“We didn’t LOSE Vietnam. It was a TIE.”
OK, the Bronze Pyramid does not fall easy. That Infernal stat seems to be important because I had a praetor loaded legion with try to take it and it failed.
The praetor is now out of the game, dumped to the abyss. More tribute wasted.
I still like my position, though. Moloch will be a problem soon, but I think I can make this work.
And did I buy that relic? Devil only knows.
Troy
Yes. That is some great games gibberish right there. That goes right to the root of why I play strategy games. That is some hardcore nerd awesome speak.
The bit about this being like Diplomacy and Tom’s statement that at this point he’s considering it a multiplayer game make me sad. I hate Diplomacy with a fervor. I hate everything about that game. I just can’t stand meta-gaming, at least not as it presents itself in Diplomacy. Something like Settlers of Catan where it’s small one-off trades I like just fine, but the meta-gaming alliances, breaking of them, backstabbing, etc, I just can’t stand :(.
And I’m a single player only gamer, so a reasonable AI is important to me. Solium Infernum is a game I’m dying to play and I’ll be buying it regardless, but now I’m concerned it’s not going to be something I’ll enjoy.
Just to offer some clarification for folks following along, since this is a pretty key part of the game and a mechanic that I particularly enjoy: everyone buys their stuff (legions, relics, Praetors, manuscripts) from the Infernal Bazaar. It’s basically an auction house, shared by all players. So if a sweet Legion comes up, only one player can buy it. If more than one player tries, it goes to the highest bidder. So all recruitment in the game is competitive. It’s an evil, evil mechanic.
I’m in the same boat.* I’ve gotten the Diplomacy vibe from previous descriptions and discussions, so I’ve been tempering my enthusiasm. It’s still a Day 1 purchase, though.
*Regarding Diplomacy, that is. I have no beef with multiplayer, though I have more time for single player.
Even with the caveat that almost everything is better with more people, as a single player game SI has some issues. Many are related to how weak the AI is but also connected to how many of the diplomatic interactions and the variety ways of gaining prestige require a more fluid understanding of threat and duplicity than any AI is really capable of.
We’ll certainly have more to say on this issue as we experiment in both SP and MP. But I think that Armageddon Empires had more hooks for single player play than SI does - visually, mechanics wise, and how the theme gets translated to player movement.
As a MP game, though, this is a lot of fun to play with people you barely trust.
Troy
It doesn’t play a lot like Diplomacy, despite some high concept similarities–simultaneous turns, deterministic combat resolution (though not entirely… see below), a lot of emphasis on devious political machination, and a victory condition that requires gaining a majority of a resource (Prestige) rather than wargame-style map conquest.
But there are a lot of ways in which SI differs from Diplomacy, too. Combat resolution isn’t entirely deterministic, for instance, because there is also a “hidden information” component in the form of combat cards, which grant bonuses that your opponent can’t see. The diplomatic component in SI is a lot more hostile–it’s not so much about forming alliances as it is figuring out the best way to screw over everyone else without getting yourself into trouble with the Infernal Conclave (which has the power to excommunicate you, which in turn removes a lot of political protections that keep the other players from just summarily wiping you off the map). Winning the game is also different from Diplomacy. There are a lot of different “roads to Rome” (i.e. ways to gain–and lose–Prestige) in SI, and instead of needing to accumulate a predetermined amount of the needed resource (Prestige in SI, Supply Centers in Diplomacy) in order to win, the game length is finite and ends at a certain point, and then the player with the most Prestige wins.
Usually. Unless one of the other players was especially devious. It’s a “plots within plots” sort of game. But it is different from Diplomacy in a lot of non-trivial ways, and lacks some of Diplomacy’s biggest flaws (tendency towards long games and stalemates being a big one).
I’ll hold out hope. What I hate about diplomacy is that any agreement you reach is completely worthless. You can’t rely on anything that gets said at all. I want a game where the game rules themselves hold you to at least the letter of the law, if not the intent. For example, if you make an agreement not to attack one another, but that doesn’t preclude playing cards that affect a “region” or some such, then that I’m good with. The agreement is held within limited boundaries.
In Diplomacy though, like I said, there isn’t anything within the rules at all to enforce any kind of agreement which means all talk is pure meta-gaming. A game like that just feels like one long used car salesman negotation…which is not fun.
SI isn’t about making those sorts of agreements, though. It’s not a game about making loose pacts to not attack one another. It’s a game in which the players are all beholden to a set of strict political rules that govern their interactions, and each tries to twist the rules to their favor without actually breaking them. It’s a give and take sort of deal where there are very granular consequences for everything that you choose to do.
For example, one diplomatic action you can choose to do is spend a number of your Prestige points to insult one of your opponents in front of the Conclave. If you do this, the Conclave’s rules of conduct take effect and govern how your opponent can react. If they accept the insult, they lose face, and you get your original Prestige investment back, as well as an equal number of Prestige points from the insulted player. The other player can also refuse the insult and force you to lose your Prestige investment at no cost to themselves, but if they do, then they are required to claim Vendetta against you, which means that they have go to war for a certain number of turns. In that time period, they must achieve a certain objective (capture X number of Cantons, capture a certain Place of Power) or they lose Prestige (usually more than they would have lost if they had just accepted the insult).
So it’s more of a back and forth, action and reaction sort of diplomacy, governed by rules. In that respect, it’s not at all like Diplomacy.
As Ben says, you can’t just attack - there are some pretty strict rules and there is a prestige price for every diplomatic effort.
But, as he also notes, because there are so many other ways to accumulate prestige and work your way to the top, I think there is room for fake diplomatic squabbles to throw off another player. It requires quite a bit of communication and subtlety, though, and more than three human players.
The big thing that is not like Diplomacy is how chaotic a lot of the actions are. If you play an event, it could fire back on you. And some good ones are a mixed blessing at best. Master of the Bazaar, for example, gives you a cut of every bit of tribute that your opponents pay to grab legions and relics and rituals from the market place - but you can’t buy anything yourself while the card is active. So for 3 to 8 turns you sit there seeing your rivals pay you to improve their standing, but your standing is pretty much frozen.
So you can’t always target your aggression as effectively as you want to.
Troy
Those diplomatic mechanics sounds incredibly cool. Screw your neighbor, but in a very formalized way.
Man… I don’t know I was really pumped for this until I read this blog/ battle report. The lack of AI and a huge focus on diplomacy (I like war games, not brow beat your buddy for his park place games) really shrinks this game out of what I am likely to play or enjoy.
There’s still war stuff. Ultimately, the diplomacy boils down to finding an excuse to use your legions. A weaker player may find it better to submit to insults and demands instead of letting the stronger player bring his army to bear, but ultimately you need the armies to grab land and eliminate other armies.
But it’s certainly not as combat focused as AE.
Troy
The diplomatic mechanics are indeed very clever. The key is that you cannot just “attack” someone - you have to establish cause, either by having a Demand refused or having someone accept an Insult (“Hurl Insult” is one of the orders available). So a player can avoid combat by acceding to other players’ Demands, although if they do so repeatedly they will be substantially weakened.
The interaction between the territory control and diplomatic relations mechanics makes the combat limitations very severe. You may want to grab a Place of Power, but have no way of getting to it without attacking multiple players. Or you may have territory which, through various means, becomes isolated from your main holdings, and re-establishing a line of communication may mean an attack on the player who controls the intervening territory. Which he may then try to deflect by acceding to your Demands until he can get into position to take it himself.
The reason I think the game is a lot like Diplomacy is that you really have limited things to do in a single turn. You start out only being able to give two orders per turn, and there are always more things to do than you can actually accomplish. So in a game with 6 human players, I can’t imagine not having to sketch out agreements via email or something, and trying to convince people not to attack you, because you will always be vulnerable somewhere, and more likely in more than one place. So while the game does have rigid rules about diplomatic stances, there still is nothing to prevent players from saying that they won’t make any Demands or Insults on you for x number of turns, and then breaking that agreement.
Yes.
Yay!
Hmm.
Guess I’ll have to play for myself to really figure out if SI is for me. The good news is that, after these last few posts, I’m more optimistic than before.
I had some of the same reservations when Vic was talking about how much diplomacy is in the game. However, the important thing to realize – and I’m pretty much just re-stating what Ben explained above – is that none of the diplomacy is metagame stuff. It’s all coded into the rules, and it folds very neatly in with the victory point system, the nobility ranks, and the resource model.
-TomSo I just want to say that if it was one of you two jerks who played the Tyrant of Heaven card that reduces a random attribute by one point for every archfiend, that hurt. Seriously hurt. You have no idea how much you just boned me. I hate you and I hope you lose.
-TomAs for AI: Keep in mind that Master of Orion is one of the most-loved TBS games in all of history, and nobody has ever complimented its AI.
Edit: I meant to say “Master of Magic”, of course. Not that MOO had great AI, but MoM is the one that’s a bit legendary for the lack of AI.
So, the game continues. I lost a Legion to Moloch, so I immediately picked another one up at auction. Like Ben said, everyone is in competition for the same recruitment pool.
I’ve posted a couple of screenshots, which you can view by clicking on the links below. The might give away a bit of info (for example, you can see my Resources listed along the top of the screen) so I will trust Tom and Troy not to do so. My Legions are in red any everyone else’s are in dark brown. You can see my stronghold and a couple of Places of Power, as well several enemy Strongholds. The border of my territory is marked in red. I also included a screenshot of the Diplomacy screen, which shows all the archfiends and their diplomatic relationships. Mine is at the top, Il Problemo. The numbers above our portraits are our Prestige scores.