Recent content by Trav'ling Canuck

No change to the number of territories, but with more land tiles and fewer water tiles, there are more land territories to explore, claim and fight over. More land territories doesn't necessarily lead to less fighting, but it extends the period of time during which you're jockeying for...

Hmmm. I wonder if map generation has changed? On a normal map with 6 players, 2 to 3 territories was the max I could ever get on the higher difficulty levels before I was surrounded by rapidly expanding AI. I couldn't even imagine trying it with 8 players on that same size map. There's a...

Being able to hire some of their armies as mercenaries is quite well done, I think, but otherwise I agree with you. That said: 1) The IPs do have individual traits that are intended to make them play differently, but they're generally ineffective at this purpose as things stand now. The...

@Krajzen That's disappointing. I haven't been able to play recent balance-change builds very much over the past couple of months, but it sure looks like the dev team may have overshot on their concerns about the game being too hard for new players. There are a lot of mechanics to make...

One of my disappointments with HK is that the dev team has not embraced the historical reality that once your neighbour knows a tech, eventually you will, too, whether you actively pursue that tech or not. I really hoped that with the fame and era star system, they would orient fame and era...

My personal view on the AI in HK is that it ticks all of my key "asks" from a 4x AI: 1. Acts as a "speed bump": check. Early reports suggest this is not true in the release build for lower difficulty levels, but once you raise the difficulty level a little, you cannot play the game as a solo...

Out of curiousity, have you found this to be true in the higher difficulty levels, too? The AI seems to be tuned right now to be rather passive in the starting difficulty levels and to take it's cue from the player as to whether this is to be a war-heavy or peaceful game. But at the higher...

The game is rich in terms of map features, but other than luxuries, those varied map features mostly just change tile yields. They're extremely valuable and do serve to make certain location better for certain districts, but they don't have any unique impacts and that does limit the excitement...

I don't think I'm speaking out of turn to share that the dev team was aware that experienced 4x gamers would find it easy to minimize stability in the release build, including through luxury stacking. They didn't want stability to be too punishing for new players, though, especially those new...

Interesting perspective, but I don't share it. All historical civilizations from the classical period on were "frankenstein" civilizations, as they all built on the traditions of civilizations that preceded them and that they evolved from / absorbed / conquered as they took over that same...

The Netherlands' ranking is based on importing raw food, processing it, and then exporting it. The value-added from the processing is what bumps up the value of their agricultural exports to 2nd behind the U.S. Turkey used to be "self-sufficient" for agriculture back in the 80s, but I...

I'm coming in late, but Aesthete seems like such a natural fit for USA, I'm very surprised to see Expansionist. The way Influence exerts pressure on neighbouring empires and forces osmosis events seems like a perfect fit with modern America. Expansionist would have been fine for the prior era...

What makes it more interesting, though, is that just placing an Outpost isn't enough. You also need to be able to defend the Outpost, because it can be destroyed by other empires even if you are not at war. And if it's destroyed, your Influence is down the drain. So you also need to invest in...

There's a whole bunch of balancing to be done, and as I understand it, that's one of the main motivations for the Victor OpenDev. There's nothing like a huge crowd of playtesters to understand "who finds the game too hard and why", "who finds the game too easy and why", and "who broke our game...

I hope this turns out not to be true. The brilliant thing about the Events system is that the optimal choice is not (or should not) be the same every game. Most events juggle up to three factors: a direct bonus/malus, an Ideology impact, and the potential for follow-on impacts from your...