1981

I think for this to go from a low - middling game for me to a really good game they need to add a bigger variety of decisions and improve the UI. It has this weird grip on me right now that I don’t necessarily want to quit, but the pull isn’t that strong either. I still feel like I’m essentially doing the same thing over and over. You can probably say that about a lot of games, but it just doesn’t feel that way in a game like Civ or Endless Legends. This feels even more “grand strategy” then Europa Universalis. Even in vanilla of EU IV it just felt like there were more varied decisions to make and maybe more importantly more factors to consider when making decisions.

I’m pretty confident Paradox will address this. Granted my meh tolerance may be kind of low, but I really am surprised by the number of people still thinking it is really good in this state.

1982

Not being able to make ally agreements when the other nation is at war can be annoying too.

1983

The randomness of the AI parts that work well continue to amuse me. New game, not xenophobe this time as my son suggested I find out what picking “Random” does (it randomizes your everything, not picks a random created choice). I ended up with fanatic collectivists, religious nuts molluscs. Well, ok. Like Armando, I come from a table top game background where making sense of a random choice was part of the game, and the options there are amusing. But it gets worse.

So in one of the early science ship discovery events I decide to take a choice that I (wrongly) assume is a throwaway. It had no info on the mouse over, something like “Don’t use this find, but someone sells it as art.”. Well, a little after that I get a message that this art became a fad and those who viewed it feel differently about other species. Huh? So I do some mouse over investigating …

Oh great, I have fanatic collectivist, religious nut, XENOPHILES now in my cites. In my desire to wrest the narrative back, I go to the advanced form of their government a transcendent empire which is +100% slave tolerance and +30% relocate. Aaaand I settle all new planets with the xenophile variant. This should end well huh?

I settle my first world with presentient fungi (err) with my xenophile new variant slugs and promptly chose to enslave the fungi. I wanted to see how slavery worked as my first game of happy hippy humans fainted if it happened anywhere in the known galaxy. While the slaves were, as expected, very unhappy, with this new “advanced” government no citizen blinked. The new faction was just the fungi, no sympathizers. Some xenophiles they are. So I sigh at the inefficiency of the unhappy slaves, bookmark the planet and decide to check in again after some more slave science research. My vassals were fine with this, and no neighbors objected. The despotic slaver empire on my right even gave me a diplomatic boost of thumbs-up.

I come back and notice one of the slave fungi is no longer with the yellow unhappy triangle. I decide to mouse over this before I break the planet out and hand-build slave-y buildings. The AI randomness was not done poking me in the eye. Nope. This one fungus had mutated and he was now also a slave loving fanatic collectivist! He loved (worshipping?) his slug overlords. And they loved him, and he loved being loved since he was also getting a happiness bonus from xenophile overlords. WTF. So, what about the unhappy fungi? What about I just purge them and see how this guy does? I can still make this end badly!

So I kill all the enslaved fungi that hate being slaves, and the lone happy fungus isn’t bothered by this at all. Really? REALLY? No one cares! Not a peep out of any main race slugs either, though even my Despotic Slaver neighbor though I was a tad aggressive, but it was a mild penalty. They get +15% from enslaved! I then gen-modded them to Communal for an added 5% happiness. The only thing they dislike is no vote. But This ruler is a living god; nobody votes. I have no slave related buildings either. So I have a planet of happy (yes 99% happy in planet they are 100% on as their home) enslaved fungi worshiping their xenophile slug overlords now. The fungus was happier that I killed all the rest of his species than my Despotic Slaver neighbor was, and promptly started a family.

This is hysterical.

1984

Having recently started a game as a Randomized civ as an exercise in roleplaying fundamentals, I’m loving the AAR, Hechicera. So thoroughly bizarre. . .

1985

If the fungi are pre-sentient then they’re basically cows. And we enslave them and cull them without the rest borrowing. (It’s not like a cow on one side of the planet can gossip to one on the other about things)

1986

You might have to re-evaluate that statement after spending some time with my ex and her friends.

1987

Kevin, You owe me a new keyboard. I think I can salvage the screen. :)

1988

Is the evasion really the only problem though. I mean… if I have a laser that does 200 dmg but each time it only targets one ship… what good is that. I would think a large ship with five guns that can blow-up these little ships it should be able to target five ships. It kind of seems like everything just launches at one ship which is… silly.

1989

Seconded. Well played KevinC, well played.

1990

In order to beat back a certain invader i had to think outside the box, such as it is. I couldn’t afford a large enough force to simply beat them with numbers. Even the supposed ‘corvette’ trick, including maxing the Corvettes up with as many +evasion modifiers as i could stack, wasn’t enough for a foe that could replace troops at will.

I noticed that the size of the weapon slot also increased weapon ranges, so i decked out a fleet of what i dubbed ‘Black Sword’ battleships with particle lances and supported by regen equipped support battlecruisers. The particle lances hit like a freight train at distance 60, and so ordinary fleets of similar size die before they even reach firing range. It still took awhile because that class of Battleship had weaker than usual shields and could be overwhelmed, but eventually with a lot of retreating to forward bases to keep up my strength i was able to make a surgical strike on the beating heart of evil and stop the invader.

1991

BTW not to be a pain in the butt about this --but (!) I think I am starting to be more right about waiting on expansions and patches on this particular game before its done. Kinda like percolation.

Do you jump in at Day 1 and play play play and then get grumpy? Is that the same game you’ll get after a year?

I’ve gotten some grief over the whole “wait and see” strategy – but I have yet to see my theory wrong.

(BTW the guy who pointed out he liked to play new games and discuss them when they are NEW and progress with people as they go early has the best argument)

NOWi have to use this superpower self-control on Total Warhammer. It won’t work.

1992

You know what I’d say --the game won’t even resemble itself in a year – and it will be tons better then. Annoying truths are still annoying, I know -

1993

I have a different perspective entirely Kristi - all strategy games suck.

What i mean is that we’re adults, who’ve been doing this stuff for years, if not decades, now. There’s isn’t going to be a second string revolution here, no magic AI that a mysterious unknown company is going to invent. Real time games in 2d or 3d space with constantly evolving unit abilities is more or less an unsolvable problem. We’re never going to find that magical strategy game that perfectly challenges us (or it’s something you don’t care about, like some obscure Eastern Front war-game, with highly constricting rule sets and specialized victory conditions).

So even when you wait for months upon months for patches and expansion, which, yes, will make the game better, will it really, honestly, be that perfect game? It’s like the Total War games; it’s been the same damn game, more or less, since Rome 1, yet the AI is still incapable of playing like a human in even the slightest sense. Even the fantasy Warhammer version looks like the same sort of sending cavalry into the flanks of units stuff we’ve done for a decade now.

Stellaris’ issues are a combination of game design and bugs; i’ve not had any crashes, have encountered some annoying combat issues - not quite the level of bugs, although i wonder about fighters and hangers. I’d say Stellaris is close to doing what they set out to do with it. Things like randomized civilizations and complex personality are hard to do, and in the spartan environment of Stellaris, emergent personalities are like accretions of minerals building a stalagmite, so slow and patient that only those who enjoy watching grass grow will notice… but it is there. There are issues with documentation, but this is now the era of Youtube and Minecraft, and kids don’t expect or even care about manuals and probably don’t even know what a tooltip is. If they have a question they’ll just look it up on the internet.

1994

Your logic and reasonableness put my cynicism to shame.

That said I think I’ll wait till – well, Xmas maybe – and play the game they actually created with all the expansions and patches and dlsc’s rather than the early access game they released a few weeks ago.

ps – damn you I think you are right overall.

1995

I agree to some extent, the magic "right " difficulty is hard to find, many strategy games err on the side of just being too easy. We’ve yet to see a Dark Souls of strategy gaming. It’s a pity, me and a buddy are now playing a mp game on hard, and it’s too easy still, way too easy. It’s time they gave some thought into what a challenge really is…

1996

So we played for about…6 hour tonight. 3 Person MP, very stable by the way, only a single pause. One of our little group though got a little too close to a Fallen Empire’s Borders, despite everyone warning him not to do it. He was attacked with three groups of 19k very advanced ships. They destroyed nearly every mining and research stations in a straight line, took out the spaceports in roughly the same area, bombarded the planets and then hoovered in the same area for three hours. It’s like the AI doesn’t know how to finish a war. We were waiting for him to just… well whatever happens when a highly advanced empire just dominates yours and it never happened. He snuck a few colony ships to another part of the galaxy… the AI instantly found him, dominated that area too and just left it in Limbo.

Speaking of AI instantly knowing stuff. I am kind of sick of destroying hostiles only to have other alien science ships show up the half way through the battle to scan the system. I’m not even done with the battle and they decide to instant know it’s safe.

1997

What happens is that you sue for peace. The way wars work in Paradox’s games is that the loser gives the winner something. Money, territory, whatever. Your friend probably didn’t realize that he or she was supposed to cede whatever the AI wanted. You do this by pressing the war indicator, checking the warscore, and piling up offerings until they satisfy the warscore. In your friend’s case, it would have probably been everything but the capital.

Oddly enough, I don’t think there’s a fail state in Stellaris. Not that I ever hit and I had some real goat ropes. I think you always get to keep your capital.

-Tom

1998

I’ve played Paradox games for years though. If you have your entire empire taken over by enemies in EU4 or even in 3, your people will force you to settle for peace whether you like it or not. It won’t let you drag it out forever. I don’t know exactly what his peace terms were but every time I wound up at war they always want my home planet which seems… ridiculous too. I think they need to reintroduce CB in this game. Believe me I understand War Scores, but… there is something off with this. This isn’t like France declaring war on England to grab that tiny piece of land they have on the mainland and you eventually just give it to them… they go straight for the capital planet and then the war goes on… forever.

1999

I take umbrage at your opening shot sir.

I still play and love strategy games as my main focus of being a PC gamer. They are however nearly all OLD strategy games (CivIV and CKII being the very latest).

Which is where your closing comments come into play sadly. We are indeed in an era of ‘less reading’, and that is a multi-discipline spanning thing too (from TV to Film and games) in terms of general ‘dumbing down’ (or ‘streamlining’ to use another phrase) across our cultures and societies. And that to my mind is really where the main problem lies, in relation to having decent strategy games (or any type of game to be honest!) to play. We are in the era of the lowest common denominator running the show, it’s why most games are ‘streamlining’, it’s why depth and complexity are getting harder to make right, as we lose the brains that can do it, it’s why when we attempt it (Stellaris perhaps?) it takes a while to get it decent? It’s also why Trump might be your next President! ;)

2000

Yet the rise of professional streamers gives us a way out, at least where games are concerned. I imagine that they will steadily move towards including more and more input from and early content production by streamers, which in turn will make for more detailed, hardcore games with lots of meat for repeated plays and advanced strategies. Since a streamer can bring the experiences of the game to those without the time to learn it, so they can create a much richer experience with games designed to help them do that.