Realpolitiks -- February 2017

[quote=“TimJames, post:3, topic:127432, full:true”]There’s a guy in the comments that says it’s a bit “lite,” which is both good and bad in that sense.
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I noticed that too, here’s the full quote for anyone interested:

“Having worked on it myself as an outside contractor, I can say that it does have some sense of humour, is definitely Grand Strategy Lite (i.e. it’s not going to destroy your brain a la EU or CK), but is immense fun to play.”

I think going Paradox Lite is probably a good move for these guys. As you said they don’t have the experience and probably not the resources for a really long development cycle to iron out problems.

Judging by the screenshots it looks like it has some good features though, like blocks of nations, economic stuff, events, and the now-standard relation score diplomacy and warmonger score. Hmm, the more you look at the game the more you realise that most of the mechanics are borrowed from Paradox games. I suppose that helps them iterate to a working design faster.

I’ve been thinking about the Supreme Leader series, they just quite don’t work. Geopolitical Simulator is just a big mess. It’d be great to see one of these actually work. Someone is bound to get it one of these days. I’m not so sure it’s these guys that will do it but hey I’m glad to see them try.

Hearts of Iron 4 is the closest I’ve seen recently to modern geopolitics but it skews logistics and conflict heavy, it is a World War 2 game after all so I can’t really argue with that.

Tom Mc

I’d be ecstatic if there’s another studio putting out grand strategy titles. I’m pretty skeptical, but would absolutely love it if they pull off a good game.

So here’s a new gameplay trailer (much better than the last one):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2LwcJBLMPo

The release date is 17th February.

Here’s the prepurchase page on Greenmangaming, looks like the VIP price is $16:

At this price i’ll be diving in day one no matter the very early steam reviews say, i’ll try to remember to post some impressions here after I have spent some time with it.

I was thinking this was from the developer that keeps re-releasing the same crappy $50 geopolitical game year after year. Glad to see I was mistaken.

On my wishlist.

Man, I’m buying in at that price. It’s juuuuust low enough to snag me.

Welp, I bought it, price was too good to pass up. I love contemporary strategy/politics games like this, so bring it on.

Let’s Plays:
Veneke
Drew Durnil

Ohhhhhhh, looking good.

The demo is also coming in a couple of days. It lets you play as Russia or Germany as the Lets Players are playing.

The big difference from this and the Paradox games, from what I have seen, is that you don’t push little units around the map to fight wars. Instead you assign units to theatres and then conduct operations. I don’t think this is a bad move given that it probably cuts down the general programming and AI requirements by a huge margin. If they went for full wargame as well it would just be too ambitious to be possible to hope that a new studio like this could pull it off.

With that said, the war UI looks a bit confusing. They really should have released a manual to go with the lets play build, as I watched at least one lets player who had no idea what they were doing.

[quote=“Tim_N, post:14, topic:127432”]
They really should have released a manual to go with the lets play build, as I watched at least one lets player who had no idea what they were doing.
[/quote] Yeah, Orbital Potato was taking a beating as Russia, fighting a war against Lithuania. And he clearly had no idea of the options open to him. I have no idea whether he was misunderstanding actions that he needed to take within the war, or whether his technology was insufficient to turn his superior numbers into a victory.

I am all for the decision to get rid of the pushing little units around the map. For me, that had little entertainment value anyway. But I do hope there is a solid manual or tutorial or whatever to clarify what all these myriad options mean in gameplay terms.

[quote=“FinnegansFather, post:15, topic:127432, full:true”]Yeah, Orbital Potato was taking a beating as Russia, fighting a war against Lithuania. And he clearly had no idea of the options open to him. I have no idea whether he was misunderstanding actions that he needed to take within the war, or whether his technology was insufficient to turn his superior numbers into a victory.

I am all for the decision to get rid of the pushing little units around the map. For me, that had little entertainment value anyway. But I do hope there is a solid manual or tutorial or whatever to clarify what all these myriad options mean in gameplay terms.
[/quote]

That’s the one I was thinking of. If you watch closely his units were actually destroying Lithuanian tanks/planes, even though the operations kept “failing” (maybe there was a bug or two in there or he just simply lacked tech. Sometimes in these games declaring war on day one isn’t a good idea). I do like that wars appear to take time though, even with weaker neighbours.

Demos on steam now. You guys are going to have to post some impressions for me to read as I’m away from my computer for four days.

I played for a while this afternoon. Economic development and internal politics look promising, international diplomacy and military maybe. But the real question is how the parts will all fit together, and I am going to have to play some more before I have a real opinion.

I think I like the warfare system - it doesn’t get bogged down in the micro management of the Supreme Ruler games. I want to spend more time with it over the weekend, but right now I’m leaning slightly to the positive.

If I throw the entire might of Russia, as in every last soldier, tank and jet along with a preemptive nuclear strike, at the Baltic States, that should not be a serious fight. I should not slog through a year’s worth of battles, winning only 10% of them, and be ground to a halt by the unyielding power of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania without any NATO support and a combined military half the size of mine.

My first impressions with the war system do not leave me even remotely impressed, but if there’s much better documentation in the final version then that might not be as dire as those impressions leave me feeling. I fear they have gone too abstract, likely in an effort to make sure that every country has a chance in war against every other country.

But is the problem the system itself or just bad luck with the RNG?. It might be like missing one of those 95% chance to hit shots in XCOM. So far I only played the tutorials, but my biggest concern is seeing the same 4 operations popping up. I don’t know if that’s because it is the tutorial, because it’s a demo, or a problem that will persist in the full release next week.

I don’t think it’s just RNG. Orbital Potato couldn’t win in his Let’s Play, and I saw a posting about this on Steam.

On the other hand, when the tutorial had me attacking a couple countries as Poland, I never lost a battle, although my odds were often just around 55-60%.

This could mean a problem. It could also mean that there are pieces we are not seeing at this point. Maybe tech levels. Maybe those other numbers on the war screen (bonuses to kinds of units, numbers of each type required.) But if that is the case, then I don’t know why the percentages are what they are.

I spent more time with this today. No doubt, it offers interesting choices in running your country.

However, a lot of what I saw was way out there. In the relatively short time period covered in the demo, Russia nuked me (Germany), Poland (my ally), and Lithuania (a separate war, after we had defeated Russia.

The circumstances of the nuking struck me as unrealistic – Russia was the aggressor, and in no way cornered. Worse by far, they just hit each country with a nuke or two, and proceeded to slowly lose the war, without using nukes any further. And maybe worst – from a realism point of view – there was little repercussion within the attacked countries or the world in general. Not even a directly relevant UN resolution to offer. It certainly did not alter Germany’s internal politics – no pressure to get out of the war, no increased support for more military to prosecute the war.

Less dramatic, but also of shaky realism. You can, in fairly short order change another country’s opinion of you, invite them to your bloc, and change their political system to match yours. Very neat and simplistic.

Simplistic seems to sum the whole thing up. I may get it on very deep discount at some point, but that’s about it.