1749

So you think that Blizzard has achieved overlapping player engagement because consumers view their trademark as a Seal of Quality?

Isn’t “polished bag of old experiences” Blizzard’s M.O.?

1750

[quote=“DeepT, post:1748, topic:73564”]
While I hate to say this, but I think the reason that Stardock’s games do not take off is that there isn’t anything really new in terms of game-play. [/quote]

Blizzard wouldn’t be nearly as successful if this was the problem. Blizzard is notorious for recycling other games, just doing so with a high level of polish.

1751

I hear/see this all the time from gamers. They expect Blizzard games to just be better and more finely honed at launch than games from competitors in the same genre - even if that other company has been working in that genre longer than Blizzard.

1752

I’ve been having fun with Crusade, though baby-related issues means I can only play in small doses here and there.

I’m finding that square-root production from population is a harsh master. A city increases a planet’s max population from 4 to 20. That’s huge! However, due to the square-root scaling, it only moves raw production from 2 to 4.47, so a net 2.47 increase. However, costs for maintaining support are linear, so you give up a tile for food, a tile for the city, some space for morale-boosters. For perspective, a single asteroid mine boosts raw production by 1, and the mercenary ship I hired boosts it by 5.

It seems like it would be a lot more natural to have production proportional to population, and then have a set of problems with reaching and maintaining large populations.

1753

Maybe they do and maybe they do things first, in an accessible way others either do not or fail at.
Back in the day when there were very few RTS games, they were popular because there was little choice. It was like C&C vs Warcraft. Then with the advent of Starcraft they introduced asymmetry which was a boat load of WoW. C&C also did this and was very popular and successful. It was all new.

Now why isn’t the elemental series of games some amazing game experience destine to be a classic? Lets look at other memorable 4x type of games. Masters of Magic is a holy grail of the fantasy 4x, What made it so cool? The races and units were asymmetric. Undead vs Trolls vs Dark Elves, etc… Even the schools of magic in MoM were very asymmetric. AOW again same thing. Very popular and memorable.

When you think of the memorable games that in the same genera that Stardock as made, what about those games made the fun last for a long time?

For me, a game’s life depends on how long it can offer new enough experiences. Asymmetry is a content multiplier. You can play in the same world on a similar map, but if you are playing with different mechanics, then its like you are playing a whole new game.

I am not saying asymmetric mechanics are the one ring to rule them all, but it is the only one I can think of at the moment that can greatly amplify and extend my interest in a game.

Both in GC and the elemental games, the only real difference between factions are small statistical changes and THAT is boring and boring is the death of a game.

1754

Brad, here’s something I wanted to say.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Stardock. I even imported a physical version of Galciv 2, something which was hard and expensive to do in my case. And then I followed Stardock for a long time, buying most (if not all) games you’d put out. I even bought a bunch of third-party games on Impulse more to support Stardock than anything else.

Then Demigod happened. I preordered it almost an year before it came out. And I really liked the game, but Stardock didn’t fulfill its promises about its single player mode. It made me sad, but I still supported you. And I felt like you wanted to do better, but couldn’t for whatever reason.

Then Elemental happened (another game I preordered an year before it was released), and on release (after what happened with Demigod), you pretty much lost my faith there.

But then something else happened. You listened to your fans and customers. You took a second look at Elemental and realized it wasn’t quite what you thought it was. And you took every step to make it right, even giving the expansions to people (like me) who had preordered. And you made the game a lot better and closer to what we all expected - Legendary Heroes is truly a great game, and one of my favorites from Stardock.

You won my faith back right there, because of how you behaved, and the actions you took as a company and as people/devs/gamers. You earned my trust. And I have a great deal of respect for that.

The thing is - I don’t feel Paradox is doing that. They have been very successful (so far) with their business model, but I feel like that same business model is slowly eroding the faith of their longtime customers/fans (and likely of some of their third-party devs). They used to listen more, they used to support games more (without the veiled “if you don’t pay for DLC forget about getting support for this game” thing), they used to look back at their mistakes and try to fix them (something I don’t feel they do that much anymore).

In the long run, I see Stardock in a much better place then Paradox due to that attitude, that “humbleness”, that “knowing your limitations and your strengths” thing that Stardock has now and Paradox seems to lack each day more. And I do think that matters more than any engine tech (even if that does make a difference).

Also, I really appreciate the fact that you participate in this community. It’s a little thing that goes a long way in making me appreciate (and support) you all even more.

That’s all. Also, Crusade is a fantastic improvement on GalCiv 3 and a game I can see myself playing a lot more than Stellaris. I’ll let you know about ES2 later. ;)

1755

Same experience on Elemental. I feel Brad and Stardock went above and beyond with early Elemental adopters to make it right.

1756

I find it really interesting to read the sort of perspective, because it’s completely different than how I’ve viewed Paradox over the (many) years. The major thing I hated about early Paradox was how awful the quality of their games were (in terms of bugs) and how absolute shit their support model was. “Oh, sorry that half the features of the game are broken, the AI doesn’t work, and you can’t complete a game due to crash issues, but if you would like to see them fixed, you will have to buy our next 3 expansions”. My brain just cant compute how something like HOI3 could be seen as being better for their customers.

Nowadays, everyone gets but fixes for free. Everyone in EU4 has received all the map improvements (and they have been huge) that came out in Art of War and onward. You have a game that is going to be 4 years old still seeing major updates to people who haven’t paid beyond the initial purchase of the base game. And they tried to accommodate those who preferred the game at an earlier stage with the ability to roll back to earlier versions of the game.

Paradox hasn’t become so successful lately because they’re exploiting their fans and mining them for salt, it’s that they are making better games with a support model that many people like. I get that it might not appeal to you or other individuals (you can’t please everyone), but I think the market is clearly speaking on this one.

1757

Exactly. Brad and company earned back a ridiculous amount of company loyalty with that move.

Similar to how Puget Systems offered customer support when Monarch computers closed and I’ve used Puget ever since.

1758

I agree with what you said about GalCiv II to GalCiv III. Though, I would argue that GalCiv III: Crusade changes that with a number of unique features (Missions and Promotions to name two) that should become part of every game in the genre. Crusade races also can play by different rules as well.

I also wouldn’t agree with the concept that they games “don’t take off”. GalCIv III, despite the base game’s flaws, has sold well.

But your broader point I do agree with to a point (except about Elemental, it was many things but not being innovative was not one of its flaws).

The question then becomes, why are the designs so conservative? The answer to that comes down to the tech choices.

GalCiv I to GalCiv II was a major change with GalCiv II introducing a host of innovative features. But why was this? Because GalCiv II used the same engine as GalCiv I.

GalCIv III, by contrast, was a complete rewrite in order to be a native 64-bit, multi-core engine. Thus, the budget went into the engine and not the design elements with the subsequent openings for games like ES2 and Stellaris. (I don’t think ES1 was particularly innovative).

Now, fast forward to GalCiv III: Crusade and it has more new in it than GalCiv III had over GalCiv II. Why is that? Because there’s been 2 years of experience on the new engine. ES2, by contrast, is an iteration on their existing Unity codebase and Stellaris is the most recent iteration on the Clausewitz engine.

I’m biased of course but I think most 4X players in a blind test would prefer GalCIv III: Crusade to any other 4X currently shipping. It really is that good (in my admittedly biased opinion of course) But it still has to carry the baggage of GalCiv III’s base game which was pretty meh. (Crusade, races don’t differ by % bonuses for instance).

But looking to a future GalCiv IV and now you’re going to be dealing with a mature engine where 40% of its budget isn’t being spent building a brand new engine.

In the meantime, GalCiv III: Crusade addresses the points you bring up in your post. It has plenty of game-changing features that are unique to it.

1759

Crusade is definitely on my wish list. Ill get to it one day.

1760

Like @KevinC, I don’t see it this way. Paradox said they will make DLC for a game for as long as people buy them. People must be still be buying them. They also seem to have a very loyal following, at least it appears that way on Reddit and YouTube. Paradox not listening to their fans though? In Stellaris especially, they have been working with fans on what is wrong and listening to ideas. They are active on Twitter and Reddit. Also got the same feeling from HOI4.

1761

It has for me. If I see Blizzard on the label, I know it’s going to be a good game.[quote=“MikeJ, post:1752, topic:73564”]
I’m finding that square-root production from population is a harsh master. A city increases a planet’s max population from 4 to 20. That’s huge! However, due to the square-root scaling, it only moves raw production from 2 to 4.47, so a net 2.47 increase. However, costs for maintaining support are linear, so you give up a tile for food, a tile for the city, some space for morale-boosters. For perspective, a single asteroid mine boosts raw production by 1, and the mercenary ship I hired boosts it by 5.

It seems like it would be a lot more natural to have production proportional to population, and then have a set of problems with reaching and maintaining large populations.
[/quote]

I’m playing with a build in which population is still square root but cities also act as hubs for other types of production which is turning out to be pretty compelling. It needs more balancing (And, ahem, AI coding) but I think this may make the mega-food planet to having a city planet strategy a lot more rewarding.

I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Also, MoM was a financial failure.

Elemental failed because it was a buggy catastrophe, not because it didn’t let you play against fantasy ant people who built hives complexes instead of cities or something.

The elephant in the room, of course, is Civilization where the races play literally identically.

A game’s success is not the result of any one thing imo. It’s the culmination of many elements coming together including gameplay, innovation, legacy, production values, attention to detail, balance, marketing, distribution, etc.

The industry is littered with very innovative games that sold few copies that are later beloved by a dedicated group (Distant Worlds for example).

Blizzard nails all those elements together which is why their games take off.

1762

That sounds interesting! I look forward to playing it.

If you are in the mood though, what is the design goal of having the square root rule in place?

1763

Demigod was a game we didn’t develop but rather published. The tragedy of that game is that it’s fate was tied up with THQ. THQ canceled a bunch of projects that Gas Powered Games was developing forcing GPG to lay off much of its staff.

Thus, Demigod found itself late in development with lots of things that just weren’t there. Stardock, at its own expense, persuaded GPG to give it access to source so that we could finish it (internet multiplayer, more demigods) but in the end, there is a limit on what the publisher can do on something that isn’t its game.

The irony is that the 4 months of Stardock engineers that were spent on Demigod were engineers that were pulled off of Elemental to fix Demigod.

Demigod and Elemental are intrinsically linked for us because one led to the other.

Not a day goes by where I don’t think abut Elemental.

Thank you so much for the kind words. My friend and colleague, Derek Paxton, deserves the credit. He made the Fall From Heaven mod for Civ IV and we hired him specifically to take a look at Elemental and help us find a way to use what we had to actually make something good with it.

(about to board the plane, will continue this later.)

Cheers!

1764

Brad, just to second (or third or fourth, whatever) how much faith you restored in Stardock with your actions post-Elemental.

Let me put it this way. I had pre-ordered Elemental along with several of my friends. We’d had a ton of fun playing the Fall From Heaven mod in MP and couldn’t wait for a fantasy TBS built from the ground up to provide that sort of experience. To say that my MP group was disappointed with what ended up happening with Elemental is, uh, probably an understatement. :)

Then you guys went to work repairing your reputation. By the time Galciv3 came out, I had bought the lifetime founder package (and haven’t regretted it!). That’s a pretty remarkable turnaround in my opinion.

1765

You raise many good points, and as a long-time fan of Paradox, I’m fully aware of them. But with the old Paradox, I felt it was more about the games than about the business. I felt like part of Paradox, in an odd way. Now I feel like I’m a number in their balance spreadsheets.

I’m not even saying that they’re exploiting their fans - they’re not, even if sometimes they seem to stretch to see how far their loyalty goes - but something got lost along the way. Their vision in terms of design is no longer as focused; their games run better and are supported longer, but many of their most recent games have DLC-shaped holes and poorly-thought derivative designs. And EU is the best Paradox game currently, the one they support (and design) better, the one with the most accurate vision, so providing it as an example doesn’t really show the full picture.

Now, Paradox did improve a lot in terms of quality of releases, presentation, and accessibility. And Blizzard serves as proof of how effective that can be in terms of the market. But that only goes so far, much more so in a competitive market where most of the innovation resides in small studios and indies, and most of the high hitters require AAA structures with large investments.

Finally, while the market may be speaking (and we have yet to see for how long), I don’t necessarily link that with quality or even merit. Sometimes I resent something that the market favors in gaming in the same way I resent the success that some music artists have in spite of (in my opinion) far more talented musicists that just barely get by. But that’s a whole other can of worms.

1766

You deserve just as much credit, Brad. Ultimately, you’re the one who took action, the one who hired him. He deserves credit, of course, but you deserve just as much, and by extension Stardock as a company.

There’s great wisdom in knowing when you can’t do things alone, or when you need help. There’s great merit in admitting something is wrong and trying to fix it. And there’s also great virtue in identifying talent and fostering that talent. Look what you did with Soren Johnson and Offworld Trading Company! I can’t think of any company that would bet in that (brilliant, in my opinion) design, and yet you did. You took a risk, and I don’t know if it paid off in business terms, but it was a breath of fresh air in a genre that hasn’t seen that kind of tight, intelligent design in a long time.

1767

I don’t think Blizzard is particularly strong in terms of innovation. Most of their games are very derivative - there are only two of their games that I’d really call innovative.

However, Blizzard knows how to take things that worked in other games and put them together in a package with all those characteristics you listed. And that requires talent (to understand why something works in a different game and make it work in your own) and hard work. And Blizzard works their IPs brilliantly. Even when they’re derivative, their games are filled with character. They’re always very distinctive, and Blizzard uses that to its full capacity, which is why many of their games don’t feel derivative even when they are. And Blizzard’s vision of “games as a community experience” only makes it better for them.

1768

I agree. One thing that we have left out of the conversation is of course, money.

Paradox got (if memory serves) something like a $32M cash infusion prior to going public from investors. That kind of capital allows companies to fully realize their objectives.

When Stardock sold Impulse, it received a substantial cash infusion too. This being 2011, Stardock’s catalog was Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations II and Elemental. Sins is owned by Ironclad and they were working on Sins of a Dark Age at the time.

So Stardock used its capital to fund a next generation engine so that its future (post 2018 and beyond) would have a solid platform to be built on.

But the first set of games on the new engines would, obviously, be pretty low budget.

For example, Ashes of the Singularity had 1/4th the budget of Planetary Annihilation which in turn had 1/2 the budget of Supreme Commander (not counting FA).

Galactic Civilizations III had a budget of around $2.4M which included the engine development for it (Which was nearly half the budget). I’m not privvy to ES2 or Stellaris’s budget but I suspect it was in the multiples of that.

Millions of dollars in budget allows for a lot of design iteration allowing for both more innovation and a heck of a lot more polish as well as being able to afford more world-class talent (as an example, I was barely involved on GalCiv III and instead working on the creation of Soren’s company, Mohawk and Oxide’s Nitrous engine).

So for Stardock, the real test whether this strategy was worthwhile is when the 2nd generation games which have 100% of their budgets put into the game without half of it going to an engine.

To really bring that difference home: Crusade, with all its changes and fundamental improvements, had a $600k budget total – 25% of the budget of the original.