panzeh

I kinda liked the discussion near the end where they got into the idea that maybe big empires didn't need 'fixing' as bad as Firaxis thought, but I thought a bit too much of the discussion was on fluff, which has been gone over before. SMAC was a weak game mechanically held together by quotes between massive caricatures of ideologies. Beyond Earth is trying to copy it but doing that even worse. Game mechanics, though, Civ 4's limitations on expansion only really applied in the beginning. Later on you want to be as big as you can. I think that's fine. Civ is a game about getting big and beating other players, it's not really about having a smorgasboard of different-sized powers ala EU4. A lot of Civ 5's mistakes come back to trying to accomodate 'tall' play- if you want to play civ 4 sub-optimally, you can play tall, too, but you're going to suffer on a difficulty like deity. I'm okay with difficulties like deity requiring more optimal play. I do think the city management in civ doesn't lend itself very well to managing huge empires, and that's perhaps the big problem. I think the solution is probably changing the mechanics of cities to make them simple to manage- e.g. making cities on the periphery have no building/pop management at all, just some kind of basic trickle production, making zones where you can lose and gain things and not hugely turn the game one way or the other the way losing a real city would. One could even ditch a seperate city management screen entirely, opting to put all the "city" improvements on a map the way tile improvements are now. Chris Park kinda has this idea with Stars Beyond Reach, though he got a bit burned out on designing it and took a break from that one for a couple months. Moo1's planets were just sets of sliders, that with a coat of paint and a couple new automation settings could be easy to manage in high numbers. I wish GalCiv3 was a better designed game, unfortunately I think the developers didn't think through just how insane specialization made things, from shoving tons of sensors on ships to shoving tons of factories on a world. Civ 4 encouraged specialization, but it wasn't a super power the way it is in GC3. In the beginning you could make a scout ship that sees 20+ tiles by just stacking sensors on a big ship, though I think they finally patched in diminishing returns. AFAIK you can still put a ton of mobility on a ship, making the combat very trivial against the AI because it never builds ships that can go 4-5 tiles so you can just never fight a bad fight.

Personally, i'm not as high on the game, but it really does do something unique. I guess maybe i'm a bit too given to other strategy games in that I feel this game is a lot more of a text adventure with a strategy game framing device. You can make choices, but not as many as you might think, and while there are a lot of ways to lose, there's only one path to the end game and it's only tagentially related to the strategy part. Still, I think it did the story thing a lot better than, say, SMAC did. That being said, the pretense of being a strategy game is a really important device because it makes the stakes feel a lot bigger. I feel like a modern indie developer would avoid it but these guys did a really good job.

It's like a lot of indie games, you have an interesting thought and don't really go much beyond that- Kingdom is a really shallow game. It seems like the developers hit a point where they could make a great game if they did the design grunt-work to do so, but they don't, they just push out a proof of concept and call it a day.

A lot of the time though you end up pretty much winning or losing the battle in the first five minutes, though, put in an almost-impossible position and you just spend 20-30 minutes playing out the slow tick against you as you try to dig yourself out of a hole. At least in a game like SC2 when you get 6pooled you pretty much know you're dead right away. I mean sometimes you get a really cool tactical puzzle and sometimes you play your way out of the hole, but a lot of the time i'm just going through the motions to win the game as my opening just took the whole center or something and I sit at a huge advantage for the whole game.

I think most things people want from RTS games are showing up in other genres and in much more accessible packages as well. Lords Managements pretty much took much of the traditional crowd because they're easier to play and get into- while high level Lords Management play is quite deep, it's quite a bit less stressful than the multi-tasking nature of RTS games. I mean, most RTS games made these days are specifically not trying to ape SC. They may be gunning for an MP crowd, but they're really trying not to take cues from SC2 because they think that kind of RTS is dying. Almost every RTS in existence, including the ones people state as 'the good ones' still has the stressful element of "if you're not doing anything you're losing". Some of their attempts to not ape SC2 make them actually pretty awkward and introduce flaws(Wargame's demand for you to blind build 1500 points worth of things in a 100% blind opening is notable in how swingy it makes competitive play). Those bases people complain about so much take the place, for example, of needing to prepare for one strategy or another, necessitating scouting and counter-scouting. The SC2 formula, for all its faults has its reasons to be what it is, and I think people just assuming it to be out of custom are a bit misguided. It's a lot like MMORPGs, though. People stopped paying sub fees for them because people can get games that do exactly what they want for less- crafting sims, social sims, combat games, progression games, PvE games, PvP games. Games that do one thing end up doing them a lot better than the kludges that were MMORPGs and I think RTS games are in that same boat- people get their tactical fixes from stuff like Ultimate General/Total War, their city builder fix from city builders, competitive MP from Lords Managements, etc.

I think archers in general should be much more effective in direct fire than at long distances because they tend to vastly overmodel their ability to hit targets effectively. CA has absolutely not found any way to make lighter infantry useful so it's almost always the heaviest infantry that dominates. CA's obsession with heavy infantry dominance has been there since Rome 1. I would like to see the ability to use mixed-arm units effectively, too, because this was way more common than 'a big block of swordsmen' and 'a big block of crossbowmen/archers' standing beside each other. The best combat was Shogun 2's by far because CA actually found a way to make different tiers of units useful for different things but I still think archers were generally a touch too good for a game ostensibly about the Sengoku Jidai.

Act of War, to me, wasn't even that good at its time, and I certainly don't think it needed a spiritual successor ten years later. RUSE and Wargame were a lot more original takes on the genre that worked better, though both had some flaws, and instead of injecting more of that interesting originality or taking those original ideas and refining them, they just went back to the old well. I had hoped Act of Aggression would be closer to RUSE but more cleaned up, with less mushy control and better balance. I don't think the traditional RTS is dead per se, but you really have to put more craft into it than Eugen did to make it pleasing to play and I don't think that happened at all.

The Germans were very good at using anti-tank guns throughout the war, and enjoyed a superiority in their use which had a decisive impact in, for example, the 1941 operations against the Soviets where they were able to have infantry divisions blunt large scale armored counterattacks. That all being said, starting in 1943 the Germans were really looking for ways to get their new, heavier AT guns onto tracks, because anti-tank guns were not very flexible in their use, and the heavier ones could no longer maneuver much at all. The 37mm guns that were adequate in the beginning of the war could be manhandled and towed by small cars and jeeps and even mounted on the back of trucks or halftracks. The 75mm and larger guns that were needed by the end of the war could only be towed by heavy vehicles and really couldn't be moved by man power alone. I could also go into the example of the US Towed Tank destroyers, one of those little-known fiascoes that went far worse than the more well-known tank destroyers. The towed tank destroyer battalions used the 76mm gun as a towed AT gun that had to be moved by a half-track. Their performance, however, was awful. They almost never got to engage enemy tanks in the first place, and even when they did, they performed very poorly. Most of the towed tank destroyer battalions were relegated to firing as artillery. Part of that, of course, is that the US was almost never on the defensive for a long time, but I think part of it is that towed anti-tank guns were becoming more and more obsolete. You're right, though, that there are a great many factors that go into these sorts of things, and I think the most important part of simulating technical details is figuring out what they do to the behavior of players in the game.

Well, there's a much simpler explanation that makes a lot more sense- neither the Germans nor the Italians fielded a tank that couldn't be penetrated easily by the 6-pounder until Tunisia. The 88mm was used as an expedient as the German 37mm was found wanting against some of the heavily armored French tanks. Also, I have a feeling that they would have suffered the fate of the US towed tank destroyers- an AT gun that heavy was nigh-useless in offensive operations and almost everyone was finding deficiencies in all towed AT guns as the war went into its last couple years, particularly those that demanded heavy movers.

It's a really good point- Shogun 2 also had some really subtle interactions that come through when you dig into the game, too. Ashigaru bowmen, for example, had a hidden debuff against armor, which made most samurai units largely impervious to them unless they got focused down and stood there taking it, and samurai units tended to be more flexible, but more expensive. You still used ashigaru of all types throughout the campaign, and the optimal play involved using buff-stacked ashigaru the whole way through, which is actually pretty thematic, too. I've said elsewhere that Rome2 and Attila have more variety- but it's skin-deep, just different skins on the same heavy infantry units. That all being said, one of the biggest problems with the TW series' combat is that units don't work together well- it's very cumbersome to try to come up with a formation where your matchlock ashigaru can be protected by yari ashigaru, even though that's exactly what happened. You basically see flanking, putting bowmen behind someone else, and that's about it.

I think even in that case, the Paradox games and the general assumptions of them don't work very well. I've been looking at a board game called Churchill, which is a game about the war conferences where Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt wrangled for resources and position while winning the war, but I don't know if Paradox can do a design that really captures anything about the era without being bloated. For example(and this hurts HoI as a wargame), Paradox takes care to make almost every minor country playable, but this is not an era where they really mattered, or really could possibly end up mattering. I think it's way more fun, for example, to play out a Cold War game like Twilight Struggle where the various post-colonial/small countries are battlegrounds between the superpowers than a Paradox style game in the period where Angola can conquer the world. I kinda wish computer strategy game developers were willing to cut things out and be focused on something, to make it really work, rather than throwing in meaningless black boxes like Victoria 2 or Distant Worlds, among others.

Yeah, in MP minor countries were played to give the majors some teammates rather than as players on their own.

I think the problem is one of having those years in a game about ww2. It isn't interesting at all if Germany is invaded in 1936 and defeated quickly by the Allies, so you kind of have to force it. You could make the game, but I don't think it would be well-suited to having the intricacy of combat in a ww2 wargame. I could see it working if instead of playing a country, you played an ideology, starting with a country, but instead of just controlling one, you would control several, a coalition. That would, for example, make a cold war a lot more interesting to play out, and it solves some of the problems of a ww2 game where you have to make it fun for a Romania player(those small countries were never going to have that much of an impact). It was weird seeing people be so happy about East vs West when the #1 feature everyone knew about was customizing warships, which strikes me as exactly the wrong kind of focus(it was a hoi3 derivative, but hoi3 was not the right base for a cold war game unless you want it to be a ww3 wargame).

There are ways to make the Allies want to stay at peace if you're willing to be a gamey game and have victory conditions that don't entirely tie to crushing your enemies. This is the avenue explored by the hex and counter wargames. Alas, you still end up having to have restrictive rules for the Allies when you try to accomodate earlier starts. Totaler Krieg starts in 1937 but the Allies can't declare war on anyone(aside from a few X Challenges Germany cards in Limited War which are not guaranteed) until Total War begins. Basically in that game all the allied countries have policies that place restrictions- German demands can't spark war, for example, until an allied major power gets out of Appeasement or Rapallo. Once they do get to Guarantees or Entente, though, then ww2 can begin. There's no way to really ahistorically build up, though- your unit additions and replacement steps are pre-determined from a few options.

The problem is that there aren't really any other limited resources for a skilled player after 100 years or so.

Unconditional Surrender!, Axis Empires: Totaler Krieg/Dai Senso, World in Flames, Advanced Third Reich(and its derivatives). These are all games that cover the whole war, and there are others, at varying levels of railroadedness. I think USE has the best combat out of all of them and Axis Empires is probably the most interesting- Axis Empires starts in 1937, but it's far more structured than Hearts of Iron, and the three(or five) players each have their own option cards to play, including different things to do in the pre-war period. Japan probably has the most in-depth choices, but the USSR and Germany have some interesting ones, too. I will say A3R and WiF have playability issues, but the concept isn't really the problem. It's all about implementation. I don't know if a 20th century everything-game is going to resemble the 20th century in any way that isn't going to be utterly bloated. It would be tough to even make a combat system that would work in both 1900 and 1999.

I don't think so. There's no good focus for that kind of game, and a game kinda needs a strong focus to be a good game, otherwise you get cold war games where you customize the turrets on warships. Also, ww2 is quite interesting. I think a ww2 wargame is a fine game to make, and i've played a lot of them, but you have to know what they're about, and starting from 1936 feels like a good way to just make everything go way off the rails. It seems like there's a desire not to make any sacrifices in the design to get a good ww2, so they try to have everything, and you never get any kind of ww2 really. The minor countries are given way too much significance, Allies are allowed to rearm with impunity, etc. If I had a say, I would start the game in 1939 with a sort of CYOA system to give a few changes to the pre-ww2 history and let people have some customization within bounds. You'd start with things like the Sino-Japanese war in situ, but that's a sacrifice that has to be made to have Europe work.

Empire of the Sun is a really good strategic take on the Pacific War, and I don't think it's that complicated in and of itself. It's more reading the situations is unintuitive at first because defense is more about the reaction move possibilities than anything else. I think it does a good job of giving similar challenges to War in the Pacific without anywhere near as much weight.

I think this guy must be from some alternate terror universe 2010s because the defining thing of this decade in gaming is just how many games in every genre are out there. A lot of it is rough around the edges, but there's so much choice these days, and if you think the 90s wasn't full of trash(it just doesn't look the same as today's), you must have been in a different timeline than myself. With roguelikes now, developers borrow from them and they borrow from other genres, and you see a lot of cool stuff happen. I mean with the big AAA Event Games yeah you're getting a certain thing but I hope by know you know what you're getting into with them, and some people enjoy that. If you think those kinds of games didn't happen in the 90s, I can give you many, many examples. BTW, I don't think anyone gets into making video games for the money of it- the people who develop games are there because they want to make games- in most of the related fields to making a game, there are more lucrative opportunities elsewhere.

The galactic senate victory would sometimes arbitrarily lose you the game in moo on the hardest difficulty because the humans would be present and get a circlejerk going before the first election.

It does but if you're doing well at all you'll never have civil wars. In any case, that kind of thing in a 4x game becomes a reset anyway.

One of the things that's striking to me is how much different Civ4's MP is than its SP. In that game style, games are in fact often decided in Classical and Medieval because the players recognize that the quickest way to win is to kill the other guy, rather than go for anything else, because it's usually 1v1 or a similar small amount of players, and unlike the AI, the player isn't bound by relationships. It's just in the way people play SP, with six or more opponents on large maps where the AI has bonuses that you end up having to play through most/all of the game. That's quintessential 4x to people, though. I like the idea of rising and falling civs, and you see it in some board games like Vinci, Small World, and Britannia, where players are meant to be switching countries once they're done with the current one.

I still hold the opinion that the whole popularity of Lords Managements is their similarity to the RTS games from which they came, but being easier to get into and play overall. This is why, I think, other genres trying to work like them doesn't really work that well, e.g. Monday Night Combat, among others. This isn't to say there's not depth to them, because there obviously is, but I don't think they would have the popularity they have if they weren't less imposing than Starcraft 2 or Warcraft 3.

Honestly, even in CK2 it is not that difficult to make a stable realm when you know what you're doing, and in CK2 that's a lot of the focus in the game. Civ is a "build up your empire among several similar others" type game.

Yeah, what I mean is not having cities having anything that would require their own management screen.