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Angry Lobster posted:I miss Dominions, however playing a couple simultaneous games in Dominions 3 where each (lategame) turn took 2 hours kinda broke my spirit. The Throne mechanics in Dom5 really helps shorten the game. TL;DR: holding a claimed throne give you points, when you have x amount of points set at game creation (typically 50%+1, although there have been some funny games with a lot lower amount and one (31/30) incident), the game ends and you win. And if that's not enough, once you hit a pre-set turn limit doom horrors are going to start popping up everywhere, and a doom horror that gets to spend a turn on a throne will eat it, also lowering the threshold by it's value. So if the settings are 13/24 points, after the destruction of one throne the win threshold is now 11/22. This really improves the game. The best parts of Dom are the early and mid game, and the lategame is typically a horrible slog. With good settings, you can just clip off that endgame. And even if you don't, it also really helps with the late-game problem of "my enemy has 200 provs, and will not be hurt particularly much by the loss of any specific one, so the game is just one horrible slog of slowly grinding them down". Because a typical game has 12 thrones, and if you claim 7 you win, and in deep endgame there are going to be a couple which are mostly safe for their holders, the endgame usually crystallizes into massive battles over ~4 or so provinces.
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Jun 14, 2022 13:06
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 17:35 |
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threelemmings posted:So theoretically the hot gas dwelling giant balloon aliens had no real reason to compete with the tiny vacuum cold asteroid crabs. Stars! has a system where each planet (star, really) gets rolled 3 different habitability values, radiation, temperature and gravity, and in race design you can pick the midpoint and width of the habitability band for each of those. The most point-efficient way to get a wide habitability is to be near the middle with roughly equivalently sized bands, but there can be really serious diplomatic benefits of having at least one of the bands narrow and pushed far from the middle (because if you meet someone who did the same but in the different direction, you are the bestest of friends and can happily expand into each other's space without hurting each other). (I always thought it a little weird that there is a minimum radiation requirement for habitability.)
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Nov 4, 2022 14:49
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Libluini posted:Stars! always interested me, but I never managed to get it to work on my modern PC. Is there a GOG-version or something available? It runs great under wine. If you have no linux machine to run it on, install WSL2 or a linux virtual machine, and then run wine under that. This is true of a lot of 16-bit windows games of the era.
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Nov 4, 2022 18:28
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Libluini posted:Thanks, last time I checked, I simply assumed it's one of those weird old games that need Win 3.1 or Win 95 to run and are now forever lost. Didn't know Stars! was a Linux-game, my next inept install attempt would have gone done the wrong road, It's not a Linux game. WINE (which is an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a reimplementation of Windows APIs on top of Linux. They have much better backwards compatibility than modern windows, and can run a lot of old stuff that no longer runs on windows. Also, the AI on Stars! is really rudimentary, the full experience really needs human opponents. Valatar posted:I played the poo poo out of Stars! back in the day, and yeah the hab ranges and some of the faction-specific techs could make the game play very differently. It also has great operational combat, that imo really hasn't been matched by later games. In most 4x games moving around fleets just consists of making a really big blob and slamming it at enemy blobs. The "galaxy" in Stars! is just a grid of (iirc up to 4000x4000) locations, which might have a star but are mostly empty space, and ships can move to and stop anywhere. Add minefields, which don't necesarily hurt big ships that much, but which crucially *stop them* if they try to move through too fast, and suddely there's a whole emergent layer where large battles can be decided not by the big ships shooting at big ships but by skirmishing, minesweeping and protecting your own minelayers outside the actual battle. Probably my greatest video game achievement, or at least the one that felt most like one, was when I was 15 or so when I was playing a -f SD (means: "I have great mines, and I build nothing particularly valuable on planets so I can evacuate cheaply when necessary"), I was jumped by 3 neighbouring players who had just drastically more powerful fleets than I had, and over two months or so I managed to outright win the "small war" to the point where their massive fleets, which were much more powerful than what I could face, were reduced to moving 16ly/turn on my territory trying to do damage to me while I wrecked their homeworlds and took out all of their ability to reinforce until they all quit, all without ever actually beating their fleets in battle. Good times. Valatar posted:It needs to be run on an emulator nowadays, but there is still a hosting site for multiplayer games: https://starsautohost.org/stars.htm I saw "4 games running" and was almost shocked that people are still playing this. Sadly, they seem like ones that have just been forgotten on hold instead of being ended. The last turn is from May of this year.
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Nov 4, 2022 20:51
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Pirate Radar posted:I’ll skim the changelogs when I get a minute. I know at some point, maybe still, the AI got to build roads for free in order to make up for shortfalls elsewhere. I haven’t played in ~6mo but I believe the AI also still won’t build planes but will overcompensate by building too many AA guns. If playing against AI, just turn air forces off. You'll get a better challenge.
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Jan 10, 2023 12:09
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Bremen posted:Does RTW cheat in the AI's favor? Because I remember my last game I ended up just ragequitting after the fifth or so time I dropped several torpedoes into an enemy ship and had it sail away with moderate damage, whereas every time my ships got hit by a single one (even plane launched) they sank within minutes. And it's not like I was skimping on the torpedo protection, either. Were you skimping on researching torpedo techs? There are really major step changes in the destructiveness of torpedoes. IIRC each new torpedo protection tech is paired up with a torpedo warhead tech, and any torpedoes earlier than that are basically hard-countered by the new protection tech.
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Apr 5, 2023 08:15
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Bremen posted:No, I had it focused, and my ships were (as far as I was aware) well designed and this happened over several wars over several years. Honestly I walked away from the game with no doubt in my mind the game was designed to give the AI a large advantage in battle (to make up for the AI itself not being great, mind you) and now I'm not sure how to take everyone insisting that it's not. I have absolutely not noticed this myself -- my experience with torpedoes is that they work just fine at sinking ships. One thing that's possible is that the game has a semi-random tech tree where techs are sometimes skipped for a few tiers, to make fleets of different nations diverge. My best bet is that precisely this happened to some key torpedo warhead tech for you.
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Apr 5, 2023 15:26
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OT for the rest of the discussion, but I've never understood how the Chinese Room thought experiment is supposed to be an argument against anything. "Can you point to the specific, single neuron in your brain that knows how to speak English? No? Gotcha, clearly you can't really speak English!" -- that's what the argument sounds like to me. Complex things can do things their parts alone can't do, news at 11. Tuna-Fish fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Apr 8, 2023 |
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Apr 8, 2023 12:10
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FrancisFukyomama posted:Jagged alliance 2 has a pretty similar thing going with how the Alrucan army has to physically move around the map and gets its resources from its territories Yeah, the first time you realized that you can ambush the reprisal raids in territory much more favorable for you when they have just marched halfway across the map and still tired instead of letting them rest up to full and fighting them out in the towns you just captured was a revelation. I want the ability to raid supply lines and to ambush and stuff. I don't care if the AI actually has to play by the same rules, so long as it looks like it to me and I can derive advantages from doing sneaky stuff.
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Apr 12, 2023 20:37
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RandomBlue posted:Yeah, that was the one part I didn't like. Ship designers look cool in screenshots or whatever but I don't like spending hours designing every ship. Ship design gameplay can be very interesting, but that then has to be part of the core, not just bolted on to the side because a 4x is supposed to have one. I'd happily play a space version of RTW, but I don't see much point having a "drag components onto a hull" style ship builder.
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Oct 30, 2023 22:07
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 17:35 |
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Veryslightlymad posted:On paper, ship designers are meant to be a fluid rock-paper-scissors type system, where you can tailor make your own fleet to counteract the very specific challenges that your glorious space armada is likely to face, and having to change your design plans to something new could be the thing that ultimately spells your doom. The one counterexample I have for this is Stars!. It basically had no AI, it was nearly always played PBEM (turn per day) against humans, and I always found the ship designer interesting and positive for the gameplay. The designer constrained what ships you could build severely enough that it made using it much less tedious than usual (it was a slot-style thing, not freely use all tonnage for whatever you want like MoO). If you knew exactly what you were facing, you could always counterdesign ships that were better than the generic option. To use new tech components, you had to design new ships, but also as you researched new techs all the old components got noticeably cheaper, including ones in designs that already exist. There was a strict limit on 16 different ship designs that could exist at any time, when you wanted to build your 17th you had to delete an existing design and all ships built to it. There were no refits and also many of those 16 slots will be taken by freighters or other economy-related stuff and not fighting ships. For the midgame, new tech components were unlocked consistently faster than you can/should update the ship designs in your fleet. It took many turns to build meaningful amount of warships. Much of that happened because the game was built for 16-bit windows with a strict limit on how much memory it could use. The net effect was that decisions about ship designs were very impactful, but also didn't require tedious tinkering. If you knew you were going to update your main ship design, you basically always knew exactly what you were going to put in it. The big question was always "should I do this now, or wait a few turns". Tuna-Fish fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Mar 26, 2024 |
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Mar 26, 2024 13:23
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