BirdNES 3: Discussions & Questions

[Dreadnought]

Why are people assume that strategies that don't make sense work? I just want to clarify that.

I assume, based on what I have read, because in this instance those strategies did work.

 

[Immaculate]

Specifically like what?
Colonization by China?
Domestic development by England?

 

[Dachs]

Basing my response on this alone: I think having a model divorced from reality and effectively penalizing historical plausible sense is fine if it wasn't in a black box. Right now it's sorta like chess, a game divorced from reality relying only on its internal logic, except all the players don't know what to do, or think it's some sort of tactical wargame where pawns are really footmen and knights should beat the excrement out of anything except the castles, and forfeit their turn if they made a wrong move, rewarding those who basically stumble upon it's insane and idiosyncratic logic.

Lifting the veil will mean that players can begin treating the game as such, devising strategies relevant to the achievement of success based on the mechanics as presented, as opposed to devising strategies that make sense in historical and geographic context but are suboptimal seeing that strategies that don't make sense in historical and geographic context have similar or even better returns.

This was a good post.

See, I don't have any problems with unrealistic NESes as such. I might actually run a RiskNES myself sometime soon if I ever figure out how to lolgraphics. But if the NES is based on internal, unrealistic logic, the players should know that so they can be capable of understanding it and working within that logic. The motivation to prevent the rules from being exploitable for loopholes by people like Abaddon is entirely understandable - but clearly the rules are being exploited anyway despite the black box.

Why are people assume that strategies that don't make sense work? I just want to clarify that.

What Dreadnought said.

 

[North King]

Why are people assume that strategies that don't make sense work? I just want to clarify that.

Well presumably to achieve an unrealistic outcome like exponential growth in a preindustrial society, you have to intentionally reinvest in ways which might well be historical in nature but antihistorical in scale.

Granted "we"¹ don't really have to prove this, because "you"² have already admitted that this NES is not designed with a realistic economic system in mind.

There are a few more things I want to address here:

And in the end, it's only a game. I think BirdJ did good job at moderating it.

If you found some mistakes and problems - and these problems annoy you. And your "historical major" or "wikipedia l33t skillz" give you access to much better knowledge, more accurate stats and true knowledge, then stop whining about how historically inaccurate this NES was and run a nes of this scale yourself, that WOULD fulfill your requirements.

Yeah, I'll go and do that. On top of all the other stuff I'm doing.

No one's saying Bird shouldn't run an NES. No one's saying he HAS to run it in a certain nature. However, having expressed some desire to understand what is antihistorical about it, we're simply EXPLAINING that. No one is delivering an ultimatum here.³

If it makes y'all feel super important, call it what you like. Doesn't distract from the fact you're all kidding yourselves.

Look, some people take the game/story more seriously than you. And guess what? That's okay. It doesn't make you a super-lameo-mulpepper to try and make the hobby that you work at for roughly 5 hours out of the average 24 hour day a better or more interesting experience. It means you're trying to maximize the utility of that time spent.

So sorry if I like my entertainment intellectual. Maybe you don't. But guess what, there's nothing wrong with liking intellectual entertainment that requires your brain to function.⁴

What is somewhat amusing to me is that I have never seen any NES with an economic model that even approached reality. There may be some, but I have not seen them. Those I've played are all very simple and designed to facilitate game play and easy upkeep. The closest attempt is PerfNES with its "no economic system" approach and essentially two stats: money and prestige. I find it very interesting, in spite of the "fantasy" setting, and want to see how it plays out over more than a few turns.

There are a whole number of problems here, outlined elsewhere, which I won't readdress.

But I am required to say that characterizing Perf's NES as a "fantasy" setting is a gross misuse of the term.⁵

The issue of limiting nations to some approximation of historical ecomomic boundaries is a design question that is built around how one wants the players to act and the degree of freedom one gives to the players. The more one constrains player ability to drive economic growth, the less important are all the potential economic decisions. If it is not a stat or if it is not a stat one can change or cause to be changed, then for game play purposes it is irrelevant.

I find this statement to be deeply troubling. Basically you're framing the discussion like this: "change" as the only thing which requires player attention, and assuming an unchanging stat is an "irrelevant" one.

This is an extremely dangerous pair of assertions, and one which seriously undermines some of the most interesting parts of playing in an NES.

Is "change" the only thing we have to worry about? Is a stat which never changes "irrelevant"?

Well first of all I think your assertion is massively flawed in the first place. Income levels don't have to change from turn to turn to provide player interest, because a budget by definition is always going to require player input on some level. You're going to need to figure out how much you have to spend, on what you're going to spend it, and unless you're the most boring person in the world, you're going to change that from turn to turn. Why on Earth would you need the budget to go up or down to make a difference there? Patronizing artists is a valuable pursuit of time, as might be building new religious or civic buildings. Neither should really net you an increase in income. But both are essential to the cultural development of nations.

But more vitally, I think your assumption that stats in general need to change from turn to turn to maintain player interest is flawed as well. Holding actions, whether in economic or in military endeavors, sometimes will require just as much activity from the player as would some kind of active growth.⁶ Finding ways to work around the status quo is more interesting, IMHO, than simply breaking it.

But then, I've never been a cut-the-Gordian-knot kind of guy, and maybe you are.<sup>7








1</sup> The people who are generally on one side of this "debate".

² The generic "opposition".

³ Well, except the generic "opposition".

⁴ I am not saying your brain does not function.

⁵ Based on standard usage of the word "fantasy". Perf's NES is no more "fantasy" than this one is.

⁶ Personally I find defensive actions to be the most engrossing of wars.

⁷ Interestingly, Alexander the Great's action stopped a young up-and-coming mathematician from developing a general solution to the problem of knot-untying that would have advanced civilization's technology by several thousand years.<sup>8

8</sup> I may have made this up.