Kordanor

Yeah, but what you describe as option to grind, is not really present in todays RPGs anymore, and imho that's a good thing for the most part. In most games these grind options are limited to random encounters like in the Fallout Games, or a minimum of Respawn like in Avernum. You could grind it, if you really, really wanted, but to do more than just get the last 5% to the next level would be really tedious. Lords of Xulima didn't work out as the developers had it in mind. I brought this as feedback in beta regarding mechanics like food and also the early herbalism or learning skill, but they kept it anyway for the most part and agreed post mortem that they underestimated how forced players felt to grind / do tedious tasks which were intended to be optional fallback mechanics. Regariding DOS 1 and DOS 2 I can only say, that I liked DOS 2 quite a lot and the combat worked almost perfectly. DOS1 however was so incredibly easy that I decided to play without potions, magical arrows and deaths to make it somewhat challenging. Hard in the beginning, easy later on. And yeah, in that case RTwP can be an advantage, though I am glad it was turnbased anyways.

Thanks for the read & reply. ^^ While difficulty is often stretchable to some degree by "grind" (repeatable quests or respawning monsters) it's also often more of a catch-up mechanic than actually something you could grind to get far ahead of the intended difficulty curve. Maybe it's more prominent in JRPGs which I don't play, but grinding random encounters on a map for example can become quite insane in western games. However this is something which is clearly optional. You can either do it nor not. Black or White. If you chose to, you can just ignore that. But that's not possible with the pause frequency, unless you decide to not use pause at all. Or decide on limiting yourself to auto-pauses only. If at the start of the game you could chose an game option of "no-pause-allowed" and the difficulty is changed accordingly, I'd probably pick that. But if I have this tool available I'd usually also use it. Not using it, to me, would be like occasionally stopping by to look at the landscape in a racing game. It feels completely unnatural, so you usually go full speed and try to even beat the track record. A great example of a turn based game, which has some elements which were as bad as RTwP combat in this matter, is Lords of Xulima. In that game you could collect food (absolutely boring) or just buy it. Gold is a limited resource in this world. So what do you do? Of course you collect the food. Yes it is boring as hell, but you never know what you need the gold for. The game actively incentivizes you to have bad gameplay. I wouldn't say that POE is a bad game, despite the combat I still enjoyed it (played on the beforementioned Path of the Damned). However, now that other games are available as well, I chose not to play PoE due to the RTwP system, which makes it a second or third choice for me.

I am a bit late to the show, but I just listened to the podcast and wanted to add something, though it's likely not to be read anymore. ^^ Enjoyed the podcast and thought it was interesting that you described the heritage of the multi-ability character system and the parallels to RTS. However I think you missed out two major parts. "hidden Turn based system": It was mentioned that they basically have a turn based system running under the hood. And I'd argue that it's only partially true, and this is one of the issues why it causes so many issues. While each action has a allocated time, lets say an sword attack takes 3 seconds, there are actions which fall out of the system. That's 1. idling around, and 2. movement. And that essentially means that you do not have a turn based system under the hood. You have several turn based systems under the hood which are out of sync. If you just had 2 characters and both are archers, and both were just shooting arrows, you are fine. Both of your characters shoot an arrow every 2 seconds, the game pauses every 2 seconds and you can re-issue commands. But if you have one archer and one melee character the system already breaks. The Archer attacks for 2 seconds, the warrior runs to the enemy and takes 1.5 for it. So now you need to pause and do the attack, just to pause again 0.5 seconds later to do the attack of the archer. And if you add this up to 4 or more characters you are in a world of pain if you want to play optimally. And of course you also have opponents in your battle (hopefully) who have their own timers. So the Archer attacks (2s), the warrior charges (1.5s) and then attacks (2s), you pause after 5 seconds for the hunter to issue a new order (2s) and while the warrior is still in his action (1.5s remaining), after 0.5s the enemy finishes a cast and hurts the warrior really bad, too bad that on your archer you will now need to abort the current shot and cast a heal instead, because waiting for the attack being finished and then do the heal might take too long. So again, huge pain in the ass as you are facing multiple strains of turnbased played in real time at once. Ofc all no problem if you are just playing around on easy. But that's actually the other point: Difficulty: I was surprised that it wasn't mentioned by you at all, besides of the system working well on easy, which I agree to. But there is a whole other issue: For turn based games it's basically: Difficulty <-> PlayerSkill+PartyStrength. If the difficulty is higher than your PlayerSkill+PartyStrength you will lose. If you are a very good player or have good equipment / party setup, surpassing the difficulty, you will win. If you want a challenge you will set the difficulty to maximum. You need to try to play as good as possible, and also try to maximize party strngth. For RTwP this looks different: Difficulty <-> (PlayerSkill+PartyStrength) * FrequencyOfHittingPause In addition of just playing well, the frequency of you hitting pause is essential. You can be an amazing player, but if you play these games without any pause at all, you will lose. The more often you press pause, the easier it will get. Depending on the game there is a cap of about a maximum frequency of about 0.3 seconds or so. Beyond that you hardly gain any advantage out of it. The game however is not designed with pressing pause every 0.3 seconds in mind, even on higher difficulties. So what are you supposed to do if you want to have a challenge? Artificially limit yourself by just pressing pause once per second? That would feel like playing a naked warrior to increase the difficulty (or in other words: Very supid). In addition the flow of the game is so bad, that any turn based game would run better. Because in turn based games you usually plan for a turn which represents 2 or 3 seconds, which could be 5-10 times hitting pause in RTwP. As an examply you could take a recording of a bossfight in Pillars of Eternity 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-IZW1__-8g This fight probbaly would have taken 2-3 minutes of real time without pauses. With the help of RTwP it is stretched to 20 minutes. The amounts of pauses used (and I just counted roughly) was 86. There are ways to mitigate that: -Having an AI was mentioned. But no AI will be as efficient as the player himself (for existing games). I mean, of those who like challenging gameplay, who is using the auto city governor in Civilization games? -Queueing abilities of course is a huge help. Without this, most RTwP games are hardly playable at all for me. -Very long ability timers and very few participants: If you are dealing with just 3 characters and each ability takes 5 seconds to execute you wont have an issue. And if you are only playing one character, RTwP will also work. You can also think of FTL which indeed is RTwP as well. But due to only having limited options in comparison and rather long timers it's working fine. But even there you will be suffering massively when you don't time your pauses optimally. -Also there is an option of artificial forced gaps. There is a RTwP Dungeon Crawler called "Fall of the Dungeon Guardians", which has a system which is a bit hard to understand at first and I am not sure if I remember it 100% correctly, but it uses forced gaps between actions. Simplified: Each ability comes with a 6 second global cd. In addition you have auto attacks. These auto-attacks can be "overwritten" in the first second (e.g. when it takes 5 seconds) after that they will be executed. You can queue abilties up, so they will be executed once there is the next available spot while no Auto-Attack or GC is active. But you already see that just explaining/understanding this is a pain in the ass. But cudos to their developers to put some thought into it. But being a first person dungeon crawler the game also has the advantage of not needing to bother with movement, which is one of the main issues in RTwP games. In that regard, you also did not mention Drakensang (the first) and Drakensang River of Time, which also were RTwP games, with some movement issues due to a sticky aggro system, where one character movement could result in everyone moving over the battlefield like a bunch of ants. In the end, I think just making all games turn based is the best option, at least for players who like challenging fights. In my eyes RTwPs only reason for existance is for players to get over boring combats, which either means that these players aren't that interested into challenges, not interested into combat at all, or that the combat is badly designed. If you happen to have read this posting so far in this old thread I thank you for your attention.

A little bit late to the party, but another game from 2016 which is totally worth being checked is Tahira. Somewhat similar style and combat to Banner Saga, but without any character progression or RPG aspects. Mostly pure tactic, but extremely good one. And with ~30h of total game play also doesn't eat much time of bigger projects.

Hey there, guess the subject already says it all. I am wondering whether there is a chance to not only get idle thumbs but also Three Moves Ahead stuff in the store. I remember that there was some merchandising stuff back on the Flash of Steel page, but these had white backgrounds and were not an option for me. ^^ Not sure if this is the right place for this thread, but as we cannot create new threads in the TMA Forums...

Actually there are typos even in the German texts. ^^ But I don't see how that has a big impact on the game overall.

I am wondering if Battle Worlds: Kronos slipped under your radar or you don't like that one, also because you haven't done a podcast about it yet though I'd consider it a major strategy title. For those who don't know: Battle Worlds Kronos is the spiritual successor of the Battle Isle Series from Blue Byte (old German Studio) where especially the second part became cult. Battle Worlds: Kronos was done by King Arts who became well known for their adventure "Forgotten Tales", probably the best adventure game of the last decade. The game caused a lot of headlines in the german media and I have already listened to a couple of podcasts about it. Maybe it's not that big outside of germany. Nevertheless it is a great game you can multiplayer and singleplayer. The game also caused some discussion about "how hard should games be" as tons of players whined about the difficulty level of that game (hint: it wasn't too easy) The developer even wrote a column on a german gaming magazine site about Difficulty in games which can be found here: http://www.pcgames.de/Battle-Worlds-Kronos-PC-139941/Specials/Gastkommentar-von-Jan-Theysen-Duerfen-Spiele-nicht-mehr-schwer-sein-1101751/ Translation to English via google: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&prev=_dd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgames.de%2FBattle-Worlds-Kronos-PC-139941%2FSpecials%2FGastkommentar-von-Jan-Theysen-Duerfen-Spiele-nicht-mehr-schwer-sein-1101751%2F

I think the standard game speed is probably the most popular. On multiplayer matches you might also get matches on quick though. Just be aware that while all the economic sysems are adjusted to the speed, the movement isnt. That means that on quick it's easiest to react on attack and on marathon it's the hardest. They need the same amount of turns to move to your cities but it becomes easier for you to build counter measures as the production time is decreased. But in the end it's a matter of taste I guess. Personally I prefer playing on normal. In Civ 4 however I prefered playing on Marathon. But Civ 4 created an immersion of a "real world" in which I wanted to dive into. Civ 5 is more like a board game im comparison if you ask me. Has it's advantages and disadvantages.

Yep. While I am not sure if the values are correct for BNW you might want to take a look at this list: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ5/difficulties It basically means that below Prince you are cheating. And from prince on you play the game as it is "intended" for you. And while your skills might improve you can "learn" how stuff works and should work. And even if you play on higher difficulties later on you can use most of your knowledge. The higher difficulties are to make the game more challenging because if you have the same "rules" as your opponent a human player will always be better than the AI in most cases. So the AI starts cheating. I'd recommend to play a game on prince to adapt to the "correct" game rules and then go further, maybe even go straight for immortal for a challenge. The reason I'd not go for deity is mostly because of the free additional settler the AI gets right at the start. On immortal you can still go and finish world wonders like hanging gardens or chichen itza, you can expand at the same time as the AI and you get them technology wise maybe in the renessance era. So basically it "feels" fair. This is not really the case on deity when the AI plants a second city right ahead.

Didn't listen until the ending yet but I don't think that science is too slow. Actually I thought it was too fast and still is. Not in terms of "does this fit to the year displayed" but in terms of the turns where you use a special unit or a "category of units". It feels like once you are in the atomic/modern era the science and units coming with it just "fly by". The exception being the rocket artillery, which comes after a long gap, and the introduction of the atomic bomb (and airplanes/submarines). I think the malus for additional city is a good idea in itself.

Only at strategy games he said. ^^ But yeah if you want a real challenge look for human opponents. Just make sure you play with the same houserules.

Maybe I should start to avoid listening to podcasts of games I actually played a lot as my opinion about it seems alyways to be very different and it kinda hurts getting through it. ^^ So, what are the biggest flaws of Civ 5 just before BNW (like if you would disable the add on right now): -The City State System is basically broken -The AI is horrible and don't know how to navigate units -The Game is quite unbalanced in a few aspects -Not much happens in the World compared to Civ 4 and the AI's thougts about war -Long Loading Times/Small Worlds compared to Civ 4 -The cultural victory was boring -The "you are screwed"-problem Now I don't just want to throw these points in and appear as a troll, so I will write a little bit about each one though I'll try to keep it short: -The City State System is basically broken Before BNW: Unlike it was said in the podcast the City States had much more benefits than just the luxury ressources. Each city state had a bonus like culture, faith, happiness, military. So it could give you a big advantage if you have these city states. This itself is not the problem though. The problem is, that City states are much too dynamic and easy to befriend and lost as easily in multiplayer. So what you have to do in multiplayer is to buy out city states, make them as ally and then declare war to other players so that they cannot buy them out. The swap of a city state could easy cause your happyness to drop into the red. The whole city state quest system is also extremely snowballing. If you buy city state A, they give you a ressource which then does a quest for City State B and so on. Once you are in the lead and generate more great persons and World Wonders than other player, you also get them to be allied automatically. City States are an extreme RNG Factor. In addition you don't need to build a worker in the beginning when playing with city states as you can get one from them for free at about turn 20. After BNW: The old flaws stayed the same, in addition the importance of city states even rose for the world council. So with the insane amount of money you get now in the later game, you can easily buy the city states you need to get what you want in the council. This is a convenience mechanic for the player if he plays against the AI. If you play with another player it will break the game very fast in the sense of making it very random. Even the diplomatic winning is purely based on how much gold+luck you had accumulating city states in multiplayer. With the new money rain coming from trade routes this even gets more absurd. I therefore recommend to disable City States alltogether, before BNW and after BNW. Besides of the new Civs and the world congress there are no new features related to city states. Don't forget to disable to diplomatic victory as well as otherwise the loser can vote for a third party and end the game by that as you don't need more than two player's votes to do so without city states. -The AI is horrible and don't know how to navigate units Before BNW: It's like basically all of you said in the podcast, the AI just cant handle to win fights. They are horrible to navigate troops and unless they have tons of units and the city is totally open they are easily defended by a couple of units. As there aren't any obstacles in naval paths the coastal attacks become much stronger than at vanilla when AI was totally afraid of water. After BNW: It's almost the same. Just that the AI has seems to have a harder time to build units and upgrade them. So they are even more unlikely to do something -The Game is quite unbalanced in a few aspects There are at least two points in which the game are unbalanced. -Starting Locations. Before BNW: While the location relative to other players is also very important this is not what I am talking about there. What I mean is that it is for example that your capital city has a river. A river gives you tons of money, you will be able to build the water mill, an extremely powerful building in the beginning, you will be able to build gardens which increase your great people generation, you will be able to build a hydroplant late game which will boost the city production a lot. And of course there is also the mountain which will boost science by 50% and the coastal city which will enable you to build the sydney opera house which is very important for the cultural victory. But mountain and coastal are not essential. So while in Singleplayer you can just restart until you got a river, in MP gets harder. If you just play with one buddy it shouldn't be a big problem to restart as long as everyone has a river, but with more people this would become a pain in the ass. To have a good spot for the capital is essential because 1. you get a big boost in the beginning and 2. unlike in Civ4 you can't shift your Palace to another city. Your religion will be founded in the capital city, so the grand temple can also only be built in the capital city, there are faction bonuses only working in the capital (Korea, Rome), the whole Tradition Tree is only working in the capital (and I contradict Troy here and say that it's most times as powerful als liberty if not better), also the opener from the mercantile Tree bosts the money from the capital. After BNW: Rivers don't add to money directly but they increase your income for trade routes by 25%, so the effect is basically the same. Gardens are now even more powerful because of the great culture persons you probably build in the capital. But in addition in BNW it's an even greater advantage to have coastal cities. Every city which is not coastal is basically crippled as it needs to use caravans which are much less effective than ships. Having your capital as coastal city means you can boost the city a lot by other cities. It also means that you can get much more money out of your trade routes because the capital normally generates more money (especially with Tradition tree or the mercantile tree.) In addition with the new trade route system it is of advantage that your holy city = capital is a coastal city because it makes spreading the religion much easier. So all in all it's even more important to get a good location than before. If you got a coastal city with a river you are off sooo much better than a player which is inland without river that with equal skills he could almost give up immediatly. -Balancing in Factions: Before BNW: The factions were balanced quite badly. While there are a lot of "good" factions, there are also some which are just gimp or a one-trick-pony (Huns, Danish), there are also some factions which are overpowered. The Austrian is a great example for an overpowered faction. With just 700 Gold they can convert a city state to an own city. They don't just get an additional City with more than 10 population, They also get tons of units for free, where a single unit would cost as much. Playing austrial you can actually completely neglect bulding military if not at war, then raise an army buy buying two city states and crush your opponents with them After BNW: No improvements. The role of some civ powers was shifted a bit. You get much more culture now, so the aztecs lost some of their value for example. Troy said "they have redone a lot of the old civs". In fact they adjusted only two civs: The French and the Arabians because their old bonuses do not make much sense anymore. -Not much happens in the World compared to Civ 4 and the AI's thougts about war Before BNW: Due to the stupidity of the AI it has a hard time to actually conquer cities. If there is a war between two AIs, the AI will most probably just take one city, if it even manges to get the troops to the other side. While in Civ 4 the shape of the world changed a lot and to watch the video summary after a game was lots of fun, there is not much change to be seen in civ 5. After BNW: The AI now considers the loss of gold when declaring war. Many people realized that the AI hardly ever declares war in the early game. That seems to be due to some sanity calculation within the AI as Aristos pointed out at Civfanatics: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12619981&postcount=498 As long as you don't declare war on anyone and earn the "warmonger" flag, you will have a very peaceful live during your stand. And that also contradicts what Rob said (at least I think so) in the podcast: That you would need troops out in the field to protect your traderoutes. Thats not the case. In the first turns trade routes are highly risky of course, but once the map is basically filled with cities (and thats when you start to have more than 2-3 traderoutes) the barbarians are gone and there is no risk anymore besides of maybe a few barbarian ships coming from tiny islands, which you should watch. You don't have that many traderoutes anyways, so you don't necessarily send them to all cities on the planet. And if the routes are long and an opponent wants to plunder them you can hardly protect them by ships anyways. But as I wrote before, war hardly happens for a long time if you don't initiate it at any point. So I said the world is at peace, right? Well, that suddenly changes if you play with another human player. While the AI hates to go to war on it's own since BNW. It will happily do it if you give them like one luxury ressource and a gold coin each turn. So the AI becomes this "black mass", a tool you use to attack other players and screw their trade routes. The AI players are extremely cheap to buy and do your bidding. This then destroys the immersion of different factions battling for themselves. We even had one totally absurd situation were we both asked the Aztec to attack each other at the same time. They took our stuff and declared war on both of us in the same moment. -Long Loading Times/Small Worlds compared to Civ 4 Before BNW: The Loading times got much better since vanilla but they were still not as good as you would want to play on a huge map. The benefits of that were just too small. After BNW: The Loading times went up a lot. In addition it happens even less in the world. So that most of the AI factions will just serve as traderoute node or partner to sell ressources to. I don't see any use to play on a map bigger than small. -The cultural victory was boring Before BNW: As mentioned in the podcast you clicked on Next Turn a lot with almost nothing in between After BNW: It became much more interesting though the tourist system seems not to be that fleshed out. The jumps it does in later techs are insane. The swapping of great works to get set bonuses can be annoying, especially in multiplayer. You can hardly win by culture alone though and a strong military can help to take out the biggest tourism pusher, which makes it interestng. -The "you are screwed"-problem Before BNW: You had essential city states which could drop from ally to friend or you might have another player who just gave them money so that they aren't your allies anymore. That could then lead to unhappyness. There is not much you can do about it but to declare war on any human opponent. You can also be easily screwed if someone keeps luxury ressources or strategic ressources destroyed which you need to maintain happyness or make your troops effective. But this is basically your own fault. After BNW: There are different factors which were added: With the addition of world congress there are lots of opportunities where someone can completely screw you while you have no real chance to do anything. If someone bought up most of the city states or manages it otherwise that there is a trade embargo against you, you are almost done. Not just your own traderoutes are lost, but all the incoming as well. You will hardly gain any money from that moment on, making it impossible to get back some city states. The world congress can also screw you by forbidding ressources you depend on. In addition the ideologies and the tourism can screw you heavily. Also if someone goes at war with you and the trade routes you haved are just deleted or get plundered by the other faction you are easily screwed. In all these cases you can do some work to prevent it, but there are lots of "single events" which might screw you completely and trigger a spiral down, especially in multiplayer, where the other players will do everything to cause this. So in essence, what did actually become better in the Add On? I'd say not much, but a couple of little things. The trade routes are a nice addition though they fluctuate a lot. The cultural win was improved for sure, though it's not perfect. It's nice how the religion ties in with the trade routes now. In addition the overhaul of the social policies was nice. The different trees have a better structure and starting conditions. I disagree that these changes make Civ like a whole new game now. Advantages from Civ 5 over Civ 4: I agree that it's not the graphics but the one unit per tile system which the AI can't handle unfortunately. In addition to the much more stable multiplayer platform even if mp was and still is handled as a stepchild. But it seems like it slowly gets better finally. If I played alone I'd still play Civ 4 because I love the feeling of beeing in a living world. Civ5 in comparison still feels like a board game (which isn't bad, but its a different experience). Due to the technical side however Civ5 is my game of choice for multiplayer matches. And just for those interested: After playing for a while in MP, we made following houserules to make the game most enjoyable for us: -0 city states -diplomatic victory disabled -start over until all players have a river in proximity of the starting location -don't trade AI into war, only ask it without buying it (discussion menue instead of trade menu) -don't suggest embargos in the world congress And I guess that are my 2 cents about this topic. Well, looking at the wall of text it's probably more than just 2, but well...^^ (my Experiences are based out of 50-70h of gameplay in about 10 games on Immortal with another human player and 4 AIs, first games with normal amount of city states to see the changes, then reduced to 0 again)

Well, besides that I don't make it through the tactical layer much as mentioned before, I'd consider the strategy layer more of a matter of taste whether you want to be "guided" from mission to mission, almost if it was a linear strategy game and you have to make some decisions now and then which alter your path (you could compare it to the SC2 campaign I guess), or play more of a sandbox game, where most of the options are lying infront of you on a table, where you might screw up the same way, but where you might not realize it as fast, more like in civilization, where your little wodden ships suddenly face steel battleships. You can prefer the one or the other. But if they wanted to stay closer to the original, the sandbox approach probably would have been the better choice. Of course the current approach is more "natural" with storytelling.

I guess you are talking about the patch at the 11th of october. As I had to wait for the EU Release, my observations are all from post patch. And yesss...looking forward to Xenonauts.

@sclpls Completely agree. I actually found him annoying the first few episodes I listened when a friend recommended 3MA to me. Now I am happy each time I see him joining the cast.