How the player is a dictator or "god" in strategy games

[BackseatTyrant]

One thing I appreciate about the video, is how it points out how democratization in Vic3 essentially gives the player more autocracy, since each nation has a ruling class whose interests go directly against the player's. I feel like more strategy games going forward should at least consider this approach

 

[Patine]

One thing I appreciate about the video, is how it points out how democratization in Vic3 essentially gives the player more autocracy, since each nation has a ruling class whose interests go directly against the player's. I feel like more strategy games going forward should at least consider this approach

I don't know. Though I haven't personally played Vic3 (or any other Paradox computer game), those sorts of mechanics, in a general sense, immensely reduce the enjoyment I get out of strategy game - refer to my comment on MoO3, above. It would be a real blow to the Civ franchise, in my view, if Firaxis took up that - or other similar - practice.

 

[aieeegrunt]

You could have an AI partner assisting governance/ruling for you that would get increased decision powers according to the politic cards in you government. If you choose a card increasing cultural/tourism output, the partner AI could start buying and/or place art pieces in order to better maximize that strategic option.

I’d rather just have puppets and vassals back

I've thought of the idea where maybe you could be overruled on certain things, or have policies passed that you yourself do not choose, depending on if you have a government like Democracy or have built a specific governmental building, like a "Senate House". But other than that, I think the idea of the player being a dictator/god makes sense.

Civ2 had this, either democracy or republic or both would refuse to let you declare war on people

The idea of the player with limited knowledge and control is as old as gaming. When you are playing against other Humans, as in Poker or the boardgame Diplomacy, limited control and knowledge is, in fact, the essence of the game.

I remember fondly the old SPI boardgame, Franco-Prussian War, which deliberately tried to give the player trhe same lack of information a 'real' general would have had: all combat factors and sizes of units were hidden, a bunch of 'dummy' units were on the map, so you did not know what you were facing, exactly, until Combat started - and sometimes not very certain even then. In a set of miniatures rules for the Napoleonic Wars from over 50 years ago, while you could see all the units on the table, their morale was not known until the first time you had to test it (and if there was a neutral Umpire present, not even then!). Since 'morale' was a set of three numbers multiplied together, one of which was based on the type of unit (Line, Guards, Grenadiers, etc) one based on you the General's estimate, and one a random generated by the Umpire or game when you tested, which might be 0, there was a chance that on its first test for stability your lovingly painted Franconian Militia might turn out to have 0 morale and run right off the table before you could stop them. It made for some exciting games, but also some frustrating ones. A vehicle for Perfect Plans it wasn't.

Which is the real Crux of the problem. Having the entire game buried in a computer means that virtually any information can be randomized, hidden, or manipulated to Mess With The Gamer's Mind, without needing an Umpire at all. This can give the gamer a taste of the Real Problems that Lieutenants, Colonels, Generals, Politicians, Diplomats, and even God Kings have to deal with all the time, but it may also make Ferd the Gamer rage quit after the umpteenth time he walks his scout into a field of digital bunny rabbits - who all happen to be Homicidally Rabid.

So, much as I like having to deal with 'real' historical Problems, including the fact that No one out of your sight can be trusted to do what you ordered them to do (Mary Beard's recent book on the Roman Emperors emphasized this: even the semi-Divine Imperator of Rome could never be sure that anyone was telling the truth or that anything out of his sight was actually being done the way he wanted it to be: picture of a gamer in a 'realistic' Historical Game!) - I think the whole concept has to be handled very, very carefully. While there is no real limit to the perfidy or apparent perfidy/randomness of people and Mother Nature (the Homicidal ***** of Goddesses), if All is Random the game is unplayable. And if most of it is unpredictable it is effectively unplayable except by Masochists.

So, leaning away from the Omnipotent, Omniscient God-King, Grand Nagus, Ineffable Rotundity is not a bad thing, and some 'uncertainty' can keep an apparently-certain game interesting, but the designers have to constantly be asking themselves: "Is This Too Much?" or "Can This Be Handled With Less F*****g With The Gamer?" Because too much of the latter leads quickly to No Sales and some really nasty comments about the game posted on every site from Tobruck to Togo . . .

I mean a computer medium is ideal for this approacb

 

[UWHabs]

I’d rather just have puppets and vassals back



Civ2 had this, either democracy or republic or both would refuse to let you declare war on people



I mean a computer medium is ideal for this approacb

Yeah, I think Democracy forbid any war declarations, Republic I forget when you could or not. It made for some interesting game decisions at times. I don't mind having more tradeoffs like that - even in civ abilities, you see that with some leaders being able to do different things.

But for civ, and other games like this, the biggest thing is that we know the game, and we know the rules. Like, I don't think 4000 years ago when people were setting up workshops in towns they thought "You know, if I put my mill a little upstream, I'll leave space for a dam on this river in 3000 years" Or the old "well, we had a scout walk across this forest 2500 years ago, but we just discovered that Uranium can be found underground there." While those aren't necessarily related to being a God in these games, they come at the same point - we're playing a game, so some things just have to work differently.

For the actual God Mode part of it, for a game like civ, the only way really around that that would work would be to still let you do anything, but just make sure that any big actions have big penalties. You could make war weariness even more crippling, or you could bring back some of the corruption modifiers from previous games that made infinite expansion only possible in some circumstances. But you can never really solve the "I want to put my campus here because in 2000 years that's a better spot for it" unless if you basically have a large set of rules that you don't know will happen down the road. Which, I mean, you could do. Like if you were playing civ and you didn't know until you built it what the range on a factory overlap was going to be, or if the adjacency bonus that an industrial zone got from a dam was randomly picked from between -2 and +2, or if some games campuses got bonuses from forests instead of jungles, etc... Given enough randomness and you have to live a lot more in the now than the autocratic future. But then the game becomes a lot harder to balance and play, and ends up as an RNG simulator than any world builder.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Yeah, I think Democracy forbid any war declarations, Republic I forget when you could or not. It made for some interesting game decisions at times. I don't mind having more tradeoffs like that - even in civ abilities, you see that with some leaders being able to do different things.

But for civ, and other games like this, the biggest thing is that we know the game, and we know the rules. Like, I don't think 4000 years ago when people were setting up workshops in towns they thought "You know, if I put my mill a little upstream, I'll leave space for a dam on this river in 3000 years" Or the old "well, we had a scout walk across this forest 2500 years ago, but we just discovered that Uranium can be found underground there." While those aren't necessarily related to being a God in these games, they come at the same point - we're playing a game, so some things just have to work differently.

For the actual God Mode part of it, for a game like civ, the only way really around that that would work would be to still let you do anything, but just make sure that any big actions have big penalties. You could make war weariness even more crippling, or you could bring back some of the corruption modifiers from previous games that made infinite expansion only possible in some circumstances. But you can never really solve the "I want to put my campus here because in 2000 years that's a better spot for it" unless if you basically have a large set of rules that you don't know will happen down the road. Which, I mean, you could do. Like if you were playing civ and you didn't know until you built it what the range on a factory overlap was going to be, or if the adjacency bonus that an industrial zone got from a dam was randomly picked from between -2 and +2, or if some games campuses got bonuses from forests instead of jungles, etc... Given enough randomness and you have to live a lot more in the now than the autocratic future. But then the game becomes a lot harder to balance and play, and ends up as an RNG simulator than any world builder.

The boardgameyness of how Civ6 does adjacensies is incredibly annoying

I swear everything about this game is “this is a cool concept, now what is the worst way possible to implement it?”

I found a couple mods that made adjacent bonuses make actual sense instead of Where Mountains and it improved things so much

Had to do that for just about every mechanic in the game, and now I have (checks Steam) 15 pages of mods.

It still doesnt fix the nonsense of having to do city planning a zillion years in advance, but that is Munchkin Game Design for you

 

[EgonSpengler]

You could have an AI partner assisting governance/ruling for you that would get increased decision powers according to the politic cards in you government. If you choose a card increasing cultural/tourism output, the partner AI could start buying and/or place art pieces in order to better maximize that strategic option.

Some version of the city-building games, where you set policies, build infrastructure, and set zoning areas, but then the buildings just kind of grow by themselves. And there are certain, special buildings that you can demand be built.

The idea of the player with limited knowledge and control is as old as gaming. When you are playing against other Humans, as in Poker or the boardgame Diplomacy, limited control and knowledge is, in fact, the essence of the game.

I remember fondly the old SPI boardgame, Franco-Prussian War, which deliberately tried to give the player trhe same lack of information a 'real' general would have had: all combat factors and sizes of units were hidden, a bunch of 'dummy' units were on the map, so you did not know what you were facing, exactly, until Combat started - and sometimes not very certain even then. In a set of miniatures rules for the Napoleonic Wars from over 50 years ago, while you could see all the units on the table, their morale was not known until the first time you had to test it (and if there was a neutral Umpire present, not even then!). Since 'morale' was a set of three numbers multiplied together, one of which was based on the type of unit (Line, Guards, Grenadiers, etc) one based on you the General's estimate, and one a random generated by the Umpire or game when you tested, which might be 0, there was a chance that on its first test for stability your lovingly painted Franconian Militia might turn out to have 0 morale and run right off the table before you could stop them. It made for some exciting games, but also some frustrating ones. A vehicle for Perfect Plans it wasn't.

Which is the real Crux of the problem. Having the entire game buried in a computer means that virtually any information can be randomized, hidden, or manipulated to Mess With The Gamer's Mind, without needing an Umpire at all. This can give the gamer a taste of the Real Problems that Lieutenants, Colonels, Generals, Politicians, Diplomats, and even God Kings have to deal with all the time, but it may also make Ferd the Gamer rage quit after the umpteenth time he walks his scout into a field of digital bunny rabbits - who all happen to be Homicidally Rabid.

So, much as I like having to deal with 'real' historical Problems, including the fact that No one out of your sight can be trusted to do what you ordered them to do (Mary Beard's recent book on the Roman Emperors emphasized this: even the semi-Divine Imperator of Rome could never be sure that anyone was telling the truth or that anything out of his sight was actually being done the way he wanted it to be: picture of a gamer in a 'realistic' Historical Game!) - I think the whole concept has to be handled very, very carefully. While there is no real limit to the perfidy or apparent perfidy/randomness of people and Mother Nature (the Homicidal ***** of Goddesses), if All is Random the game is unplayable. And if most of it is unpredictable it is effectively unplayable except by Masochists.

So, leaning away from the Omnipotent, Omniscient God-King, Grand Nagus, Ineffable Rotundity is not a bad thing, and some 'uncertainty' can keep an apparently-certain game interesting, but the designers have to constantly be asking themselves: "Is This Too Much?" or "Can This Be Handled With Less F*****g With The Gamer?" Because too much of the latter leads quickly to No Sales and some really nasty comments about the game posted on every site from Tobruck to Togo . . .

"The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense." - Stephen King (At least, I heard it from King. Google attributes it to Tom Clancy, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were both quoting someone else.)

 

[BackseatTyrant]

"The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense." - Stephen King (At least, I heard it from King. Google attributes it to Tom Clancy, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were both quoting someone else.)

Found this on Wikiquote:

EDIT: Quote Investigator also has an article on this quote, attributing its origins to Mark Twain

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

"The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense." - Stephen King (At least, I heard it from King. Google attributes it to Tom Clancy, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were both quoting someone else.)

My earliest reading (that I can remember, anyway) was Science Fiction - back in the 1950s, the "Golden Age" of authors like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Sturgeon, Simak, Leinster, et al.

I became interested in history when I realized that, as imaginative as those authors were, they couldn't touch what history regularly throws up. The sheer Surprise Factor has kept me intrigued for 60+ years . . .

 

[aieeegrunt]

My earliest reading (that I can remember, anyway) was Science Fiction - back in the 1950s, the "Golden Age" of authors like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Sturgeon, Simak, Leinster, et al.

I became interested in history when I realized that, as imaginative as those authors were, they couldn't touch what history regularly throws up. The sheer Surprise Factor has kept me intrigued for 60+ years . . .

Man I remember that era.

The only ones from that group I can still read is Niven’s stuff, and some of Pournelle’s.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Man I remember that era.

The only ones from that group I can still read is Niven’s stuff, and some of Pournelle’s.

Just re-read Footfall and Mote in God's Eye this last year, from the Niven/Pournelle team effort.
From the classic era, find a copy of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy or Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts - all three are, IMHO, masterpieces in fthe Pournelle/Niven vein.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Just re-read Footfall and Mote in God's Eye this last year, from the Niven/Pournelle team effort.
From the classic era, find a copy of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy or Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts - all three are, IMHO, masterpieces in fthe Pournelle/Niven vein.

I gave up on Heinlein because the crazy started escalating and his fetishes were increasingly on display, similar to Frank Herbert, but I might check those out.

Niven and Pournelle always deliver, and stuff set in Niven’s Known Space as well because it’s so different from the usual Space Opera formula.

I wonder how Niven feels about Halo, since they blatantly stole Ringworld, and then 343 Industries flew the story straight into the ground. The first time I played Halo I was like man how’d they get the rights to this, and I kept waiting for the Pak to show up. Made Halo CE’s “surprise” even more effective

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I gave up on Heinlein because the crazy started escalating and his fetishes were increasingly on display, similar to Frank Herbert, but I might check those out.

Niven and Pournelle always deliver, and stuff set in Niven’s Known Space as well because it’s so different from the usual Space Opera formula.

I wonder how Niven feels about Halo, since they blatantly stole Ringworld, and then 343 Industries flew the story straight into the ground. The first time I played Halo I was like man how’d they get the rights to this, and I kept waiting for the Pak to show up. Made Halo CE’s “surprise” even more effective

Last Post Off Topic:
Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is, I'm sorry to say, the last thing Heinlein wrote that I consider any good, but it is very good indeed: after that, he seriously needed a good editor to take an axe to his work, but the publishers were apparently afraid to cut anything by a Grand Master of Science Fiction. Sad.

Niven is a bloody genius and Pournelle a good story-teller, but a less-well-known (now, anyway) who did almost as well was H. Beam Piper. Cosmic Computer and Space Viking were set in the same 'future universe', but in a nice switch, so far apart that they are disconnected: by the time the colonized worlds that call themselves the Sword Worlds (with names like Excaliber, Durandel, etc) and are raiding older worlds, the original Earth is unknown and the events in Cosmic Computer (the aftermath of a massive interstellar war) have been forgotten. I also reccommend any collection of his short stories: The Man Who Walked Around the Horses is an absolute Gem of 'alternate' history that is based on an actual mystery from the Napoleonic Wars: if I had ever actually worked as a History teacher I think I would have made it required reading!

 

[GIO888]

I liked Poul Andersons Time Travel stuff.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I liked Poul Andersons Time Travel stuff.

I think his stories of Nicolas van Rijn and the Polesoltechnic League are even better: The Man Who Counts, for example, is a brilliant novel on several levels: world and alien-race building, politics, application of technology, interpersonal (and Alien) relationships Van Rijn quoting Shakespeare to an audience of flying aliens whose help he needs is one of the Great Scenes in science fiction . . .

And if you like time travel stories, H. Beam Piper was the Original Alternate History writer: his Paratime Series explores the basic alternative history ("every time there was a decision, history went both ways") hypothesis beautifully, both in 'historical' setting and in science fictional backgrounds: like a society that has discovered the scientific techniques of communicating with the recently dead. Piper explores how that changes the Society. Like, whether the dead can return voluntarily or are simply drawn back to reincarnation in any random infant, how does that change your inheritance and property laws? - And with that background, the society's respect for Life when your current Life isn't your only one? Clue: Personal Bodyguards, registered assassinations as political acts, and an Assassin's Guild as an institution.

But unless Civ VII is to be set entirely in the Future Era, all this is 'way Off Topic . . .

 

[aieeegrunt]

Should we take this discussion to an Off Topic part of the forum?

 

[Patine]

I think his stories of Nicolas van Rijn and the Polesoltechnic League are even better: The Man Who Counts, for example, is a brilliant novel on several levels: world and alien-race building, politics, application of technology, interpersonal (and Alien) relationships Van Rijn quoting Shakespeare to an audience of flying aliens whose help he needs is one of the Great Scenes in science fiction . . .

And if you like time travel stories, H. Beam Piper was the Original Alternate History writer: his Paratime Series explores the basic alternative history ("every time there was a decision, history went both ways") hypothesis beautifully, both in 'historical' setting and in science fictional backgrounds: like a society that has discovered the scientific techniques of communicating with the recently dead. Piper explores how that changes the Society. Like, whether the dead can return voluntarily or are simply drawn back to reincarnation in any random infant, how does that change your inheritance and property laws? - And with that background, the society's respect for Life when your current Life isn't your only one? Clue: Personal Bodyguards, registered assassinations as political acts, and an Assassin's Guild as an institution.

But unless Civ VII is to be set entirely in the Future Era, all this is 'way Off Topic . . .

Should we take this discussion to an Off Topic part of the forum?

Doesn't @Valka D'Ur have a thread called, "Whatcha readin'?" or something along those lines?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Doesn't @Valka D'Ur have a thread called, "Whatcha readin'?" or something along those lines?

You're partly right. I'd love to see a discussion of science fiction books in A&E but you're thinking of Zkribbler's "Whatcha writin'?" thread, and that's meant for discussions of what people are writing. I don't think we've had much joy in using that thread since Zkribbler died, to be honest. I still miss him, and it's hard to know that there were conversations going with him there that will be forever unfinished.

What I would recommend, if you want to take this discussion to the A&E forum is to decide which posts you would like to split off from your thread (since strictly Civ posts don't meet A&E's description, decide on a new thread name and who will be the new OP, and ask a moderator to move it to A&E (retired mods like me aren't active, so we can't do moderator stuff anymore). I've seen enough comments here that I would love to participate if you're going to talk about some of my favorite authors.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Ok if someone wants to make a new thread I’m down

 

[Patine]

Ok if someone wants to make a new thread I’m down

I think @Boris Gudenuf should do the honours!

 

[narmox]

I've thought of the idea where maybe you could be overruled on certain things, or have policies passed that you yourself do not choose, depending on if you have a government like Democracy or have built a specific governmental building, like a "Senate House". But other than that, I think the idea of the player being a dictator/god makes sense.

civ1 and I believe 2 had this feature in Democracy or republic govts that would randomly overrule you when declaring war or force peace treaties. It was removed from later games in the series because it removed player agency…