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ArchangeI posted:There was a DD early on where Ethiopia managed to do a naval invasion of Italy. It caused some consternation because a) the AI wasn't supposed to be able to do naval invasions yet and b) Ethiopia doesn't have a fleet Just when you thought Mussolini couldn't gently caress up in Africa any harder.
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Oct 22, 2015 15:00
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Tahirovic posted:I guess you only have Three Mountains left for that. Or maybe some WC games. Theres a thread a few days ago with someone doing it in 1.13
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Oct 22, 2015 17:12
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Kavak posted:That's 100 times better than Darkest Hour at least. I see the AI invade Britain pretty often, in fact the AI does more amphibious invasions then people give them credit for. Its just they don't tend to succeed, and if they do they tend to get wiped out pretty quickly. Most recently in a Kaiserreich game at that, the entire Entente was navally invading Haiti who had like 14 divisions for some reason, and they actually managed to pull it off. But failure is generally the most likely outcome, to be fair. D-Day was pretty much incredible in the fact that it succeeded after all. Its pretty common for me to see Germany in normal and modded games take something in Southern England only to be driven out immediately or a short while later, usually without taking London but a few provinces at best. Westminster System fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Oct 22, 2015 |
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Oct 22, 2015 17:16
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Panzeh posted:A lot of players are really loving stupid and go "HUGE MAP/MARATHON/MAX OUT EVERYTHING" because they think that's fun. Honestly, from my own experiences, the main reason people think that this is a great idea is because obviously bigger sizes = more content, right? I don't really blame people for choosing all the stuff that makes the game a lot longer and bigger, since from their perspective, it's the option that will give them the "most" out of the game. But, while on paper it may seem like increasing the scale of a game won't change much, the effect is much more like what you get if you make someone several times the height of a normal human in real life. You don't get a monster of a human being, you get a human being whose back breaks instantly under the force of gravity and is left with a myriad of physical health issues which probably makes them incapable of even sitting upright. The same thing can be seen with games: Increasing the scale does not equal more content, it results in the framework of the game breaking apart and previously interesting components becoming incredibly annoying and dull. It doesn't help that a lot of strategy game developers seem to just think that allowing players to make the game as big as they want is completely fine. If you want to truly increase the scale of your game, you have to do a lot more than adjust a couple of values and call it a day, you have to absolutely overhaul a lot of the systems to account for the fact that the player is going to be managing dozens of times more units/settlements/whatever than they'd normally would, and playing on a map far larger than what the game was designed for. Developers really ought to make sure that their game is capable of functioning on even the highest scaling setting available, but I'm basically a nobody so who cares what I think? 
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Oct 22, 2015 18:22
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VostokProgram posted:Make the game phone home with every move every player makes, do some machine learning on the collected information, release AI patches monthly.
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Oct 22, 2015 18:29
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Dibujante posted:Unless the problem can essentially be represented as a matrix, it's not presently machine-learnable. This is why images are so popular - they're already matrices, or if you want to get fancy, you can perform feature detection on them and get a feature detection matrix. Something as squishy as the course of an EU4 game would take herculean efforts just to develop a representational model. A lot of people say "do machine learning" when what they mean is "do some kind of fancy AI stuff". I blame press releases about self-driving cars and the like.
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Oct 22, 2015 18:46
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VerdantSquire posted:Honestly, from my own experiences, the main reason people think that this is a great idea is because obviously bigger sizes = more content, right? I don't really blame people for choosing all the stuff that makes the game a lot longer and bigger, since from their perspective, it's the option that will give them the "most" out of the game. But, while on paper it may seem like increasing the scale of a game won't change much, the effect is much more like what you get if you make someone several times the height of a normal human in real life. You don't get a monster of a human being, you get a human being whose back breaks instantly under the force of gravity and is left with a myriad of physical health issues which probably makes them incapable of even sitting upright. The same thing can be seen with games: Increasing the scale does not equal more content, it results in the framework of the game breaking apart and previously interesting components becoming incredibly annoying and dull.
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Oct 22, 2015 18:50
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How long does your typical HoI3 game take in realtime? Just interesting in seeing if it's shorter than other Paradox games.
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Oct 22, 2015 18:53
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VerdantSquire posted:Honestly, from my own experiences, the main reason people think that this is a great idea is because obviously bigger sizes = more content, right? I don't really blame people for choosing all the stuff that makes the game a lot longer and bigger, since from their perspective, it's the option that will give them the "most" out of the game. But, while on paper it may seem like increasing the scale of a game won't change much, the effect is much more like what you get if you make someone several times the height of a normal human in real life. You don't get a monster of a human being, you get a human being whose back breaks instantly under the force of gravity and is left with a myriad of physical health issues which probably makes them incapable of even sitting upright. The same thing can be seen with games: Increasing the scale does not equal more content, it results in the framework of the game breaking apart and previously interesting components becoming incredibly annoying and dull. Yeah, it's the same with nobody wanting a shorter timescale for EU4 or TW games. Even though I've only finished either of those games like once, what if I'm having the game of my life and suddenly find it ends? What if I end up colonizing 30,000 tiles in Civ V and find I run out of room, what then man? It's irrational but it's always at the back of my mind in these games. But then the reality is that Civ games on quick speed/ small worlds and the TW games like FotS that are incredibly collected and tight are by far the most fun I've had with them. I don't think it's good to limit the options though, so I disagree about locking it out, even if most people actually don't enjoy the ridiculously huge settings; likewise, even though it's trivial to mod, I do wish Paradox would just let you have unlimited points in Nation Designer as an option if you wanted it. Paradox games are some of the easiest games out there to get mods for and I still have some friends who want nothing to do with the mods in them, and in most other strategy games where it's more complicated it's even worse. Maybe just make it so you have to play the game properly once or twice before you're allowed to go nuts, so you don't get a soured impression of it.
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Oct 22, 2015 18:53
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Scale can be its own reward. Not a grand strategy, but I've never done everything in Morrowind. Just the idea that there's still frontiers there adds to the experience, though. Yes, that's irrational. But so what? Humans are irrational. It's inescapable. Might as well accept that when designing a game.
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Oct 22, 2015 19:35
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uninverted posted:A lot of people say "do machine learning" when what they mean is "do some kind of fancy AI stuff". I blame press releases about self-driving cars and the like. You would be appalled by the hacks that go into most actual machine learning applications. For example, a car staying in a lane. Early lane-staying system basically took a picture of the road and then tried to machine-learn whether or not the picture seemed to have two lines to either side. Pictures that deviated from that prompted a drift right / left response to try to make the picture correct to something that fit the heuristic better. The car didn't "understand" that it was "between" two "lanes" - it could have been easily fooled by washed out lanes, lane printing errors, someone laying down dummy lanes, particular patterns of road damage, etc, because it was really just a really convoluted image correction algorithm stuck behind a steering wheel that could slowly "learn" that, given an image of the road, it could generally make the image get closer to its desired state by toggling one of its two outputs. This is basically the Chinese Room dilemma. No AI actually knows that it is "playing" a "game". It is optimizing a mathematical function whose outputs hopefully line up with effective gameplay. It's stupid hard for anything beyond the most trivial AI applications (like pathfinding).
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Oct 22, 2015 19:46
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I think the greatest AI researches have gotten up to is like a massive super computer trying to simulate/machine-learn the brain with the power of a... rat? That rat might be real good at pulling off naval invasions though, who knows
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Oct 22, 2015 19:57
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Bort Bortles posted:I like doing big scale games of Civ5 and space 4x because I love the concept of large empires, long-term games, and strategic planning. What is the point of putting a lot of thought and planning into my plays if the game is short and there are only like 3 options that are viable? Its hard for me to explain so I doubt this really conveys how I feel about it but I just like larger long-term games. Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Master or Orion 2, anything, you name it, I liked playing on a big map. I find it more satisfying even if it means more micro or whatever. Same, I like big maps for 4Xs because I like the more dynamic worlds you end up with as a result. If you play a small map of Civ5 with 3 AI players, it's likely you'll all end up roughly the same size, maybe have one friend and two neutral/enemies, maybe one war between other civs. On the other hand, a bigger map with 9 AI players makes it far more likely that one of them will defeat another in a war and end up big and powerful, another will get their expansion cut off and end up small and stunted, two others might be BFFs who stick together, etc etc. You get big powers and small powers and more combinations of alliances and ways to win. It's more like a Paradox game in that there are tons of players in different situations who can play different roles in your game, and it makes it much more interesting. It may also mean that the game takes longer and maybe you don't get all the way to the finish line, but the game is more fun while you're getting there so who cares?
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Oct 22, 2015 19:58
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Pimpmust posted:I think the greatest AI researches have gotten up to is like a massive super computer trying to simulate/machine-learn the brain with the power of a... rat? The Black Death was better at utilizing ships than a typical German AI.
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Oct 22, 2015 19:59
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Pimpmust posted:I think the greatest AI researches have gotten up to is like a massive super computer trying to simulate/machine-learn the brain with the power of a... rat? I don't think you can really quantify a rat's "brain power" in computing terms in this way.
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Oct 22, 2015 20:30
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Rats are pretty intelligent really, in the grand scheme of things.
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Oct 22, 2015 20:32
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How do you play Viccy 2? I just had a really odd situation where I was playing as Portugal, I was doing amazing on the conquest of Africa and colonising the areas before that stuff takes off. I even kept my infamy in check. I had half of Sokoto in me, half of Ethiopa and all of Transvaal. Then I built a factory and my economy just plummeted. Beyond recovery. I even destroyed the factory to see if the resources that needed buying up for that were the root of the issue. It wasn't, and my income just wouldn't recover. I put down all of my expenditures down to zero, and boosted all of my taxes and tariffs as high as I could and I was still making negative money. All I could do was sit and watch while I took on more and more loans. Also, for some odd reason my troop bases were not replenishing, even if I set my NF to be encouraging soldiers.
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Oct 22, 2015 20:45
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The Sharmat posted:I don't think you can really quantify a rat's "brain power" in computing terms in this way. I think it was in like the amount of simulated neurons or something. Like, this computer is technically as capable as a rats "unprogrammed" but mature brain is, on a pure mental horsepowers level. Annoyingly they had to pull the plug on the project when the computer started chasing rat tail.
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Oct 22, 2015 20:49
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Another Person posted:How do you play Viccy 2? I just had a really odd situation where I was playing as Portugal, I was doing amazing on the conquest of Africa and colonising the areas before that stuff takes off. I even kept my infamy in check. I had half of Sokoto in me, half of Ethiopa and all of Transvaal. This is about the closest I've comign to understanding Vicky 2 economics: Individual pops have a calculated income. If you over-tax them they can't buy stuff, and your internal economy grinds to a halt. This is also true of Tariffs, which makes goods imported from outside your local market (Your country + sphere of influence) cost more. This not only impacts your pops, but your factories as well. If you're going to have high tariffs, you want to keep desirable imports outside your SoE and ensure your pops have enough income to pay for those imports. This also means building factories around domestically produced goods. If you're going to have high tariffs, try lowering your taxes. Bear in mind that it can often take a while to really see the impact of these changes on your economy. The budget screen numbers will absolutely lie to you. Conversely, if you produce lots of valuable consumer goods reduce tariffs and up taxation, since you'll be making money on the wealth generated by internal trade and consumption as your pops sell and buy from each other. Again it's opaque, so just keep an eye on your biggest imports/exports and use lots of trial and error with sliders. The other thing is to keep on top of industrial tech. Those bonuses to RGO output are huge for an economy that isn't heavily industrialized. Commerce techs are also useful here but, imo, not nearly as much as industrial. If you're RGO extraction or factory production efficiency isn't very good than you'll lose money as other nations can produce more goods, more cheaply. Vicky 2's economy is very wonky and opaque, but there is some method to the madness. There's also the matter of changes in good prices, which are driven by demand. For example clipper ships are a terrible investment, because they'll rapidly become worthless as steam-ships enter the picture and demand plummets. In comparison, things like steel and it's components (coal, iron) tend to be reasonably valuable through the whole game since you never stop building railroads, factories, ships, tanks, guns, etc... Just be sure, again, to keep your industrial techs reasonably competitive. Look at what RGOs you have, what you can manufacture with those RGOs, and focus your industry and commerce techs around whatever gives efficiency bonuses for those. tl;dr Keep your industrial techs up, trial and error experiments with sliders, wait to see how slider changes actually effect income, build factories around the goods you have access to and the goods that are and will remain in high demand.
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Oct 22, 2015 21:17
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Another Person posted:How do you play Viccy 2? Please don't ask us to enable your self abuse. Seek help from a medical professional.
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Oct 22, 2015 21:24
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Vicky 2 is extremely cool and good.
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Oct 22, 2015 21:27
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Another Person posted:How do you play Viccy 2? I just had a really odd situation where I was playing as Portugal, I was doing amazing on the conquest of Africa and colonising the areas before that stuff takes off. I even kept my infamy in check. I had half of Sokoto in me, half of Ethiopa and all of Transvaal. Most likely it had nothing to do with that one factory, but you were probably sphered by Great Britain or someone else who's big, so now they are taking most of your resources and on top of that your tariffs probably don't work anymore. The Sharmat posted:Scale can be its own reward. Not a grand strategy, but I've never done everything in Morrowind. Just the idea that there's still frontiers there adds to the experience, though. Yes, that's irrational. But so what? Humans are irrational. It's inescapable. Might as well accept that when designing a game. I agree with this.
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Oct 22, 2015 21:33
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The Sharmat posted:Vicky 2 is extremely cool and good. Here's everything you need to know about the economy in V2: 
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Oct 22, 2015 21:47
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vyelkin posted:Same, I like big maps for 4Xs because I like the more dynamic worlds you end up with as a result. If you play a small map of Civ5 with 3 AI players, it's likely you'll all end up roughly the same size, maybe have one friend and two neutral/enemies, maybe one war between other civs. On the other hand, a bigger map with 9 AI players makes it far more likely that one of them will defeat another in a war and end up big and powerful, another will get their expansion cut off and end up small and stunted, two others might be BFFs who stick together, etc etc. You get big powers and small powers and more combinations of alliances and ways to win. It's more like a Paradox game in that there are tons of players in different situations who can play different roles in your game, and it makes it much more interesting. It may also mean that the game takes longer and maybe you don't get all the way to the finish line, but the game is more fun while you're getting there so who cares? Bort Bortles posted:I like doing big scale games of Civ5 and space 4x because I love the concept of large empires, long-term games, and strategic planning. What is the point of putting a lot of thought and planning into my plays if the game is short and there are only like 3 options that are viable? Its hard for me to explain so I doubt this really conveys how I feel about it but I just like larger long-term games. Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Master or Orion 2, anything, you name it, I liked playing on a big map. I find it more satisfying even if it means more micro or whatever. Yeah, and that's what I generally mean when I say content. Bigger empires and longer games are both a siren call for more intense and interesting games, since people look at that and say "well, if there is more, then obviously that means there will be more events/plans/interesting stuff!". This is a completely human thing to do. I even sometimes catch myself thinking "this game I'm playing now is fun, but it would be way more fun if only the player count was bumped up to a several hundred and the maps were dozens of miles big and there were massive wars / fights going on and ..." But like I said before, the issue is that games are generally not built to handle scales several times what they're suppose to have. While having tons of extra stuff sounds fun, a game built for medium sized games is only going to have enough content to fuel a medium size game, and so a whole ton of that extra stuff, which may have been significant in a smaller game where there was generally fewer events going on, becomes bland and even gets filtered out into white noise. Increasing the amount of content without also increasing it's variety doesn't make that content more significant or interesting; in fact, it actually starts to lose significance after a certain point. To bring it back to the example of Civilization: a game with 4 Civilizations won't have as many relationships, but the relationships that do exist between those players will mean a whole ton more for how the game evolves since everyone is going to have some kind of diplomacy with one another due to the scarcity of people. On the other hand, in a game of 12, 18, or even 24 players, the players will of course have relations with one another, but a lot of those relationships are going to end up being completely meaningless. Two AI players on the other end of the globe may make friends and trade, or declare a war and fight, but the only thing they have in common is that neither of those results will seriously effect the player or the course of the game in any way, shape or form. On top of this, more players can even take away from how important the existing relationships are: if I only have three people I can trade with, my diplomacy to those three people is going to be a lot more meaningful since I will need to think more seriously about my actions and how they'll react to them; after all, if I anger one of them seriously enough, that could potentially mean permanently losing access to one or several resources that only that player has. If there are 20 players, who the gently caress cares if I piss someone off? I have 19 more possible trade partners who will almost certainly have what I want. There will always be more people to turn to, and even if that AI has allies it's unlikely that the entire world will feel the same way about them. Remember those people on the other side of the globe? They can trade with me just fine, and they don't even need to have a lot of what I want, since I only really need one of their luxury resources to get the bonus. While bigger games will seemingly have more content, that content is going to be a lot less significant. Unless the game is redesigned and expanded to allow for it, increasing the amount of content can actually make the game less interesting since scarcity is an intensely important and to some degree underrated part of game design. Although it may seen contradictory, less content can be, in a sense, more content, because what is there becomes a lot more meaningful and significant. So while it can be incredibly tempting to think that just adding more of any aspect will improve the game, always remember that unless you also alter how the game is balanced, you will be doing a lot more harm than good. Koramei posted:I don't think it's good to limit the options though, so I disagree about locking it out, even if most people actually don't enjoy the ridiculously huge settings; likewise, even though it's trivial to mod, I do wish Paradox would just let you have unlimited points in Nation Designer as an option if you wanted it. Paradox games are some of the easiest games out there to get mods for and I still have some friends who want nothing to do with the mods in them, and in most other strategy games where it's more complicated it's even worse. Maybe just make it so you have to play the game properly once or twice before you're allowed to go nuts, so you don't get a soured impression of it. I should add that I'm not arguing for all games to be entirely designed based on minimalist ideals. While I do believe they can help, there can absolutely be times where more content can enhance a game in multiple ways, and making the scale of what you have bigger is a completely valid goal for a game designer. You also raise a very good point in that a very large scale can serve almost as a kind of mental comfort. You may not use all of it, knowing that you have far more than you will ever possibly need can be a very relaxing thought. What I am arguing for is that games shouldn't have settings for campaigns that they cannot possible support, and if they do want to have those settings the developers ought to make sure the game is appropriately adjusted to allow for the larger scale.
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Oct 22, 2015 21:50
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Fintilgin posted:Here's everything you need to know about the economy in V2: That missing part? It still hurts.
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Oct 22, 2015 21:51
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Wiz posted:That missing part? It still hurts. If you only have to take 2 things away from Vicky 2, they should be: 1. PoPs are a good idea and should stick around, and 2. Never try an in-depth simulation of the economy ever again.
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Oct 22, 2015 21:57
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I've heard that the V2 economy is like a black hole that absorbs matter around it, and one day the entire world will be sucked into it
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Oct 22, 2015 21:59
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Dongattack posted:How long does your typical HoI3 game take in realtime? Just interesting in seeing if it's shorter than other Paradox games. ~20 minutes to download/install ~3-5 minutes for first launch ~1 minute to switch resolution away from 1024x768 ~1 minute to select my nation/game settings ~3 minutes to look at the OoB, tech tree, economy and decide I'd rather just play something else after all Only Sengoku can really rival HoI3 for me in average time per session.
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Oct 22, 2015 22:05
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VerdantSquire posted:If you only have to take 2 things away from Vicky 2, they should be: I actually like the economy simulation and would be perfectly happy for Vicky 3 to have the same thing just with better data presented to the player and fixed Capitalist AI.
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Oct 22, 2015 22:13
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The Sharmat posted:I still want Rome 2. Only with less focus on Rome because at that game's start date Rome is just a regional power and the Diadochi are cooler and more interesting. Also the map should extend to India, seriously. EU: Rome's map was tiny and had almost nothing on it. Kinda weird just how much people think post Alexander classical history is "and then Rome exploded all over the Mediterranean" and all the interesting Punic, Sucessor states, Parthian\pseudo Persian and Indian interactions are footnotes until they're mentioned in a famous battle where they get their faces shoved in by the Romans. It's very  in a way.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:08
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VerdantSquire posted:1. PoPs are a good idea and should stick around, and Pops were almost as lovely as the economy system. At least you could directly influence them but that system sucked rear end.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:19
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Victoria but with trade nodes will cripple my social life forever.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:34
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Pops are cool and good and easily the best part of V2
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Oct 22, 2015 23:41
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Mans posted:Kinda weird just how much people think post Alexander classical history is "and then Rome exploded all over the Mediterranean" and all the interesting Punic, Sucessor states, Parthian\pseudo Persian and Indian interactions are footnotes until they're mentioned in a famous battle where they get their faces shoved in by the Romans. It pisses me off. Eumenes vs. Antigonus is the best military campaign no one has heard of. Don't even get me started on weird poo poo like the Indo-Greek kingdom.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:45
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you should get started on it and post about it in the ancient history thread.
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Oct 22, 2015 23:51
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Larry Parrish posted:Pops were almost as lovely as the economy system. At least you could directly influence them but that system sucked rear end. Pops were amazing because they added a sort of character to your nation. Not only did the fact that they were independent actors capable of influencing the player from the inside of their nation make them an interesting gameplay component, but just their presence gave the player an idea of what their nation actually looked like. Pops were a great idea that I will defend to the death, and I'm really happy that they'll be in Stellaris.
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Oct 23, 2015 00:18
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OK The Cossacks is pretty much overhauling every remaining gripe I had with EU4 - I can now set my country's attitude towards other countries! https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/eu4-dev-diary-october-22nd-2015.887930/
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Oct 23, 2015 00:19
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I've been playing Viccy 2 for 5 hours according to Steam. I feel like I've learned a lot, but I've never gotten past 1850. Maybe Portugal is too hard a start? Their literacy is in the toilet at the start.
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Oct 23, 2015 00:21
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VerdantSquire posted:Pops were amazing because they added a sort of character to your nation. Not only did the fact that they were independent actors capable of influencing the player from the inside of their nation make them an interesting gameplay component, but just their presence gave the player an idea of what their nation actually looked like. Pops were a great idea that I will defend to the death, and I'm really happy that they'll be in Stellaris. Thats why they were bad though
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Oct 23, 2015 00:58
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Did I miss something regarding vassals? Mine are getting claims on everything neighboring so I get to just bloat them by a one province depth every truce and then just diploannex a huge chunk. This seems broken.
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Oct 23, 2015 01:34
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