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Nice. New thread
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Jul 13, 2022 22:25
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:43 |
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A long post from the Ukraine thread that I have been mulling over...Frosted Flake posted:Can we talk about that for a second? I like the level of detail in John Tiller games, CMO or Combat Mission, which is why they are good training/teaching tools, but no one person would be expected to direct each section or team in a battalion, each ship in a navy, each company in an army group.
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Jul 13, 2022 22:34
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That thing about the player having to move every single unit by hand every single turn is historically really just a hold over from the physical wargames where obviously, everything had to be done by hand. Even so, those physical wargames often retained a very primitive way to represent their armies as an undifferentiated mass of single units. Stacking several divisions for an attack would only give you the sum of the individual divisions' combat factors, the same total as if they had attacked individually. By now this has become a trope of how wargames should look and work: lazy design perpetuating itself into a genre identity. A wargame has to have a billion units for you to move one by one, because that's what makes it a wargame. Not to mention the visceral thrill of having cool black and white counters for every single SS division!
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Jul 13, 2022 22:59
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StashAugustine posted:extremely funny that Andean Abyss is about how Uribe saved Colombia when last I checked he's awaiting trial for war crimes HerraS posted:nah, lets play A Distant Plain in honor of President Biden and his hugely succesful ending of the invasion of Afghanistan would be a shame if the series peaked as early as A Distant Plain, but ADP is really good IMO
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Jul 13, 2022 23:46
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Futanari Damacy posted:I don't really play computer games anymore but I still fire up Civ 4: BtS a few times a year Remains the best designed of the series. What are people's opinions on Humankind or The Old World ?
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Jul 13, 2022 23:50
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John Charity Spring posted:Humankind sucks and is boring and weirdly racist, but I hear good things about Old World even from people who have otherwise gone off Civ games Ha, what did they do to outdo the inherent racial phrenology of the Civ genre?
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Jul 14, 2022 00:05
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StashAugustine posted:Vicky doesn't really have espionage but there is lots of economic bullshit. I'd honestly recommend just waiting for the sequel, v2 is an extremely interesting game that in a lot of ways just doesn't work right Is that Vicky 1 designer who wanted the game to showcase the superiority of his market liberalism ideology still around? It was pretty funny how Vicky 1 enforced an ontological purestrain gold standard: new money would only enter the system as gold mines were being worked... 
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Jul 14, 2022 00:44
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StashAugustine posted:Civ 3 had a bunch of weird design issues but I liked the simplicity. Civ 4 is easily the best designed one in the series. 5 has some cool new ideas but also just isn't very interesting to play. From what I heard of 6 it basically just doubled down on the bad ideas of 5  The only improvements 5 made over 4 was the switch to hexes (seen several attempts to hack 4s engine into a hexagonal system by shifting cell rows, but don't think any ever worked) and making resources only support a limited amount of units so you actually had resource wars.
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Jul 14, 2022 09:28
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John Charity Spring posted:it's got basically the same thing with inherent racial traits and bonuses but it's even more deterministic about it because of how it limits cultures to particular eras. like you can be the Mayans but when you advance to the next era you have to stop being them and instead choose to be some Europeans or whatever (or you can stay as the Mayans and be at a disadvantage because you don't get any new units or bonuses). The selection of civs is very funny too, like the contemporary ones are stuff like 'Australians'. This approach avoids Civilization's pitfall of having Americans be an eternal civilisation who existed since the stone age (reminiscent of Boer propaganda about them being the real natives in South Africa) but instead it treats cultures completely disposably and also has this thing about them being 'obsolete' once technology moves on which is just as racist in its own way. All of the marketing for Humankind was about how it was going to be a Civ beater which fixes and modernises all these archaic mechanics and what they did was basically do Endless Legend with a historical veneer and its own racist poo poo involved too. Rubbish Hmm. Yeah. From what I've seen a bunch of the old Civ mechanics appear to have been replaced with Endless Legend mechanics rather than a proper overhaul. If anyone wants do to a Civ killer I would tell them to keep the scope but throw out all game mechanics. The fundamentals of Civ from the 80s! There's no inherent need to keep any of that stuff around unless it actually serves a purpose, game design has books and poo poo written about it nowadays! Maybe try a different take on world history than "move single units, manage individual towns"... On the topic of "Civ bonuses" from a simpler reformist perspective I always thought the best way to do it was to use the Culture mechanics, specifically the Civ-wide levelling system in 5; if you want your Civ to get combat bonuses you don't get to pick a "martial race", you have to make an active gameplay choice to make your Civ into one. Make Civ choice itself 100% aesthetic (though keep specific AI personalities for different leaders). PoontifexMacksimus has issued a correction as of 12:34 on Jul 14, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 12:26
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1stGear posted:Unity of Command is a good starting point. Enough is abstracted that's its arguably more of a puzzle game than a wargame but it's still a good entry to the genre and thinking about concepts like supply and planning offensives. Danann posted:There's Unity of Command which is relatively more approachable but more puzzle-like (and bit of an RNG fest if you're going for best victory) compared to others in the grog game category. It's worth emphasising that while Unity of Command 1 and 2 use mostly the same basic mechanics, they are very different beasts: UoC2 is closer to a traditional wargame, and you need to shepherd and keep your forces alive across a campaign, and honestly UoC2 is also a lot more difficult: I think the game was very much made for veterans of UoC1 in mind. While 1 would be a good choice for a beginners light wargame, to succeed in 2 you really need to read and re-read the manual and fully understand the intricacies of the combat model.
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Jul 16, 2022 12:09
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gradenko_2000 posted:How is EU nowadays? Can you just play it straight / by-ear and react to the game as it progresses or do you need a guide. EU has always suffered from not actually having any real unique gameplay element or coherent thoughts about the historical period portrayed. Crusader King posits a medieval age defined by personalities and their relationships, Victoria attempts to model a period of drastic socio-economic development, HoI4 decided to go all in on Kaiserreich style alt-history roleplaying. But Europa Universalis suffers from being the first of Paradox's map games, so it's always been simply the "default map game" where you do "map game things" like Provinces > Gold > Troops > Provinces etc. and across the 4 games they haven't hit any new ideas to finally give a real identity to the blobbing gameplay core. I always thought the obvious way to set the game apart from other the other series and draw actual inspiration from the time period would be to focus the gameplay not on individuals or socio-economics, but on institutions. So the default game play arc would be that you start out as a feudal state where most of your territories are effectively independent, but at the end of the game your are running a unitary territorial state, French Revolution style. You would sit at the top of a pyramid of different fiefs, provinces, city states, and slowly work to bring them all to heel. Meanwhile you would probably be part of a larger pyramid like the Holy Roman Empire, and obviously there would be plenty of equals to contend with. It would also hopefully give a pleasant arc to the whole game; as the time you would need to spend managing your internal politics would decrease over time, allowing you to focus more both in-game resources and real life time on increasingly larger global stages. That sort of development over time, where you start out in a very complex micro-level hierarchical web of political entities that gradually simplifies into a broader system of 18th-century continental power game politics, including to global colonial competition, would make for a unique gameplay experience in the mapgame space, in my opinion. EU has made plenty of haphazard strides towards systems like this, but it has never been recognized as the core of the game, so it remains so much patch and DLC fluff, and the game wholly lacks the fractal detail required to make my idea work. A one-province start is not a unique long-term experience, it's just a more challenging world conquest. Edit: a useful inspiration for the long-form gameplay loop would be the factory/assembly line style games that are pretty popular currently: you are essentially trying to pave over a multifaceted local society to create the most effective state machine for extracting resources and using them. PoontifexMacksimus has issued a correction as of 01:01 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 00:50
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Frosted Flake posted:I thought EU IV’s historical theory was based on National Ideas and Institutions, though the Missions system seems like they are trying to transfer that part of HoI 4. I have to say I don’t really have experience with the game, I’ve just dabbled with it. The DLC obsession with adding new nickle and dime subsystems is honestly what keeps me from playing EU4 nowadays, but that's just predictably lazy, predatory capitalism. As you say, you need all DLC systems to work with all other DLC systems, so in the end you have to juggle a dozen different screens to pile up all your piddly +2.5% bonuses; busywork that punishes you for not fiddling, buttons you just have to click every 5 years for treats like a Facebook social experiment... National Ideas at least back on release actually mattered more, but since every new subsystem has no choice to replicate the same few core game bonuses, anything you get from National Ideas you get from many other sources, so it quickly just becomes another source of nickles and dimes... Would be interested at what point Stellaris was placed in "salvage" mode - back when they first added Alloys?
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Aug 9, 2022 01:56
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:They never had historical mechanics to begin with, they just had scripted events and triggers for historical trivia. EU suffers more than any of them because its scope is too big. The transition of from premodern to modern states over 400 years is a gargantuan topic that ends up getting represented as having 30% better trade income etc. Just silly little numbers that don't change the gameplay of moving the map around and clicking things. Also making war the only real way to progress through the game leads to boring gameplay as well. PoontifexMacksimus posted:EU has always suffered from not actually having any real unique gameplay element or coherent thoughts about the historical period portrayed.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:41
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Orange Devil posted:This is 100% true of the Dutch government. The only thing they give a poo poo about is "beeldvorming" (imaging / image formation) because this has been the key to winning elections for decades. People will vote for the appearance of efficacy over actual efficacy. On top of that the government consists of committed liberals heavily inspird by US libertarians, so they believe government ought to do next to nothing because it is not efficient at doing things (unlike private enterprise and markets). So we get stories about how our finance minister in the 90s would spend hours a day playing Heroes of Might and Magic III on his work PC. Things have only gotten worse since.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:Civ 4 needs an HD remake so drat bad Switch the map from squares to hexes, boom, done.
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Aug 9, 2022 14:58
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KirbyKhan posted:I feel like it was a little bit after the Dick update last March that overhauled how planets and population worked. Lem was balancing and then after that they announced the maintenance team that... felt like they did more than the regular content updates but materially did much less. Man, it's really crazy with Stellaris how they just keep revamping core systems over and over to see what sticks. Forget public beta, this game has been a public alpha.
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Aug 9, 2022 16:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:Holy poo poo Warlords 3 Darklords Rising got a gog.com release in 2019 and I only found out about it now Still got my CD  Man, I spent days upon days drawing maps in that game... I'm still annoyed by Gray Mana dominance...
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Aug 9, 2022 22:13
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Mans posted:I think EU4 hit its peak at around art of war when everything felt really tuned and all bugs fixed, before they started shoving so much unnecessary stuff into the game. Moving away from having a fort in every province was one of the few inspired updates EU4 got: cut down on game tedium and introduced some actual strategy to fort placement
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Aug 10, 2022 10:42
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Maximo Roboto posted:Stellaris isn't turn-based though? Stellaris has always had a problem with designing interesting gameplay loops, which is why it has been completely overhauled several times (because it did not actually ship with any gameplay idea beyond "space sandbox") - but that goes for every game Paradox has ever designed. They might honestly represent the furthest a game studio (that doesn't just ape trends) has gotten with such weak fundamental gameplay design chops I played the first Crusader Kings on release, and let's just say Paradox was in no way planning for the series to become The Sims with more murder, they just leaned into it when the system they had designed turned out to randomly produce engaging gameplay Edit: I was going to make some snippy comparison to From Soft in terms of designing your own genre and resting on your laurels, except they actually developed it into tightly designed pieces like Bloodborne and Sekiro. Paradox is more like they went straight to Elden Ring but with 80 % of the game world as DLC, and by now they're on Elden Ring IX Edit 2: essentially Paradox was originally a grognard-but-not-really studio, in that they certainly put designing arbitrary system above letting the player have meaningful interactions with them, but they were also not proper grognards in that they are simply actually pretty ignorant of historical detail and very incurious to grow in this regard. That otherwise untapped middle position of making system-heavy games that nonetheless did not presuppose or require any in-depth knowledge of the period (because Paradox never had any in-depth knowledge of any period themselves) managed to reach an untapped audience of middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearned to pull designated levers and watch their blob encompass toponyms they could feel proud for recognising This is what propelled the company to its public listing, now they are definitely always aiming towards making their games not just accessible, but streamer meme-friendly with wacky event chains always ready to for reaction videos. A development from the History Channel to Twitch memes; but in terms of actual historical understanding nothing is really lost PoontifexMacksimus has issued a correction as of 01:23 on Nov 22, 2022 |
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Nov 22, 2022 00:43
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KirbyKhan posted:Elden Ringworld As much as I think From Soft went very easy on themselves in making Elden Ring (the success of which I really hope won't drag down their future releases, I really want them to make a new, modern, good Armoured Core and not Elden Ring 2, 3, etc.) I think if you put them on the spot to design a Paradox-level strategy game they would make something far better than Paradox ever could; they certainly have the period visual research down already
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Nov 22, 2022 02:11
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Maximo Roboto posted:I would agree that they dove into the personality/court management aspects, but as I recall the first CK was no slouch on that either. The only thing it was missing was events, and QOL features like the bride matcher. And then the DLCs in CK2 really dove into adding extraneous mechanics to role-play as every single type of polity. Crusader Kings 2 actually did something with the formula, yes, but my whole point was that they released a Crusader Kings 1 with no clear plan whatsoever, and no-one has any fond memories of that game. Takings several games to figure out what the gameplay should be about is no different from taking tons of DLC, and my point remains that they are not good enough at design to do more than thrown poo poo at the wall and follow what sticks - in that case Game of Sims As regards detail their games stared out global. EU2 had a samurai on the cover; figure out yourself how much fun you can have trying to recreate the Sengoku Jidai across 5 provinces or the invasion of Korea across 2.... Not sure what you mean that HoI IV was a disaster? As I understood it was very a good seller? Certainly people buying it just for the mods is not a negative...
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Nov 22, 2022 02:34
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Maximo Roboto posted:Wait how was AoD better than DH, I thought everyone agreed that DH was the apex of what the HOI II engine could do, did AoD have something that beat DH's amazing map. I want to know this as well, I just wrapped up a very fun campaign in DH and would be very keen to know if I should switch to AoD for the next one
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Nov 22, 2022 02:48
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Maximo Roboto posted:I do, but I might've been playing with mods that allowed me to form the Empire of Africa and other ahistorical nations. Also there was no diplo range or other "historical accuracy" systems that got in the way, so my French Angevin heir ended up as Emperor of Byzantium. To return to my original point, it bears emphasising that the limit of Paradox's understanding of medieval politics was that "it was about people" - as much fun as CK2 and CK3 are their understanding of politics is still more informed by fantasy novels and prestige TV drama than actual history (they could never wrap their heads around something like the anthropological level of difference in approach to religion, Christian, Islamic or otherwise). Certainly still the best games Paradox have made from a gameplay perspective; as much fun as I am having in CK3 I could see myself reinstalling CK2 for all the subtle differences... Victoria 1 was 100 % a case of them just designing a system and trying to make a game around it afterwards (right up there with HoI3). Haven't had a chance to try V3 to see were it lands... (I'm honestly forgetting what I thought of V2 - not very much I guess?) Aah, you mean EU1, that's the one of their games I never played! Alright, I think I see you what you mean with HoI4... I hope I've made clear that it's not the direction I would prefer the company to go, but the capitalist logic seems unassailable... PoontifexMacksimus has issued a correction as of 03:00 on Nov 22, 2022 |
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Nov 22, 2022 02:56
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Frosted Flake posted:Crusader Kings is strange in that it depicts Feudalism as understood by someone who didn’t so much as bother to read Bloch’s Feudal Society, which is kind of the bare minimum you’d expect. I still think feudalism is eminently gameable, but it should essentially be an inheritance law simulator, where you are trying to marshal both legal (and religious) arguments and material political support to show why you should be given a contented fief; once that simulator is good enough you could honestly also cover most international wars all the way up to the 30 Years War depending on how robust your legal model is gradenko_2000 posted:I will preface this by saying that I do not actually recommend anyone buy AOD in TYOOL 2022 - modern Windows support is worse than DH, and the last time I'd ever looked there were a number of major issues with the game that were left unpatched as development halted. I peeked into the Paradox forums as I was writing this post to try and see if there was any activity, and apparently there's been an alternate team plugging away at patching the game with an update as recent as 2016, but I don't know how well it works so I can't comment on how much it improves the game. I might jump into it if I see it on sale, and if you already have it and are curious, I'd be interested to know your experience. But for now, DH is still the best iteration of HOI 2, and personally my preferred way of experiencing HOI in general, just ahead of HOI 3, because I'm too stupid to understand number 4. Ah, well. Honestly, maybe looking for a quality HoI2 style experience today is just a lost cause...
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Nov 25, 2022 00:32
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:43 |
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:All the Vicky games are designed around some weird economic simulation, and fall apart based on that system's merits or failures. The chief limitation of them all is that transportation of goods has to be heavily abstracted for the games to run, you cannot possibly have hundreds of goods attempting to pathfind from province-province, let alone the million+ that's normal in those games. fermun posted:There's some Paradox employee comments in a Paradox megathread here on SA from around when it was released, but Vicky 2's economic system was designed by a Scottish Tory that believed in Ron Paul Austrian Economics as the best system and then he left Paradox just shortly before the game was released to design his own space 4x game, which was never released and after a couple of years he was given a job with Paradox again but never got put in charge of designing anything again. The game required a lot of hodge-podge fixes to make its economic system spit out anything that made any kind of sense and that's why it's so weird, a totally broken ultra-libertarian economics system that didn't actually function well patched over with all kinds of fixes. Man, the unspoken history behind these games is something else - and what follows is the impact on people who think going beyond Civilization makes them free thinkers...
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Nov 25, 2022 00:53
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