Good thing I never expressed such a sentiment.
You did. You asked with incredulity how a turn-based 4X is supposed to be MP-focused. Nothing about those two descriptors detracts from player v player, and the strategy genre of course intrinsically arouses competition interest.
It is wholly conceivable a 4X game could be built exclusively for MP, and so be extension, it is reasonable a 4X game could be built with MP in mind plus other things, and it would be suspect for a 4X game to give up MP merely for other modes of consumption without an extraneous cause. More relevantly, the idea a MP-er could see a game built to be MP in the template at hand, follows simply from its ability to be MP at all; so, when you denied the extreme, you challenged the existence of any claim to the genre from that group, following the contrapositive.
You need that explained? For a game called "Civilization"?
This does not grammatically make sense to me. I asked what the feeling is you are referring to , which you claim the game gives you.
I intend to propose that the Civ games are an inefficient vehicle for that feeling or experience, or lead you by argument into valuing a smarter AI, and of the type that plays the game.
Galgus, we agree on ends... I think. So, where MP/SP (that is, accommodation of multiple players vs. a personal crafted experience) trades off with the tuning of the game's mechanics (techs, pacing, etc.) - which, to be clear, happens just when the fact "AI and game" ("game+AI") become entangled as such in designing and tuning the play of those mechanics - you would say the personally crafted experience is primary. That there will be a point where , if you needed to take the step in game-balancing which would make it balanced in symmetry (MP), then the fact that the personally-situated experience would then only receive the consequence of the resulting game+what-the-AI-can-make-of-that, means this decision is a split tradeoff for the SP experience against the symmetric design.
If that's right, please examine the following question for your consideration. If you look at AI as environment, then one is designing AI+game as the whole experience. Then will it not be AI+game which has the failing of single-optimal-path or not? Won't it be AI+game which fails to have potentially multiple viable paths to victory, or succeeds? The AI+game being duality makes it harder to grasp and carry around, but it affords in possibility the extreme morphing of one part to accomplish a given end when the other must be guided by a separate hand. With great vision, the AI could supply what SP-ers want, while the game itself is consumed by MP-ers as they require.
That's my offer to someone wanting "MP-primacy and that's that." if this is about developer resources effectively making two games, then well I wished for a 4X with as good an artistic merit as Civ to be made for the MP-ers by somebody, if not the originators who stick to their SP vision and base.
My actual position remains somewhere on the flavour of doubting that the SP-ers, excepting the ones playing for the turn times, could be playing for some motivation which would not be immeasurably accelerated by taking their enjoyment into a community of Humans who make up the rest of the world with them. For that it has to be balanced, or
clearly not balanced without claiming to be so. And then I would want the game to be slanted with the turntimers on the margins, who can pick up the environment (game) as however, and their experience is just in the craft of the AI, which is now specialized to one demographic. The AI that roleplays is just another mode to hunt optimality against for the one group, and affords the roleplay experience for people to enjoy on its own merits, yes, but is a simulation of a
player, which a Human actually -is-.
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Cars are tools, though. They're not art. Even if someone makes a car to be beautiful, unless he also tells me "This car actually doesn't have an engine", they're not the same 'creative' endeavour.
The literature entitlement is an example of the same phenomenon, but it is unacceptable there. Writing, art, music, film - the creator wants to make what he wants to make, yup. I suppose... games are co-created. Except for kinetic visual novels (which are HORRIBLY named, they're comic e-books for god sakes) the designer makes a potential experience, but the player makes the actual experience. The writer is sort of showing you himself, or the world, and with image instead of scientific description... you then take that or leave it as you will. Interpret through your own lens, but the writer is done with this process. A 'game' is by definition your participation, you both make the game real. Potential and actual - and then, aren't games essentially pluralistic?
edit: crap, this might be off-topic for a while.