Rob Zacny

Episode 302: The 4X Genre

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Have you ever felt unable to articulate the gnawing doubt that paws at your mind as you play another 4X strategy game? Wondered at the tickle of weariness that plays at your mind as you once again discover Iron and go about the tedious work of upgrading your troops to Swordsman? Have you sighed deeply, closing out yet another Civilization run a mere five hours in, knowing that you'll never come back to it, finding it easier to start again on a vast, unspoiled continent before the crushing weight of despair will once again drive your game to a close?

 

If so, this is the show for you! Rob and Troy are joined by game designer David Heron and freelance writer Austin Walker to talk about 4X games as a whole - what works, what doesn't, and why every damn conversation circles back to people looking for another Masters of Orion game.

 


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Excellent episode!  I too was once in love with Civ but have not been able to summon the interest to play more than a few hours of Beyond Earth and Endless Legend.  On the other hand, I absolutely love 4x board games like Eclipse, Twilight Imperium, Runewars, etc.  Even Risk if you can call it a 4x.  I'm not sure what the problem is, but I can try to rattle off a few possibilities:

 

  • Social interaction.  In a board game each empire has a friend behind it, making conquering and allying vastly more meaningful.
  • Simpler/faster. Board games distill things down to simple, elegant, barebones systems.  Turns go faster, you reach "Level 16" much faster.
  • Dice rolling.  Rolling dice yourself is much more fun that letting the computer do it.
  • Larger start location differences?  This may just be my perception, but there are massive differences between starting positions in Eclipse or even Risk. In theory the start location matters a lot in Civ and Endless Legend...but does it really?  The maps are so large and you can claim so much territory it all seems to average out in the end.  When you only have 3 or 4 hexes in Eclipse, the nature of those hexes matters a great deal.
  • Random techs.  Video games never seem to use random technology availability.  I think this is a great mechanic that makes each play unique.  In Eclipse the available techs are random, and players compete for them.  In Civ you can just follow the same optimal tech path every game...gets old fast.

 

So, those are just a few ideas.  A more general problem is that 4X video games are really little more than giant, super complex boardgames.  They don't really leverage the benefits of the medium (audio and video) except for making things more complicated and doing a lot of math for you.  The result is a very slow, solitary boardgame.  Series like Heroes of Might and Magic or Total War make better use of the medium, in my opinion.  HoMM is essentially just a boargame, but it has beautiful artwork and animations on large sprites that really bring your armies and towns to life.  Total War has an amazing 3D tactical battle simulation. Endless Legend looks very nice and bears a lot of similarity to HoMM, but the battles don't have nearly as much depth and the unit models are not featured as strongly.

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What a lot of 4X games are missing is focus.  The same problem came up in the "Lost In Space" podcast (ep. 216); we're doing a space 4X, so clearly the player needs to design every ship in their fleet, micromanage colony layout, micromanage a research department that spans many stars and yet can only research one thing at a time, hey, what if we make the player manage ground combat too!...

 

I think ultimately Gods & Kings and Brave New World made Civilization 5 a worse game, for example.  All they really added was more plates to keep spinning.  What it needed was something to take you away from your immediate concerns; a goal to make you stretch yourself, like perhaps something valuable you can only seize by building a far-off colony.  Instead, they added things that force you to expend nearly all your efforts tuning your victory point engine.

 

Tuning a victory point engine is fun in a boardgame where the problems are caused by the cunning of your friends.  In a video game where it's all AIs and automated systems causing the problems, you need something more.

 

One of the best 4X games I recall playing was Armada 2525.  Not the recent Armada 2526, but the original DOS game, which was completely different.  It had a smaller scale, fairly simple and understandable mechanics, and played fairly fast.  It was lots of fun, you always felt like you were making meaningful decisions, and it never felt like you were spending all your time making a purple bar fill faster than every other player's purple bar so you could win a "culture victory" or whatever the designer calls "my victory points crossed the win threshold before anyone else's".

 

I think it's the problem that Bruce has articulated in the past; it's now so easy to build massively complicated games that it takes real restraint to build a game well scaled to human intellect and enjoyment.  It's all to easy to quadruple the size of the map, or allow thousands or millions of units to take the field.

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Right, Rob also raises that point (that 4Xs tend to overload you with tools that mostly become useless upon picking one of many victory conditions) and I think it's certainly true.  But I wonder about that in terms of BNW... primarily because of how the trade route refocused much of my attention to the map again (instead of damn research agreement and the really basic diplomacy that the series has), so see BNW as positive addition to CiV.  I find civ games at their best when I interact with it on tile/map basis, and worse in pretty much every other windows like diplomacy, espionage and tech.

 

Same with EU4, except for EU4, I find the strength of the series in diplomacy and weakest in actual war waging.  While HoI series (another series I adore), deals with actual war fighting really well but diplomacy has always been lacking.  But the focus for both EU4 and HoI to me has been pretty clear so I appreciate the surprisingly focused game design despite their enormous scope in both mechanics and theme.

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I think it might be for the best if critics were to retire the term 4X. Because when designers and audiences start thinking about games as 4X games, I think that adds all this unnecessary baggage that removes us further away from what made games like the original Civ and Alpha Centauri special.

 

One of the things that I really admire about historical war games is that a lot of these games are grounded in actual research about these conflicts, and the best war games have a sort of historical thesis to make expressed through game mechanics. I'd like to see that sort of spirit and inspirations followed through to the vast array of non-military historical subjects. When a new 4X game shows up you can be sure that there isn't any kind of larger point to be made, it is the product of people playing previous 4X games and deciding to make another iteration of one. So by all means people should be working on games about revolution in India, or diplomacy among the Italian states in 1400, and there should be all sorts of scopes for these games from as epic a scale as Paradox's games, to a single day in the streets of Madrid as its citizens clash with Napolean's forces on May 2nd. And lets not stick to being 4X games, lets just have more historical strategy games. And hopefully these games will be provocative, and have interesting things to say (and be fun to play).

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Great episode.

The discussion at the end about what a grand-strategy game which expresses something besides the perspective of colonialism would look like was especially interesting. I enjoyed hearing y'all discuss whether this will come from a commercial entity or from passion-projects of hobbyists. It will come.

I know it's a crude analogy, but it seems like strategy-gaming is waiting for its Minecraft. Eventually a small developer will realize that computational power has made the fantasy of what they've always wanted a grand-strategy to be, possible. Isn't the dream to play one of these games in a world where the other nations consist of alliances between tribes that can be manipulated? And that each one of those tribes be not only interesting in itself, but also in how it mixes with is nation? That's the game I'm waiting for anyway. I think that some small developer is probably going to tackle this with clever procedural-generation and genetic-algorithm A.I. and concise priorities. The U.I. in MineCraft was and continues to be shitty, but it doesn't make a difference if the fantasy is realized for the first time.

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This was a very good episode. Austin was a thoughtful and interesting guest, and I look forward to more from him. Thanks also to David for providing a really nice jumping off point. 

 

While I really like 4Xs, my secret confession is that I have only ever finished one game. Of anything. I think it was Civ 3. The RPG analogy worked perfectly for me. I love character creation and the scope of possibilities way more than I like the fiddly business of managing a large empire. For me, though, with no real interest in an end game, character creation is founding cities. I love exploring the map and picking out my city spots. I like the tension of getting the good spots before the other civs do, and figuring out exactly which tiles my future city could grow into. Even if... well, even if it never actually does.

 

My ambivalence about the mid game might stem from a strange curse I seem to have. Something about the way I play seems to make the AI passive. Across multiple games. I want to trade and form alliances and get dragged into wars and have all those fun interactions. But in games I play no one seems to want to attack me, or ally with me. Also, none of the AI seems to want to interact with the other AI either. You get peaceful, but ultimately boring games. 

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Great episode, many interesting points.

 

Indeed, Paradox games often feel like midgame cut out of some Civilization game. Most of the world is already inhabited, powers are established - but it rarely reaches point when some single power can control everything. On the other hand it means you have to already be experienced player to "get" those games: Civilization and similar games start you with a single city/unit and complexity rises gradually, in EU4/CK2 you may start as a big country and will be immediately buried under mechanics and details - and if you start your first game as something manageable like Ulm you will soon be exterminated. This is important point in 4X popularity: even 1st time player envisions his future great empire while he only has to do simple tasks like scouting and choosing between granary and barracks.

 

Great point about mods - and the same can be said about indie games. I know Arcen games have unique mechanics. Some of them are highly replayable. And they're relatively cheap. But still I have Civ4 and Civ5 and I know those games have great UX, they're balanced by millions of testing hours and they have community patches to balance and enhance them even more. I know that I should take Civ4 or similar game to uninhabited island - by the way, what do you think one should take? Some breakthrough indie titles like AI War may get fan support and years of testing, balancing and enhancing the game. The Last Federation will probably get the same treatment. But I know that most of those small games like Star Rulers, Star Drives etc will only be interesting as exploring new game mechanics - and most probably those mechanics would be remake of MoO2 because we can't make space 4X without remaking MoO2, can we? So you get a glorified tutorial, which is only nice in case of games like Endless series - the ones with good UI and great aesthetics. As Robert had said, we are not even sure if this is a good strategy. Mods and indie games are guaranteed to not be "good strategies", even the most developed ones like Fall from Heaven 2 do not even pretend they have competitive AI.

 

So perhaps gamers like Robert Zacny - the ones who are great players able to quickly see through mechanics and "understand" and "win" complex games much sooner than average players - may have time for mods and small games. Or players who particulary interested in franchises like Star Wars/Trek can delve into some thematic mods. We simple mortals have those great games that take hundreds of hours to feel "completed".

 

And perhaps this is why genre does not evolve. You could play 100 hours in Half-Life and its clones and you got fed up, you master all those systems and after that it's all about patience and reaction and perhaps psychology. This is why Half Life 2 coming just 5 years later differs from its predecessor more than Civ5 differs from Civ1 which came out 20 years before.

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Great episode, finally made me sign up here.

 

As a Civ4 modder (moreso than player by now) it's a topic I am particularly invested in. I'm often frustrated with my own mod because I'm always running into the trappings of its own genre.

 

I think the comparison with Paradoxian grand strategy games is a really good point. The strength of this type of game is that they are usually rooted in one specific (historical) setting and can focus all of its mechanics and modeling this setting in an engaging way. This is why EU4 is a great game for its era, but the downside is that it breaks down once you reach the Napoleonic era. 4X games are usually much bigger in scope. Civ is about all of human history, MoO is about the fate of an entire starfaring civilization and so on.

 

I am happy that Troy brought up the "you start with one thing" characteristic, because I think that's what draws people to 4X games. You aren't just dumped into a historically inspired map, there's an entire map for you to explore and shape to your liking. Grand strategy games can't do that. That's probably what draws people to this type of game, and telling from some comments it's apparently the only aspect that some players like, with the following stages being kind of an annoying afterthought you have to get through to earn your victory screen.

 

(As an aside, why is it that victory screens are always so unsatisfying? (I'm looking at you Endless Legend) It's almost as if even the developers don't care about finishing the game. Or they have realized that many people don't and don't want to sink development time into it.)

 

From a game design perspective though, it means that this initial stage has to matter. This is where you get the snowball effect. The early stage is also interesting because you know that if you are doing well in the settlement stage, the game is basically set as a win. If you don't, it'll be hard to impossible to get out of the situation. I also feel that 4X games make this snowballing effect worse because of how they view territory and technology. The more territory, the better. The more technologically advanced, the better. This makes for a very one track minded game where you will always seek to maximize these, and everything else doesn't really matter. You basically have to snowball. If you fail, you might as well quit the game. If you succeed, it's a boring click through - or you just quit anyways, this time with the expectation of winning anyway. It's hard to design a compelling end game if you are up against this paradigm.

 

On the other hand, grand strategy games are all about limiting your snowballing options. There's the whole idea of limited wars and negotiated territorial acquisition. If you try to blob, you have to be careful or there will be diplomatic push back. Wars are costly, in terms of money and manpower, and even if you are powerful you can run into situations where they become unaffordable. Technology is not tied to your empire size. This is why the game can stay compelling for much longer, and why you can play on even when there is a temporary setback. Because the setback doesn't stop the snowballing in its tracks.

 

I don't see why 4X games cannot learn from grand strategy games more. Systems like limited wars and a more nuanced diplomacy with shifting alliances can certainly be appropriated in some way. But it means challenging some tropes associated with 4X games, and currently it doesn't seem as if anyone is really interested in doing that. Creative people with that mindset (too bad that you didn't get to have Soren Johnson on the show by the way!) seem to have abandoned the genre for greener pastures, probably just because it is so stale. To be honest, the genre is in kind of a weird state right now. On the one hand, I'm surprised how many of these games have come out in the last months for such a niche genre. On the other hand, it's kind of sad how uninspired they are. From a visual perspective alone it's kind of depressive how much Endless Legend or Pandora look like Civ5. I feel like these developers are more interested in fitting a setting on an existing game system than doing any substantial game design.

 

I could probably continue on criticizing Civ5 and Endless Legend for how bland they really are, but this post has already rambled on for too long I think.

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Great episode!

 

  • While the term 4x maybe isn´t very good, I found out that, the fact in this games everyone start with a single to a few units and explore around is good way to keep some distinction.
     
  • It was already said, that unlike grand strategy games where the world is already habited and much about the game is relationships between powers. In 4x you have this huge empty map with a single/few units, but I believe there is afew more differences: The middle to late problems in gameplay in 4x I think came from both space limitatios (the AI might not have enough space to recover, even in space 4x, where maps are larger, they still constricted by lanes, which mean that factions can be still be keep under control) and victorion conditions (depending of the kind of conditions and how they work the player have no reason to have much allies or let anyone became powerful, also as the player came grow the other side potential danger diminish) and number of players (many 4x games can have not so much factions in comparsion to a grand strategy game, which mean is easier for the player keep everyone in check). This three things might lead to the eventual clean up phase, where there isn´t no longer dangers to the player (they no longer have space or numbers to oppose) no climax or tension. Meanwhile in grand strategy games have the larger space (which mean the AI can came back or new power can step up) higher numbers (the player can´t keep everyone in check) and often intentional lack of victory conditions (which mean the player isn´t forced to put with everybody out of the way or risk losing the game).
     
  • I loved the part where you guys talked about faction design/concept, so many games could improve on that. I do confess I did loss interess in more that one 4x game do lack or weak faction design (this appear to happen a lot in space themed 4x, where alien designs might be visual good but many times not, their gameplay often, and also, feel flat and hollow, the greatest exemple still MOO3, with things like begins which live inside gas giants, that play exactly as everyone else which often mean they do a lot of stuff which make no sense).
     
  • On faction design, aside everything already said about Endless Legend, I got to say that Age of Wonders III proves that even using classic troopes, you still can have something that is really good and still feel unique.
     
  • By the way, Age of Wonders (any of the three games) are really good fantasy 4x, with a few twists, such the maps have already other cities around.
     
  • I would really like to see this episode about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while I haven´t played much the strategy titles, so hard to find, lately I see myself turn a Dynasty Warrior fan and really like the story. Talking about it, maybe one thing strategy games could use is have so much character like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and use them well as in the story (to reflect the different generations, height the sense of drama, ect...)

     

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I enjoyed this episode. I've recently been playing a lot of Civ4, wanting something different than my usual Football Manager/EU4/CK2 comfort food so it was kind of topical for me.

 

The point made that the moment of peak enjoy in a 4X being well before the victory condition, around when your continent has been explored, your cities have been pretty much all built, and your engine is up and running seems right to me, though I hadn't thought of it before. In Civ4 I'd put that point at the discovery of Liberalism - the free technology is something to shoot for, my cities will have all the buildings that I prioritize building up to that point, and the rest of the game begins to feel like a slog of building backlogged/ low-priority improvements, slowly fighting wars, and gradually moving towards the victory conditions.

 

 

 I find civ games at their best when I interact with it on tile/map basis, and worse in pretty much every other windows like diplomacy, espionage and tech.

 

Same with EU4, except for EU4, I find the strength of the series in diplomacy and weakest in actual war waging.  

 

 

I hadn't thought of this before either (I guess I don't do a lot of thinking), but I would agree completely. Civ is absolutely all about interacting with the tile/map and CK2 and EU4 are more about interacting with the other powers, rather that be fellow nobles or nation-states.

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I hadn't thought of this before either (I guess I don't do a lot of thinking), but I would agree completely. Civ is absolutely all about interacting with the tile/map and CK2 and EU4 are more about interacting with the other powers, rather that be fellow nobles or nation-states.

 

To be fair, it's not a completely original assessment by me... it's based off something Soren said XD

 

Soren if you read this, just to let you know, I think you are so smart.

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One of the interesting ideas that is never questioned in 4x games is the idea of the seperate city/planet screen that has its own development.  For all the talk about tactical combat, I wonder if this is "tactical management".  Ideally, I would enjoy seeing a civ game where you could play entirely on the map itself, where you see the meat of the 4x's strength, maybe pawning off city improvements to tiles on the map or even doing something different than having cities be the centerpiece.

 

It seems kind of..  redundant to have all these improvements you build in this seperate screen, while you also have improvements you build on the map.

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But that's already in?  For example, in civilization games, you have buildings in your city (city management) and then tile improvements which can be shared by cities and reflects more of empire scale.  The two intermingle (buildings influence tile yield and vice versa), but that's same as how tactical battle influences your strategic war situation by killing units, etc.

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But that's already in?  For example, in civilization games, you have buildings in your city (city management) and then tile improvements which can be shared by cities and reflects more of empire scale.  The two intermingle (buildings influence tile yield and vice versa), but that's same as how tactical battle influences your strategic war situation by killing units, etc.

 

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

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

 

That's fallen out of favor in computerized 4x games, but it's not unheard of.  In Warlock, for instance, your city improvements occupy hexes on the main map.  Dark Wizard, Master of Monsters, Brigandine and the like moved their economics/force management to an inter-battle screen similar to Dawn of War: Soulstorm, but they were turn-based hexmap strategy games.  At least some versions of Warlords had a simple enough city management UI that it could be up while the map was still up, and only really took over the screen for production vectoring.

 

If I was working on a 4x, city management is one of the things I'd probably look to reduce in complexity.  There's a really good 4x game waiting to be made for the first person/team who can boil the genre down to its essentials.

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That's fallen out of favor in computerized 4x games, but it's not unheard of.  In Warlock, for instance, your city improvements occupy hexes on the main map.  Dark Wizard, Master of Monsters, Brigandine and the like moved their economics/force management to an inter-battle screen similar to Dawn of War: Soulstorm, but they were turn-based hexmap strategy games.  At least some versions of Warlords had a simple enough city management UI that it could be up while the map was still up, and only really took over the screen for production vectoring.

 

If I was working on a 4x, city management is one of the things I'd probably look to reduce in complexity.  There's a really good 4x game waiting to be made for the first person/team who can boil the genre down to its essentials.

 

Have you seen Romance of the Three Kingdoms 11?  I really loved what it did with city from both economic management to combat management, but sadly it was marred by incredibly inept AI, which then got 'fixed' and turned into incredibly cheating AI.

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The biggest problem I've had with the little Civ I've played is that your empire is so stable. You build a city and you're in complete control of it for the rest of the game, unless an enemy takes it over. The people might get unhappy, but that just makes the city less efficient. There's never any threat of rebellion or disagreement or anything. Not only is that mechanically dull, it's also historically ridiculous. One of my favourite things about Crusader Kings is that it emphasizes how tough it is to actually get the things you want done and hold a group of disparate places together. I wish 4X games tried to implement mechanics that rocked the boat a bit more.

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The biggest problem I've had with the little Civ I've played is that your empire is so stable. You build a city and you're in complete control of it for the rest of the game, unless an enemy takes it over. The people might get unhappy, but that just makes the city less efficient. There's never any threat of rebellion or disagreement or anything. Not only is that mechanically dull, it's also historically ridiculous. One of my favourite things about Crusader Kings is that it emphasizes how tough it is to actually get the things you want done and hold a group of disparate places together. I wish 4X games tried to implement mechanics that rocked the boat a bit more.

 

I mean, what I immediately think about the game sclpls linked is that China's history is not one of dramatic military expansion but one of sustained cultural influence, diplomatic hegemony, and occasional internal disturbances. I really hope that OE Devs (their business name, which unfortunately must be Oriental Empires Developers) is able to come up with a series of systems that reward stability, conservatism, and tradition in players' strategies... but, of course, I'm not optimistic. I remember clyde and I talking for days about what a postcolonial Civilization would look like and coming up with almost nothing. It's hard to think outside of the box, and I don't know if decades of training and experience make it easier or harder.

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@tberton,

 

That's kind of apple and orange comparison though, isn't it?  I adore CK2 for what it achieved and how unique it is but it's also really poor when it comes to handling anything not inter-personal relationships.  But I wouldn't fault CK2 for that because the game just isn't about war or managing abstract empire.  While Civ has piss poor people management, it makes a really good game out of empire management from more of strict resource-territory sense.  I think they are alike as much as Mario Kart is to Forza series or something.

 

@Gormongous,

 

I'm not sure how I should feel about Oriental Empires myself, because it's trying to cover 3000 years of history which includes both the Warring State and Three Kingdoms era, both ripe with materials to make good distinct strategy games out of... so to just wrap all that timeline into one game doesn't sound too good.

 

I mean, I get that Civ series does exactly that, but then again Civ games never tried to pass itself off as anything but absurd in terms of scale and detail and embraced that pretty openly by abstracting the hell out of everything.  But this game... focusing on one region, which implies specific vision, then to wrap up 3000 years of it in one go, sounds extremely conflicting.

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The biggest problem I've had with the little Civ I've played is that your empire is so stable. You build a city and you're in complete control of it for the rest of the game, unless an enemy takes it over. The people might get unhappy, but that just makes the city less efficient. There's never any threat of rebellion or disagreement or anything. Not only is that mechanically dull, it's also historically ridiculous. One of my favourite things about Crusader Kings is that it emphasizes how tough it is to actually get the things you want done and hold a group of disparate places together. I wish 4X games tried to implement mechanics that rocked the boat a bit more.

 

That is very true, now Civ kind tried to solve that by having random events in Civ 4, but their event were either meaningless, as such small buff/penalty that you won´t notice or annoying, such the one which you can handle a citiy to another neighbor faction, which not only you had no reason do to it, but it was very easy to accidently give them the city and having to reload again.

 

Paradox games solved that (maybe not perfectly but they did), where as you said the world felt more alive, because everything is much less stable, not ony for you but for the computer too, therefore even playing the same country the way things will unfollow is different.

 

Guys, this Oriental Empires does look interessing. Nice move to go for the historical approach, but I have lot of fear because their timeframe is just too big (1500 BC to 1500 AD) and there is so much stuff to cover that I worry that it might simple lack a sense of character (or even character at all and this might cost somewhat flavor, just remember how one thing that make the Romance of the Three Kingdoms unique is it huge cast of characters) or eveyrthing might felt slight bland (I don´t know if this make sense, but anyone remember how Empire Earth had gazillions of eras, but many of them where bland of felt empty?) or the project just begin over ambitious (now I remember Rob once saying that often wargames try to cover everything). Still I definitly kept this on the radar because it does liook really good.

 

Since we are talking about this, did anyone remember that Gamergate (the website!) had this game Sango 2 (www.gamersgate.com/DD-SANGO2/sango-2) which look like Total War Shogun 1 and Medieval 1 and a bit like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms 11? there is even a Takeda 3 (which is almost like Sango but in Japan) and a Strenght and Honor (which I think cover more the western world on the same engine). Never played or heard much about this games.

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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.

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@tberton,

 

That's kind of apple and orange comparison though, isn't it?  I adore CK2 for what it achieved and how unique it is but it's also really poor when it comes to handling anything not inter-personal relationships.  But I wouldn't fault CK2 for that because the game just isn't about war or managing abstract empire.  While Civ has piss poor people management, it makes a really good game out of empire management from more of strict resource-territory sense.  I think they are alike as much as Mario Kart is to Forza series or something.

 

Sorry, maybe I should have been clearer. I'm not trying to say that CK2 is better than Civ because it focuses more on people. I'm saying that I think a big part of why 4X games kind of feel stale design-wise and ahistorical when they use historical themes is that things are far too stable. CK2 is just the first example I had at had of a game that introduces instability. A 4X game wouldn't necessarily need to introduce instability the same way that CK2 does, but I would like to see somebody try something.

 

Also, thanks for linking that thread Gormongous. There seems to be some really good discussion in there that I'm excited to dive into.

 

EDIT: And apparently I participated in that thread and completely forgot about it. HA!

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Also, thanks for linking that thread Gormongous. There seems to be some really good discussion in there that I'm excited to dive into.

 

EDIT: And apparently I participated in that thread and completely forgot about it. HA!

 

I apparently was a lot more passionate and articulate immediately after my comps two years ago. A lot of amazing things were being said in that thread, some of them from me, though I don't know how I came to say them that well.

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