Rob Zacny

Three Moves Ahead 542: The State with Bret Devereaux

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Three Moves Ahead 542:

Three Moves Ahead 542


The State with Bret Devereaux
Len, Rowan, and Mike are joined by Dr. Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux), Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (https://acoup.blog/). The topic is The State in strategy games. What is a state? What are the advantages and disadvantages of making a game about states, and seeing history through a lens of state action? We talk in particular about how this question applies to Europa Universalis IV.

Europa Universalis IV, Victoria 2, Civilization, King of Dragon Pass

 

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I wanted to hear more about the ethical dimensions of the way Paradox titles nudge you towards certain ways of judging your own "success" - ie how seeing things through a state lens tends to conceal the effect of your actions on the people that surround you. It's perhaps more excusable pre-Victoria where you could argue that the state made little or no claim to work to the benefit of its people but is harder for games like Victoria 2 and the upcoming 3. I was pleased to see that Dr Devereaux did dig into this in a recent blog post which goes into more detail than I did in my own post on the subject back in May when Victoria 3 was announced. 

I hope you will invite Dr Devereaux back to explore these details in more depth when Victoria 3 gets close enough to ship to see how these dilemmas are treated in the game - ideally with a Paradox rep as well!

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Finally got around to listening to this episode, and something that occurred to me with Rowan's complaint about how King of Dragon Pass works makes some assumptions that may not be true:

 

You can generally break down game mechanics/game logic along two axis: probabilistic or deterministic, and be transparent or obfuscated.

 

King of Dragon Pass has extremely obfuscated game logic - but Rowan's complaint assumes that the decisions are deterministic (if X amount of land is taken from the pig neighbours, then the Minotaurs retaliate) - but the nature of the obfuscation means that it could just as well be probabilistic - that each time land is taken, dice are rolled on whether the Minotaurs show up to express their displeasure. From my perspective, the frustration would be if the game doesn't have a way to communicate that risk to the player - if none of the player's council is able to warn that the other village might have allies, or the that further abuse increases the likelihood of consequences.

 

  1. Another game that has obfuscated/probabilistic events is FTL - the rewards for a choice are randomly (ie probabilistically) determined, and there are underlying chances for a player choice to turn out well or poorly (the infamous giant spiders can result in lost crew or a reward), but the odds and even the possible outcomes aren't known to the player. Battletech events are very similar and the game event JSON files even spell out the percentage chance of each outcome. As Rowan noted in the podcast - this is the most realistic combination (and arguably one of the things that make real life so frustrating)
  2. A probabilistic/transparent game might provide the actual odds or some other information on both the possible outcomes and the likelihood of each depending on player choices.
  3. I think obfuscated/deterministic games are less common now, but Crying Suns events fall into this category - the outcome is always the same for a given choice in any specific event. Arguably, old adventure games (text or otherwise) fall squarely in this category.
  4. Transparent/deterministic games play out more like board games - Into The Breach is a prime example. There are probabilistic elements - how enemies prioritize their attacks, where they span and which enemies spawn in each wave, but the rest of the gameplay is both transparent and deterministic.

Regarding Len's thoughts on simulating a lot of distinct actors, one option is to do it like a tabletop game - crunch the numbers / decision trees of ahead of time and use it to generate result tables that can either be looked up or rolled against with the RNG. You could then save manual processing of the decision tree for anomalous situations where the game state / inputs don't match any of the pre-calculated scenarios...

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Interesting thoughts.

 

With obfuscated mechanics it's often a oroblem when the nature of obfuscation is obfuscated, if you know what I mean. AFAIK FTL random outcomes are pure chance. Having an experienced crew or specific upgrade doesn't affect those chances. In a situation where crewman or upgrade can affect the situation you get a special option giving a guaranteed good outcome.

 

I have only seen King of Dragon Pass briefly but I got an impression that there's no way to know what affects what. That's probably the idea: you're supposed to imagine everything affects everythin just like those tribal people probably imagined their rituals and past deeds affected their fate. But from gameplay perspective it's not great and may make the illusion break when you realize the real math behind it all. It you know that the chance that minotaurs come is only based on your diplomacy score or something it's more disappointing than being told about it directly by the game. Crusader Kings 3 is a good approach, I feel. It often tells you something like "you have 89% to succeed in this doplomacy challenge" and you're told if some traits affect that chance. But sometimes you get a decision with hidden chances, like in duels or character interactions: you're supposed to make a guess based on a character background. It's usually clear what is the scope of things that affect the outcome 

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"[...] what would a game about the peloponnesian war look like... they are fighting over influence with a bunch of city states around them ..and that influence manifests in a whole bunch of different ways...its not just that like the map gets coloured in a certain position and now that city is entirely under the control of the anthenian government in Athens. It's more that that city slightly realigns itself to be more inclined towards with what influence Athens can provide over it. And trying to figure out a way to do that and make that fun is the best thing what historical strategy games can work on next for me, especially like a grand strategy game. Because I'm just tired of having these incredibly destinct borders that give you total control over everything in it and zero control over everything out of it. That's just not how history worked "

 

If you guys at TMA had not constantly shot the Hegemony series down, then maybe we would have such historical grand strategy game today.... Go play Hegemony III: Clash of the Ancients with it's city states and skirmishes among them - there are no distinct borders, just spheres of influence. Raiding is so much of an option in this game. Foreign cities need to be colonized (assimilated) to make them productive. Think what the devs could have done if they had had the chance (i.e. success with their previous games + financing) to marry the Hegemony 3 engine and mechanics to their earlier game Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece with its campaigns about the Peloponnesian war?! It would have been amazing and it would have been exactly the kind of game you're complaining here now that it doesn't exist.

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