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Bort Bortles posted:
If you're going to have a lot of planetary management you have to limit the number, though. I mean if a planet is just a set of sliders like Moo1, so be it, but if you are going all out, you do have to keep the number reasonably low.
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Sep 28, 2015 23:04
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One of the things I can stand about some of these new Space 4x MoO wannabes is that they have like 5 planets in a system max. Everything I have read about the Kepler telescope and its discoveries points to our system being at or below average for number of plantary bodies in orbit of the star. Despite that, these games continually have this arbitrarily small number of un-imaginitive planets in their solar systems 
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V for Vegas posted:Orbits were important in DW for pre-warp starts when being on one side of a star or the other makes a huge difference. It would be nice to have that in Stellaris if you have to take a while to develop warp tech. The pre-warp starts are really tempting in that game but it's like 15 minutes of just tooling around boringly while you bribe pirates because you have literally no choice otherwise. As was said before, Star Ruler 2 has hella realistic physics and it's just more annoying than fun- the planet rotation is annoying but the newtonian ship physics is also super annoying. I honestly hope Paradox leaves the bloat-features for the modders.
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Sep 28, 2015 23:32
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:There is always occasional discussion of Distant Worlds whenever Stellaris is mentioned. Is that a game worth playing? I've always been interested in it, but I've always been a bit hesitant to sign up for a Matrix game since I'm particularly into their other titles. The biggest disappointment of distant worlds is learning how utterly meaningless all that under the hood stuff is- in reality, you have two things that matter- money, and to a lesser extent fuel(you can fix the latter with the former). All those other resources just end up changing how much things cost in money, and you can't really design or not design around a lack because the module resource costs are not particularly deliberately chosen. The civilian ships regenerate their mining posts anyway and you can never eliminate the pirates so you basically just work to keep them off the planets(but they sometimes build up anyway because you have other things to do than stare at every planet). Distant Worlds is what happens when you throw in a bunch of systems without really putting them through the paces of actual design.
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Sep 29, 2015 01:24
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Mister Adequate posted:There's an option to stop defeated pirates from respawning? But yeah, the resources aren't handled as well as they might be, and it's more about making sure you have a source for everything than working around your shortages or whatever. Yeah but eventually pretty much by the time you get a bit into the game everything has a source- and if not anyway you can fix it with money. It's a system, yeah, but it's one without a very interesting design purpose.
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Sep 29, 2015 01:30
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I've never tried leaving the military entirely under automation (which you can do, including the ability to let the AI handle starting/ending wars for you), but all my experience playing the game basically made it pretty clear that the military automation is generally pretty terrible, while the economy, ship design, and civilian stuff is all generally pretty decent. The special resources are the most interesting- yeah. The bonuses can be great, but the normal resources just end up meaningless. And, yeah, the automation is really bad- I try to set up pirate hunting groups but it doesn't work- the pirates act weirdly anyway- instead of just harassing shipping they tend to go after planets and mining stations, which is really bizarre. It's also impossible to set ships to escort shipping anyway except as part of a military convoy.
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Sep 29, 2015 02:05
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Larry Parrish posted:Masters of Orion wasn't a good enough game to deserve 85,000 remakes. I don't understand why everyone remakes MoO2 as opposed to MoO1 which felt less bloated in a lot of ways.
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Sep 29, 2015 11:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:That's why people keep trying to remake it though: every attempt always ends up critically flawed in one fashion or another, and so the next developer down the line thinks that they're the ones that can recapture the magic, and on and on. People got confused as hell by Star Ruler 2 because it really didn't fit that particular mold. Civ in space is something people understand, people come to expect, really.
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Sep 29, 2015 12:35
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Lance of Llanwyln posted:Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence is pretty great, but it just came out and it's Tecmo-Koei, so it's $60 right now(and add $27 if you want all the DLC scenarios). So you might want to wait for a sale. One thing i'll say is that the game is really easy- it doesn't take long to figure out the good strats and it just becomes cleanup far too quickly for my liking.
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Oct 17, 2015 01:21
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The Sharmat posted:All the factions in Alpha Centauri were ruled by horrible ideologues that went way too far and that was the point. They all struck me as dumb caricatures, honestly, but then i'm not as infatuated with the writing as other people.
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Oct 20, 2015 10:08
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YouTuber posted:The AI doesn't get smarter or more capable in harder settings with Civ and others. They just literally cheat. That is the most annoying side of 4X games. Well let me know if you come up with a process that lets the developer understand the best strats before the game even comes out so that that's even possible.
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Oct 21, 2015 22:21
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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. That's also a pretty insane task right there. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:There are some 4x games out there where the AI does actually get smarter on harder difficulties. AoW3 and HoMM series come to mind, but they also cheat on top of making better decisions. Typically difficulty increases AI aggression which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. It's really hard to justify hiding your best AI behaviors behind a difficulty curve, though- if you have a good AI you want to show it off. uPen posted:In AI War the AI getting smarter/gaining new abilities is one of the primary things that happens when the difficulty goes up. The AI doesn't even really play the same game as you, though, so you can kinda brute force some things- nothing the AI does in that game could be called 'cheating' because it isn't really playing by your rules.
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Oct 21, 2015 23:16
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Rakthar posted:Lots of apps send very detailed information back to the devs. They do so for a variety of reasons, typically monetization. I think you might be surprised to find out that a mobile dev for instance can figure out every single thing you're doing on the app, what screen you're looking at, how long, which buttons you pressed, etc. It's not the getting information- it's parsing it and then trying to glean anything from it that's the problem. Humans have enough problems deriving the right lessons from trends as it is, now said humans have to make a program that does this, much less sorting through this data. Koramei posted:I think we get a bit of an inflated sense of most people's skill when we talk on online communities for games too; I have a strong suspicion that the vast majority of the playerbase for most strategy games are actually incredibly poo poo at them. When I play Age of Empires with my friends who don't play it much (but still played it enough to know where everything is etc) we can sit around building stuff for 45 minutes and I'll go raid them and find they haven't even made 12 units yet. It's kinda interesting how this works- people tend to play difficulties too high for them on game speeds too slow and maps too big. Honestly, 4x games should probably not give the option to players to make dumb games, because they inevitably whine when the game isn't great that way. The success of civ 5 is probably a testament to the fact that people want to build a few cities, trounce some AIs, and call it a day. Koramei posted:It'd help a lot of Firaxis actually had a post-release attitude towards expansions and patches that wasn't straight out of 2005. I don't think it's like they need to be watching streams all day long, but especially with Beyond Earth they just seemed so completely out of touch. Tbf personally I don't think AI cheating is a bad thing at all as long as it isn't super obvious, but actually balancing your game around strategies that happen after launch shouldn't be some unattainable thing. Most of the good strategy games have bad AIs, from Imperialism to SMAC. If the game was good people would get around the AI, but it's clear the base is bad and that's the thing that needs to be fixed.
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Oct 22, 2015 02:53
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Larry Parrish posted:you might be the richest software developer ever if you make a consistently useful machine learning system though. so if you think you have such a great idea, time to swing for the fences!! If you could make an way to mine data and use ~machine learning~ to glean something from it you could do a lot better than making video game AIs. The Sharmat posted:Please do not develop any games. I remember when I was testing Star Ruler 2 and a bunch of people complained about how boring it was and it was universally because they jacked up the planet count to 500 so you just spent three hours connecting dots where the game was tested and tuned for settings closer to 10-20 planets per player. A lot of players are really loving stupid and go "HUGE MAP/MARATHON/MAX OUT EVERYTHING" because they think that's fun. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Oct 22, 2015 |
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Oct 22, 2015 11:27
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Pharnakes posted:I refuse to believe I can be the only sperg lord who find's it supremely frustrating when a game dangles a cool potential thing infront of your nose then goes nope, gently caress you, you rolled the dice wrong and takes it away again. Yes, I could start a different game and maybe I'd get lucky in that one, but I want to make meaningful decisions not rely on luck. Obviously games like these are making huge use of die rolls, but it needs to be kept far down under the hood, if you shove it in the players face that they are just rolling dice what's the point of playing the game? I might as well just go sit in the corner and roll physical die: "6! that means I discovered the death star and wiped out the umpa bumpa planet!" Actually I would rather literally see the die roll so I can see what went into it and what I can do differently to make it better if I fail. People who go on about "immersion" are basically idiots who hate the thought of getting good at a game.
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Nov 3, 2015 12:25
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Communist Zombie posted:Ive played it and it either has ended with Rome failing a war so we all die or when where almost of time whoever has the best shot at becoming dictator going for it culminating in everyone trying to assassinate each the other side so they dont lose. And we've lost enough times from losing wars in the early republic period (it almost always became spending the turn raising just enough legions and giving enough bread and circuses [literally] to not die from an angry mob/revolt) that we started to just start in the middle or late period. A lot of people recommend starting in the early era but honestly if you want to really politick with each other the later periods are better for that because you get more opportunities to rebel and such.
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Nov 10, 2015 14:18
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Koramei posted:Yeah, and the Paradox forums aren't really universally garbage either. The approach they have has clearly been working to some degree, I just think it could be a whole lot better. I do a lot of history but I think the best kind of history for a strategy game comes from that outmoded view, though. Twilight Struggle is very explicit in acknowledging that its Dulles-ish view of the Cold War was outmoded but it did make for a wonderful 2-player game that captured a lot about the period(For example, events involving Islamism tend to be pro-Soviet events).
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Nov 10, 2015 23:44
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Groogy posted:Don't fix what ain't broke. Worst thing that could happen is that we get a Historian that is one of those "You can only be an empire if you derive yourself from Rome because Rome, you know Rome is loving awesome ohmygod Rome I am so wet right now" The finest example of historical accuracy is when I'm playing this mod for Civ 4 col called "Dawn of a New Era." So, this guy has the idea that the colonies didn't send manufactured goods back to europe, so raw resources sell for about the same price as manufactured goods, making manufactures only good for trading to Natives. This makes the optimal approach to just spam the poo poo out of colonies anywhere and everywhere and not improve them at all except to make tools and guns so you get a much more boring gameplay. (I do recommend civ 4 col with mods, by the way, give them all a try- Dawn of a New Era is the only one that lets you have trade routes automatically drop off resources in Europe, which is great. just everything else sucks). It's not even all that accurate, but then that's usually what happens- some guy gets an idea in his head and he tries to bend the game around it. I do a lot of history, but I think the game has to come first and the history can come organically from that.
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Nov 11, 2015 11:40
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Victoria has a lot of really dumb mechanics and automation in strategy games is really bad. It's not a fix for anything and it just makes for bad design.
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Nov 17, 2015 12:09
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Demiurge4 posted:Yeah it's really hard to make hard judgements off a screenshot but I assume the city (is it a city?) gives +1 mineral and maybe +2 food for the tile, bringing it to 2m, 3f. Then each adjacent farm gives it +2f each giving it 7 food. The other tiles probably don't have any base production so I assume the farm is +3f and the adjacency another +2f to give them the total of 5. If I'm right this would mean numerical production outputs for a building and not a percentage bonus. If you cleared the tile to the left of the city and build a lab that gives +3 science that would bring the tile to 7 with the adjacency bonus and another +1.85 (maybe rounded to 2) from the global bonus to society tech but I assume that is added to the total output of the planet and not per tile. Pretty much any system kinda based on that civ-ish model is going to encourage specialization- I don't think it needs further encouragement. Civ4 encouraged specialized cities, but not as blatantly as GalCiv3. Basically, it was sub-optimal to build all the buildings in all the cities, wasting your hammers, but it was more of a gentle nudge to specialization, not "scout ships with 20+ tile sight ranges and planets that are nothing but a farm and 20 factories". The slider system contributed to GalCiv3's tendency toward overspecialization since you got nowhere near as much benefit from all these buildings if you weren't maxing out one thing.
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Nov 18, 2015 12:30
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Wiz posted:My issue with DW was never the UI. The UI is terrible, but it actually feels like the fact that the game *looks* so complex hides some really shallow mechanics (colonize everything in sight, no economic challenge or interesting resources, boring tech, shallow diplomacy). The AI is also atrocious and made me swear off allies in that game because they would pester me about map trading every 1.2 lightseconds. I feel like people only really like it because every other 4x is even more shallow. I have similar opinions about DW- all the stuff under the hood doesn't come out to much. There are a zillion resources but an hour into the game you can get anything you need so there's really no point in having a zillion resources. I like Star Ruler 2- but that game has ship design and I don't care for that aspect of space 4x games. I'm reallly sick of designing ships and the terrible things that come with that decision(Hi GalCiv3). Pharnakes posted:I think that's a large part of what is missing from traditional space 4xs, space is just so huge (or hopefully is anyway) and when every empire is perfectly centralised apart from some generic unrest % here and there it just feels so flat. Empires have tended to fall part on our tiny little earth, the idea that a colony thousands of light years away is happy to have no autonomy indefinitely is absurd, never mind a conquered enemy. A lot of 4xs try to do this, but automated management is a really dumb and unsatisfying way to handle things. See: MoO3.
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Nov 27, 2015 12:20
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Kind of a strange trade really. I mean, Slovakia wasn't historically a part of Poland. Now, I admit that this is obviously not a requirement for conquest, but it's just that, well, Lithuania is right there. Wouldn't it make much more sense to have Poland trade Danzig for German support in Lithuania? If Germany is befriending Poland it clearly doesn't have the same designs on Eastern Europe as it did historically, so letting the Poles take Lithuania wouldn't be a big deal. Hell, they could take Latvia and Estonia too, even if the Germans would probably want Memel. That way Poland retains access to the sea, and retakes lost territory, all the while preemptively protecting Eastern Europe from the Reds. Historically the Germans did make an attempt to bring Poland into their fold but they still wanted Danzig, and indeed they offered territorial compensation in Slovakia. I don't think Ribbentropp and Hitler quite understood how important the region was to Poland, but there's some historical basis in that option.
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Nov 28, 2015 12:44
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Randarkman posted:This wasn't that totally disingenious offer to negotiate with Poland after that false flag operation carried out by the Brandenburgers was it? That was in 1938.
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Nov 28, 2015 12:56
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Larry Parrish posted:My favorite Paradox naval game was the one where Aircraft Carriers didnt actually have aircraft, they just had guns with ridiculous range. To be fair, having seperate air groups from carriers is a micro issue that would need a workaround to be reasonable and have some gameplay to it.
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Dec 12, 2015 14:59
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Gantolandon posted:I don't get the space 4X focus on ship design. It's a lot of micromanagement which is rarely interesting, inobtrusive and doable for the AI. I like this kind of games, but having to replace lasers on each of my ship types every time I research a new technology is the opposite of fun to me. I've never seen a unit designer in a 4x work out in an interesting way.
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Jan 20, 2016 12:11
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Pimpmust posted:The MoO remake just looks like they made nice graphics and (too much) voice acting (Mark Hamill is a furry birdman, woo) while everything else is simplified or non-existant. I haven't seen anything interesting yet that would want me to play it over MoO2 from Arumbas previews. Honestly it feels like the less good bits of moo1 and the less good bits of moo2 mashed together. Moo2 was absolutely not the best moo and gently caress people who think that. That all being said, it's not bad, it's just not that distinct.
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Feb 27, 2016 01:42
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Darkrenown posted:Yeah, I was kinda interested in the new MoO until I watched the trailer where the devs talked about how the races were fully fleshed out "real" aliens, then it cut to the space cat race talking entirely in cat puns. I don't mind it- I mean, Moo1 was silly, but that worked okay. It's probably more comical when you have voice actors, though. The thing is, the best bits of moo1 aren't there- moo1 had a well-designed planet management system that didn't require a seperate screen and its combat scaled up extremely well. The diplomatic victory was also actually a thing you could play rather than just 'do another victory lap'. While you'd occasionally randomly lose a game to it, I think its overbearing nature worked well in pushing you to either kill or deal with your enemies. Unfortunately the bits they kept from moo2 are just, ugh. Moo2 was way more civ-like than Moo1 and played a lot slower.
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Feb 27, 2016 15:02
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Slime Bro Helpdesk posted:I mean it's possible? But I don't drink all that much and don't really remember reading that diary very thoroughly at all. I only looked at it this morning because someone mentioned "tech cards" a page or two ago and I was like 'huh I wonder..." A lot of board games with that kind of theme go with that approach because tech trees really aren't practical in that format.
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Mar 5, 2016 15:38
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I prefer imperialism because vicky's systems arent very fun to play. They are funny to read about.
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Mar 10, 2016 19:41
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The problem with a Paradox Cold War game is the way it treats countries as fundamentally much more equal than they were. You could make a really good cold war game if you were willing to make a very explicitly 2-player game ala Twilight Struggle.
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Mar 14, 2016 01:21
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Morholt posted:I like that it's just simple enough that you can reasonably micromanage everything by yourself, and it has enough granularity that every decision becomes important. The game really starts to shine on Normal difficulty and above, since you have more scarcity leading to more interesting decisions each turn. On the highest difficulty you do need to rely on imports a lot more to super-charge your industry and that can be a bit micromanagey.
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Mar 20, 2016 21:50
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Bel Monte posted:That's I believe when EvW became the laughing stock it is on this forum. And yes. It would only have been worse if he wore a fedora. What got me about the game is that it didn't feel like it had much of a design direction at all. It didn't seem to be "about" anything at all, it just had a bunch of different things going everywhere.
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Mar 20, 2016 22:30
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PleasingFungus posted:That's not actually what King was saying, though. It's the same way the Allen Dulles interpretation of the Cold War makes for a fun 2-player game in Twilight Struggle.
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Apr 8, 2016 23:39
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slavatuvs posted:Found more details, pretty good estimate It's really hard to sim cause if you just put the divisions on the map they'd get crashed or the mechanics to avoid it would be massively micro-intensive.
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Apr 20, 2016 22:06
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Gort posted:I was always quite fond of the Civ game they released for the Xbox. It had some good ideas. Civ Rev was a really good idea for a game that I think should be developed. A 1-2 hour civ game is a neat idea and should be pursued more.
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May 7, 2016 10:37
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I think the ship design in stellaris is dumb and doesn't result in much like ship designers in all 4x games. You just get the most optimized ship rather than different styles. It's not like there's much to be different on anyway in this game. I wouldn't mind abstracted war but then why the hell do i care about shields and point defense.
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May 15, 2016 22:03
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Imperialism 3 would be ten times the game Vicky 3 is because it's not trying to be a lame political sim and just focuses on being a baller as hell game. Vicky is a trash game compared to Imperialism, well, aside from the combat.
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May 19, 2016 03:45
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Imperialism was cool but video games have come a long way in 20 years. There's so much darn busy-work that could be automated, and so many ways to shoot your whole nation in the foot. You could definitely improve imperialism in a number of ways from improving combat to having more import automation but it has a lot more promise than the bloated victoria.
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May 19, 2016 03:56
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I remember when the paradox ads were making GBS threads on Shogun 2 which ended up being a much better game than Sengoku. Of course, Shogun 2 is pretty much the last time CA actually cared about craft in their games because they did so much more with the limited pallette of Sengoku Japan than they did with the entirety of the ancient Western World.
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May 23, 2016 23:27
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Koramei posted:It's when the mechanics get added without really being integrated with anything else. Estates especially are kinda their own little corner of the game. Estates were one of those things where people constantly needled about wanting internal management in EU4 and when they got it- surprise, it's not what EU4's about and it's kinda just there.
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May 24, 2016 00:16
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mackintosh posted:I agree with the sentiment that Vicky2 and CK2 make you feel like a part of the narrative where you actually care. EU4 feels like an exercise in anonymous blobbing and Stellaris is more of the same. In fact Stellaris takes it to a whole new level. I don't think I could care any less about my empire or my randomly generated adversaries. Beeline for techs, blob, endgame, restart, ad nauseum. I dislike Vicky2 and CK2 because their game systems aren't very interesting and mostly loved by people who can't hack it in real games. gently caress stories and black box systems and random garbage. (EDIT: That probably came off as harsher than I thought but I much prefer the EU4 style to Vicky/CK2 and I believe Stellaris has basically the advantage of neither game.) Panzeh fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 11:30
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