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Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
Personally, I always set a stockpile of goods used to build units (and forts/railroads/factories in the late game with a strong economy) of around 200-500 once my economy can afford it.

If you don't have the goods stockpiled, the game spends ~10 days or so buying up the goods for each unit that you queue up, which adds months or years onto the time it takes to recruit a large army or build a navy. If you have goods stockpiled, the game starts building units/infrastructure immediately.

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KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Drone posted:

5. I'm bad at army stuff in V2 but I always do stacks of 6 inf/2 cav/2 art. Later on when supply limits are large enough to do big armies and I'm at war, I double that, but I generally keep stacks of 30,000 troops.

Stack design in Vicky boils down to: take two hussars for recon (faster occupations/reduce dig in penalties), two engineers for sieges (for attacking forts), and then a 1:1 ratio of artillery and infantry, as much as you need/can fit into one stack. The artillery's there to do the killing and the infantry's there to do the dying.

The late game units are super expensive for little benefit; planes can sub in for hussars and have mad defence stats if you have the cash, but there isn't really any point at all to tanks.

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
Basically the anomalies seem a little bit like cracking open ruins in Civ or pods in SMAC/X -- random effect, possibly a disaster, sometimes nothing, sometimes a nice bonus. That was entertaining enough, so I'm pleased to read about this being a part of Stellaris.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

DrSunshine posted:

Basically the anomalies seem a little bit like cracking open ruins in Civ or pods in SMAC/X -- random effect, possibly a disaster, sometimes nothing, sometimes a nice bonus. That was entertaining enough, so I'm pleased to read about this being a part of Stellaris.

Yeah I was just about to post that Anomalies are just goodie huts from civ. Little treasures to encourage and reward exploration. But sadly once they are gone the whole mechanic is gone :(
This is why I'd love many anomalies to stick around, or have the failures give you a hint that you need to come back later. A mid or late game breakthrough could finally unlock the secrets of that weird anomaly you found in the early game.

The Sharmat
Sep 5, 2011

by Lowtax

DStecks posted:

This is objectively wrong.

It's not a game if you can't lose.

DStecks
Feb 6, 2012

The Sharmat posted:

It's not a game if you can't lose.

Your definition of game is a useless one.

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos

Baronjutter posted:

Yeah I was just about to post that Anomalies are just goodie huts from civ. Little treasures to encourage and reward exploration. But sadly once they are gone the whole mechanic is gone :(
This is why I'd love many anomalies to stick around, or have the failures give you a hint that you need to come back later. A mid or late game breakthrough could finally unlock the secrets of that weird anomaly you found in the early game.
Even if I misinterpreted excitement about anomalies as being the whole tech system, I am pretty sure Doomdark is still on the record at Gamescom saying that you can find new anomalies on old features because of new sensor technology.

Chickpea Roar
Jan 11, 2006

Merdre!

SkySteak posted:


2. Is it a good idea to AI manage all my trade but stockpile certain key resources like canned food and small arms?


You should definitely try to build up as big a stockpile as possible of resources used for constructing buildings and units.
Steel, lumber, wood, iron are usually pretty cheap and could be set to 2k early. Machine parts are rare in the early game, so you should start building a stockpile as soon as possible, unless you want to wait years between ordering a factory and starting construction.
The rest like coal, explosives, artillery and other navy/military resources can wait, but there's often a shortage of one of them in the later game when big wars are going on.

Dirk the Average posted:

Personally, I always set a stockpile of goods used to build units (and forts/railroads/factories in the late game with a strong economy) of around 200-500 once my economy can afford it.

If you don't have the goods stockpiled, the game spends ~10 days or so buying up the goods for each unit that you queue up, which adds months or years onto the time it takes to recruit a large army or build a navy. If you have goods stockpiled, the game starts building units/infrastructure immediately.

This is also a good point. Production can add a considerable amount of time to large production orders, and hearing the "ship built"-sound every second for a year of game time can be maddening :v:

Basically money is easy to come by after the early game, so there's no reason not max your stockpile of all useful resources.

vyelkin
Jan 2, 2011
So the anomalies are literally just anomalies taken straight out of GalCiv 2?

Sarmhan
Nov 1, 2011

No? There's more to the system than 'find thing, get reward'. You have scientists with traits that'll affect the outcome, and event chains that'll give you choices as well. Also, they're an essential part of the ongoing game, as opposed to being mostly relegated to the exploration phase.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

They will be most like goodie huts in civ I guess, in that they can be both good and bad, but usually good enough to get you wanting to go out there and explore. Civ tried to have an "explorer" unit that gave better goodie hut rewards but it was too small a part of the game to really make it worth building.

In Stellaris it sounds like they've become a much bigger part of the game, and more interesting. Everyone loves the CYOA events from CK2, so it will be that in space. Find a space hole to hell, fill it full of rocks, get an outcome. Except your options and the results will also be based on the skill of your explorer-scientist, your cultural values, your technology, and a ton of other things.

For instance you find a planet with an ancient abandoned city that has an engineered slave race still maintaining the city for their long dead masters. You then get options based on your leader, society, and technology.
Maybe you have good enough bio tech that you can make a simple change that makes their "loyalty gene" dormant, freeing them from their hard-wired compulsion to maintain the city and worship their old masters. In thanks they give you the technology "cubism" and a new pop of citizens joins your empire, or the city becomes a colony.
Maybe your society is down with slavery and with some simple pheromones your scientist reports we could put these "people" to productive use thinking we are their new masters, giving you a POP unit of slaves.
Maybe your scientist is lovely and tries to tell them their creators are long dead and the slaves all sink into comatose depression as they are programmed to die in such an event.

Then on another play through you get the same event, or you think it's the same event, but when you free the slaves they kill your scientist and rise up as a small but technologically advanced upstart nation. Freed from their genetic obedience they can now use their masters ancient technology to become a serious threat.

Fidel Cuckstro
Jul 2, 2007

Chickpea Roar posted:

You should definitely try to build up as big a stockpile as possible of resources used for constructing buildings and units.
Steel, lumber, wood, iron are usually pretty cheap and could be set to 2k early. Machine parts are rare in the early game, so you should start building a stockpile as soon as possible, unless you want to wait years between ordering a factory and starting construction.
The rest like coal, explosives, artillery and other navy/military resources can wait, but there's often a shortage of one of them in the later game when big wars are going on.

I don't know if a Great Power like Russia is going to have a big problem finding resources to the extent of waiting years for materials to start. I agree machine parts can lag, but even then I think it maybe means waiting a few weeks and not years.

Fintilgin
Sep 29, 2004

Fintilgin sweeps!
I want a Stellaris anomaly inspired by the Blight in Vernor Vinge's 'Fire upon the Deep'.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Fintilgin posted:

I want a Stellaris anomaly inspired by the Blight in Vernor Vinge's 'Fire upon the Deep'.

I'm sure there are going to be a ridiculous amount of events and a good amount of them will be obvious winks at established scify situations. I also hope it's easy to write our own chains or a couple PD staffers just love doing it and ever patch adds dozens or hundreds of new event hooks and options.

Chickpea Roar
Jan 11, 2006

Merdre!

Slime Bro Helpdesk posted:

I don't know if a Great Power like Russia is going to have a big problem finding resources to the extent of waiting years for materials to start. I agree machine parts can lag, but even then I think it maybe means waiting a few weeks and not years.

Yeah, Russia probably shouldn't have a big problem with that. Weird stuff can happen in the later game, though. I had a period of time as a 3rd or 4th great power where the two largest powers where using the entire world's supply of wine for their great war, so I couldn't recruit any dragoons.

Fidel Cuckstro
Jul 2, 2007

Chickpea Roar posted:

Yeah, Russia probably shouldn't have a big problem with that. Weird stuff can happen in the later game, though. I had a period of time as a 3rd or 4th great power where the two largest powers where using the entire world's supply of wine for their great war, so I couldn't recruit any dragoons.

Yeah I was thinking about adding that caveat- if you can stockpile before a Great War, even if you're not really involved in it, is probably a good idea. Although the problem with this is I've seen simply massive wars (usually big Prussian wars but prior to the discovery of Great Wars) tank out the world economy for a few years and it's hard to know when that will happen.

ArgaWarga
Apr 8, 2005

dare to fail gloriously

I just started playing EU4 a couple of weeks ago, I've tried CK2 before and found it a little overwhelming (although I think having played a bit of EU4 I would have a better shot at sticking with it), but I really want to try Vicky2. The time period is more my interest, and the focus on economy, pops, and resources are more up my alley. Looks like Brazil or Sweden are the recommended starting countries? Anything else I should know?

Fidel Cuckstro
Jul 2, 2007

I'm always a little worried posting joke threads to the PDX forums. I think the mods have a pretty good sense of humor, but they have to deal with so many messed up people :(

Dibujante
Jul 27, 2004

Kulkasha posted:

It'd require either a tile-based system of which provinces are made or god forbid some sort of vector system. Both of which are well outside of the abilities of clauswitz, I assume, which means Victoria 4 or later.

An intermediate step would be to allow provinces to decompose along pre-determined lines based on development / something(!?)

e.g. a huge province with really low development could split into four roughly even provinces (maybe randomize it up a bit?) after it hits 12-18 development. Of course, provinces can't decompose forever, so eventually you can just keep piling on the development. But really big provinces that are supposed to represent vast areas of sparsely populated land could break down into smaller and smaller provinces if they get developed sufficiently.

e: possibly some peace deals could also split a province into parts and give some parts to one side and some to another?

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Slime Bro Helpdesk posted:

I'm always a little worried posting joke threads to the PDX forums. I think the mods have a pretty good sense of humor, but they have to deal with so many messed up people :(

Someone make an account and post this:

quote:

im permabanned poster slavstomper88. i first started playing paradox games when i was about 12. by 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of "pretty borders" and tried to channel it constantly, until my thought process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like "factroy" and "As a Bulgarian state we gain several bonuses" in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start seeing rebel stacks in the corners of my eyes etc, basically prodromal schizophrenia. i'm now on antipsychotics (+.05 consciousness, -.1 militancy). i always wondered what the kind of "pretty borders" style of paradox gaming was all about; i think it's the unconscious leaking in to the conscious, what jungian theory considered to be the cause of schizophrenia and comet sightings. i would advise all people who "get" grand strategy to be careful because that likely means you have a predisposition to the posessed trait. white peace.

Fintilgin
Sep 29, 2004

Fintilgin sweeps!

Kavak posted:

Someone make an account and post this:

EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM EUIV INTO STEAM

Darkrenown
Jul 18, 2012
please give me anything to talk about besides the fact that democrats are allowing millions of americans to be evicted from their homes

zedprime posted:

Even if I misinterpreted excitement about anomalies as being the whole tech system, I am pretty sure Doomdark is still on the record at Gamescom saying that you can find new anomalies on old features because of new sensor technology.

He is, yeah. I'm a bit less certain that'll actually make it in, but it's something we want to have anyway.

Baronjutter posted:

They will be most like goodie huts in civ I guess, in that they can be both good and bad, but usually good enough to get you wanting to go out there and explore. Civ tried to have an "explorer" unit that gave better goodie hut rewards but it was too small a part of the game to really make it worth building.

In Stellaris it sounds like they've become a much bigger part of the game, and more interesting. Everyone loves the CYOA events from CK2, so it will be that in space. Find a space hole to hell, fill it full of rocks, get an outcome. Except your options and the results will also be based on the skill of your explorer-scientist, your cultural values, your technology, and a ton of other things.

For instance you find a planet with an ancient abandoned city that has an engineered slave race still maintaining the city for their long dead masters. You then get options based on your leader, society, and technology.
Maybe you have good enough bio tech that you can make a simple change that makes their "loyalty gene" dormant, freeing them from their hard-wired compulsion to maintain the city and worship their old masters. In thanks they give you the technology "cubism" and a new pop of citizens joins your empire, or the city becomes a colony.
Maybe your society is down with slavery and with some simple pheromones your scientist reports we could put these "people" to productive use thinking we are their new masters, giving you a POP unit of slaves.
Maybe your scientist is lovely and tries to tell them their creators are long dead and the slaves all sink into comatose depression as they are programmed to die in such an event.

Then on another play through you get the same event, or you think it's the same event, but when you free the slaves they kill your scientist and rise up as a small but technologically advanced upstart nation. Freed from their genetic obedience they can now use their masters ancient technology to become a serious threat.

Pretty much, yes.

Drone
Aug 22, 2003

Incredible machine
:smug:


DStecks posted:

Your definition of game is a useless one.

Where's the fun in a game where there isn't the danger of losing?

Are you also the kind of person who uses unlimited gold/ammo/resources cheat codes in every game you play?

Cynic Jester
Apr 11, 2009

Let's put a simile on that face
A dazzling simile
Twinkling like the night sky

Drone posted:

Where's the fun in a game where there isn't the danger of losing?

Are you also the kind of person who uses unlimited gold/ammo/resources cheat codes in every game you play?

Many games don't have an outright "You Lose" trigger. A lot of the best board games designed for more than 2 people do not kick people out of the game halfway through because they lost. Nothing is as unfun as being eliminated halfway through a game and having to watch everyone else having fun playing on, especially in games that last for hours. Even if you might be in a losing position, you still get to influence the game until the end. This is why you don't often see FFA multiplayer games become big, because being knocked out midway is an awful experience, and why most of the popular multiplayer games are either 1v1 or team based. In single player games and team based games, you can have far more punishing gameplay systems, because when you lose, the game is over and you can start a new one. Roguelikes are a prime example.

And then you have games like Sim City and so forth, where the goal of the game is not "To win", but rather to have fun doing whatever you want within the confines of the game.

Drone
Aug 22, 2003

Incredible machine
:smug:


Cynic Jester posted:

And then you have games like Sim City and so forth, where the goal of the game is not "To win", but rather to have fun doing whatever you want within the confines of the game.

But even Sim City has pretty strict limitations to what you can do and when you can do it. You are still bound within the confines of your city's budget, and you are still locked out of specific buildings and policies until you've reached certain milestones (income, population, density, etc). Disasters exist that can provide you with a setback to overcome with the very real possibility of your city entering a death spiral that is actually challenging to overcome. The "negative" events provide a challenge for you to overcome. Take civil wars in CK2 as a great example: they provide a very real possibility of the player losing the war and setting him or her back decades of in-game time (or, in some cases, can even mean game over). And without them, the game is 700 years of almost never having to face any challenges or consequences.

In short: losing is fun.

I do however agree with you that this really only applies to single-player. Losing in any multiplayer game is generally Not Fun, though I've had some really goddamn entertaining wars that I've lost in EU4 goon multiplayer in the past.

Apoffys
Sep 5, 2011
Losing is fun, but the failure should come from specific choices the player did or did not make, not random chance. It should be something you could have prevented if you were a better player, or had more information.

If you lose a civil war in CK2, at least you know you *could* have won if you played better or that victory was simply impossible given the circumstances. Even in a game like Dwarf Fortress, where "losing is fun" is the motto, failure is something you could have prevented. If you fail horribly in DF, you can at least see why it happened and how you can prevent that specific disaster from happening again on your next attempt.

Having an obvious coinflip where you could get a better result by reloading the game and trying again (without changing anything) is just infuriating gameplay. The answer to "why did I lose" shouldn't be "you were unlucky".

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos

Apoffys posted:

Losing is fun, but the failure should come from specific choices the player did or did not make, not random chance. It should be something you could have prevented if you were a better player, or had more information.

If you lose a civil war in CK2, at least you know you *could* have won if you played better or that victory was simply impossible given the circumstances. Even in a game like Dwarf Fortress, where "losing is fun" is the motto, failure is something you could have prevented. If you fail horribly in DF, you can at least see why it happened and how you can prevent that specific disaster from happening again on your next attempt.

Having an obvious coinflip where you could get a better result by reloading the game and trying again (without changing anything) is just infuriating gameplay. The answer to "why did I lose" shouldn't be "you were unlucky".
How do you stand playing map games? What with all the dice being thrown around for battles that you could reload and get a better result on constantly.

Freudian
Mar 23, 2011

Apoffys posted:

Losing is fun, but the failure should come from specific choices the player did or did not make, not random chance. It should be something you could have prevented if you were a better player, or had more information.

If you lose a civil war in CK2, at least you know you *could* have won if you played better or that victory was simply impossible given the circumstances. Even in a game like Dwarf Fortress, where "losing is fun" is the motto, failure is something you could have prevented. If you fail horribly in DF, you can at least see why it happened and how you can prevent that specific disaster from happening again on your next attempt.

Having an obvious coinflip where you could get a better result by reloading the game and trying again (without changing anything) is just infuriating gameplay. The answer to "why did I lose" shouldn't be "you were unlucky".

So what do you do when you fail to pass Genius onto your heir?

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Losing is fun, but only if you choose to lose. Lmao. This guy is crazy. Random chance is an aspect of every game ever made, whether its the coinflip of whether you will beat your human opponent or whether you are fighting some kind of probability system. EU4/CK2 would be a million times shittier if it just hid all the math from you (hello V2) and left you in the dark when stuff was happening.

Apoffys
Sep 5, 2011

zedprime posted:

How do you stand playing map games? What with all the dice being thrown around for battles that you could reload and get a better result on constantly.

Mostly because of the sheer number of dice throws, and the fact that you can rig them pretty heavily. Perhaps it will be the same for Stellaris, I haven't really been paying attention to it much.

If I lose a battle in EU4 for example and reload (I prefer to play ironman just to prevent myself from doing that to be honest), I don't think "that was unlucky, I should try the exact same thing again until it works". I prepare better by bringing more troops, a better general and/or picking a better place/time to have the battle. Sure, there is random chance involved, but you can and should work around it. Each battle has lots of dice throws, but so many of them that the better army wins anyway. I would prefer it if the game was less random, but you can usually just work around whatever difficulties thrown your way by the RNG (or prepare for them in advance).

There are some RNG-elements of map games that annoy me (like trying to get a siege general in EU4), but for the most part it comes down to the choices you make as a player and not how lucky you are with your dice throws. The more dice throws there are in a game, the less dependent you are on winning them all. Maybe a 30% success rate on researching anomalies is fine, there could be hundreds of anomalies and you'll get what you need eventually. The fewer you find, the more important it becomes to "succeed" in each one though.

Freudian posted:

So what do you do when you fail to pass Genius onto your heir?

I rig the game in advance by having as many children as possible, and making sure the best one gets to inherit. Or I switch to an elective monarchy and find someone qualified amongst my huge dynasty (which is full of geniuses due to careful breeding). Disaster is still possible, but usually preventable with enough effort.

DStecks
Feb 6, 2012

Drone posted:

Where's the fun in a game where there isn't the danger of losing?

I'm not saying that losing is bad, I'm saying that it is not needed for a game to be a game. You can't "lose" Myst.

vyelkin
Jan 2, 2011
It's worth pointing out that EU4 itself has tried to eliminate as many opaque random chances as possible that existed from EU3. Remember missionaries in EU3? You placed your missionary and it had a tiny chance every month of converting the province. It could randomly pop two months later, or you could be waiting 200 years. That may have been more realistic but it really wasn't better gameplay in any way than the EU4 system.

zedprime
Jun 9, 2007

yospos

DStecks posted:

I'm not saying that losing is bad, I'm saying that it is not needed for a game to be a game. You can't "lose" Myst.
You lose Myst when you don't finish it because you don't know how to play a piano.

A game literally needs losing to be a game, but figuratively video games has been broadly enough applied to say that a video game doesn't necessarily need to be a game anymore.

Apoffys
Sep 5, 2011

Larry Parrish posted:

Losing is fun, but only if you choose to lose. Lmao. This guy is crazy. Random chance is an aspect of every game ever made, whether its the coinflip of whether you will beat your human opponent or whether you are fighting some kind of probability system. EU4/CK2 would be a million times shittier if it just hid all the math from you (hello V2) and left you in the dark when stuff was happening.

Random isn't the same as unpredictable. When I get a 0-10 kill/death ratio in a game of Counter Strike, it isn't because I was unlucky with the dice throws. I can't blame my lack of skill on random chance, I just have the choice of dealing with it or trying to do better (or finding less skilled opponents). I don't want games where I have to consciously choose to lose, I just want games where it's possible to make a choice that leads to success.

DStecks
Feb 6, 2012

zedprime posted:

A game literally needs losing to be a game,

It literally doesn't, but for argument's sake, let's say that it does. What does policing the definition of "game" actually achieve? It is inevitably a bludgeon being wielded by people who want to enforce their video game preferences as the only legitimate ones. "A game without losing isn't really a game" is perhaps a statement of interest to, say, developmental psychologists studying the animal origins of play, but in the field of video game design it's a worthless statement, which can only ever serve to stifle creativity.

Pharnakes says "I find it frustrating when a game says "hey, maybe a cool thing!" and then says "actually no, nothing at all!"

The Sharmat says "You're not allowed to! If there's no chance at failure, then it isn't a game!" conveniently ignoring, for example, random events in the very games this thread exists to discuss. Plenty of Paradox game events have only positive outcomes. Does this mean they delegitimize these games? Make them lesser? Because that would seem to be the argument Sharmat is making.

This is why I said that Sharmat's definition of a game is a useless one. All it exists to do is tell developers there's certain things they aren't permitted to do, that there's certain things games aren't permitted to be. It's video game fundamentalism.

Funky Valentine
Feb 26, 2014

Dojyaa~an

I get really mad when I lose in Animal Crossing.

vyelkin
Jan 2, 2011
The fact that it's impossible to die and lose permanently in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor means that it doesn't count as a game.



e: also Cities: Skylines, one of Paradox's most successful games ever, is not even a game in the first place! :monocle: Paradox should return all the money spent on it at once.

vyelkin fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Nov 4, 2015

Riso
Oct 11, 2008

by merry exmarx
Finally a discussion that conclusively settles the question whether Gone Home is a game.

Randarkman
Jul 18, 2011

Seems some guys here are getting pretty upset that Stellaris, a Paradox game, has random events with multiple choices.

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Plutonis
Mar 25, 2011

Randarkman posted:

Seems some guys here are getting pretty upset that Stellaris, a Paradox game, has random events with multiple choices.

Comet Sighted

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