posted:Reminded me of something I wondered for a while, why hasn't anyone taken some of the good stuff from Reach for the Stars 2000 remake. The biggest one was the different races, there were like 16(?) they all had different requirements for temperature, atmosphere, and gravity. I don't think the AI was designed to make use of it but you could imagine a similar game mechanic leading to certain species naturally getting along, since they're never competing for each other's resources. Stars in Shadow has a moderately complex biome system, though it's not a factorial model. It's sufficiently nuanced that the pillbug dudes here:  can have an affinity for deep-sea vents, while the fish people do better in higher oceanic zones and coastal reefs, and that has an effect on which planet types both prefer. It's a neat convolution of the colonisation system, though last I checked the UX for shuffling population around to max your caps was not great.
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Mar 16, 2021 19:06
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threelemmings posted:With stellaris' border system I didn't think you can really share where someone has Rho A and you have Rho B or whatever (this was a few years ago maybe they've redesigned the system again like they seem to do from time to time). Well, since you bring it up, the original border system at release did in fact allow multiple states to control different parts of a single star system. Not 100% on what the motivation was for changing it (probably the war it interacted with claims, since it happened at the same time as the rest of the war changes), but it honestly didn't play that well. Given how many systems you're expected to manage in Stellaris, everything below the interstellar scale feels like too much detail to have to care about.
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Mar 16, 2021 20:36
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Megazver posted:So people who've pre-ordered Humankind can play in a short beta now. Has anyone tried it? They've had a couple of open beta periods and people have been posting about them in the Humankind thread The last one was okay, I thought, haven't tried the latest but people seem to be up on it.
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Apr 24, 2021 16:46
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 Stellar Monarch 2's space dukes have got style 
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May 20, 2021 09:06
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FuzzySlippers posted:I booted up Humankind from gamepass and is there seriously no way to crank up animation speeds? I've barely started playing but watching my dudes slowly shuffle around the map is pretty aggravating. There's a Battle Animation Speed slider in the Gameplay settings but curiously enough I don't think there's a corresponding one for map animations.
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Oct 18, 2021 12:30
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:In my experience it's when there are no unclaimed systems in reach. The very moment when all my borders butt up against other borders is the moment when there's nothing exciting left to do Does the Wild Space mod help with that at all? I mean, for me, the game stales out just after the first war. Or after you have in some other way grown large enough that the AIs will never be able to threaten you again. But I think the Wild Space mod is designed specifically to fix your thing. ----- Anyhoo, Stellar Monarch 2 goes into EA tomorrow. If you don't remember or haven't heard of Stellar Monarch before, it's this plucky little one-man 4X. I haven't been following the development of the sequel too closely, so I'm not 100% sure what to expect, but the original has a bunch of that people are always saying they want to see more of in the genre; asymmetric mechanics, military automation, internal politics (kind of)? It's fast and light and definitely tries to put the player into the role of a Galactic Emperor specifically, rather letting them micromanagement every aspect of the state. I'm interested to see what's new in this version. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 01:23
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 I love early access 
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Dec 6, 2021 20:26
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jng2058 posted:So after a long while playing Age of Wonders 3 again, I moved off it to another older game....Stars in Shadow. It's not a great game or anything, but it's light enough that I can play it on autopilot while doing other stuff, has just enough different mechanics to not feel like a total clone of other games, and is generally a decent enough time. It's probably worth it's normal $25 price, but it's DEFINITELY worth the $5 ($6 with the DLC) it costs on Steam right now. I'd recommend giving it a look....I'd rather have the game than a Starbucks coffee. SiS has quietly become one of my favourite 4Xes over the past few years, purely by virtue of how fast and tight and clean it is. It may be the only 4X I've ever encountered where playing it never feels like work. pedro0930 posted:I don't know if I'd say Star Ruler 2's ship design system is good. It's certainly meaningful in that player designed ship can be multiple magnitude better than the default design (at the same construction cost), and there is enough components and limitations where you can make interesting choice in your designs. However, it takes way too long to do so you pretty much have to design your ships before hand then just load the templates once you are in-game. It also takes a lot of time to test your design if you want to make sure it behave the way you imagine it to. Yeah same. Like, even as a guy who likes and enjoys ship designers, the ones like this and StarDrive's where you have to construct ships from lots of little parts are an exercise in tedium.
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Feb 2, 2022 13:19
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chaosapiant posted:Is this a game based around Insane Clown Posse lore? It's a HoMM clone that has some clown units in as a joke. e: I wrote some thoughts on it over in the strategy thread (where, I think, it properly belongs, because it's really not a 4X), back in September. It's had a few patches since then, but I haven't been keeping track of what's changed- most of the factions seem to have more unit options, at least, and I assume there's been a bunch of balancing/QoL work done. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Feb 3, 2022 |
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Feb 3, 2022 01:30
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Archonex posted:Speaking of 4X games, did anyone pick up Wizards and Warlords when it was mentioned way back? I know I was going to do a topic about it but it seemed interest was iffy. So given the complexity of explaining parts of it I never bothered due to only a one or two people that seemed to be interested in it. I played a couple of games to completion, yeah, I probably posted about it at the time. It, uh, felt really flat and static? Like I'm boggling here at your statement that it's got some sort of sim going on in the background, because I got no hint of that at all. In my first game I wasn't even seeing the regular level of AI activity you'd expect to see in a 4X. Sat back, noodled around, researched the entire tech tree and won without ever seeing a hostile army, let alone actually getting pressured by once. Second game was a little better, I at least got invaded once before winning, but by the point it happened I was so far ahead in economy and research that I just steamrolled the other wizard with endless stacks of, I think phoenixes? Magefire phoenixes, that was it. It's not like I was exploring or expanding slowly, either. Or at least, I thought I was going as fast with that as my eco would let me. The other problem I had with it was, research was just so fast and opened up so many options that it quickly became impossible to figure out what I should use for what. Endless lists of fantasy creatures. The numbers on phoenixes seem good so let's just spam those I guess?? I didn't hate the core gameplay exactly so I just put it down to EA jank and moved on.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:14
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Sadly I can never get into the fantasy setting, but I'm super intrigued about this description. What makes it an anti-4X? Is it the case that you play as someone sabotaging the AI's empire, like barbarians on Civilization? That does sound a lot of fun... Sort of? It's a clone of a game which never existed, vapourware kickstarter darling "That Which Sleeps". The basic premise is: you are a Evil God, the world's great Adversary, who once in long-ago forgotten days threatened to destroy the world (or otherwise reshape it in some fashion radically inimical to the standard-issue fantasy civilisations currently inhabit it), and was sealed away. Your objective is to break those seals, escape your prison, and use your terrible powers to enact whatever flavour of apocalypse is yours. So you start off weak, only able to exert the smallest of influences on the world, needing to work through mortal agents and infiltrate existing power structures to acquire resources. Go too fast or too obvious and you run the risk of tipping off the forces of Good to your reawakening and having them cut your schemes short before you're strong enough to contest them. Later, you can go loud and have a final climactic showdown before ushering in The End. Or, that's the theory. It's a really cool concept for a game and I'm glad to see it back, though the very quick look I took at Shadows left me with mixed feelings. Over-large, ugly UI, a tutorial that broke on me halfway through. The chat in the Dominions thread definitely makes it sound like it can throw up some cool poo poo, though, so I'm going to give it another shot. Maybe ignore that tutorial altogether.
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Mar 16, 2022 01:32
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Stellaris just runs like poo poo* in general, and the Star Trek mod is well above the vanilla baseline in terms of stuff going on. (*Claims are the latest patch has fixed this better than all the other times they've supposedly fixed it, but I've not tried it yet myself). I kind of feel like the sluggish performance of Stellaris is the actual root cause of a lot of people's dissatisfaction with the game. Or at least, I'm pretty confident it's at the root of most of mine. Like, sure, the game is very flat and empty, but would that grate so much if it ran x2~x3 as fast? If playing it didn't feel like crawling through mud?
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Mar 21, 2022 20:53
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Does SE PBEM not take like real life decades to finish
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Apr 18, 2022 11:03
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There was an attempt at something FFH-esque in Éa, but it never got close to a 1.0 release unfortunately.
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Apr 29, 2022 23:56
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SI was PBEM only, so yeah async.
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Sep 25, 2022 15:53
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Demiurge4 posted:Stellar Monarch 2 has actually released as well, I haven't played it yet but apparently it's just the first game with bells and whistles. It's more an overhaul than a true sequel, to be sure, but some of the changes are substantial. There's a whole senate wrangling thing for passing laws now and military stuff is fully automated.
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Nov 4, 2022 15:17
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:In Civ the hardest thing to do is making attacks on cities. A player will queue up their attack force just out of range so they can rush as many units as possible into the assault at the same time. The Civ AI is real bad at that so it tends to suffer defeat in detail. In Old World its much easier for the AI because it can double move up on you. Well, I think something that's interesting to consider in this context is that it's a very common refrain among players of Civ VI that they find barbs to be more of a challenge than the other civs, and while a large part of that is going to be down to the way that they will rush you down in the first few turns of every game, a lot of it is also that the barbarian AI is more willing to throw away units on the offence that the regular AI isn't. The tests Gort does or did with every patch back this up: the AI fails to take cities, even unresisted, because it will not commit to an assault. I have a strong suspicion that the AI in that game would look a lot more capable militarily if it just weighted unit preservation a little less. e: I'll also note that, like, I don't think I've seen the AI have trouble moving units around? It has difficulty keeping up economically- so it has fewer, worse units- and doesn't do as much damage as it could do with what it does have, but actually getting around the place hasn't seemed like a problem for it IME. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Mar 22, 2023 |
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Mar 22, 2023 17:02
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Jossar posted:Anybody been playing Ozymandias recently? Saw it mentioned once or twice in the thread but it just dropped its final map as part of the Steam sale (in which everything is 40% off if you get it all in one bundle) and curious to know if it's worth it. I played a couple of games a while back and enjoyed those games but have felt no compunction to revisit it since. It's streamlined to the point where there's nothing left to learn once you've won a game.
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Sep 2, 2023 11:10
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Click on the lil [?] under that guy's post to instantly discover The Horse Node Rant.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:33
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Telsa Cola posted:Oh I'm talking more in regards to the faction customization. I played a couple games and ultimately felt like I had basically done/seen everything which is not great. The AoW4 customization? I had a similar sort of problem where at release I felt kinda creatively stifled in the faction design screen by a lack of options, but I went back for the latest patch/DLC and it honestly feels a lot better.
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Mar 21, 2024 13:57
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