While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[North King]

That depends a lot on the era in question, and I believe Symphony is referring to an intrinsic advantage of defense in those particular game mechanics, which wouldn't go so hot.

 

[Symphony D.]

Civilization's problem is and has always been that the best/fastest way to win is Always Be Conquering (remember your ABCs) and literally everything else in the game is built to try and dilute that strategy, from happiness/corruption to the alternate victory conditions and their associated baggage. From a gameplay perspective, giving the attacker a huge advantage, and priveleging first strike and a very particular unit comp, when the player always goes first and can micro better, strikes me as a bad way of responding to deficient AI, especially when the AI has always been deficient.

There is no way around Stacks of Doom short of mechanically limiting them because concentration of force is pretty natural and works. The best and easiest solution to someone else's concentration of force is to bring more or better forces. You're not going to easily model guerrilla/asymmetrical warfare without adding loads of new features, and unless you do (and even then) stacks will still be a good to optimal choice.

So you make bombardment hit whole stacks. Cool. Now you make stacks of bombardment units and finesse your positioning a bit more with maybe a few screen units or scouts. IIRC, that was called Civ IV. Unless there's supply or disease or higher attrition from attacking up, stacks are still the dominant tactic. A game with a single dominant strategy (conquest victory) and a single dominant tactic for securing it (Stacks of Doom) is pretty much just a bad game.

 

[Kozmos]

Aren't 90% of games like that? Having an optimal strategy/tactic with additional choices for flavour and roleplaying? Civilizations problem (besides the oft problematic AI) has been making military units cheap to maintain and not playtesting gold production exploits enough. I recall maybe one 4X game where you had to keep watch on the number of military units you had and where you concentrated to have decent response times in case of unforeseen events while you were off trying to play hegemon of the galaxy.

 

[Symphony D.]

Aren't 90% of games like that?

90% of bad games, sure.

If your game is built on replayability then having a single dominant strategy (which is also extremely tedious after awhile) and hoping people will just play intentionally suboptimally is pretty terrible design. That people want to go back to that is bizarre.

 

[Luckymoose]

What are your thoughts on soup?

 

[Lord of Elves]

Fatherland Proletarian Alphabet
For the Instruction of Revolutionary Children

A is for the Act of Union, bringing together the great Swedish and Norwegian peoples
B is for Brazil, the Tyrant in Rio de Janeiro
C is for colleague, our brothers in arms
D is for Denmark, soon to be reunited with its Nordic cousins
E is for England, languishing under its tyrant king
F is for Finland, the eastern bit of Sweden
G is for Germany, our worst enemy best friend
H is for heroes, who die to defend the Fatherland
I is for independence, from tyranny and despotism
J is for Jesus, who would have been a proletarist
K is for Kongo, whose native people cry out for freedom from the traitor regime
L is for liberty, for which we will fight and die
M is for Mannerheim, the First Proletarian
N is for Norway, brother to Sweden
O is for obvious, the virtue of our cause
P is for proletarism, the path to freedom and justice for all mankind
Q is for quick, the deaths of traitors
R is for Russia, our best friend worst enemy
S is for Sweden, brother to Norway
T is for total, as in, total annihilation of our enemies
U is for united, our free Fatherland
V is for Vinland, the black sheep of our Nordic family
W is for the Workers and their Commonwealth
X is for xenophobia, because foreigners are bad
Y is for yellow, like our coward enemies
Z is for zealous, our loyal armies​

 

[Luckymoose]

World War Record:
Brazil 1-0
Scandinavia 0-2

 

[Crezth]

World War Record:
Brazil 1-0
Scandinavia 0-2

 

[Golden1Knight]

Yay.

 

[Symphony D.]

What are your thoughts on soup?

Most soups I have had were pretty tasty.

 

[Arrow Gamer]

He has interesting stuff to say, shocking isn't it?

It's almost as if... Wait, no, that can't be right.

But it seems like... I wasn't talking about the quality of his content, nor picking a fight.

 

[Kozmos]

90% of bad games, sure.

If your game is built on replayability then having a single dominant strategy (which is also extremely tedious after awhile) and hoping people will just play intentionally suboptimally is pretty terrible design. That people want to go back to that is bizarre.

Then what games are good games? (that focus on replayability to limit the scope)

 

[Symphony D.]

Then what games are good games? (that focus on replayability to limit the scope)

Well, part of the problem is probably from the very nature of 4X games, especially the 4th X: exterminate. The dominant strategic approach is sort of predetermined by this very idea. Indeed, most game genres are defined by what the dominant strategic approach to victory is: in FPS it's "shoot mans," in RTS it's "kill other army," in MOBAs it's "kill enemy team," in MMORPGs it's "waste time." However, most of these have some kind of metagame and so have varied tactics, and although some are usually dominant, there are usually several different ways of achieving the strategy. Even other 4X games, like a lot of space 4Xs, have varied tactical approaches for most of the game.

Civilization has historically had stacks, and that's it. It's actually fairly unique in having basically zero meta for the killy bit, just for the economic setup to produce killy things (wide vs. tall, OCP vs. ICS, rush vs. produce, etc). There's positioning and micro, but the unit comp doesn't matter supremely and the actual tactical aspect of achieving victory isn't even one-dimensional, it's a singularity. Stack and push. That's uniquely dumb and boring. Getting rid of them was good and I can say without hyperbole that wanting them back is actively wanting a terrible game, in which case you should just go buy SimCity 2013.

 

[Lord of Elves]

World War Record:
Brazil 1-0
Scandinavia 0-2

No one remembers or cares how opposed I was to CI's First World War

 

[Grandkhan]

World War Record:
Brazil 1-0
Scandinavia 0-2

I missed the bit where Brazil won a second world war.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

He only claimed one victory... and I now move beyond 666 posts, as much as I loathe to do so.

 

[Symphony D.]

I have an idea for an art project. It would be a statue of some kind, placed in some major metropolitan area. The exact details of the statue are sort of irrelevant, the main draw of the piece would be that it will hold a completely functional nuclear weapon of arbitrary tonnage, strategic or tactical. Whatever looks best. I like the W87 myself. Anyway, the piece would be named This Machine Kills Everyone, in an ironic twist. It would be displayed out in the open in a public space. It would also, of course, be the most heavily secured piece of art ever, with multiple response teams on immediate standby all the time, in addition to all other kinds of security measures.

Given the worth and utility of the piece, and the fact that people steal and/or deface famous statues all the time, I think it would serve as a tremendous idiot magnet and dangerous and/or stupid people would flock to it to be dealt with rather than lurking about presenting a danger and/or requiring the authorities to find them in the first place. It's a rare piece of art that serves the public good beyond simply inspiring the soul.

e: this dude has won the Best New Dumb Conspiracy Theory Award 2014


Link to video.

See how much you can stand to watch.

 

[Grandkhan]

He only claimed one victory... and I now move beyond 666 posts, as much as I loathe to do so.

Ah, right, I misread that.

nvm #rekt 100% dunked list of burn wards in the continental united states.

 

[Daftpanzer]

e: this dude has won the Best New Dumb Conspiracy Theory Award 2014


Link to video.

See how much you can stand to watch.

TOTALLY LEGIT ARGUMENTS (approx ~ 30s before started skipping)

In other news, it is confirmed that Satan won the 2008 US election.


Link to video.

 

[Daftpanzer]

In other news:


Link to video.