derbius

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Posts posted by derbius


  1. Your reactions collectively were also mine largely but I wish you had spent more time talking about Ardennes assault which was excellent and if it had been simply adopted to the new theater might have made a good game better. I can see how the designers thought they would make it a lot richer but then succumbed to scope creep. I am still hopeful they can do a paradox and refine it into something good. The other two things I would make more of is that particularly in the single player campaign skirmishes the enemy is normally so much more powerful at least so far ( and at the same time tactically clumsy) it seems impossible even with tactical pause to play a nuanced mobile game. Instead, it almost always seems to degenerate into spotting the enemy and pulverizing him with artillery and/or smoke. And lastly I would have made more of the disappointing fact that the factions are not more distinct with the possible exception of the fun way the DAK is tuned to recycling enemy vehicles and repairing their own. ( the second time I played Gazala the key to my eventual success was grabbing and repurposing an Archer tank destroyer). 


  2. I got pulled into this game after a free weekend and found it to be captivating. I hope you will revisit it soon. I am finding my fellow players approach the game with a good degree of seriousness, and I think you under-emphasize just how beautiful and therefore immersive the maps and animations are (at least on my new mid-high end PC). I have been playing WWII games and shooters for about 35 years, so I clearly need a game which I can enjoyably play even with sub-par reflexes and vision.

    Also, the fact you don't really know what is going on overall generally lets you believe that your own side is working as a team as long as your squad is, which makes victories all the more satisfying!


  3. This episode finally helped me understand what concerns me about most city and civ sims. It's not that they hide ethical problems from users, or fail to measure them, it's that there's almost never a way to optimize around making the world better! If you make people you are simulating miserable it's a problem because it bugs you personally or because it messes up a different goal that is measured and valued in game. But you generally can't try to run your empire to make you and your neighbours happy because when happiness is measured it is nearly always in terms of "is your population happy enough" not to revolt or to stay adequately productive. I can't remember a game scenario that prompts you to try to make the happiest nation - you generally can't even track that kind of information comparatively like you could wealth or prestige. And what if you want to get more complex - maximize human flourishing (happiness * education?) Make as many people happy as you can while protecting anyone from being too miserable? Give people more equal life chances? In principle this kind of thing could be roughly modelled using the "pop" model in Victoria 3 and similar but there seems little interest in doing this. So far in the Victoria 3 developer diaries the slave trade and opium wars for example are things you might want to solve as a mission ("journal") or because of effects they have on other systems. But you can "succeed" in what the game measures without tacking either.

    (I expressed some concerns about ethics in computer games when Victoria 3 was announced in a blog post last year at greater length).


  4. I wanted to hear more about the ethical dimensions of the way Paradox titles nudge you towards certain ways of judging your own "success" - ie how seeing things through a state lens tends to conceal the effect of your actions on the people that surround you. It's perhaps more excusable pre-Victoria where you could argue that the state made little or no claim to work to the benefit of its people but is harder for games like Victoria 2 and the upcoming 3. I was pleased to see that Dr Devereaux did dig into this in a recent blog post which goes into more detail than I did in my own post on the subject back in May when Victoria 3 was announced. 

    I hope you will invite Dr Devereaux back to explore these details in more depth when Victoria 3 gets close enough to ship to see how these dilemmas are treated in the game - ideally with a Paradox rep as well!


  5. The announcement of Victoria 3 and the way this grand strategic "sandbox" game seems to focus on the colonial period from the colonizer's POV caused me to go off on a bit of a rant. I hope I am wrong about the way it's going to go but regardless I would like to hear from the 3MA team and if they can have the PDX folks talk about how history can/should be taught/used in strategy titles:

     

    https://blog.org/2021/05/values-in-video-games-victoria-3/


  6. Finished a playthrough. Thanks for encouraging me to try it out. I can understand the temptation but you should have tried harder to avoid spoilers - the podcast was full of them by the end - or at least put a warning up front saying "if you want to play through this and you should we will be talking about a number of key plot points"...


  7. I have really enjoyed playing this so far. Like any semi-scripted game there is the odd time when the dialogue options don't allow you to finesse things the way you might like to or the game seems to "forget" your actions (I tacked centre-left on most things but my lefty VP seems to think I won't get socialist votes. But once in a while there's a real whopper - like this:

     

    image.thumb.png.301087fb5fa5df400a7ae4ad136f1c48.png

     

    A drop of 2/3 in GDP over three and a half years? My head would have been on the end of a pike months ago...


  8. I could never get into Dwarf Fortress but as a big 4X fan and wargamer you guys may have persuaded me against my better judgement to try this again after bouncing off the demo in bafflement. It seems like a sort of Dwarf Fortress in space? Are you trying to get the designer on to the show? I'm sure talking to him would be a fascinating episode whether you approached it as getting him to explain some of his design decisions or even just talking about how he ended up making this quixotic labor of love. 


  9. Game mechanic I continue to be baffled by your love for Crusader Kings. Fundamentally, this is a game which you would think would require a robust diplomacy engine and yet I sounds to my astonishment that there is no way at least in the default scenarios to set up formal treaties, to threaten or even to do duchy swapping Etc. All I have to work with aside from brute force is marriages and dirty tricks. I can't even easily find out which of my neighbours or potential enemies dislikes which of the others so I can set them off against one another. Why isn't this even in the reviews? 


  10. The excitement so many people show about Crusader Kings 3 still baffles me. I really want to get into it but I find that very obvious gaps are hugely frustrating to me. Doesn't it bother anybody that you don't have any diplomatic options with nobles & kings outside of your court that don't involve either intermarriage, hooks or war? At one level the game seem to be largely about the inter-personal but there is no option for even simple horse-trading (stop messing with my vassal or else, trade you this duchy for that one, I will marry your daughter for 500 gold - that kind of thing). Was that impossible in Crusader Kings 2 also?


  11. Well I for one looked up Annals of Rome though I didn't actually try to play it because the start screen looks like the attached and goes downhill from there. But the manual makes it sound awesome. I even tried to get interested in Marcus Livius Drusus (I assume Troy meant the younger?) but both the Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Brittanica entries are pretty dry. Any recommendations for a readable pocket bio of the man?

     

    PS This show certainly made me want to play a decent Rome-centric strategy game. Pity it seems EU Rome wasn't such a game - maybe Imperator will be a better second chance?

    Screen Shot 2018-06-03 at 23.36.28.png


  12. I agree with Hexgrid - I would like to be able to give any units with special powers the autonomy to use them at their discretion if they wished rather than having to micro them.

     

    I bought Homeworld:DoK primarily because of this podcast (at full price!) but found the campaign suffered from some of the same problems as original Homeworld - if you have not managed to play well enough early on you don't have enough resources to survive later levels (see this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=615295620). Admittedly I was trying on "hard" because I was given the impression that otherwise it was too easy.

     

    And those un-skippable cutscenes! Ugh!

     

    Plus, despite the glowing reviews I am not finding many opponents online yet...


  13.  the main thing that is likely to keep me from playing this game any further though is just that the maps are so wide open. There doesn't seem to be any real way to play a defensive game  as noted here http://aow3strategyguide.weebly.com/open-vs-closed-games.html.  although I haven't played multiplayer yet it seems to me pretty likely in any battle you'll end up with a lot of big stacks walking into undefended cities and burning them to the ground (and once you know that one player has his two or three stacks of heroes and units engaged against an enemy, the temptation for a third party to walk into the undefended rear of that players Empire must be almost irresistible). Can anyone prove me wrong? I would certainly like to squeeze a bit more playing time out of Age of Wonders 3

     to return to an old old topic I picked this game up recently when it turned up on half-price on steam. Unfortunately, the AI is lousy – in particular, when it takes over one of my cities it does not think to raze it, sitting around instead until I can assemble an army to take it back. I agree with the thrust of the comments on the podcast – I may be missing some fine points but by and large my cities all feel the same. magic items for the heroes also seem more like chrome then something that it is really important to collect.

     

    I'd like to play multiplayer but I have a feeling that as with most such games after a while the multiplayer forums will be full of hard-core gamers who have winning down to a science.

     

     where should I go to look for decent strategy guides (ones that do more than state the obvious)?


  14.  to return to an old old topic I picked this game up recently when it turned up on half-price on steam. Unfortunately, the AI is lousy – in particular, when it takes over one of my cities it does not think to raze it, sitting around instead until I can assemble an army to take it back. I agree with the thrust of the comments on the podcast – I may be missing some fine points but by and large my cities all feel the same. magic items for the heroes also seem more like chrome then something that it is really important to collect.

     

    I'd like to play multiplayer but I have a feeling that as with most such games after a while the multiplayer forums will be full of hard-core gamers who have winning down to a science.

     

     where should I go to look for decent strategy guides (ones that do more than state the obvious)?