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Rob Zacny

Episode 304: Star Drive 2

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MoO-ve over, other space 4X games -- Star Drive 2 is here and ready to impress. Fraser Brown (it's definitely Fraser this time) and Rob discuss the finer points of perpetuating genocide on a mass scale for the best reason possible: a lack of any other viable option. Star Drive 2 improves on the original and brings a ship building module that Rob actually enjoys, a feat not seen since GalCiv2 which is only accurate because I am writing this summary and Rob is not. Also, Endless Space is a great game. Love, Michael.

 

Listen here.

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The discussion about victory conditions was rather interesting. I haven't played Stardrive or Stardrive 2, primarily because everything I've read says that it's all about conquering enemy empires, and that doesn't hold my interest for very long. But I have played Endless Space, GalCiv, and Sins, and they all have a similar issue in my view.
 
Usually there are three basic victory conditions for space 4X games. You can conquer your enemies, form some grand alliance or accrue relationship points with your enemies, or beat your enemies to the end of the tech tree. And while certain factions might have attributes that lend themselves to one victory type or another, such as the Amoebas in ES being able to see the entire map or the Advent just pumping out culture like nobody's business, every game eventually falls into the same pattern because you find yourself needing a certain-sized economy to remain competitive for any of these victory conditions. Vanilla Civ V probably had the most interesting change from this with the Utopia victory condition, where a relatively small hermit kingdom could win the game because culture was slowed down by having big, sprawling empires. But by and large, you just want to get super-huge and steamroller everything either through your military might, your technological prowess, or bribing them.
 
What if factions had specific victory scenarios that only they could fulfill? If you have specific rare resources that are randomly generated on maps, perhaps not spawning at all, or specific mixes of technologies that unlock certain victory conditions, wouldn't that offer more variety in games and victories and extend the replayability of the game?
 

If we use Endless Space as an example, what if civilizations with the Pilgrims Affinity gain a new victory condition if the Shipyards of Ys are found on the map that allows them to build a Puppeteer-like interstellar vessel if they research specific technologies, uncover specific non-standard resources, and populate the "vessel" with their Pilgrim ships? Or if the Empire Affinity unlocked a specific diplomatic victory condition where the player has to engage with internal diplomacy events and factions to gain the Imperial Throne, and other players could see the progress of this Imperial quest as random event popups. But make these victory conditions reliant on the map generation or rival factions in the game, so that players cannot just pursue these unique or semi-unique victory conditions in every single game like the generic victory conditions, so that when players do find themselves able to roleplay as these factions, it feels good and special, that this isn't just an ordinary thing.


 
It might not be a good idea, especially not if it's too complex for game AIs to deal with or steps on some principle of faction design, but I think having interesting victory conditions would extend the replayability and excitement of a lot of these 4X games. And I apologize if this has been dealt with in the 4X podcast; I haven't gotten around to listening to that one yet.
 
Calling back to a prior podcast,, it was rather amusing to hear them discussing the moral weight of all these galaxy-spanning wars and the potential genocide players are committing with every other click. Ethics in strategy games indeed.

Did the space mollusks really have enough character that Rob and Fraser really just didn't want to wipe them off the face of the galaxy when they were just a single planet with no resources but wouldn't accept a "fair" peace deal or have the ability to become vassals? I know that in Civ V, I always wipe out my enemies because if you don't you just create somebody who absolutely hates your guts and will denounce you at every opportunity, possibly forge alliances against you with other rivals, compete for influence with city-states, and oppose every resolution you make at the World Congress. It's just way more convenient to destroy them.


 
What is it that makes the idea of having vassal protectorates so much more satisfying than destroying the enemy civilization and just making their people part of you empire? Is it really a moral issue, or is it more for the pride of seeing your former enemies bow down to you?
 
Should games have some reward for players who promote peace or show mercy? Would that make it too easy to game the system if you just declare war for a turn then sue for peace?
 
More generally, does anything drive players to seek peace in these games other than the nuisance factor?

 

It seems like in the highly advanced future of these space empire builders, there is only war.

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I'm keeping eye on StarDrive 2 and hoping to get it once I get bored of Endless Legend (realistic) and Civilization 4 (not realistic) or it's on sale (very realistic).

 

I'm kind of surprised it has no alternative victory conditions. Isn't there a rule 4X should have those? How can you copy Master of Orion and miss this important feature? 

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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.

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I do admit that one of my issues with Star Drive is that the atempts of humor and some faction design do kept me at the bay.

 

Also given the size of maps and the large time of play, maybe space 4x should have some kind of armistice/surrender mechanic to avoid the endgame anticlimax situation, where you have nothing elso to do but the "clean up phase" where all you do is facing enemies that simple have no more to challenge you but also are still to spread around which turn the whole thing a busy work. Maybe if a game make that soon as some large power are emerging, smaller ones, will flock to one side or another becoming like vassals/allies, so your end game is showdown between huge power and their allies. Also a victory condition, that make possible to you win as someone vassal would be fun.

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I do admit that one of my issues with Star Drive is that the atempts of humor and some faction design do kept me at the bay.

 

Also given the size of maps and the large time of play, maybe space 4x should have some kind of armistice/surrender mechanic to avoid the endgame anticlimax situation, where you have nothing elso to do but the "clean up phase" where all you do is facing enemies that simple have no more to challenge you but also are still to spread around which turn the whole thing a busy work. Maybe if a game make that soon as some large power are emerging, smaller ones, will flock to one side or another becoming like vassals/allies, so your end game is showdown between huge power and their allies. Also a victory condition, that make possible to you win as someone vassal would be fun.

 

Yeah, I think lot of 4X games just doesn't know when to call it quits actually.  They could probably benefit from having more 'time-aggressive' victory conditions that creep up on you faster.

 

About the latter, recent Total War games did that and I really like the concept, but the executions have always been bit shoddy.

 

It's been a while since I played those so I hope my memory is correct on these...

 

Shogun 2 did the infamous 'Realm Divided' thing where once you reach certain size, everyone got huge diplomacy penalty with you so they just form this giant AI bloc... makes perfect sense as far as escalating challenge and 'gaming the victory condition' goes, and I actually liked it (it was bit too harsh but still) but it got lot of hate.  Fall of the Samurai fixed it up a bit and now you get an option to pick one of 3 sides (Emperor, Shogunate, or Republic (you vs everyone)) which I think fixed up the brutal aspect of original 'Realm Divided' but the idea of it being a switch rather than something you build toward throughout the game felt off.  Rome 2 was a fucking mess with the game firing this Civil War event where it creates a new faction that starts off next to one of your city with like 9 full stacks of armies... the game swore you could avoid this with careful management of politics but nope, it always happened (and this got patched in one of latest patch).  This was on top of so many other issues so that just freaking bombed the game for me completely.  It was so bad that I still didn't get Atilla.

 

EU4's coalition mechanic is much more organic variation of this, but that too gets tons of hate from the players.  But I think that has more to do with the way EU4 handles war demands and how coalitions lock you out really badly there.  And EU4 technically suffers just as much with its end game, but it gets away with it by not having any explicit 'victory condition' so players are not discouraged to just quit out whenever things get bit boring.  And the scope of the game is big enough that it offers lot of 'fresh starts' for players to mix it up with.

 

HOWEVER, EU4 is game of diplomacy, not war-fighting... like if you just rip EU4's diplomacy and planted on more war focused games like Star Drive 2 or Total War games, I think both diplomacy and war-fighting will suffer greatly.  But then again, I haven't played that title Fraser Brown adores (one that is pretty much mixed version many different genre and all of them seem to have equal face time?) so maybe I'm just wrong on this?

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I do admit that one of my issues with Star Drive is that the atempts of humor and some faction design do kept me at the bay.

 

Also given the size of maps and the large time of play, maybe space 4x should have some kind of armistice/surrender mechanic to avoid the endgame anticlimax situation, where you have nothing elso to do but the "clean up phase" where all you do is facing enemies that simple have no more to challenge you but also are still to spread around which turn the whole thing a busy work. Maybe if a game make that soon as some large power are emerging, smaller ones, will flock to one side or another becoming like vassals/allies, so your end game is showdown between huge power and their allies. Also a victory condition, that make possible to you win as someone vassal would be fun.

I think Civ IV did get a good handle on this, where you could vassalize the weaker AI towards the end of the game due to how much better you were than they were. It really helped streamline that end phase down to maybe you and the next two biggest opponents, and was actually useful for making the AI a little more challenging since your enemies could also create vassals. I don't know why this basically disappeared after Civ IV though.

 

 

I'm keeping eye on StarDrive 2 and hoping to get it once I get bored of Endless Legend (realistic) and Civilization 4 (not realistic) or it's on sale (very realistic).

 

I'm kind of surprised it has no alternative victory conditions. Isn't there a rule 4X should have those? How can you copy Master of Orion and miss this important feature? 

Tech and Diplomacy victories are a little weird in general. Most of the time you're just researching your way down the entire tech tree, and with how Stardrive 2 handles tech, with the cool branches thing, it'd be hard to set up a Tech Victory unless it was just about researching or acquiring a certain amount of tech points. As for Diplomacy, I guess there isn't a "UN" that you can win in Stardrive 2, so any diplomatic victory would require a lot more time fiddling with the diplomacy mechanics that clearly weren't what Zero Sum wanted to focus on.

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Early CiV AI just gobbled up other smaller AIs really fast, which actually made them super strong (stronger than having vassals would have) but people didn't like it because for example, on continents end game boiled down to you vs one large AI, with each having complete control over respective starting continent.  It was more 'challenging', but it wasn't that interesting.

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Yeah I do agree about the Realm Divide, because I could see what they where trying to do, to simulate the division between Tokugawa and Mitsunari with vassals going to one side or another, until you had the western and eastern armies, but as you said it was flag rather that a organic system. However, with small adjusts (to make long time allies don´t change sides when the flag goes up) it kind worked and was fun. I am not 100% sure, but I haven´t see a civil war like in Rome 2 in Attila, the closest thing I see as a much smaller scale when a general lost too much loyalty.

 

EU IV, have the advantage of lacking victory conditions, which allow you more room play in different style, like someone ally/vassal. Which I think once Bruce Garyk said, so you don´t have to play going straight toward a victory condition from the very early start llike in civ 5 per exemple.

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Yeah I do agree about the Realm Divide, because I could see what they where trying to do, to simulate the division between Tokugawa and Mitsunari with vassals going to one side or another, until you had the western and eastern armies, but as you said it was flag rather that a organic system. However, with small adjusts (to make long time allies don´t change sides when the flag goes up) it kind worked and was fun.

 

It was still a very ugly system, even modded so that it wasn't a ridiculous "everyone vs. the player" scenario. The vanilla system was a creeping opinion modifier that eventually topped out at -200 (absolute hatred), but the best mod that tried to fix it just flipped it and made it a -100 modifier that slowly decreased over time, so that strong alliances would survive the opinion hit but not much else.

 

My ideal system for "realm divide" would combine the basic concept with some kind of player-designated sphere of interest, which the AI could use to calculate whether or not it was threatened by the player, since actions outside of a player's sphere would be heavily punished with opinion penalties or unrest modifiers. It's weird that, of all the strategy games I've played, only Victoria 2 makes much of an effort to present a player-facing system of spheres, and even then it's just another system where the player invests points to "claim" a country in a different way. EU4 actually has a sphere system too, but it's entirely subsumed in AI calculations about whether or not they hate the player.

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EU4 actually has a sphere system too, but it's entirely subsumed in AI calculations about whether or not they hate the player.

 

Hmmmm separation of threatened vs hate... very intriguing!

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Never said it was perfect. Good points, yeah that sudden -200 opinion was ugly. But, sorry I may not been very clear, when I mean adjustments, I mean not only what could be possible by mods, but in the theory too. Anyway, in my experiences playing, I had both the ugly game breaking situations and the times when kind "worked" (with lots of commas), because I guess  much is how the current campaign state is when it unfolds. When it "worked", the campaign was at a point, where there wasn´t much factions left, therefore, the player vs all wasn´t so bad and mod allow me kept my allies, also it created situations, where in order to avoid I had find other ways to face enemies while still building my strenght.

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Yeah, I think lot of 4X games just doesn't know when to call it quits actually.  They could probably benefit from having more 'time-aggressive' victory conditions that creep up on you faster.

 

Shogun 2 did the infamous 'Realm Divided' ...

 

The problem was that all your diplomacy up until the Shogun 2 divided realm meant nothing after it. You could play an effective game with several loyal and useful vassal clans, and after the event no one would stay with you. This was such an immersion break. But it was so close to being an acceptable way to bring about the endgame. Although in that respect it probably came to early, which is when you had, needed and valued your vassals, which is why it grated so much.

 

 

Historically in war, most of the time people were not seeking to genocidally conquer another state. War was instead fought to take territory, which equalled resources, and population. There was little need to kill the subject population, provided they were not rebellious. Generally empires were pretty ruthless to rebellious subjects.

 

Likewise, many weaker states throughout the ages 'signed up' to become vassals & allies of powerful neighbours our of fears for their survival. video games, the victory conditions and Video game players do not usually make much of simply surviving. I will agree that Paradox has this well covered, although then it becomes an issue of 'what is winning?'

 

Its difficult to find an outcome regarding diplomacy and peaceful colaborative victory conditions that is useful for the game and acceptable for the player. Consider this example: I cannot imagine a Video game player, playing as WW2 Britain, would accept an alliance with the USA which basically boiled down to "We'll win you the war, but you have to give up your Empire." They'd rather hit "new game." I'd rather hit new game.

 

Its interesting that most video games (about futuristic space warfare) exist in a pre-MAD intellectual arena. Nuclear weapons changed the rules in such that it became meaningless for the most powerful nations of the day to face off in fights for territory. Probably because its not very gamey, and peace is not as exciting as "action!". But conversely, this makes diplomacy vitally important.

 
Final note, the 'incomprehensible genocidal unrelenting destroyer aliens' (eg. Aliens, Tyranids, Yuzang vong, Orcs, whatever) are a standard trope; they dont have to play with diplomatic rules.

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I wonder why in this podcast were mentioned games like Galactic Civilizations 2, Endless Space, Endless Legend, Sins of a Solar Empire that fail to have either a detailed unit design system or detailed tactical combat (or neither).

At least you've cited Master of Orion 2 (for obvious reasons) and Distant Worlds, but where's the mention of actual ship design and real-time tactical combat focused games like Sword of the Stars 1 (and 2) and Space Empires 5 (and 4)? (and Star Ruler 1&2 as well...) Or even Alpha Centauri...

 

These games I just cited also generally aren't really good in the diplomacy part (because their focus is on warfare).

 

It's funny that you talk about ethics in a combat-focused 4X game... isn't it a bit like talking about the ethics of killing people in a first-person shooter? I wonder if the game being "funny" and a bit "self-aware" didn't actually work pretty well in that aspect, as the contrast between the tone and what was actually happening made yourself wonder about the ethics of genociding or enslaving whole species...

 

As for the "tolerance" mechanic - I feel it serves more the purpose of preventing tech brokering, which is generally a big issue in 4X games that allow it.

 

I feel empire management is well made in SD2 (though there's a lack of tools - but the game is rather small scale, so it's not much an issue until mid-late game). If you feel that it doesn't really change anything you're probably not playing at a high enough difficulty level. Opteris have a very different set of constraints than Humans for instance. That's also where game re-playability comes from, it feels a lot like Endless Space actually in this aspect (and in the game mechanics employed).

Colonizing everything might not be a good strategy considering that after a while it will just slow down your research too much. SD2 does seem to be lacking a mechanic allowing you to destroy planets (or making them uninhabitable) for "scorched ground tactics" or to diplomatically tell the AI not to settle there.

 

I'm pretty sure that like in almost all the other 4X games, AI factions barely pay any maintenance costs (it's just really hard to make an AI that doesn't kill itself with maintenance costs otherwise - as they tend to have much bigger military - as again, they aren't generally smart enough to use a few units well).

 

I'd say that ground combat is closer to X-Com than to HoMM, because you have single units with equipment. Also, can you give *any* example of 4X doing tactical ground combat well? It's hard to even find a 4X doing tactical ground combat, and the ones that tried (I'm thinking about Space Empires 5) generally failed badly. So I'd say that ground combat in SD2 is actually very well made, it's just lacking a bit in content that will hopefully come out with updates, expansions, and modding.

 

Many games that came out after Civ4 (2005) have the "surrender" mechanic, I'd say that those that don't are actually pretty rare. Which ones did you have in mind?

 

Space Empires (4 & 5) also has this "Mega Evil Empire" mechanic, where if you get big enough, every other empire will just start declaring war on you...

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I don't personally understand this universal acclaim for Master of Orion 2.  Having played a ton of the first Master of Orion when it came out, I recently tried to get into MOO2 but frankly found the game completely unbearable.  My typical game is about 2 hours of empire building followed by the stark realization that my empire is so backwards compared to all of my neighbours to the point where my fleets get completely slaughtered.

 

My empire typically ends up with one or maybe two hospitable worlds who are so focused on food production to support the mineral rich, but barren or worse worlds I've colonized.  Despite having 70% of my homeworld growing potatoes my worlds are often still starving and all the while so few of my citizens are focused on technology research.  In the early game there's so little exploration, so little to do beyond building things that I found myself just clicking next turn repeatedly waiting for things to happen.

 

If one compares this to Civilization, in the early game of that while your city is trying to build up you have other units like workers imrpoving the area or warriors wandering about exploring and looking for ruins to pillage. In MOO2 there is no such multi-tasking to keep interested. Your explorer ships are sitting idle. Your colonies are waiting to build units, some of which take some 30+ turns to complete.  It's simply boring.

 

And really for a space-faring empire, why would they ever need 70% of their people creating food? In North America the number of people farming is 2 percent. TWO percent. Admittedly world-wide its 60 percent, but that begs the question why an interstellar empire has third-world food production efficiency.  I much preferred the first Master Of Orion's more abstracted representation of worlds and much higher fleet limits which made one feel that they were always building things even if only a stockpile of obsolescent units. Also I rarely found that I was ever unable to at least cause an enemy some trouble in the early game.

 

If Master of Orion 2 is the gold standard for 4X space games, then 4X space games are in a bit of trouble from my perspective.

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