Gormongous
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Posts posted by Gormongous
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I have a question: I'm eying the wargame: european escalation steam offer. Does anyone know how good it is?
The Three Moves Ahead guys liked it a lot, and the free DLC has improved almost all their complaints. I went ahead and bit, since I liked R.U.S.E. and love the military porn of Cold War hardware.
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I've also been intrigued by the Japanese penchant for essentializing their national figures lately. I stumbled upon the Sengoku Basara anime while playing Shogun 2 and was totally baffled by the gleeful and crass transformation of complex historical personages into fighting game archetypes. It has a way of making the sengoku jidai seem more elemental, a clash between ideologies and a crossroads for the future, which suits its status as a foundational myth just fine.
I can't recommend Sengoku Basara, though. It's utter dross. I can't even recommend the book I'm reading to cleanse my palette, Taiko by Yoshikawa Eiji. For being a fictionalized biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and a supposed literary treasure, there's just way too much inconsistent characterization and informed attributes going on.
No, Troy. You should watch all the anime where they gender-swap Nobunaga and company: Sengoku Otome and Oda Nobuna no Yabou for versions set historically, or Sengoku Collection where they all go to modern-day high school together!
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I am continuing to talk myself out of buying Anno 2070. Damn them for making it 24 hours.
Yeah, Anno 2070 and Payday: The Heist are the sticking points for me. I've tried them both and hated them, but for some reason the low price tag gives me a vision of a perfect world where we'll click and all my friends will join in too.
Didn't work with New Vegas, why should it work here? Or so I keep saying.
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The way I see it, grand strategy games, whether turn-based or real-time, require two elements for an engaging and successful theme: context and direction. I think of context as what we consider backstory, the canvas upon which a player projects their own narrative. Direction is more along the lines of world-building, an understanding of the processes at work and how they affect the player's narrative. The landscape and ecology, if you will.
Most games start out with a little of both already, because any setting has some real-world analogue and game mechanics invariably accomplish some world-building. Authored touches like flavor text and art are necessary to engage the player beyond that basic level though, otherwise we get experiences like the release versions of Europa Universalis III and EU: Rome, where a historical point of departure and abstracted but verisimilitudinous mechanics achieved an experience just about as engrossing as drawing borders on a dry-erase world map.
I wonder if the reason we keep sticking on space games is that there's no real analogue to provide even the barest ready-made context. History is self-evident and fantasy has Tolkien & Renn faires, but the popular understanding of space settings is the WWII Pacific theatre. The empty ocean doesn't have much in the way of character, and even if it did it's so far removed from what actually is depicted in space 4x games that there's no signposts for developers to follow. Unless there's a strong authored vision preexisting and able to provide a framework, we inevitably get large, amorphous empires, the sole purpose of which is to fuel war machines (read: the US and Japan during the Second World War). Like Cory insists, that doesn't sink a game or even preclude it from having an engaging theme (the first Sword of the Stars is a great example), but I'm hard pressed to think of a video game with a weak or superficial theme that is acknowledged to be qualitatively better than one with a strong theme in the same genre. Theme and atmosphere are what computers do best anyway, board games handle abstraction better and novels/movies produce stronger authored narratives.
I don't know, every strategy game I've ever grown cold on too quickly (Galactic Civilizations II, the newer Europa Universalis games, early Sins of a Solar Empire) were ones that felt directionless and contextless. I conquer Planet A from the Blue People using my fleet of Ships Mk. V, that gives me X more units of resource Y and a Z% increase to production? Give me a hook to hang my narrative on and I'll play it all day, but mechanics and setting can't create atmosphere on their own. I know it seems like a lot of work to build something intangible like that, especially for games set in space, but look how glowingly games like Alpha Centauri and Masters of Orion 2 are spoken of fifteen years down the line. Clearly, it's worth it, and I feel well within my rights to criticize games that merely pay lip service to it.
Good show though, everyone said really smart things at some point or another. Also, does anyone else remember Emperor of the Fading Suns? That game felt like living Dune, even with the clueless AI.
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So hey, I snatched up all the miscellaneous DLC since the Steam sale gave 75% off that too and found some time to play a game as the Kalbid dynasty of Palermo in Sicily. Holy hell, Orvidos, that quote you posted was right. Everything happens a thousand miles an hour and you have a million kids and one of them inherits but it doesn't matter who unless he doesn't have piety in which case you observe Ramadan and go on hajj and argh. On the one hand, the religious events for the Muslims are amazing and I would happily drop ten bucks to get the same experience for Christians, with pilgrimages to various holy sites, intrigue with the local bishop, and papal elections. On the other hand, playing as a Muslim just lays bare how important the finer points of the base game, like succession laws and inheritance, are to enjoyment. I'm not sure I'll play another Muslim after this one.
I find the game... impenetrable.
I have a few Paradox games now, and mostly I do something goofy like take control of Texas in Victoria II or Ireland in Hearts of Iron III. Neither of these options are a good way for a beginner to play the game, but I am a history nerd and that's how I've been having fun so far, before actually, you know, playing the games. Truth be told, I'm rubbish at strategy games, but still enjoy them.
I should go and figure out how to play this game.
I've played exactly three full-length games of Victoria II: first as the Empire of Brazil, then as Bavaria in a failed German unification, and finally as Sardinia-Piedmont in a successful Italian unification. I had enormous fun with all of them, but I hit a wall after the last one and have exactly no desire to go back to the game. For a beginner who enjoys being the historical oddball, I'd definitely recommend Brazil. It's an economic powerhouse with tons of desirable goods and the potential to be a major world power under a smart player, unless you played it during version 1.1 like me, where there was a game-breaking bug with the PoP AI that perceived it as more cost-effective to hire no one than to obey minimum wage laws and to starve on minimal welfare than get a job. A conservative's nightmare, really.
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IQuestion of my own: if I buy Shogun 2 (10 Euros), is it absolutely essential to get the Fall of the Samurai expansion pack with that (which is kind of expensive because it's new)?
I like Fall of the Samurai as a game, but I think it's more shallow and less satisfying than the base game. Much more a power fantasy where you get to watch firearms slay samurai by the cartload. I've only replayed it twice and I'm not sure I'll ever come back, while with all the faction DLC the base Shogun 2 game seemed to have nigh infinite replayability.
Oooooo.... I hadn't even considered playing it multiplayer. I'm not even sure how that would work. Would make a long game.
I've been trying to organize a game among my department where we play the five great dukes of the Holy Roman Empire (Swabia, Franconia, Bavaria, Saxony, Lotharingia). I'm not sure about pressing it so hard, because it seems like the sort of thing that could end friendships. Still, it's a dream to make it happen someday.
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I wonder if steam could also provide the answer to this problem, if the changes you disliked were mainly balance ones shouldn't it be comparatively easy for someone to create a mod that balances them again and put it on the steam workshop?
As I've heard from a few people who own Civ V but miss the depth of certain mechanics from Civ IV, the mod Civilization NiGHTS is apparently just what one would crave.
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In fact I think they would would have considered that with the Soviet Union gone there was now nothing stopping the American interpretations of democracy and capitalism from going on and effectively “conquering” the world (for their own good of course). The American cultural, military, and in particular economic ascendancy(perhaps even near hegemony) was seen by some as a Fait accompli.
Eschatological ideation, in the form of the "end" of history, is a cool subject in general. Reading for my doctoral exams, it's particularly amazing how many authors writing in the twelfth century intended to include the apocalypse in their work, since it was sure to be forthcoming in their own lifetime. Otto of Freising, uncle of German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, refers to himself constantly as "one who writes at the end of time".
There just must be something coded into the Western psyche that processes the prospect of a universal empire, whether the Holy Roman Empire or United States of America, as the end of human history, perhaps even the end of humanity itself. In the twelfth century, the actual upshot was the popularization and intensification of the crusade, which was largely responsible for the idea of "Europe" as its own civilization. I don't think we've seen the full scope of consequences in the twenty-first, myself.
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Ah, yeah, of course. For some reason I forgot Egypt was in the game for a moment. Yeah, that's probably the one with the most thoroughly traceable history that far back.
But then again, Egypt stops being an independent culture and therefore a player in world history shortly after 1000 BC, so it's not a particularly good example there either. China is the closest to the ideal of an eternal and unchanging civilization, but only because its successive governments have been enormously invested in arguing for perfect continuity with the past. No, the entire idea of history-spanning nations is totally bankrupt from an intellectual standpoint, but it feels very authentic, so I guess we give it a pass?
I'm not exactly arguing that you should be forced to play civilisations that actually existed at 4000BC (not least because information on that time is so scarce) and then "evolve" into later ones...
One of the scenarios that came with Beyond the Sword was a (somewhat clumsy) adaptation of the popular mod Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, which did exactly that. To start, you could choose one of the powers from early antiquity like the Babylonians or Egyptians, then as certain circumstances were fulfilled you could jump ship to new civilizations spawned by your actions, carrying your score with you. So you'd start as Assyria, conquer the shit out of the Middle East, reach critical mass, then either jump to newly-spawned Persians invading your empire or try to go against history by defending against them. The Greeks would be spawned by similar conquests out west and you'd again be given the choice of staying or switching.
It was a fascinating idea kind of undermined by the fundamentals of psychology. It's tough to spend the first hundred turns building an ideal society, then be expected to turn tail and wreck it, but the alternative was being trapped in a decaying and increasingly marginalized society. Thematic, maybe even authentic, but as a gameplay concept I was never sold.
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So uDraw is the Death Note? I can dig that.
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To me looking back original Civ was the product of a time where Americas ascendancy in world affairs seemed unchallenged. After the Berlin wall fell it wasn't just a Superpower it was the only superpower, or to put it another way, America was the only empire that had stood the test of time.
On a related note, it's always been interesting how different versions of Civ have dealt with the existence of an endgame. I remember reading in an interview how Sid Meier agonized over how to discourage the use of nuclear weapons in a scenario where the world ends at Y2K, which makes it particularly curious that they've stuck by the hard deadline that makes such recklessness possible.
Above all, it invariably leads to this weird situation where, all other metrics failing, the largest and most powerful nation left standing after six thousand years of history is the victor. So that's success, is it? I guess I'm proud to be an American then.
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I'm not articulating my point very well, either. Probably because I'm confused about what my point actually is, as it is a bit of a moving target. For now, it is this: Every Civ (except for Civ 2) has been "different in kind" than its predecessor. Civ5 is no different than the rest. So I think I initially disagreed with you that Civ 5 was "different in kind." Now I agree with you. But I think that's always the case with a new Civ game, and I don't think Civ5 was a bigger change than over its predecessor than, say, Civ 3 or Civ 4.
I suppose this is kind of a goofy argument, and whether an individual likes 4 better than 5 depends on your own personal preferences and pecadilloes. Like I said in my original post, if you enjoy micromanaging your tiles so you can make sure that no overflow food is lost, Civ 2 is still there. I remember trying to do that. It was horrible. Me, I like to relax, turtle up, skirmish a bit, explore, make large-scale strategic decisions, avoid micromanagement, and win peacefully, with maybe one or two dramatic war tossed in to make things interesting. Civ 5 is a lot more fun for a player like me. I like the city-states. I like the 1UPT (it makes defending your territory more fun than confronting a stack of doom.) I like that the various Civs are better differentiated. I especially like the more leisurely pace of expansion, and the use of global happiness as a replacement for the obnoxious old mechanics that put brakes on your growth (city happiness and $$$ and corruption). I can appreciate the frustration people have with the design decisions that restrict your options, in particular the move from changeable civics to permanent policies. But that doesn't strike me as THAT big of a problem. I guess I'm just a bit confused by people who insist that Civ 4 is a better game. To me, Civ 5 is another big step forward. And I hope this isn't the last major expansion we'll see. Civ 4 didn't reach perfection until the BtS expansion, which really made that game super-awesome.
Oh, I'm not saying Civ V is better or worse than any other installment in the series, though it hasn't managed to capture my own heart. My point, lost in all the minutiae, was that certain design choices have made it harder to plot Civ V on the line graph of increasing sophistication that provided the narrative for the franchise's development thus far, which explains in turn the mixed reactions as much as any metric of "quality". In many ways, Civ V is more like a reboot, reimagining mechanics that have remained unchanged at their core since the beginning of the series, and reboots are always divisive, especially among fans.
Anyway, we can let this drop and actually talk about the game itself. I haven't said, but I've been loving the stories.
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Hmm, and now Paradox is announcing an AAR competition to drum up interest in the new Sword of Islam DLC.
I have to say, it really rubs me the wrong way the few times Paradox has offered to put your name in a historical game as a prize in a contest. I know they're combing charters and prosopography databases for character names and still probably don't have enough, but at least leave me the illusion that this isn't all just make-believe...
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I think I just talked myself into agreeing with you, at least insofar as Civ 5 is different "in kind" from its predecessor. But I still disagree with the point that previous Civ installments were merely iterative. Civ II being the exception, as it was probably the smallest step up, mostly adding improved graphics and multimedia (!!!) advisors. Civ III added a boatload of new features to II, some of which were not always well-received (HOW CAN I BE EXPECTED TO WIN WHEN THERE IS NO IRON ANYWHERE NEAR MY EMPIRE?!??!), and IV added new features to III, none of which I can remember at this time other than civics.
I probably didn't articulate my point properly. I didn't mean to say that previous installments in the Civ series added nothing new. If anything, I meant to say that each new version added or expanded features, up to Civ IV. Civ V was the first game in the series where the overwhelming majority of design decisions involved revising established mechanics and how they interacted, rather than attempting to improve upon or nuance them. The only real exception I can think of is the pollution system, which saw heavy revision between Civ III and Civ IV, though you could even argue there that it didn't work as intended, whereas nothing was fundamentally broken in how culture and civics operated as mechanics in Civ IV, but they were the subject of massive changes anyway in Civ V.
So yeah, the first installment that's really different kind. I think we agree, Procyon. I'm just bad at choosing my terminology.
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Put more simply, maybe I should just say that Civ V overhauls so many time-honored mechanics because there was little else that could be done to improve on them. They'd been iterated on so thoroughly over the past two decades, they had become evolutionary dead ends, however refined. It may be necessary and even good that Civ V struck out on its own instead of being content with minor improvements, but in doing so it dispels the rhetoric of incremental improvement and progress that is the primary dialectic of the Civ franchise as a commercial product, which I think is the source of much frustration.
And I think this will be my last post here, I've been talking way too much in a thread about a game I've only borrowed from a friend for a couple of weeks.
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Gormongous, please explain what you mean when you say that Civ 5 is a "different take on the same themes." (In case I sound like an a$$hole again, I am genuinely curious to hear you out on this. I spent 5 minutes on that sentence to try and make is sound less confrontational. I hate the internet.) I ask because I don't think that the change from 4 to 5 is so different than the changes between previous versions. I'm grinding my brain trying to remember the mechanics from 2 and 3, but my recollection is that from 3 to 4 was a very big leap in many, many ways. Civ 5 seems like a much smaller change.
Yeah, but vast majority of the change between previous installments were all additive and iterative: tweaking how civics are used, refining how borders work, and so on. Civ IV to Civ V fundamentally alters how a lot of these basic mechanics have always worked: civics are now irrevocable decisions, culture is now spread by tile increments, tiles are now hexes that only support one unit, and so on. Valid or not, there's a distinct sense of discontinuity that is easy to be reactionary towards.
It was a long time ago, but IIRC, Civ 3 wasn't greeted with open arms at the beginning.
It seems even longer to me, but I recall the backlash being over missing features that were popular in Alpha Centauri, already a two-year-old game at the time, as well as a general lack of stability. People weren't disagreeing over design decisions per se, and complaints disappeared once features and fixes were patched in. I don't think there's a patch that could resolve many of the disagreements I've seen over Civ V's design, though fixing the diplomatic and strategic AI has gone a long way anyway.
I'm making some sense here, right guys? Granted, I've only been playing since Civ II, so my pedigree's not as perfect as some, but it does feel to me like Civ V is the first game in the series where the question is not "more" but "different".
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Here's my "Civ Story," but first, my Civ Credentials: I've owned and played every Civ game, including Alpha Centauri and Civ Revolutions. It all began with Civ 1 on my parents' old 286 when I was in middle school. Every iteration has been better than the last.
And so this is my story. It is the story of the holdouts, those who will not admit that the latest Civ is better than the last. Alas, this is nothing new. If you dig in the Civfanatics forums, you will find similar sentiments when Civ IV came out, as Civ III pro's absolutely hated everything about Civ IV. Heck, you can probably find gripes from Civ II holdouts when Civ III arrived. And, sometime in the next decade, we will hear people mumbling about how Civ VI ruins everything that made Civ V the Greatest Game of All Time.
I've heard the "gamers hate change" argument used to dismiss all sorts of complaints for every stripe of game. And yeah, it's a big problem, because the attitude does exist and it discourages innovation, since change can alienate fans without convincing skeptics that there's something new and interesting to be had.
The thing is, it's almost perfectly counterbalanced by the "cult of the new" effect in the gaming culture. You talk about people who've dragged their feet on every new iteration of Civ, but I'm reminded of the glowing reviews Empire: Total War received from the same people who would describe it as a buggy misstep when Napoleon came out a year later. The games industry as a whole has a fierce positivist streak where change is new is better, which is especially incongruous considering that, compared to books or movies, games in a single series or franchise are seldom manifestly better or worse as media, once you factor out the technical aspects.
Civ seemed like one of those few franchises where every iteration was received as a qualitative improvement by the majority of the community. Civ V broke that streak by being a different take on the same themes that its predecessor laid out, which explains to me its mixed reception as much as the drawbacks of one-unit-per-tile and the diplomatic AI.
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Well, I played a bit of Sword of the Stars II and... I didn't like it. I turned me off the moment I saw the tech tree, nearly everything seemed to exist to make better ships for combat.
Well, you're also playing Sword of the Stars II, one of the worst Paradox titles of the last decade in terms of playability and polish. Its predecessor definitely put the empire management on the back burner though. If you like the feelies involved in customizing each city/planet, you're going to want something more traditional in design, like Civ or Gal Civ.
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Thanks for posting that LP, Orvidos. I've read a few good Crusader-Kings-to-Hearts-of-Iron-III campaigns, but this guy is a real pleasure to watch at work. Such a virtuousic player makes even the dry and sterile Europa Universalis look fun and fulfilling.
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I am broke, and so must also resist DoW2. I keep telling myself it isn't worth putting up with GFWL. Am I wrong?
As far as I can tell, the GFWL integration is confined to occasional messages during singleplayer that you've been disconnected from their network. You can avoid even those if you make an offline account, which is totally viable since no one playing multiplayer is playing anything but Retribution, which ditched the GFWL components.
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The criticism most of you levy against Civ 5 is something that I recognize but don't really think has to be seen explicitly as a criticism; Civ V is simply about different things than other Civ games are. I don't subscribe to the notion that each game in the series needs to capture the same dynamics--Civ IV still exists, after all. I too have been playing Civ since the first game (Civ 1 was probably the game that really got me into gaming in a big way, and I suspect I've still played it more than any other game in the series), but to me, Civ V is simply a game that is more about capturing a national character from the start, and working within the constraints that implies. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. It's just a different game.
I wonder if it's not that gaming as a medium hasn't reached the point where "different" and "better" aren't expected or even required to be the same thing, at least within a single franchise. My own issue is just that I still really love Civ IV, and I don't know if I have room in my heart (and schedule) for a similar game made by the same company with slightly divergent design goals and themes. Even if I did, I think Alpha Centauri is probably higher on the waiting list.
Also, seeing robc's post, I wonder if my story should have been how I once passed a world history test on the Spanish conquest of the Americas in junior high because two of the questions could be answered by naming an Aztec city off the top of my head. The Aztecs weren't such unforgivable assholes in Civ II, but I still remembered every city their antics forced me to raze...
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Damn, I want to play as some crazy proto-Finn! If you click the religions tab, there's a huge swath of land marked as SUOMIUSKO that cannot be historically accurate, but still gives me a warm national romantic feeling.
CK2+ lets you play as any religion, so it's possible. I've even read an AAR about becoming the pagan king of Finland and Lithuania, but it sounds like a brutally boring first hundred years as you struggle to scrape together enough men from your one-holding provinces to actually beseige someone else.
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I'll listen to the podcast more thoroughly later, but I figure I'd duck in here to tell a quick Civ story so I don't miss this contest like so many others.
I don't own Civ V, but I tend to play on small-continents-and-large-island maps in Civ IV, mostly because I like stumbling on whatever political situations have developed on other landmasses by the time I'm advanced enough to cross the sea. I was playing the Byzantines in a game where I had every player's nightmare scenario: alone on what had to be the smallest island. Thankfully, I figured it out soon enough to bootstrap to Astronomy and contact the neighboring islands before I fell too far behind. By the dawn of the modern era, the Byzantine Empire spanned a handful of fairly rich islands to the west of a single, giant continent filled with infidel nations that would dogpile me the moment I tried to carve a foothold in any of them.
At this point, I was the most technologically advanced, but I was maybe half the size of the biggest of my enemies, and half my territory was recently conquered, to boot. I had to find some way of destabilizing that continent while I retooled for a Space Race victory.
Then I discovered Arabia in the cold and barren north of that foreign country, the only non-Buddhist nation besides my own. They'd clearly been losing border wars for the past hundred years, but that stopped once I began funding money, matériel, and technology their way. I've always been really stingy with gifts to enemy or neutral nations, so I was amazed how effective this was. Gifting the Arabs with two nukes and a handful of tanks stopped the Buddhist riflemen of a half-dozen hostile nations in their tracks, while my money and tech allowed the war as a whole to stalemate for almost fifty years, plenty of time for me to build every part of the rocket and launch it before anyone could redirect their war machine my way.
As I closed down the game, I marveled at what real-life parallels even an abstracted simulation like Civ could produce. I'd made my own Israel, more or less, though I think I profited from it more than actually was the case.
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Boo, someone changed my fancy Latin thread title to plain old readable English. Oh well.
Really looking foorward to playingg this, it soundss like it was made for me, how taxing on ur system is it?
I have a beast of a PC I built a year or so ago, so it doesn't make a scratch. Like Orvidos says, some of the map overlays piss off older cards something fierce, and in general a larger kingdom is fairly RAM-intensive, though if you have an x64 system you can follow this tutorial to allow the game access to more than 2GB of RAM (targeting "ck2.exe" instead of "eu3game.exe" of course).
As for CK2+, Wiz has been talking about messing with the decadence system to make it more of a stop gap, if you have Sword of Islam already. Which is pretty great, honestly, it's a real change of pace from some Irish count or a Bohemian duke.
So yes, I am still playing it.
I am having a heck of a time justifying a purchase of the Sword of Islam DLC. I rarely if ever play non-Christian powers, and ten dollars feels a bit steep for a lark. Then again, all the CK2 DLC has seemed a bit off in pricing for what it does. Two dollars for a sprite pack or a three-song addition to the game's soundtrack? Five dollars for a barebones character editor that barely works anyway? I don't know.
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I'm bringing this up exactly because it's the sort of anime that'll never be recommended, but everyone who likes period dramas should check out House of Five Leaves (I think it's Saraiya Gorou in Japanese).
It's a beautiful, meditative piece with an arresting art style about a shy samurai looking for answers and the sinister characters he falls in with while searching for them. There's little action, little spectacle, even little plot, yet it captures a sense of place almost perfectly. I think it may be the best thing I've seen since I rewatched Gunbuster a year ago (which I also recommend, if only because it actually faces the personal implications of FTL combat).