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Rob Zacny

Three Moves Ahead Episode 473: Historical Guardrails

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Three Moves Ahead 473:

Three Moves Ahead 473


Historical Guardrails
Rob, Rowan, TJ, and Sean discuss how "historically" they like their games to play out and whether that wish is incompatibile with player freedom and variety.

Imperator, Three Kingdoms, Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings II, Victoria II, Civilization, Hearts of Iron, Operational Art of War

 

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I think the best historical games stray from simulating history itself but instead focus on circumstances of it all. Someone on the podcast said a similar thing, but not quite.

 

Games like Colonization, Vietnam'65 or Afghanistan'11 - and even Civilization in a way. They don't put nations and armies where they were, they allow you to play your own colonizations or vietnams that follow historical rules but happen on another Earth.

 

Another thing is the level of abstraction. Technically everything that happened in history can happen in Civilization (maybe except the appearance of new civs mid-game) because it operates on a higher level. Weird coups, conquests, rebellions and inheritance systems only work through special events in EU4 and especially CK2. In Civ you can assume all of this happens in the background. Your bonuses when you play as Russia reflect special inheritance system, feudal fragmentation and cultural nuances, but when you play as Russian count in CK2 it's obvious that you don't get real inheritance system or unique government types.

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Great episode guys.  All of your episode are good but I thought this one was special thought provoking.  It was well done in the way everyone walked the line not to come down to hard one way or the other.

 

I feel it is ok to simulate the history into oblivion and always play hoi4 with history lock off.  It gives some very easy and very difficult runs.  All of them interesting and unique but for some you have to suspend disbelief of practicality.  For some and me, I think there's a wider band width for historical inaccuracies.

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Just catching up with summer listening (!) but just needed to lodge this observation: one difficulty of historical grand strategy games is the fact that the important moments of history are discontinuous -- the moments when the rules themselves change. Sean came close to touching on this when discussing the need for different rules to apply to different factions, but the modeling challenge is how to provide the player with the experience of that break while maintaining a single perspective. The cautionary tale here is Spore, which attempted this writ huge and sadly failed.

 

Literally created an account just to say this, big thanks for your great podcast even when I'm months backlogged

 

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