This facile little iteration on the usual “grow your armies and throw them up against the other growing armies” genre is about what you’d expect...But you want to know the game’s biggest crime?
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2017/08/01/rapture-world-conquest-puts-demi-demigod/
Does that have anything to do with the “rapture” as many fundamentalists believe in?
Not in any meaningful sense. It’s just their hook to make it like a god game. At the end of the game, the little units – they’re just symbols – go flying out into space. There. The Rapture.
-Tom
Where do you find a copy of Oasis?
Always wanted to try it.
You liked Oasis?? OMG
I don’t get this hatred for globes. You’re not looking at the whole world in Civilization either. What’s the difference between scrolling a 2D map and rotating a globe?
Those of us with malfunctioning visual lobes find the third dimension eminently confusing?
Sure, but not by design. Furthermore, every effort is made to let you see as much relevant information at once as possible. It has the extreme zoomed out view. It has a minimap in the corner of the screen. It doesn’t stick a round gameplay surface into a rectangular monitor.
Games are put on globes because the developers think it’s cool to force the player to twirl an object around in real time. It’s an unnecessary layer of interface that actively limits information for no good reason and in games like this, it’s there as a component of twitch-based gameplay. While you’re managing the real-time invasions on one hemisphere, guess what you’re not managing or even seeing on the other hemisphere.
Part of the gameplay is frantically twirling a 3D object as a prerequisite for situational awareness. That’s not an issue in Civilization and it’s certainly not an issue in the other real-time games I mentioned in the review, because those games don’t drape the gameplay surface around a sphere.
-Tom
This is especially true when it serves no purpose. The much ballyhooed z-axis in the Homeworld games, for instance. Or the terrible star maps in Sword and the Stars. The only thing a third dimension added to those games was confusion.
-Tom
The only game I can think of where I really enjoyed having the game map as a globe was the original X-Com and that’s maybe just because of nostalgia.
I’m with you there. I would argue that map might not have been as functional is a flat map, but it added a fundamental element to the vibe that you were protecting the Earth. The actual Earth!
-Tom
So for my part, I literally lack a visual imagination. Things that come like second-nature to other gamers, like learning how to easily navigate deathmatch maps or constructing a mental map during a dungeon delve are more-or-less impossible for me. Even sufficiently large 2D maps are difficult for me to mentally “store” reference points for (e.g., remembering actively and only-as-words, “My capital city is to the left of some big mountains down at the bottom”), but fully 3D rotatable maps just completely overwhelm my brain.
Dune 1 had a globe in it that also gave me that feeling that I was fighting over an entire planet. But in both that and X-Com, you weren’t really playing the main part of the game on the globe. I guess I can see how it would be infuriating to deal with it if there was too much going on, especially in real time.
Ahh, don’t be mean to classic SoTS. Once you grok the star map and get it fully loaded into your head it is this really awesome bit of sci-fi cosplay, as you are weighing the 3D starmap, the various forms of interstellar travel for the different nations, fleet dispositions, and the diplomatic/economic situation. Having all that weird info in your mind at once really makes you feel like a space-admiral. Admittedly, when you first come back to a game it does look like a bunch of soup, but nothing good comes easily.
Everyone knows that Tom is mean to Sword of the Stars only because he wrote the manual for GalCiv II.
Worst UI design aphorism ever. :)
-Tom