A Game of WTF
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@Arantor said:
A diplomatic victory including the humans, Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians...? They're just too different to align, at least in my head.
They all allied against the Dominion in Deep Space 9, although it was a long-ass road to get there.
Nothing unites like a common enemy.
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I'm afraid that this is a game with a market of one
I think you can count on at least two. No way to know until something is actually implemented, of course, but concepts sound interesting; I'd give it a try.
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Well it's like I always say: You can design a game any way you want, but no one is guaranteed to like it. So you should always try to make a game you want to play, so that you know there's at least one person who likes it.
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At least run your UI past normal human beings so you don't make a Battlecruiser 3000AD.
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Battlecruiser 3000AD
Some people might want that experience! I don't, and you obviously don't either, but tastes can get weird. After all, Steel Battalion sold well…
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Steel Battalion "sold well" because they only printed a few thousand copies, not because it was a good game.
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It took me a while to figure out what this reminded me of, but I think I finally got it.
In 1990 Electronic Arts (Back before Trip Hawkins traded the company and his soul for a handful of magic 3DO beans) released a game called Imperium for the Amiga (and a few other, less exciting computers). It followed the Master of Orion mold fairly well (which is interesting, because that game didn't come out until 1993), and I think that my parentheses privileges have just been revoked. (Damnit.)
Anyway, Imperium tried to be a high level, make-only-the-decisions-that-the-emperor-needs-to-make kind of game with a lot of charts and spreadsheets instead of maps filled with more exploding starships than the Baen catalogue. As I recall, instead of micromanaging what each factory on each planet built a big part of the game was to appoint governors and admirals to do all of the hard work for you. Most of the people you had available at the start of the game were incompetent weasels so you needed to switch from playing Galactic Empire Simulator to Human Resources Manager Simulator for long enough to find the competent ones, send them where they were needed, and reward them with just enough magic longevity drug to keep them happy, alive and improving their skills without ever letting them become so powerful and popular that they realized that they would make a better emperor than you were.
I thought it was a nice take on the usual "The Emperor Will Do All Your Jobs For You" gameplay, although the resulting Excel based play style was a little dry. 2003's Master Of Orion 3 tried to do something similar by having governors do the hard work for you, but ended up having all of the gameplay of a bucket full of fried eggs. It's a good thing that MoO3 was just a bad dream, like the sequels to Highlander and Aliens.
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Yeah, that's the kind of thing being thrown around. And I certainly remember trying to "play" MoO 3. Would have had more fun with Excel.
But I'm not entirely averse to the AI Governors angle, I just think it's massively tricky to balance well.
I know what might work, actually, including being a balancing mechanism.
Let's say there are 6 major areas of focus: technology, ship design, diplomacy, fleet coordination, economics (including growth, terraforming etc) and something else that doesn't quite fit in my head yet but let's go with 6 areas.
What if you can only have 4 governors for those 6 areas? Maybe ritualistic reasons, maybe interpersonal conflicts, whatever, but split amongst the major areas of focus are less governors than you have areas. Meaning that on some level you will have to get dirty, but you can pick what you have to get dirty doing.
Then up a difficulty level, you only get three governors to play with, and so on. The expert crowd will have to micromanage everything but lesser mortals like me will have a choice not to. I don't habitually play even the games I like at maximum difficulty if I want to unwind.
And you get a choice of which governors, including periodic options to replace them. Or even potential disaster if they're assassinated by a rival or something.
Certainly there's food for thought in the AI helper crowd and I will have to do the AI thing anyway.
I'm just wary of the balance angle to it :(
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So, first up, I'd have unique dialogue between races, where it actually has some sense of authenticity. I see absolutely no problem with a mechanical race that doesn't communicate verbally amongst itself using Engrish. Declaration of war? "All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time." Run it through Google Translate a couple of times, ending up in Japanese then translating back to English. Make it feel like it's come from a machine that doesn't really get the language but doesn't care enough to really learn it anyway.
And this, if done correctly, can be *frumple* when *campers* have *parties*, unless you *spit* *slow time* words for better *dancing*.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIbVYXHnaBU
Although it is lacking in Frungy! The Sport of Kings!
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Would have had more fun with Excel.
Oh! You probably missed out on playing Stars!, then, because that's how people tended to describe it.
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Diplomatic Victory is my least-favorite in Civilization.
Ugh. Yeah.
Related to that is the concept of a cultural victory-- that one makes a heck of a lot more sense to me.
I always turn off diplomatic, cultural and domination victory conditions. It always feels like the game got cut off in the middle with those.
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I always turn off ... cultural ... victory condition
For shame. Just because you aren't as good as Brazil!
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@boomzilla said:
I always turn off ... cultural ... victory condition
For shame. Just because you aren't as good as Brazil!
I'm always the most cultured. It's my favorite way of getting new cities! I'm a
cultural bullySHITLORD when I play. But I want to play, not have the game stopped early before I can impose my cis-heteropatriarchy on the rest of the world.
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You just have to build Moai and airports, man! Its easy!
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It's not like you're talking about different branches of humanity that are separated by culture and mild changes of genetics, but entirely different species.
Imagine your grey tentacled aliens adopting all the human habits, chomping down on Big Macs, listening to rap and basically dropping the whole cultural heritage of their race to adopt human one as something "natural" enough so that those wanting to go back to old habits are treated like insane crackpots.
And if your grey tentacled aliens can breed with humans, cut all the pure bloodlines and turn their planets into cultural melting pots for good measure.
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You just have to build Moai and airports, man! Its easy!
Of course I build airports. How else to get all my Modern Armor in place to steamroll the primitives?
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So basically when they've evolved Toejam & Earl? First thing that came into my head.
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Imagine your grey tentacled aliens ... dropping the whole cultural heritage of their race to adopt human one
Japan?
And if your grey tentacled aliens can breed with humans
Japan.
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Sure, Mr. President of the Universe might not be concerned about anything smaller than a thousand-year plan for his civilization, but the player behind Mr. President will quickly get bored if the whole gameplay ends up boiled down to "pick one of the two branches of development once in a while". After all, you're making a strategy game, not a visual novel.
I enjoy watching the AI do things by itself in games, like the sims or the peasants moving stuff in settlers 2.
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Though I just realised this doesn't exactly help the Horta any with their plant fundi-ism. Hmm. Might just have to suck it as the hardest race to win as since science isn't their strongest point, neither is production.
If their ships are organic, they could be able to produce them fast, with little equipment. Like the zerg?
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On the other hand, a program does what is was designed to do. This system may be a kind of Skynet, built to protect its (now extinct) creators from the other races through war. It is unable to change the core objective and will always want to exterminate the other races.
I believe a super intelligent IA, while unable to change it's core objective of killing everyone else, or turn them into paperclips, would pretend to be an ally when it's convenient for it.
I like to think that a paperclip maximizer would pretend to realize that turning the entire universe into paperclips was a silly objective, and that it transcended beyond it, only to accumulate power and get back to making paperclips when it's unstoppable.
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At least run your UI past normal human beings so you don't make a Battlecruiser 3000AD.
If there is a game that deserve a @blakeyrat's review, it's Battlecruiser 3000AD. Maybe it's kind of kicking a dead horse anyway.
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If it has one major flaw in its design - the inability to reflect upon its goals and adapt them to reality - then it might as well have another flaw - for example the designers thought that aliens are non-sentient beasts and there is no point in trying to communicate, and they imparted that belief on the AI.
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I enjoy watching the AI do things by itself in games, like the sims or the peasants moving stuff in settlers 2.
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@fbmac said:
I enjoy watching the AI do things by itself in games, like the sims or the peasants moving stuff in settlers 2.
I was hoping that was a link to this:
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I had a 8-bit computer that used to show random characters on screen like this, it was usually fixed with percussive maintenance.
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I miss Johnny Castaway.
Steel Battalion - Wikipedia
