I like to imagine they are mutant armies.
I think maybe the idea was one of immersion; at the distance scales in the game, and with the timescale of the realtime clock, animating a missile traveling from Ship A to Ship B might technically mean said missile covered 9 light years over the course of 45 months in-game time, although the battle in question only “actually” lasted a much shorter time.
But maybe I’m interpreting it wrong. Don’t care much either way personally, but I guess I could see how that might bug some people?
Oh, I see what you are saying. I am indeed working on the assumption that there is a separate battle view outside of the strategy layer. Or, if not, then it’s one of those deals where fleets are just an icon at the regular viewing level and if you zoom into them to watch a battle you’ll see all the individual units doing their thing. Either of those is fine with me.
How did i miss this? Even the RPS article! Well it sounds like one seriously cool space game and i will join the adoring crowds, even though i suspect this will be Steam only as that is Paradox’s ‘new’ thing these days. Sucks to be me.
Stop flaunting your superior reading comprehension skills, jerk. ;)
I still don’t get it, though. It’s a game, and like any game of this sort there are going to be thousands of abstractions, visual or gameplay. It doesn’t make any sense in Civ that your early game warrior rush army took hundreds of years to reach the enemy city either or that your workers spend centuries building a pasture for some piggies.
Also, like AntediluvianArk and Wiz have said, armies of troops five miles tall isn’t realistic either, but it’s a lot more usable than microscopic armies on the world map.
Of course! I just happen to prefers some abstractions over others ;)
It is very clear in CK/EU that each of your dudes represents a full army (and even though I trun in counters whenever possible -in HoI-). Also, the pre-canned unit animations have nothing to do with combat resolution. Here, the article seemed to imply that each ship represents exactly one ship, not a fleet, and that their behaviour is fine grained. While I can see most people liking this, I really don’t find this king of detail that interesting in a game in this scale and these kind of things do break immersion for me, which happens to be what I value most in games.
I get ya, Juan. I have some bugaboos myself that drive me batty in games that most other people don’t think twice about.
It makes me happy to read the high-level description in conjunction with the news that is has an accepted alpha. Many time I’ve read a very ambitious, exciting description of how a strategy game will work only to have the features dropped or severely curtailed once the developers actually implemented the systems and realized that they couldn’t make it fun.
At this point, Paradox has at least implemented the major systems and has some idea of how they work together in practice. These aren’t just aspirations on a whiteboard somewhere. Which is not to say that I don’t expect problems or irritating design decisions, but their goals, their state of development and their recent rep for quality releases makes for a very heady brew.
I had to look it up once so I could know. It’s yonic. But I think it’s not a very mainstream word yet and I don’t think it’s been added to some major dictionaries?
Reading the description in the RPS’ article, A+ for ambition but zero confidence in Paradox’ ability to deliver what they have announced. It reads like these over ambitious blurbs you used to read on the back of game boxes back in the days (showing my age here!). “The most advanced AI ever created!”, “a dynamic works responding to your actions” etc etc.
Some of the features they have announced in particular (genuine space exploration and discovery, mid-game scope change, end-game uncertainty, genuine variety and viable playstyles): oh boy. A handful of games that I know have managed to implement one of them at a time. But don’t worry, Paradox will implement all of them at the same time. And it’s going to be awesome. Yeah right.
The mention of the PoP system is particularly jarring since it remains a broken mess in Victoria 2 (besides the poor optimisation).
Shame on RPS for writing what was basically a reprint of a PR fluff piece. Part of a trend I guess, the site was a daily read but now if I go there maybe once a week.
Looks promising, especially with MP being listed. I can’t wait to see what they have in mind.
Every gaming review site/magazine of the last 30 years has done preview pieces off of presentations or private play sessions. It’s obsurd to point fingers at RPS for doing one (which is nothing new for them). How else are we supposed to get info on a game in development? Read it with a grain of salt, but it’s not fair to say RPS is some how worse because they did such an article.
I’m plenty critical of Today’s Paradox, and I am very worried that they’re going to pull a Dominions and put too many ingredients in the soup, but this is something where the biggest obstacle in Paradox games is gone- and that is the history. It’s quite possible they could pull something special off, if they don’t overextend themselves.
I was getting pretty tired of Paradox historical GS, but I’m excited for non-historical sci-fi or fantasy GS. It’s part of the same reason I’m excited for At the Gates.
Let’s see, I will cheer Paradox if they manage to deliver! Just have low expectations.
Wow, lots of innovative ideas here. I know, the proof’s in the implementation, but Paradox launches have been increasingly smooth, so I’m more optimistic than some of you.
But no announced release date! Argh! Any idea how long we’ll have to wait?
There is lots of ambition shown in that article and yeah, getting it done right it won’t be as easy.
February was on those leaked shots from Steam, I think. Not to say that means anything, but maybe it conveys a very rough estimate on where it is in development.
Don’t you mean, “pull a Dominions and put a historically accurate number of ingredients in the soup?”
The “historically accurate” part makes me laugh, like there’s some special number you cross the threshold on and it makes it accurate.
I want a good game not a history lesson. I have books for that.