Imperator Knoedel
Currently obsessed with The Owl House
Yes, yes, the bourgeois indoctrination in your mind is beginning to break up, continue fighting it!
Also this is highly relevant:
-
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Would you want to know more about Leoreth?
- Thread starter Hojsimpson
- Start date
Yes, yes, the bourgeois indoctrination in your mind is beginning to break up, continue fighting it!
Also this is highly relevant:
Yes, yes, the bourgeois indoctrination in your mind is beginning to break up, continue fighting it!
Also this is highly relevant:
I mean the goal was to land on the moon. We did that when the soviets were unable so yeah we kinda did win the space race.
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Imperator Knoedel
Currently obsessed with The Owl House
"You" won a tiny insignificant fraction of the space race while the glorious Soviet Union beat you at literally everything else.
There was no space race. There was the world's leading capitalist nation desperately trying to catch up with and copy the myriad advances brought about by the workers and thinkers of the USSR.
Not much of one apparently. Sometimes I test this on people who don't know where I'm from, and usually the response is "barely noticeable and unplaceably foreign". The thing is, you kind of grow into a language without much awareness of its different dialects and accents and absorb them at random through whatever influences you. So I have this weird mixture of various AE and BE elements in my English that is probably unlike any existing accent.How bad of a German accent do you have, Leo?
Last time I was in California I was talking in German to some people while queuing for a restaurant, when the man in front of us turned around and asked what language it was. He wouldn't believe me at first when I told him it was German, because as it turned out his parents were German immigrants and he had a set idea of what it was supposed to sound like. I guess even my German accent isn't German
Last time I was in California I was talking in German to some people while queuing for a restaurant, when the man in front of us turned around and asked what language it was. He wouldn't believe me at first when I told him it was German, because as it turned out his parents were German immigrants and he had a set idea of what it was supposed to sound like. I guess even my German accent isn't German
Doesn't German have a whole bunch of dialects? Maybe they've all been standardized, but accents remain.
Panopticon
Utilitarian
Frankfurt, EZB. So I can't blame teleconferencing Americans.
Yeah, but I speak near perfect Standard German. I think the difference was more the change colloquial German went through since his parents' generation (he was around his seventies already).
Oh, Frankfurt. I've always found that an unpleasant city to be in.
ales_
Heir
May I ask why?
Panopticon
Utilitarian
People are busy and there is not a lot of hanging around.
Panopticon
Utilitarian
It sounds like Leoreth will have to bow to pressure and host DoCCon in Frankfurt.
Okay everyone, DoCCon takes place at Saravanaa Bhavan, Frankfurt (South Indian cuisine, I can recommend it).
It's also the Polish flip zone.
So I did some reading on Stellaris and started following their dev diaries, so I think I can give a more substantial opinion on it.
TLDR: I think it's going to be terrible.
Okay, my actual thoughts are of course more nuanced but that's still a pretty accurate description of my opinion. And it's not because I don't like Paradox or the space 4X genre (I do) or because I want to be edgy and predict failure (who cares).
I care about this topic a lot mainly because I think both space 4Xs, but also the 4X genre itself, are in a lot of trouble conceptually. If you have time and want more background, these Three Moves Ahead discussions give voice to a lot of things I also have been critical of.
In particular, the 4X genre is stuck in a creative slump where games are very formulaic and the mechanics are designed very conservatively. This is even more evident in recent times where the genre is much more popular again: they always feel and play very similar in spite of the thematic differences. Civilization obviously looms very large here, and other games seem content to supplant its mechanics into different settings, and do most game design work on special features that are stuck unto the repeated core design.
The space sub genre is in a similar situation, with Master of Orion being the unsurpassed touchstone (did you know there is a remake in the works?). New games are made, hyped as the successor to MoO, and then found wanting. I think the problem is not that they are not better than MoO (although I also don't think they are), but that they are so similar and imminently comparable to it in the first place.
I think Paradox is very good at innovating, or at least deviating from what is thought of as the proper (or only) way to execute a specific genre of games, so I had high hopes for what they had come up with. Unfortunately, it seems they are completely out of touch what is actually wrong with the genre.
Full disclosure here: I have lots of concepts for a space 4X game in my drawers, and I have put a lot of thought about what I think doesn't work in the genre and how I would design a game to fix it. The game basically started out as an exercise in producing the MoO successor I'd like to play but slowly turned into a project of how not to recreate MoO.
Anyway, let me enumerate some points where the problematic nature of Stellaris manifests itself.
1. Setting vs. Limitless Possibilities
This is the most significant point in my opinion. Previous Paradox games were strong on setting by the very nature of being historical games. Paradox is obviously very good in embedding historical processes into their game mechanics so playing their game and experiencing history evolve almost feels like the same thing. We know what the Early Modern Era is, what WW2 is, what the Victorian Era is, how the Middle Ages were like. This gives you a strong setting almost for free, you just have to make sure that you are (historically) "accurate".
For obvious reasons, that doesn't work when you are creating a game that is about space colonization. It's by its very nature about the future: the game designers don't know what that future is going to be like, and neither does the player. They probably also have wildly different imaginations of said future. Furthermore, the most educated guesses probably predict a future that is incompatible with the entire premise of your game, or at least a fun version of it. In other words, you don't get your setting for free.
That leaves you with two options. Create (or license) a setting, or make the game all about limitless possibilities and an organic evolution over the course of the game. Paradox chose the latter. Limitless possibilities seems thematically fitting (it's the future, anything can happen!) and mechanically enticing (so many different games could develop). In fact, it is the commonly accepted thought that space games have to be that way: everyone starts out the same on their homeworld, the galaxy is their oyster, let's see what develops. In my experience, the possibilities are actually still very limited in these types of games, and they usually develop in very similar ways.
This also makes the game more 4X like. I don't understand why Paradox made this decision because it's really not their strong point. The more 4X like games they made are certainly second tier, and the Paradox flagship games are so different from 4Xs that we had to come up with the Grand Strategy genre in the first place to describe them. Why abandon it for no good reason?
In addition, if you're going for limitless possibilities, you have to make the stuff in your game more generic because there is not really a setting to ground that in. This manifests in many elements such as races, buildings etc. but it's most evident in technologies. Here is where the free historical setting makes this permissible in games like Civ, but not in a futuristic setting: everyone knows what The Wheel is, or Democracy, or Economics. This means there is an immediate feedback to the player about what is happening in your civilization. When you unlock Rifleman, it is not only that you become stronger, you can tie yourself getting stronger to your understanding of what a Rifleman is in a way to increases your immersion. On the other hand, researching Superphasic Cannons or worse "Lasers III" is very abstract and essentially meaningless to the player. It all becomes a bland choice of raw bonuses with very little immersion. I thought we played space games to be immersed in a Scifi setting?
(It's interesting to observe how games deal with this tech problem, and the more you pay attention to what they're doing the more it becomes evident that it is a huge problem. For instance, Endless Space does this thing where the tech descriptions often include deliberately absurd technobabble or just plain out state that nobody gets how it works. This way of trying to get out of the responsibility of doing decent writing by being ironic about it immediately put me off the game. And in my opinion Endless Space is comparatively strong on setting! Even Master of Orion isn't immune to this, where many techs are direct references to many different scifi or space opera works. If you don't have your own setting, borrow flavor from others.)
2. Taking Science Fiction seriously
Don't worry, this section isn't about space game science not being "hard" enough, and how there is no stealth in space or how space fighters wouldn't be a thing. Yeah, I've read those threads on the Paradox forums. I think these discussions miss the point of Scifi entirely: it is not primarily about technology, but about society.
I think making this shift in focus could help a lot with the problem outlined above. It certainly did for what is the best science fiction game I have ever played, which is of course Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri was very smart about this, because it took the central question about the future of human society
and turns it into the central conflict of the game by associating its factions with these competing ideologies. This makes the different factions more than just different sets of bonuses, suddenly they have a very fleshed out and distinct personality, especially through their very charismatic leaders. The brilliant thing about this is how this reflects back on other aspects of the game: the way leader quotes are used to describe technologies for example immediately makes them more relatable and immersive. (Of course that's not the only reason, they also just did their research when creating techs and looking up philsophical/historical quotes to match them, something which your average developer cannot be bothered to do.)
Of course little is known about Stellaris in that regard, but the way they chose the unlimited possibilities approach it is unlikely they will be thematically strong in that regard, which is very unfortunate. Not only would it help the setting of the game, but would help the game to actually be about something besides the standard 4X paradigm of expansion and land rushing.
Do we really want our future to be only about the same imperialist/militarist ideology that is perpetuated by historical 4Xs all over the place already? I think there is more interesting stuff to envision.
I bring up these two things because they could have been easily avoided if Paradox had stuck closer to their usual model. Instead of the 4X-like "everyone starts at their homeworld" model, why not actually do some writing and create different factions/races with their own personalities? And then create pre-populated galaxies with established powers from a selection of these races through some procedural generation similar to the established powers model of EU, Vic or CK? If done right, there could actually be more ways for games to turn out, and I would have more trust in them getting the game design right when in their comfort zone. Why they have made a different decision is really confusing to me. Either they erroneously think that space games just have to be that way, or they just don't know what to do when there is no historical background to base your game on.
3. Micromanagement
Game design should be slick and elegant in its conciseness, just like this article (...)
In short, I am shocked at how much micromanagement this game promises, and even more shocked how many people are praising every new feature they reveal where I have to control every tiniest thing.
The worst thing about MoO2 in my opinion is that I have to manage 20 build queues each turn after the mid game. That's not fun, I'm always executing the same build orders anyway. That's literally the first thing to get rid of for a MoO clone. And Stellaris is promising me that I have to put buildings on plots on every single planet and there is stuff like adjacency bonuses and that is a good thing?
Is that really what people want from a space empires game? If I have a huge sprawling stellar empire, I shouldn't have to deal with these minutiae. This problem shows up in many game aspects.
For instance, the whole character/ship quest thing seems like a shoe in from Crusader Kings because it's popular there. And I like it there because that's what CK is about. On the other hand, in my futuristic empire I shouldn't have to care about the choices of individual people. There's little known about these events but I suspect they will be the same three choices Paradox events we're already used to. Nothing against those events in general, but the way they are included here seems tacked on and needlessly complicated and distracting.
Also, when I read that ship design (even for civilian ships!) is in this game I just had to roll my eyes. Why do I have to design every little thing and then redesign it all over again every time a new tech comes out? Especially when playing against an AI that is completely inept at it (I'm talking about MoO here, I'm sure the AI in Stellaris will be better, but there hasn't been one that hasn't been outplayed in these things yet). I realize that customization needs to be in the game, as a way to put all your techs into effect and offer some strategic/tactical choices, but I would make it as streamlined as possible. Not only does this remove the chore of repeated redesigns from the player, it makes it easier for the AI to keep up. All of this is especially egregious should Paradox decide that we couldn't command the actual battles. Am I designing ships to optimize for their usual arcane dice roll battles?
(After all my praise for Alpha Centauri I have to admit that it also made this mistake. I've heard that Brian Reynolds is of the same opinion by now.)
Again, I feel like Paradox is usually better in pruning useless tasks from their games, especially with EU4. This looks like a step back.
(I could write a similar paragraph about shoehorning in Vicky's POPs as well but I think by now you get my point.)
Okay, time to close the essay I think. I wrote this in one go without the intention of letting this go for so long, and no way I am going to edit this. So sorry for mistakes and weird sentence structures.
Further thoughs:
All in all, I think there is a lot of stuff in this game that should not be part of a grand strategy game, while it brings little innovation into a genre that really needs it.
TLDR: I think it's going to be terrible.
Okay, my actual thoughts are of course more nuanced but that's still a pretty accurate description of my opinion. And it's not because I don't like Paradox or the space 4X genre (I do) or because I want to be edgy and predict failure (who cares).
I care about this topic a lot mainly because I think both space 4Xs, but also the 4X genre itself, are in a lot of trouble conceptually. If you have time and want more background, these Three Moves Ahead discussions give voice to a lot of things I also have been critical of.
In particular, the 4X genre is stuck in a creative slump where games are very formulaic and the mechanics are designed very conservatively. This is even more evident in recent times where the genre is much more popular again: they always feel and play very similar in spite of the thematic differences. Civilization obviously looms very large here, and other games seem content to supplant its mechanics into different settings, and do most game design work on special features that are stuck unto the repeated core design.
The space sub genre is in a similar situation, with Master of Orion being the unsurpassed touchstone (did you know there is a remake in the works?). New games are made, hyped as the successor to MoO, and then found wanting. I think the problem is not that they are not better than MoO (although I also don't think they are), but that they are so similar and imminently comparable to it in the first place.
I think Paradox is very good at innovating, or at least deviating from what is thought of as the proper (or only) way to execute a specific genre of games, so I had high hopes for what they had come up with. Unfortunately, it seems they are completely out of touch what is actually wrong with the genre.
Full disclosure here: I have lots of concepts for a space 4X game in my drawers, and I have put a lot of thought about what I think doesn't work in the genre and how I would design a game to fix it. The game basically started out as an exercise in producing the MoO successor I'd like to play but slowly turned into a project of how not to recreate MoO.
Anyway, let me enumerate some points where the problematic nature of Stellaris manifests itself.
1. Setting vs. Limitless Possibilities
This is the most significant point in my opinion. Previous Paradox games were strong on setting by the very nature of being historical games. Paradox is obviously very good in embedding historical processes into their game mechanics so playing their game and experiencing history evolve almost feels like the same thing. We know what the Early Modern Era is, what WW2 is, what the Victorian Era is, how the Middle Ages were like. This gives you a strong setting almost for free, you just have to make sure that you are (historically) "accurate".
For obvious reasons, that doesn't work when you are creating a game that is about space colonization. It's by its very nature about the future: the game designers don't know what that future is going to be like, and neither does the player. They probably also have wildly different imaginations of said future. Furthermore, the most educated guesses probably predict a future that is incompatible with the entire premise of your game, or at least a fun version of it. In other words, you don't get your setting for free.
That leaves you with two options. Create (or license) a setting, or make the game all about limitless possibilities and an organic evolution over the course of the game. Paradox chose the latter. Limitless possibilities seems thematically fitting (it's the future, anything can happen!) and mechanically enticing (so many different games could develop). In fact, it is the commonly accepted thought that space games have to be that way: everyone starts out the same on their homeworld, the galaxy is their oyster, let's see what develops. In my experience, the possibilities are actually still very limited in these types of games, and they usually develop in very similar ways.
This also makes the game more 4X like. I don't understand why Paradox made this decision because it's really not their strong point. The more 4X like games they made are certainly second tier, and the Paradox flagship games are so different from 4Xs that we had to come up with the Grand Strategy genre in the first place to describe them. Why abandon it for no good reason?
In addition, if you're going for limitless possibilities, you have to make the stuff in your game more generic because there is not really a setting to ground that in. This manifests in many elements such as races, buildings etc. but it's most evident in technologies. Here is where the free historical setting makes this permissible in games like Civ, but not in a futuristic setting: everyone knows what The Wheel is, or Democracy, or Economics. This means there is an immediate feedback to the player about what is happening in your civilization. When you unlock Rifleman, it is not only that you become stronger, you can tie yourself getting stronger to your understanding of what a Rifleman is in a way to increases your immersion. On the other hand, researching Superphasic Cannons or worse "Lasers III" is very abstract and essentially meaningless to the player. It all becomes a bland choice of raw bonuses with very little immersion. I thought we played space games to be immersed in a Scifi setting?
(It's interesting to observe how games deal with this tech problem, and the more you pay attention to what they're doing the more it becomes evident that it is a huge problem. For instance, Endless Space does this thing where the tech descriptions often include deliberately absurd technobabble or just plain out state that nobody gets how it works. This way of trying to get out of the responsibility of doing decent writing by being ironic about it immediately put me off the game. And in my opinion Endless Space is comparatively strong on setting! Even Master of Orion isn't immune to this, where many techs are direct references to many different scifi or space opera works. If you don't have your own setting, borrow flavor from others.)
2. Taking Science Fiction seriously
Don't worry, this section isn't about space game science not being "hard" enough, and how there is no stealth in space or how space fighters wouldn't be a thing. Yeah, I've read those threads on the Paradox forums. I think these discussions miss the point of Scifi entirely: it is not primarily about technology, but about society.
I think making this shift in focus could help a lot with the problem outlined above. It certainly did for what is the best science fiction game I have ever played, which is of course Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri was very smart about this, because it took the central question about the future of human society
Spoiler :
and turns it into the central conflict of the game by associating its factions with these competing ideologies. This makes the different factions more than just different sets of bonuses, suddenly they have a very fleshed out and distinct personality, especially through their very charismatic leaders. The brilliant thing about this is how this reflects back on other aspects of the game: the way leader quotes are used to describe technologies for example immediately makes them more relatable and immersive. (Of course that's not the only reason, they also just did their research when creating techs and looking up philsophical/historical quotes to match them, something which your average developer cannot be bothered to do.)
Of course little is known about Stellaris in that regard, but the way they chose the unlimited possibilities approach it is unlikely they will be thematically strong in that regard, which is very unfortunate. Not only would it help the setting of the game, but would help the game to actually be about something besides the standard 4X paradigm of expansion and land rushing.
Do we really want our future to be only about the same imperialist/militarist ideology that is perpetuated by historical 4Xs all over the place already? I think there is more interesting stuff to envision.
I bring up these two things because they could have been easily avoided if Paradox had stuck closer to their usual model. Instead of the 4X-like "everyone starts at their homeworld" model, why not actually do some writing and create different factions/races with their own personalities? And then create pre-populated galaxies with established powers from a selection of these races through some procedural generation similar to the established powers model of EU, Vic or CK? If done right, there could actually be more ways for games to turn out, and I would have more trust in them getting the game design right when in their comfort zone. Why they have made a different decision is really confusing to me. Either they erroneously think that space games just have to be that way, or they just don't know what to do when there is no historical background to base your game on.
3. Micromanagement
Game design should be slick and elegant in its conciseness, just like this article (...)
In short, I am shocked at how much micromanagement this game promises, and even more shocked how many people are praising every new feature they reveal where I have to control every tiniest thing.
The worst thing about MoO2 in my opinion is that I have to manage 20 build queues each turn after the mid game. That's not fun, I'm always executing the same build orders anyway. That's literally the first thing to get rid of for a MoO clone. And Stellaris is promising me that I have to put buildings on plots on every single planet and there is stuff like adjacency bonuses and that is a good thing?
Is that really what people want from a space empires game? If I have a huge sprawling stellar empire, I shouldn't have to deal with these minutiae. This problem shows up in many game aspects.
For instance, the whole character/ship quest thing seems like a shoe in from Crusader Kings because it's popular there. And I like it there because that's what CK is about. On the other hand, in my futuristic empire I shouldn't have to care about the choices of individual people. There's little known about these events but I suspect they will be the same three choices Paradox events we're already used to. Nothing against those events in general, but the way they are included here seems tacked on and needlessly complicated and distracting.
Also, when I read that ship design (even for civilian ships!) is in this game I just had to roll my eyes. Why do I have to design every little thing and then redesign it all over again every time a new tech comes out? Especially when playing against an AI that is completely inept at it (I'm talking about MoO here, I'm sure the AI in Stellaris will be better, but there hasn't been one that hasn't been outplayed in these things yet). I realize that customization needs to be in the game, as a way to put all your techs into effect and offer some strategic/tactical choices, but I would make it as streamlined as possible. Not only does this remove the chore of repeated redesigns from the player, it makes it easier for the AI to keep up. All of this is especially egregious should Paradox decide that we couldn't command the actual battles. Am I designing ships to optimize for their usual arcane dice roll battles?
(After all my praise for Alpha Centauri I have to admit that it also made this mistake. I've heard that Brian Reynolds is of the same opinion by now.)
Again, I feel like Paradox is usually better in pruning useless tasks from their games, especially with EU4. This looks like a step back.
(I could write a similar paragraph about shoehorning in Vicky's POPs as well but I think by now you get my point.)
Okay, time to close the essay I think. I wrote this in one go without the intention of letting this go for so long, and no way I am going to edit this. So sorry for mistakes and weird sentence structures.
Further thoughs:
- The name: Stellaris is such a good name, I wish I could have come up with it. Seriously, coming up with a good name for this type of game is hard, because it needs to evoke space and scifi without being too cheesy. This one is short and elegant and still works.
- The Clausewitz engine is impressive, didn't expect it to handle that sort of thing. Even in this early state there are some great looking elements, I like the planetary surfaces and how settled areas light up at night for example.
- I like their stuff on the art direction in general. I always thought that this sort of game needs to do more to communicate to the player what its future looks like, and to actually reinforce how your civilization progresses and takes shape. I like the art style they have chosen and as opposed to the writing they seem to be serious about getting this right. Unfortunately it doesn't show through in the game itself much though, hopefully it won't remain limited to promotional art.
- Despite what I said about the setting, I like the race customization options, seems very flexible. I wish there would be more options for having completely weird aliens though. Still miles ahead of the MoO model for sure.
- I like that they try to emphasize the explore part of the 4Xs more. Space exploration is obviously thematically important so I like that they try to include it in the game experience. Not sure if the solution ("yeah there will be events while exploring until actually interesing stuff happens") is fun in the long run, depends on how well these events interact with the rest of the game and how quickly they exhaust themselves across games. Of course the whole problem of having little to do in a Paradox game while expanding could have been avoided by skipping the expansion phase, but I am repeating myself.
- The greatest positive is of course the inclusion of Paradox style diplomacy into a space strategy game. That's where most of my positive expectations came from initially at least. MoO with its diplomacy replaced by Paradox's and a few dozen of factions would already be a vastly improved game.
All in all, I think there is a lot of stuff in this game that should not be part of a grand strategy game, while it brings little innovation into a genre that really needs it.
Imperator Knoedel
Currently obsessed with The Owl House
With all this thought you seem to have put into sci-fi 4X, have you ever taken a look at Civ4's Final Frontier Plus mod? God-Emperor and that other guy whose name I can't remember atm have really done a number on Shafer's scenario, in a good way.
Panopticon
Utilitarian
Thanks to Leoreth for that essay. Not just a programmer.
I think that for some version of the word "best", Alpha Centauri was the "best" game I have ever played. Certainly it made me think more about human society rather than just winning computer games.
I think that for some version of the word "best", Alpha Centauri was the "best" game I have ever played. Certainly it made me think more about human society rather than just winning computer games.
Imperator Knoedel
Currently obsessed with The Owl House
Well... Maybe you could give it a try?
Have you tried Civ4's Planetfall mod? Essentially it is a remake of Alpha Centauri, and definitely doing a better job at it than Beyond Earth.
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