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TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

I think the basic design most 4Xs use make it really drat hard to make AI that is appropriately challenging, even leaving aside bad ai coding.

Most 4x have a basic cycle of strong economy -> more research -> stronger economy/military. This means that when the coders slam the "Hard AI Gets More Money" button they are also screwing with the game pace. Too much and the AI just has a huge army of units that are all better than yours and there's not a lot you can do. And it sucks because often you just can't realize this until its turn 132 and you went to war and discovered they're gonna wreck you. Or almost as bad you discover that all the AIs are paper tigers with lovely armies and you might as well declare victory and quit now.

it's insane how rare it is in 4x games to get that one AI enemy who manages to be perfectly paced with you to function as a nemesis and generate awesome gameplay. Everyone's always chasing that high but its so rarely achieved.

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TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

NihilCredo posted:


I'm looking for a strategy game that scratches the same kind of itch for single-player mode:

- Turn-based
- Minimal management and number crunching
- Quick and abstract combat
- Fairly simple empire / city / base building elements
- Some kind of tech tree / item collection / card selection mechanic that has a BIG impact on the game. Less "+5% ranged damage" and more "All your troops now have ranged attacks"


The closest I can think of is Kaiju Wars, where you play as the mooks fighting off giant monsters. The monster(s) act fairly deterministically, so it has a sort of puzzle game feel - but both you and the monster are heavily subject to the vagaries of random but powerful card draws from your decks which can change things up.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

I slept on Gladius for a long time but was actually pretty impressed when I picked it up. It manages to boil down a lot of modern civ-like mechanics while still retaining the interesting parts, with a more complicated and interesting combat system.

There's some weird parts to it, with some similar issues to BFG-Armada where unit stats are a direct rip from warhammer tabletop for reasons. Also the hero system is both important and feels kinda vestigial which is weird.

Still, it's a decent 4x game that you can actually sit down and finish a multiplayer session of, which is nice.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Gladius technically has quest-plots for every faction with writing for every quest step. Pandora, Gladius' predecessor, definitely aimed to be an Alpha Centauri successor and had a plot that would unfold every game. But any fiction writing it might have had wasn't memorable enough for me to recall it.

Maybe Total War: Warhammer...? A lot of focus on the Legendary Lords as characters, and the story campaign modes have plot.

Distant Worlds 1 had faction-based plots, galactic history to uncover, and an endgame story plot that would unfold. But no characters at all really.

Terra Invicta has pretty good writing for its faction plots, imo, and they are partly driven by the headline characters for each faction. But its more of a grand strategy than a 4x.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

i was debating mentioning Stellaris Megacorps. The issue there is they wussed out; the penalties for being a Megacorp are minor and corporate expansion ends up being a secondary part of your empire. They mostly just play like regular factions.

Star Ruler 2 might rate an honorable mention. Many of its races have large differences in their economic systems that lead to very different vibes and altered decisions. Like the faction that lives purely in space, they still colonize planets but all their construction is done on motherships and all the population lives in satellites (that can get blown up by enemy ships, lol.) Or a dlc race that converts planet resources into goo to feed their digital utopia. They all still participate in the planet race tho.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Solium Infernum also had a thing where you could spend resources to gain secret objectives during the game, completion of which would award VPs unknown to other players. Between that and the 'Kingmaker' trait....who is actually winning can be extremely murky. Not only is the ostensible leader making themselves a huge target, but they might not even be the actual leader. Only those players spending resources on Prophetic rituals might know.

And of course it might all be subverted by a surprise military attack on the Conclave...

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

4x games genuinely are too complex for machine learning. This is for several reasons, but one of the bigger ones is that 4x games take a while to play. It takes a lot of repetitions for machine learning to not suck at like, mario brothers; but you can repeat runs of mario brothers extremely quickly, and you are running against a fixed scenario. Running a 4x game takes longer, especially considering for the machine learning to perform usefully you need to either have a human player in the loop to provide an opponent or to already have an AI programmed (lol)- either of which drastically slows down your ability to run the game quickly. Otherwise the only thing the ai will learn to do is to spam cities like mad and have the bare minimum military to fight off barbarians.

if its a simulationist game like distant worlds forget it, you will never repeat the game enough times to work. Sims already chew cpu like crazy.

Then you make a balance patch and the AI literally breaks and you have to redo it all from the start.

TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Mar 21, 2023

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

I think the whole "ai can't handle 1upt" thing tends to be exaggerated because of civ V/VI having much worse AI than civ IV across the board (not just in combat)

I haven't played a ton of it but the old world ai seems to handle 1upt combat fine

Old World's orders/movement system lets the AI rush whole armies straight onto your face, which made the task of effectively mounting attacks a lot easier.

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.

Ultimately though Old World's AI is still trash at fighting players. Even moderate difficulties cheat shamelessly by giving them multiple starting cities, which has other design problems like wiping out the tribes extremely quickly.

TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Mar 22, 2023

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Re: AOW4

there was an interesting discussion about the tactical AI in the AOW: Planetfall thread.

for instance telling the AI to highly value murdering heroes is probably correct on a strategic level, but its not much fun for the players, so thats something that was specifically toned down from AOW3 to AOWPF.



Games with separate tactical battle systems are always a bit finicky to balance for AI, because - dating back to Heroes of Might and Magic - players will strive mightily in tactical combat to never take any casualties. But the strategic AI simply has to take it on the chin with whatever results autoresolve gives them. And that's not something you can change a lot in AOW, because their autoresolve system literally plays out a battle; any improvements to tactical AI will always benefit both sides.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

I wouldn't be surprised of RTW Ai had decided to almost irrationally bias towards deflecting torpedoes over making an actual effective fighting ship, in ways most humans wouldn't.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

IMO Planetfall strikes a pretty good balance of options. The number of possible threats you have to build against is small enough that you can build a reasonably good general purpose army, yet wide enough that specialist armies can attain a large advantage against specific opponents or builds.

nrook posted:

Out of curiosity, do you think Civ IV has been surpassed? I personally don’t really feel 4X game design has moved forward since then. The quality bar for the genre is really low— tons of developers, including even well-known series like Civ itself, release games that don’t function as serious, interesting games because their AI opponents can’t actually compete with the player. But then, these games are enough of a commitment that I can only play a small fraction of them, so I can easily imagine I could have missed bigger trends.

4x game design has definitely moved forward since Civ IV, but that's a separate question of whether better games have been made.

AI is always a problem, and design can play into the ability of an AI to play a game... but noone likes SMAC for the AI, or calls it badly designed for its bad AI. Or if you look at it from the other direction: AI War is an example of a game specifically designed to have decent/entertaining AI opponents, but as an exercise in game design it's somewhat of an abomination and certainly a victim of massive overcomplexity.

TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Apr 5, 2023

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

GlyphGryph posted:

Unit customization in SMAC is effectively the mods, deciding if you want a specialist attacker/defender or if you want someone who can do both, and creating "specialty" units that do something other than standard fighting, like a psi-combat guy (which lets you focus almost solely on unit skill and morale instead of combat tech) or an espionage unit or a rover terraformer or something. Everything else is not only automated, but it even lets you automatically upgrade all future units and usually most of your existing units with no thought required at all.

Why is having specialist attacking/defender units a bad thing, though? The cost of building a unit that can both attack and defend isn't that big an increase, and the units themselves are not just more versatile, but they have a lower maintenance budget than building two units would have which means depending on your playstyle and policies building fewer units that can do both is a good thing.

I'm not saying this is advanced, top-tier strategy or anything, but I don't understand why it's supposed to be bad. (Now if you want to criticize SMAC's combat balancing, considering how broken stuff like gas chopper attacker spam is, by all means, but "you choose to build a mix of offensive and defensive units or you can minimize support by building better units who can do both" seems like a perfectly good strategic element so its weird that THAT is the part you criticize)

This, the way you are describing it here, sounds absolutely miserable, btw. I trust it is better in the game than the explanation makes it sound like? Because that sounds simultaneously mind numbingly complex and completely worthless at the same time. What is the actual decision making element going into that sort of customization? That's the part that makes a customizer interesting, the stuff you're describing above seems like a good way to make a game worse depending on how its handled.
Minmaxed units like in SMAC are kinda boring because its effectively the only way to do it. There's little downside to minmaxing so everyone does it. Ultimately the unit designer isnt interesting because there aren't many choices to be made, and making choices is the essence of game design. There's little that the designer does that you couldn't easily do with predefined units. Even the stuff like nerve gas you could do pretty simply with different mechanics if need be.

Planetfall's customization works because you can't be strong against everything. You're either going to have weaknesses, or you're going to be mediocre across the board. So it's better to concentrate on your strengths, with an eye to identifying your enemies weaknesses and playing into them. An Arc unit with the mods Lowen identified would be very strong against certain enemies such as the Vanguard Drone Carrier, an giant walker that constantly spawns drones and has a weakness to Arc damage specifically. That Arc weakness means it both takes more damage and it is more susceptible to the Stun effect. But by doubling down on the Arc damage, it means that you are going to struggle with other units such as the Carnosaur, a dinosaur with laser guns that can easily access additional Arc protection - meaning less damage and a low chance to stun - and since it isn't spawning drones the damage-jump mechanic is much less effective.

or to summarize, you're always looking to make your units stronger through synergies with mods and other units, but at the same time you have to be wary of being counter-built or just running into units that are tough for you to handle. If you're fighting random creeps, you might be able to just power through your disadvantage - but if you're fighting a pitched battle with another player's war stacks, being countered can be fatal.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Kinda. Distant Worlds has logistics in the sense that distance matters and fuel matters in ways they don't really in most games, so strategic planning, positioning, and fuel depots are important. Combat does consume fuel but it rarely is a big deal.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Megazver posted:

Not really a 4X game, though. I respect the design, but I didn't enjoy it. But Old World also had solid AI. Soren Johnson designs and balances all of his games by making MP versions first, which seems to be the trick.

I can't recall the specifics, but my understanding is that this actually caused some issues. There were some things vastly preferred by anyone playing SP that it took heroic effort to convince the 'mp mafia' to support because of the different perspective.

Old World's AI has some good points, but it's ultimately in an awkward place design-wise. Adjusting the difficulty up gives the AI more starting cities, so in the early game the AI will significantly outnumber the player. The player effectively has control of whether you get into early wars with the AIs so this isn't a death sentence like it would be in some games, but since the player is still a lot better at growth and fighting it means that every game is just a curve situation where you are outmatched early, grow hard, and hit a point in early-midgame where you are superior to the AIs and go dunk them and the game is effectively over.

The high # of starting cities also means that the AI easily bullies the Tribes (sort of enhanced barbarians) and makes a hobby of clearing their city sites, rendering the tribal mechanic somewhat pointless.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Espionage systems are almost uniformly trash. They're either basically magical and OP, not worth even looking at, or irritating timesinks. Often, they are somehow all three at once.

IMO, the best espionage systems seem to be extensions of political mechanics like in Star Ruler 2 or Solium Infernum. Those games do not have spies per se but rather espionage-like actions are folded into the other game mechanics. Doing 'Espionage' in that context comes with a opportunity cost of other actions you could be doing, so it could be powerful and an orthogonal angle of attack without being its own weird seperated thing.

Or for a surprise left field entry, Total War Three Kingdoms. 3K was very character-focused but you were always hiring new characters, resulting in the possibility of some of them being spies profferred up by other factions. So you always had to be careful about who you let into your circle of trust. It was a rare enough problem to not dominate the game, but it *did* happen and you always had to account for it. And you could put spies into enemy factions, which was a long game with uncertain rewards but sometimes had amazing payoff when the enemy decided to put that character in charge of an important city or army.

This cool spy system in 3K contrasted with one of the factions special powers: casting OP-AF magic spells as 'espionage' every 5 turns when they were pissed at you. Which is one of the absolute worst implementations of espionage. In conclusion, Total War is a land of contrasts.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Endless games have extremely exponential economies even by 4x standards. It's nearly impossible to find a difficulty where you won't either faceroll or get facerolled in terms of basic combat power once you're a decent way into the game. And once you develop road networks your armies can practically teleport around the map. IMO its best to just have fun developing your poo poo and doing the quest victories because playing it as a map painting exercise will always be dissatisfying.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

DW2 has good bones and the mid/late game works pretty well. But I remain frustrated at what a disaster the early game is.

i played mortalen recently and with some bad traits on my leader i wasn't generating enough revenue to even maintain my starting spaceport. i killed teh leader but of course this lead to a year of civil war. All 'evil' factions have this issue, they are just worse than 'good' factions because good factions get more money and can put that money towards growth incentives leading them to having more money. Also invaded colonies are *massive* drags on income for an extended period of time, wrecking your budget which again limits your ability to apply growth/research incentives owing to how the budget works.

another game i played teekan (?) and early on got a terraforming facility in an event. a princely reward to be sure, but again, it cost more maintenance than i had revenue.

In DW:U, if you do a prewarp start you slowly explore and build up your solar system, unlocking warp drive as you do so. In DW2, a prewarp start means your ships get about 60% of the way to the next planet before you finish warp drive research, meaning those ships just wasted everyones time.

In DW:U, your research grows very slowly with your empire size, so while a large empire always had an absolute advantage a small empire might have an advantage in specific research areas by virtue of owning a high multiplier location. In DW2 your research is restricted by your # of research labs and multipliers are additive rather than override, so your research ability is almost entirely a function of your controlled territory. this also leads to, again, some early game issues; if you do an 'early' rather than a prewarp start your research actually moves slower because you don't get the prewarp-story research locations seeded near you. your research simply grinds to a halt until you find some procgenned locations.

All of this is to say that while I enjoy DW2 and the modern engine is a massive step up, it's also a step back in a lot of ways which is frustrating.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Caconym posted:

Anno 1800 custom start without competitive NPCs.

seconding this. Note this doesn't mean no NPCs, Anno 1800 is specifically built so there can be non-hostile NPCs that still function as trading partners and will take some of hte islands. So the world doesn't have to be lifeless like in some games.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Stellaris has a massive original sin problem where the original designer had Fun Ideas but had zero idea ahead of time how to convert those ideas into good gameplay. About the only thing in the original Stellaris that genuinely worked were the exploration events, which ultimately weren't really gameplay *either* but at least they were fun and interesting.

Wiz was appointed to clean things up, and took a chainsaw to a lot of the parts of the game. Removing 2/3 of the FTL systems massively pissed off a lot of people, but it ultimately left the game in a better place. Still, some parts of the game were essentially unfixable and remain so to this day - like the combat system, which is in a weird place of being simulated but not simulated enough to be interesting, while also being too simulated to play around with abstract mechanics.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Stellaris has been better managed than other Paradox games in terms of DLC requirements. About 2/3 of the DLC are either 'Story' or 'Species' packs and are focused on being content expansions. The remaining 1/3 are mechanics DLC, but usually a good % of each mechanic DLC ends up implemented into the base game because other DLC needs to interact with it. For example, the Federations DLC doesn't actually require the DLC in order to form Federations.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Old World is interesting. I like the dynasty mechanics and the narratives it creates. But I find the whole experience falls apart by turn 80-100 or so in singleplayer. On moderate difficulties, the AI starts with more cities, which puts them unimpeachably far ahead. This also means they get a big military quickly and then spend all their time cleaning out tribals, so the tribal mechanic basically gets killed by the ai quickstart before it amounts to anything. Fortunately (?) the AI is trash at building cities, so the player will inevitably catch up, at which point you probably go fight a war because you're sick of paying off the AIs. During the war you get to deal with units zooming in from outside the fog of war and (seemingly) across half the map just to gank ur dudes as an unfortunate downside of the orders system. It does make the AI moderately more effective than usual for civ-likes, but can still usually be handled by a 4x veteran. After you win that war you might as well quit because there won't be any challenge left.

I wouldn't qualify it as low micro. Managing your dynasty, family politics, and city optimization takes a decent degree of mental effort and time, especially for a new player.

TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Oct 26, 2023

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Star ruler 2 is kind of amazing IMO. It makes the best of the blend between RTS and 4X. Like the political mechanics are genuinely great and probably actually work better in the sort of game Star Ruler is rather than a more classic 4X.

Though as usual, the AI is solidly mediocre and can't efficiently handle a lot of the more esoteric racial mechanics that are available. There's a lot of options to boost difficulty, but metering those to get appropriate challenge can be difficult.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Lichtenstein posted:

Checked out Star Ruler 2 based on goons raving, despite vaguely remembering not liking the first game and hell yeah it owns, a fresh little Sword of the Stars x Kohan x Sins of the Solar Empire.

It's a shame the wiki is down, as it takes some more figuring out, so I'll ask about one thing where I know I'm missing something: what's the benefit of Nylli's mothership/habitat system? It introduces a little more micro and a centralized bottleneck expansion, you lose all planetary construction but what's the upside? I suppose the flipside of mothership micro is that you can go more stop-go with colonization, barging into a system and quickly dumping however much population is needed to set up a new production chain. I vaguely understand that the no pressure cap is probably the big part of some nice centralized setups, but I don't really get how that's supposed to work.

Please give me Nylli tips, I like spaceborne races thematically and their FTL drive is incredibly baller.

Nylli can colonize faster at the start of the game, but hit a hump where they slow down until they get more motherships online. No pressure cap is fantastic for worlds that are physically small but otherwise valuable, it abstracts out some otherwise difficult concerns and plays into another strength of theirs: they can colonize nearly instantly if need be. Although you start with a size 1000 mothership, i believe the size minimum is actually 500 and has no impact on population growth: so, lol. Keep that in mind for secondary mothership designs. Also keep in mind you can make them quite speedy! They don't need to be slow. Also keep in mind that Fission reactors are much cheaper than Fusion.

A neat trick with motherships is that if you give them both tractor beams AND mining beams, they can simply drag around ore asteroids while mining them. If you unlock the ore-based hull for ships it reduces the cost of producing those by 50%. Since your construction facilities are mobile this also means you can barge into a system, take it over, and throw up monster defense platforms very quickly (the labor cost for defense platforms scales with the distance to the world building them).

The habitats themselves are a double edged sword. Although it means that your population is directly vulnerable to enemy fleets (and thus ironically the nomad faction is quite vulnerable to raiding on your small worlds), it also means that your larger planets are extremely well defended against enemy fleets as long as you keep your research up: a size 20+ world has a lot of habitat HP and firepower, even if its not garrisoned by support ships!

I like to use the wormhole projector with the mothership race and RP as peacekeepers from Farscape. I forget if thats their default FTL...

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

DW2 has a bunch of much-appreciated core improvements over DW1 that are more than just graphical upgrades. And the scale has been upped by an order of magnitude or so which is awesome for combat.

It also unfortunately has a bad early game that keeps dragging the whole thing down, which is frustrating.

-'dark age' starts mirror the same starts in DW1, except the scale and speeds and research setup make sublight exploration pointless; you'll have early warp drives before you can get to more than the local moon/gas giant.
-if you try to take the non-dark age early start, you actually progress *slower* because you don't get the freebie tech locations
-research now effectively scales linearly with # of tech locations and planets, meaning area controlled = research capability, meaning DW2 fell face first into one of the 4x design traps that DW1 managed to avoid
-'evil' governments are incredibly crippled at the start of the game. it's possible to do a start with an evil government and be unable to afford more than your starport's maintenance costs. (the devs don't seem to understand the problem, judging by adding a free armored unit to evil gov starts to try to buff them. yay, more maint)
-relatedly pop growth is the god stat, also kicking evil governments in the balls. DW1 also had this problem (tho not as bad), but increasing pop growth with excess spending in DW2 means evil govs get a *double* kick in the balls.
-because its impossible to stop pirate raids early on and because raids kill off incredible amounts of population for some reason (thereby tanking your budget), it is always the correct choice to pay off early pirates (lame!)

TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Nov 12, 2023

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

IMO the biggest issue with learning/starting an aurora game is that easing into it is difficult. You need to design a complete suite of systems that work together to build a warship, even a relatively simple laser warship. Even for veteran players its easy to forget a key system and be flying around for years with a useless hulk.

& all the really cool LPs involve multiple player run factions which is just a huge hassle if you're just trying to Enjoy Game.

The missile update looks cool though. I've asserted for many years that the way box salvos work makes missile gameplay degenerate and that reworking EW is the way forward, and this is hitting a lot of the high points.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

There's a TI-specific thread, but it's kind of an issue that the game is still patching heavily through early access. While general principles mostly haven't changed, most of the information and guides available refer to the state of the game as it was on EA launch. So the specifics are kind of off or even just wrong.

There's three basic things you're trying to do at the start of the game. First is develop your Council as aggressively as possible. Your Councilor stats are all important up until you start hitting your stat caps; and in order to increase those stats, you need money and influence so you can acquire Orgs. How do you get money and influence? By having strong councilors, that can acquire control points in rich nations. It's a feedback loop, so the faster you hit the ground running the better off you are. (Pro tip, your influence income primarily consists of two sources: your councilors, and the percentage of the world population that supports your cause. Another pro tip: your control point cap scales with both technology and with your councilors Admin, Command, and Persuasion stats. Admin is considered the god stat, although its mediocre on its own; it controls how many Orgs the councilor can control.)

Your other goal is to get as much Boost income as possible to bootstrap your way into space. The typical process is to get a Lunar mine as fast as possible; it's critical that it give you a Metals income. The majority of tonnage of space bases is Metals, so having Metal in space *drastically* reduces the boost cost of building habitats. That lets you get mines on Mars, and once you have those then your space economy can start snowballing and you can pretty much stop investing in Boost. Note that Boost is cheaper to build for any nation with land near the equator. France is one of the best situated, as its wealthy but has holdings in South America; but ultimately you will be getting boost anywhere you can in the early game.

Of course, complicating this perfect world is the Alien threat. I don't want to spoil anything, but it's important to follow the main plot line for your faction; which usually involves directly confronting the Aliens sooner rather than later.

Finally, the real secret of the game is to judiciously use the Spoils priority. It's extremely important for getting funds at the start; nothing else can compare. Just mind that environmental damage and how it damages your popularity and the government score.

TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Jan 4, 2024

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

you can play dominions co-op, it's just not where it shines. although with Disciples and with AIs actually being able to do diplomacy, dom6 may be the most co-op of all dom

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Dominions AI has come a long way since like Dominions 3, when the notion that it's worthless trash was apparently set in stone. The AI is not good at magic, but it's perfectly capable of amassing big armies and spamming summons.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

The biggest complaints i have in Millenia so far are presentation. The minor cities need to look more like minor cities (evidence of farming or something); literally everyone mistakes them for barbarian camps. 'Minor' 1v1 combats like barbarian vs scout dont really need the battle interface and should be communicated more clearly on the worldmap (for example, animations + a specific icon showing that your unit retreated from a hex when you get attacked offturn, ui distinguishing between minor and major combats). Unit movements feel kind of off in ways i cant articulate.


Other jank is extremely welcome, like the entire palisade wall simply exploding into splinters when you break down the gate

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

I'm not sure that I like that ages are determined by the research leader. The AI just goes for the vanilla ages (or gas difficulty meeting the prereqs) so enh.

It needs to be more complicated than that, or involve bidding, or something.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

I definitely don't like that it's controlled by the tech leader. The AI doesn't seem to give a poo poo about variant ages and is perfectly happy to only do three techs per age, so you lose out if you try to backfill techs. (Made a little worse by that some techs seem mandatory , like Discipline.)The two attempts I made to trigger age of blood or heroes in the demo didn't work.

TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Feb 23, 2024

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Millenia doesn't have workers. You plop down tile improvements from a resource pool.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

orangelex44 posted:

AI War isn’t a 4x game, it’s a puzzle game. The “advanced AI” is moreso a list of ever-increasing complications towards figuring out if you fleet of power X can handle a planet of power Y, and in what order to kick down said beatable planets.

It has all the Xs... I guess exploit is debatable.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Amplitude 4xs have intrinsically bad AI because the exponential expansion they all feature is completely bonkers

Of course if you're playing against humans you will also have the same problems of one side outrunning the others 10:1 so really is the AI the problem?

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

There's a TI thread for more detail, but:

Your first priority is expanding and ranking up your council. You need to control nations to gain resources to get orgs to buff your councilors to control nations with. Your second priority is getting space mining setup, particularly on Mars. For this you'll need Boost. Your third priority is battling the alien menace - but not too enthusiastically or you'll get targeted.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Spice merchants do keep catching me out with their outpost garrisons. I always forget

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TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Shadow Empire is good, but it has this grog game problem where enormous amounts of attention were put into systems that are pointless because of balance and design decisions. Ultimately it has a lot of wasted potential. The tech tree just being WW2 with lasers slapped on the end is a case in point.

Still fun though and got my moneys worth

TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Apr 3, 2024

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