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very nice episode i'm not sure what the podcast is truly about, but these stories of how older game software got made always ends up being pretty interesting to me even if i haven't played the games discussed

the problem with chess is that it basically requires time pressure to function as a game, so it ends up being more like a real-time game rather than a turn-based one modern strategy gaming really has evolved to the point where you'd make the same move no matter whether you had 1 minute or 1 hour to think about it, and chess feels like it hasn't figured out how to adapt. maybe if it was computer-assisted so that normal people could filter out bad lines without spending minutes brute-forcing all the possibilities, it could work. i'm not sure how that can be done without devolving to computers playing instead of the human players though

fanboy detected

there could be more optimizations you can make, but even if you learn that stuff you still should just fast-forward until you get enough money to do anything. the game is just paced horribly and making any progress is pointlessly slow

i worry that this game is too "boring" to appeal to normal gamers, but actual strategy gaming is so dead at the moment that I really hope this reaches whatever audience it can there needs to be something strategic on PC to play that isn't a card game or some poorly designed epic that requires 10+ hours to play

the resulting software was completely expected given paradox's history the problem is it was marketed as a 4x strategy game, but it misses the entire point of what makes a 4x game a strategy game instead of a simulation game 4x games are just competitive races to victory conditions that will be extremely boring if you aren't playing to win. that's not really a problem with the games, but rather a disconnect between what the game is actually about (racing & winning) and how people actually play it (casually non-competitively in single-player and never actually reaching the end) you invest 50 minerals to increase production by +2 per turn so that in 25 turns you start getting extra minerals, and you hope you can turn those extra minerals into something relevant to win the race. when stellaris copies all the same mechanics in an uncompetitive space empire simulator, it's just pointless. and when those mechanics aren't interesting, the pace of the game is ruined i'm sure it matters in competitive multiplayer, but i still think it's a fantasy that people actually want to play a 25-hour long multiplayer RTS, especially when the whole concept of planning (i.e. what defines strategy games) is basically non-existent with random tech trees and random events and random everything stellaris feels like a 4X for people who don't actually like 4X games. that's fine and the audience for that is huge, but people really need to come up with better terms for this stuff. i haven't gotten to the end of a game yet, but if the game needs 50 packages of DLC that shift the focus away from 4X stuff and turn it into space EU4, then why bother trying to attract the 4X crowd to begin with?

a problem can be extremely difficulty and relatively easy at the same time if a computer could play checkers in the 80s, chess in the 90s, and go in the 2010s, maybe it can finally play RTS games in 2050 and 4X games by 2100

the game is much better if you just play it the obvious way use lancers to kill tanks / mounted guns use snipers to snipe from afar use scouts to scout / grab forward positions use engineers to defuse mines / repair & restock i didn't use orders at all and found it to be extremely well-balanced for a single playthrough the trick with all these Japanese games is to avoid overleveling and making a supersquad. i think i finished the game with level 10 units maybe i got lucky with my progression being close to whatever the game was tuned for, but it was a nice change of pace to play a game that was appropriately challenging by design instead of relying on a bunch of difficulty sliders in the setup screen and letting the players figure it out

this game is the enemy of planning (which is entirely what strategy is about), so it's hard for me to see this in a positive light as a strategy game roguelikes have a lot of the same "stuff happens to you" design, but at least they generally put mechanics ahead of the lore/theme so they work better when it comes to making informed decisions (as opposed to making uninformed decisions)

i'm not saying there's a shortage of strategy games i'm saying there's a shortage of good popular online computer strategy games. lack of alternatives is one reason why some games (eg. hearthstone) get more popular than they would be otherwise starcraft 2 is full of people who don't really enjoy the game but might play it anyways for some time because there's literally nothing else. i'm not saying it's impossible to play other games in small communities (for example, I still play civ4 multiplayer to this day), but that's a far cry from being accessible or thriving. you need popularity for things like skill-based matchmaking or playing on settings you enjoy to work. and don't confuse dota with warcraft 3. those are action games with a RTS interface, not strategy games. civ5 and paradox games are the only non-starcraft products with a large enough audience to even attempt multiplayer, but for various reasons they fall short. i don't really mean to single them out for quality reasons, but they're examples picked for popularity reasons. even if you like the game's design, civ5's problem is simultaneous moves being a "who clicks first" minigame. the games are also too long and unstable. paradox makes sandboxes where you can do lots of things and sort of simulate history, and some people enjoy that ride. multiplayer basically needs "game-like" victory conditions with more fair starting conditions. and i don't know if those experiences would even be satisfying in the span of a couple hours instead of days. the last time I played EU, you couldn't even win or lose. i'm not sure how that lends itself to competitive play the problem with single player vs. AI is that it's rarely good enough to beat even mediocre players without massive amounts of cheating. once you learn the rules of a game, you basically win 100% of the time. RTS game AI can do a little bit better than turn-based games by being really fast & precise compared to humans, but there usually isn't any strategy mastermind behind that APM. i'm not going to derail the thread further by elaborating on that point RTS is struggling, but if you can find ways to have fun with it more power to you. i just miss the progress and advancement of the 1990s and early 2000s.

RTS is really just a term for the interface of managing lots of units there's just a huge difference between management and strategy deciding what to do with resources is strategy. actually performing all the clicks to do those things is not. and the genre is not so great because there's way too much emphasis on the second part, and Blizzard is a major part of the problem there. the fact that the starcrafts 'won' and rise of nations 'lost' was basically the end of hope for the genre. ironically, that was largely due to the single player campaigns & cutscenes/storytelling, but the 'why' doesn't really matter if the genre (referring to strategy, not management) wants to thrive, it almost needs to get rid of the interface because it's always a giant barrier between the management part and the strategy part i don't know how that can happen without some far-future neuroscience tech, so it's probably better to just go turn-based the RTS campaigns are kind of different, but i don't know if 'save/reload until you figure out how to beat each level' really counts as strategy part of the reason Hearthstone was popular is that there just aren't many strategy games to play. I guess board games are probably popular somewhere, but i don't know how PC gamers really get into that. civ 5 was & is awful. paradox doesn't really make "games". everything else is way too unpopular for multiplayer. and i'm not going to get started on why all these devs are awful at making single player AI that actually works vs strategy gamers...

the game clearly presents an objective that the player is supposed to achieve from a strategy game discussion standpoint, this creates an optimization problem i agree that most players might not try to solve it, but the actual game (the objective the designers want the player to accomplish) involves almost nothing beyond mindless repetition

strategy is just the art of planning the most common form happens to be adversarial games, but it can be applied to any goal there are city-builders and tycoon games where the goal is to create 'order' it's not "gamers" who are likely to accomplish something in a non-accidental manner, but rather people who can formulate plans to achieve goals not all people who play "strategy games" know anything about planning or goals or optimization

those were designed to be easier though, but it looks like it'll have that basic idea basically anything to add even 1 or 2 decisions per hour will be better than "take 2 steps. overwatch. repeat for 20 hours" the thing is it doesn't look like this meld thing is even required. guess it's just about how well they balance it

from the sounds of it this one might actually be a strategy game http://www.shacknews.com/article/80790/xcom-enemy-within-encourages-less-conservative-play might fix the original problem with the game - no strategy at all in the main gameplay portions

anyone know how to make this game fun for someone who is actually competent at strategy games? the AI is absolutely no threat on any difficulty level except deity... and the game just doesn't function anywhere close to how its designed at that level has anyone found any satisfaction in seeing how quickly you can win instead of whether or not you will win at the end?

any game with tactical battles will have this because it's literally like a board game at that point for me, recent examples are legendary heroes & fire emblem awakening xcom is just a poorly designed tactical game because the best tactic is just about looking half a turn ahead all you have to do is end your turn in safe cover and overwatch and/or safe distance and you have played optimally. i booted up civ 5 with their latest flavor of poor game design I guess when there's a barbarian at your border you will count how many moves it will take for him to reach your worker... it's just a bit of counting... I wouldn't say that requires any real thought everything else in is either long-term planning or immediate optimization in some rare instances of multiplayer I will think a few steps ahead strategically, but not in terms of discrete turns

it is higher quality if you look at it like an abstract 4X game that happens to be set in outer space things like risk-reward equations make or break games from a strategy perspective also the AI is lightyears ahead of other 4X games (that doesn't mean it's competent, but it's good in relative terms) it's just a matter of perspective... there are people who play 4X games without having a clue about the cost/benefit equations people have fun seeing an archer fight a warrior, even after they have seen it 1000 times people want to build the Pyramids, and enjoy how they look people want to customize spaceships and make "cool stuff" there are people who play 4X games to engage in tough decision-making people don't care if it's archer vs. warrior and turn off the combat animations - they just see a unit with some stats and some cost people don't care about the Pyramids or how they look - they just see a unit with some stats and some cost people don't care about how their ships look, but find depth when economy, technology, and ship design tradeoffs come together it just comes down to what you consider the "game" to be. the "theme" has absolutely nothing to do with the game in terms of actual strategy it's just important to remember that the player's overall eXperience is not one of the 4 X's it's important to consider, especially for developers who want to make money, but it's not completely relevant

lol civ 4 already derails most of the 4X episodes i don't think they're avoiding a whole episode about it because it isn't "classic"

I find it absurd to pretend that XCOM is a strategy game while FTL isn't... xcom is just some minor battlefield tactics that you optimize by playing in a boring way (take baby steps + overwatch. repeat for 50 hours). there's nothing happening at the strategic layer

"Meatshields in front. archers in back" is supposed to be repetitive. It's a key difference between tactics and strategy. There's probably a reason for it. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the tactical battles to become dull. I'm guessing that the designers anticipated this happening and put in the auto-resolve feature as a result. But there are inherent problems with that. What am I automatically resolving? Because this is actually a strategy game, there are mutually exclusive goals. Which units am I trying to keep alive? Am I preserving mana? Am I preserving items? Even if the auto-resolve was optimal in some way (it's nowhere close), it seems like a non-solution to the fundamental problems with tactical combat. Even if they make the battles more complicated or put more variety in them, at the end of the day they're still going to be about routine execution. Still, it's nice to see Fallen Enchantress try to be more than an optimization battle versus some AIs (which is a dead-end as soon as the AI cannot compete with the player). I think the game is really innovative in its approach. If it succeeds, it'll be a big win for strategy gaming. Borrowing from RPGs is great because those games have figured out how to handle difficulty and progression which is where every single 4X fails. Also, it would probably be cooler to have a broader view of the game with more discussion from the designer instead of a review show prepared before anyone was ready.

What exactly are you complaining about? The only people paying for it are the ones who never bought WoM. Even if it's a very similar game to WoM (I wouldn't know), it's like saying once an expansion pack comes out, the entire game should be free for everyone. On topic... from my brief experience with it, the game looks like it will be fun because there's more to it than simply doing stuff faster than the AI. There's an entire fantasy world with tons of lore and quests and lots of choices. It even lists RPG as the genre, in addition to strategy. I don't know if there's actual role-playing or it's limited to choices in the quest rewards and a fairly long line of unit promotions. Either way, the game seems to have a lot of variety, and if the AI is good enough it has the potential to be very strategic. It's the same guy who wrote Gal Civ II's AI, so there's actually a chance it will work out that way. But even if it doesn't, this game is fun BEFORE you learn everything about it. It isn't like the typical 4X games where you can't really enjoy them until you know how to play. Most 4X games are really just about wasting 50 hours learning the rules and then optimizing something (growth or military or science or whatever) and then using that against AIs who haven't optimized it as well. In a multiplayer game, it's fine because if you go for the wrong thing, a human is good enough to punish you for it. But in a singleplayer game, the strategic decisions aren't so meaningful if you'll win no matter what you do. Humans know how to exploit an advantage. Computers typically don't. Civ is exactly like this, but you only waste 50 minutes learning the rules instead of 50 hours. There's a split between the strategic empire-building and the tactical battles, but unlike XCOM or Total War there is some actual strategic interplay between them. For example, mana is shared. So you basically need to choose between using mana and losing troops. There are also items that have a one-time use so you have to decide when to use them. The troops and their equipment and their location does depend on what you do in the 4X stage, so there's some strategy there as well. Tactical stuff gets old very quickly, but since there are real strategic choices involved, it may last. But since I can tolerate it and don't completely hate generic medieval fantasy (dragons, mages, trolls, etc.), the worst case scenario for this game is looking pretty good. Maybe it's a waste of money if it only stays fun for a few hours, but it isn't a waste of time which I value a lot more.

Lords Management as strategy (as opposed to micro + tactics) is a bit of a stretch anyways... could just as easily talk about FPS games as far as strategic content goes

based on brief first impressions involving me running heroes around without a clue about how to actually play the game... its singleplayer will be much better than Warlock's or Civ V's

this game needs a mode for auto-resolving missions so that ironman is actually playable without redoing the long and repetitive early portions of the game over and over again reloading is this magical thing that turns "lost all soldiers. no reward. panic increased" into "promoted all soldiers. got a reward. panic decreased" completely negating the idea that there should be consequences for your decisions if the choice is between a satellite and weapons + armor, then choosing the satellite should mean I lose soldiers. being able to dodge that penalty by being a bit more cautious in the missions is just silly. that satellite will pay for itself in 1 month, so I'll always be picking that option...