"Strategy Games"
#1
We've been enjoying discussing them lately so let's have a thread.

I started with Age of Empires 1 and have been fascinated ever since. Fascinated, but I haven't enjoyed every development and still mostly enjoy games from around that time, for reasons I've gone into in various other places.

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This is still fascinating to look at for me in a way newer games don't really match. When I was very young this wasn't a "game". I didn't know mechanics, I didn't know how anything worked. I had a few caveman looking guys, a little patch of gathered stuff, and ominous darkness in every direction. I couldn't even find the tutorial at one point, so all that there was was this vague notion that somehow this could be directed and mastered. I put "Strategy Games" in quotes for the Thread Subject to cover this. That the field is really far more diverse than the language assigned to it can cover. Even within single games there are a variety of experiences offered, and somewhat deliberately.

Age of Empires is a good example. Because it's built robustly and thoughtfully enough to function as a competitive "game", a competitive challenge with lots of nuance and room for experimentation and mastery. Especially the second game. But it's also built to serve as a foundation for solitary experiences which are aesthetic rather than competitive, using the same parts which form the competitive game. If you push every part of this game that exists to its limit, you can get a very compelling experience. Age of Empires 2 is still popular online for a good reason. But for most of the game's players over its history weren't into that. They were into something more like what I was doing with the first one when I was very young. The game has "Campaigns" for you to play. Constructed scenarios built around stories, history, cool presentation, and letting you see and play out cool things.

Like I've written about Bungie's Myth and a few other strategy games I really like, the main appeal was really something more like a little simulation of war, or an interactive and self-generating dynamic war movie playing out inside your computer. The fact you could try to develop a capacity to play as a kind of skill was just a bonus, and a really niche appeal.




This little video is a great display of the primary old appeal of both Age of Empires and strategy games in general. It's the updated version of the game, I can't find the original, but the point still stands. Compare this to how the game looks played competitively online.




I don't have anything against these people, I actually play the game online sometimes too and greatly enjoy it, but my point is that these might as well be different games. It's like what happened to Halo and Call of Duty. Two games in one, but we call them the same thing and their parts overlap and sometimes get in each others' way, so we struggle to describe what we like in them.

Something I've tried to explain on /vst/ a lot of times (in vain because nobody on 4chan actually likes video games, they're just a posturing tool) is that "strategy games" declined and died, especially the old conventional "rts" games, because they failed to recognise their broad appeal, the fact that they offered a foundation for multiple different kinds of fun. The public faces of these games tend to be their long running competitive scenes. The idea is that it's best to become the next Starcraft. But the real base of their popular rolling support was people not really into that. People who bought Starcraft mostly bought it for giant soldier guys fighting bugs to some crappy warhammer ripoff story. People bought Dawn of War because it's fun to set up Imperial Guard heavy weapon teams and artillery at choke points against the AI.

Starcraft happened to become beloved by some strange people as a "game", a platform for competition, so they built a sequel, which could still be both, but was largely focused on that, and they succeeded again. Dawn of War also built a sequel, which could be played as both, but largely focused on being a competitive game this time, and it didn't endure so well. Then they doubled down with Dawn of War 3 and created something almost solely designed to be a competition, and it died out the gate almost instantly.

The half of "strategy games" that people seemed more into was pretty much allowed to die at the bleeding edge. And then by some strange twist reconstituted itself in sort of sometimes playable indie games which completely give up on the hybrid thing and seem mostly built in the self conscious Doom: Eternal style and Paradox style of trying to make you feel like you're seeing something crazily complex by playing them. Banished, Going Medieval, etc, they're sort of like why I liked Age of Empires 1 but feel like they were just built to be broken.

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This looks okay. It's not Rimworld at least (I hate Rimworld). I might play this game if they ever finish making it. Ideally a company with money and standards would be doing this, but they're all too busy wasting their time and money trying to become repeat Starcraft.

Sorry about that negative tangent, but I wanted to get us rolling and this is sort of always on my mind. On the more positive side, as you can pick up from above I love games about cool stuff happening on a large scale and simulation. Not too interested in the game part. Strategy games are dead, long live strategy games.

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I'll make more kind of general posts in this thread in the future if I can be bothered. I have more thoughts. Big games, turn based, Paradox, etc. Some of you already saw my Total War posts, I'll link those here too: https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threa...post-21011

Please feel free to talk about whatever. I'm just trying to get us rolling.
#2
There's something very stimulating about the isometric view. Even as a young kid I felt there was a certain inexplicable magic to RCT2 that wasn't present in RCT3 due to the full 3D style. Bonus points if there is a grid. There is something essentially artistic to designing around to a grid to nonetheless make things have complex non-grid shapes. 

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#3
(05-14-2023, 12:23 AM)a system is failing Wrote: There's something very stimulating about the isometric view. Even as a young kid I felt there was a certain inexplicable magic to RCT2 that wasn't present in RCT3 due to the full 3D style. Bonus points if there is a grid. There is something essentially artistic to designing around to a grid to nonetheless make things have complex non-grid shapes. 

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I think one part of it is that the necessary abstraction of hard isometric views often came with superior (functionally) simulation, which felt more real. A point I can never make enough. FEELING real, which does not track 1-1 with fern density and shadow fidelity. Lots of these games look fantastic still, and there is great craft behind them. But I also still adore how X-Com and its faithful mods look.

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A big problem with games like the newer total wars is that after a certain level of visual fidelity is achieved we kind of take it for granted that physicality will break down. Things will phase through each other, impacts will very obviously not be tracking with contact, it's a kind of shadow of physical interaction over the top of what are more transparently number based simulations than games which came out 30 years ago. In Julian Gollop's UFO (Non-American title) a bullet flies through 3D space until it hits something. You can exploit this in various ways. Direct objects and projectiles into anything in the simulated 3D space and get a fitting result. Can you shoot through a wall? Depends what the wall is and what you're shooting. Your assault rifle might tear through the wall of a suburban house (either because you aimed at it or it's behind the guy you missed), but not a UFO's hull (but maybe something else could...).

In the new XCOM game our world is three dimensional, the camera can fly around, everyone has a 3D rendered face. This level of detail is used for some cool things. My favourite part of the game by far was the ability to customise the appearance of soldiers. But the concessions come in extremely hard and fast. Actually simulating 3D space rendered so much more finely would be virtually impossible to do as a playable turn based game (though Gollop later made an admirable attempt in Phoenix Point, which was ultimately too cheap and underdeveloped). So what they ended up doing was winding the thing back to a level of complexity comparable to a board game. It looks superficially more like reality, but your inputs have been rendered rigid to the point of dumb simplicity.

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The memes make themselves.

Other major point of difference is aesthetic sensibilities. Julian Gollop's inspirations were The X Files, anime, British science fiction tv, UFO culture, conspiracy culture, fundamentally cool stuff. The people who take up his work now get this and carry on. Look at the gun in the UFO mod. It's an FAL. It looks like a solid thing made of metal that kills people. Now look at the new XCOM character's gun. It's a giant retarded nerf gun. I'm kind of amazed nobody has pointed out that especially in XCOM2 they were just rendering FORTNITE characters before FORTNITE. Look at this damn gun. This is not scary. This is deliberately designed not to be scary.

There's a lot wrong with new games that's ultimately traceable to taste and sense, and strategy games are no exception. How much of Total Warehouse sucks now because morons who like stuff like this are behind it? I have to wonder.

Now back to Isometrics for a little moment. I actually read the book on Julian Gollop and the history of UFO's development. Gollop started out on tabletop making physical games before getting into computers. You can see very clearly that UFO and his earlier games exist as a way of breaking through the constraints of cards, paper, tokens, and dice. The man broke through the ceiling of what was possible to keep making things cooler. Now, I'm a guy who endorses the Age of Empires campaigns, I don't believe the point of games is to create the most complex contrived challenges possible. We do get something for scaling XCOM back to tabletop levels of simplicity. But what? I think we can call it going backwards rather than merely shifted priorities because it looks stupid. If it looks cool I'll take anything. But we discarded tactical depth and fun practical options for a plasticine 3D world of hulk feet and FORTNITE anti-guns. I almost said "that wasn't worth it", but I understand that it's not a one or the other thing. This was an earnest attempt at moving forward. It was something rather than nothing, not something else.

Ultimately I think this should be taken as another learning experience and case study in what is and isn't cool. What does and doesn't work. Isometric arguably never really got outdated. It's simply better for a lot of things. On the whole I think the transition to 3D actually went really well for strategy games and opened up a lot of cool possibilities, but where we really suffered was functional simulation. It seems to just become exponentially harder to make complex parts which naturally interact with each other when you transition from 2D and pseudo 3D to actual 3D. The trends away from physicality compensated for by visual excess and flash were how we ultimately got to Total Warhammer's health-bar blobs posing as armies.
#4
(05-14-2023, 01:04 AM)anthony Wrote: ...

I've noticed when it comes to the subject of resolution many are easily fooled in this way. It becomes a game of sheer numerical complexity, one of addition rather than multiplication or exponents. The new stuff touts itself on the ability to computer a large, static number. Their game has 8802929394 different options. The older games because of their limits had to think more logarithmically, they couldn't just hard-code a zillion different templates or options into the game and instead were stuck with a smaller number of systems which ended up more robust. But the robustness of those systems results in complex interactions that build on each other in the way you mention, the aformentioned "multiplication" and "exponents" (when systems of systems are able to build on each other and interact meaningfully). Full range of movement is now taken as a given in every game, yet in most cases it just ends up being used for empty or unstimulating spaces in between scattered nodes where things are more deliberately designed and interactive. In a lot of cases the more restrictive and older notions of space forced people to ensure more of the actual space was designed and gave some kind of meaningful feedback. You couldn't afford to create vast swathes of nothing simply for effect at that point.
#5
It's been too long for me so my thoughts aren't so good here, but I'll offer a little of what I can:

AoE and AoM were some of the first places where I was made eager to read about history etc. on my own. I know there's more than a handful of people who had a similar experience. In school, we got the boring stuff. In games, we got the good stuff.

That aside, the form itself. Anything with macro, base-building, involved that satisfaction and "time vortex" effect of seeing your buildings go up, units produced etc. It's one of the reasons why one could play Brood War etc. for so many hours so easily. You could live a thousand lives by playing the game. There was a satisfaction to every tier, it felt significant.

Thinking about the campaigns, and the introductions to new units, new terrain...it was all paced very well. You weren't thrown toys at random. It felt like you were developing and so was your opposition. You were barely keeping pace, until you got ahead through performance. It was a good narrative.

I think a large part of it was just being a commander too. It's a position that everyone dreams of. Getting to play at it is very satisfying.

PvP...Well, it was a degen scene and probably still is. If you wanted competition, it was a good place to find it. You could run a match, the rules were fair, the results were recorded. It was a good arena at the time. People were serious. Fairly respectful. There was hidden information, and different groups favored different ideas. This was enjoyable, compared to what seems to be the norm now, where everyone follows a consensus "meta" that may or may not be correct. Although I think the devs enjoy this since it's easier to deal with on their end. You also can't "push" units the same way you could when pathfinding was more manual. I guess it's a better simulation of units, but maybe not. After all, shouldn't a good commander be able to get more out of each unit? Even to the point of taking absurd victories?

Still, you're right in the OP. The prime appeal of the game was never PvP. That came after. The campaign itself was gripping. The art evocative...you can tell, at a glance, what each race is, down to the core. I am amused that I played Zerg, considering my position on these things. The sound was critical too, and I think one of the biggest improvements compared to older titles. It made the units more real, sound bytes are highly powerful.

I liked Valkyria Chronicles too, which is a different way of expressing strategy. I guess it's more similar to XCOM. I liked XCOM, but it destroyed me endlessly and I never "beat" it. The enemy being invisible, attacking at random (or at least that's how it seemed), having to research them to learn about them...It was powerful. Probably the scariest game ever made.
#6
[Image: Agartha.png]
#7
(05-14-2023, 01:04 AM)anthony Wrote: In the new XCOM game our world is three dimensional, the camera can fly around, everyone has a 3D rendered face. This level of detail is used for some cool things. My favourite part of the game by far was the ability to customise the appearance of soldiers. But the concessions come in extremely hard and fast. Actually simulating 3D space rendered so much more finely would be virtually impossible to do as a playable turn based game (though Gollop later made an admirable attempt in Phoenix Point, which was ultimately too cheap and underdeveloped). So what they ended up doing was winding the thing back to a level of complexity comparable to a board game. It looks superficially more like reality, but your inputs have been rendered rigid to the point of dumb simplicity.

[Image: image.png]

If you have not: I recommend you give Gears of War: Tactics a shot. I think it addresses your concerns vis-a-vis adapting isometric gameplay into modern graphics in part.

Though it's been called an Xcom clone it plays quite differently. Namely, getting shot isn't that big of a deal. In Xcom (or Xcom 2, at least, the only one I have played), having a squad member take a hit is a screwup. This incentivizes essentially playing a game of ambushes on higher difficulties. Ideally you won't even use a healing item on a mission. There is some satisfaction in planning these ambushes, but having to constantly sit and do nothing for turns on end can get dull. Having to be especially mindful of the "Pod system" (the way the AI maneuvers enemy squads and their attentions) also prevents any truly thrilling turns from being played until the late game with ideal play.

Gears Tactics is much more fun than I expected. Essentially: the action revolves around navigating cover on equal ground through continuously suppressing enemies in cover while taking cover, while attempting to avoid being flanked as well, in a manner very similar to the traditional Gears of War formula if you had full control over all members of your team. Of course: to account for player bias the Locust far outnumber the player and have a far broader variety of strategies to use.

It's on Gamepass for PC currently and I think Microsoft is still offering free trials for $1 if you don't want to bother sailing the high seas. It plays well on PC" but bearing in mind it's primary intended audience was console players you should still start on a harder difficulty.
#8
(05-14-2023, 07:20 AM)Guest Wrote: AoE and AoM were some of the first places where I was made eager to read about history etc. on my own. I know there's more than a handful of people who had a similar experience. In school, we got the boring stuff. In games, we got the good stuff.

This is a point I make again and again within pop-art, which I think is strongest here. That the stuff that is taken least seriously can get away with taking the world the most seriously. Our school history is boring because it's defanged and dehumanised. The superficiality of history in video games is in the incidental details more often than in the essential spirit. A genuine fascination with war and power will put you in more authentic contact with history than anything you'll read. But of course real books (not allowed in schools) will do this too. And of course, even more egregious, there isn't even bare exposure to so much in schools. Nobody mentioned Babylon in school to me. Nobody mentioned the Byzantines. Too busy spending years at a time walking the slow kids through the names of 6 prime ministers. "Strategy games" in addition to being history rendered awesome and power/conflict based, are history rendered at your own pace. Engage as much or as little you like, as vapidly or deeply as you like. 

Quote:That aside, the form itself. Anything with macro, base-building, involved that satisfaction and "time vortex" effect of seeing your buildings go up, units produced etc. It's one of the reasons why one could play Brood War etc. for so many hours so easily.  You could live a thousand lives by playing the game. There was a satisfaction to every tier, it felt significant.

Thinking about the campaigns, and the introductions to new units, new terrain...it was all paced very well. You weren't thrown toys at random. It felt like you were developing and so was your opposition. You were barely keeping pace, until you got ahead through performance. It was a good narrative.

I think a large part of it was just being a commander too. It's a position that everyone dreams of. Getting to play at it is very satisfying.

PvP...Well, it was a degen scene and probably still is. If you wanted competition, it was a good place to find it. You could run a match, the rules were fair, the results were recorded. It was a good arena at the time. People were serious. Fairly respectful. There was hidden information, and different groups favored different ideas. This was enjoyable, compared to what seems to be the norm now, where everyone follows a consensus "meta" that may or may not be correct. Although I think the devs enjoy this since it's easier to deal with on their end. You also can't "push" units the same way you could when pathfinding was more manual. I guess it's a better simulation of units, but maybe not. After all, shouldn't a good commander be able to get more out of each unit? Even to the point of taking absurd victories?

Still, you're right in the OP. The prime appeal of the game was never PvP. That came after. The campaign itself was gripping. The art evocative...you can tell, at a glance, what each race is, down to the core. I am amused that I played Zerg, considering my position on these things. The sound was critical too, and I think one of the biggest improvements compared to older titles. It made the units more real, sound bytes are highly powerful.

I respect Starcraft as PvP and a "campaign" even if I like neither. The aspiration is "cool", even if not to my taste. Hulk feet, gigantic pauldrons, trash-genre writing, at least they're trying. Guns and monsters. And the PvP, I respect any game that you can really get into long term. I get it. The nuance is not lost on me in the amount of depth and possibility contained within the thing. I consider it one of the less interesting things to do within "video games", but it's something.

Quote:I liked Valkyria Chronicles too, which is a different way of expressing strategy. I guess it's more similar to XCOM. I liked XCOM, but it destroyed me endlessly and I never "beat" it. The enemy being invisible, attacking at random (or at least that's how it seemed), having to research them to learn about them...It was powerful. Probably the scariest game ever made.

I really love Valkyria Chronicles. Only started playing it properly sort of recently and haven't finished it, but there's really a lot to love there. It's a distinctly Japanese approach to "strategy" which is more personal than abstract. The trend I see across all titles is that Japanese "strategy" is about being a person in a position of strategic responsibility, while Western "strategy" is about games (contrivance, abstraction of inputs to serve the contrivance of abstract and impersonal direction of large forces). Valkyria Chronicles is not a game about being the world spirit of your nation animating soldiers and armies to fight to your whims. It's a game about being Welkin (the protagonist) and trying to survive a war with your friends. The game is not designed to be turn based, or pseudo turn based, or whatever, it's designed to be character based. The quirks and contrivances of its systems are obviously built around building personality and intimacy into the actions of individual soldiers. It's a human-scaled war-strategy game. It's just full of details which are superfluous to the "game" but essential to the human element. Every soldier has barely consequential quirks, likes and dislikes, minor skills and weaknesses, their own voice actor and detailed face. Very Japanese.

Japanese strategy from Koei to Pikmin has stuff like this in common. This concept of organic "strategic" scenarios revolving around and commanded from the "human" perspective.

X-Com (original, aka UFO) can get very involved and personal, but it's still very abstract. Julian Gollop grew up on board games and started with them. You are the "Commander", and this does work for personal investment only because it's so open and unadorned. The game assumes nothing, gives you nothing, and leaves it all to you. No ludonarrative dissonance either way if you care or you don't. The game works regardless. That's a nice strength, but incidental rather than designed for. There are a lot of similarities between the game and Valkyria Chronicles, but I consider them incidental. Gollop's interest, the reason the game exists, is that he wanted to create a higher fidelity tabletop style "strategy" scenario generator. And then it got a global view and a metalayer adding even more depth because his producers asked him if he could take cues from Civilisation. Again, I read the book. It's kind of amazing how good his producers were. They had good ideas, went out of their way to keep the project alive. Really a pleasant story.

(05-14-2023, 08:34 PM)fox Wrote: [Image: Agartha.png]

A fellow Dominions pretender. Excellent. I remember having some solid EA games as Berytos.


(05-15-2023, 04:28 PM)calico Wrote: If you have not: I recommend you give Gears of War: Tactics a shot. I think it addresses your concerns vis-a-vis adapting isometric gameplay into modern graphics in part.

Though it's been called an Xcom clone it plays quite differently. Namely, getting shot isn't that big of a deal. In Xcom (or Xcom 2, at least, the only one I have played), having a squad member take a hit is a screwup. This incentivizes essentially playing a game of ambushes on higher difficulties. Ideally you won't even use a healing item on a mission. There is some satisfaction in planning these ambushes, but having to constantly sit and do nothing for turns on end can get dull. Having to be especially mindful of the "Pod system" (the way the AI maneuvers enemy squads and their attentions) also prevents any truly thrilling turns from being played until the late game with ideal play.

Gears Tactics is much more fun than I expected. Essentially: the action revolves around navigating cover on equal ground through continuously suppressing enemies in cover while taking cover, while attempting to avoid being flanked as well, in a manner very similar to the traditional Gears of War formula if you had full control over all members of your team. Of course: to account for player bias the Locust far outnumber the player and have a far broader variety of strategies to use.

It's on Gamepass for PC currently and I think Microsoft is still offering free trials for $1 if you don't want to bother sailing the high seas. It plays well on PC" but bearing in mind it's primary intended audience was console players you should still start on a harder difficulty.
You know I've looked at that game before and it seems kind of interesting. But it's a Microsoft game, so the filesize is absolutely absurd, the price is high, and the taste is questionable. The "Pod System" of XCOM really felt like it was built around Normal difficulty and you only playing the game once so you don't learn it too well. It feels superficially mysterious and tense until you poke at and explore it a little, then once you understand it it's just this awful contrivance that forces you to play like an unfun sperg for optimal results. Alternate attempts at making games of this type interest me. I might give it a look eventually. But still, I think UFO and its mods win over these. If I don't care about 100GB of graphics (used to render dirt, dreadlocks, and gigantic shoulder pauldrons) what does this have over UFO?
#9
RTS singleplayer was almost the only genre I played as a kid, for the exact reasons Anthony states in the OP, some sort of mix between an aesthetic experience and the fun of playing war games. My interest in history was in no small part influenced by these games. I haven't played in a long time, because I have not enjoyed any of the more recent RTS games, and because the old ones are outdated. I start up AoE II every few years, still.

I have seen some promising games in development for this genre over the years, but none delivered. The next one I will try is Songs of Syx, if anybody has played this, please report. It appears to be in that sweet spot between economic simulation, citybuilding and strategic warfare that I'm usually looking for.

The last of the newer ones I liked was Anno 1404, which reduces the military aspect to a point where all strategy is a subset of economic decisions, but still was fun. They followed up with a climate change remake of 1404 (called Anno 2070), which I hated. Never touched the series again after that.

As an aside, I liked Rimworld, but I think it offers an entirely different experience than what I look for in a "strategy game". Micromanaging instead of designing production chains, basebuilding instead of citybuilding, tactics instead of strategy.

I'll end by posting some pictures of what I liked to play as a kid (age 8-12).

Cultures 2: Gates of Asgard

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Extremely cozy game, but when I took it up again as an adult, I found it boring.

Die Völker 2 (I think it was "Nations" in English)

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Very simple game, one of the few that I basically mastered even as a child. Still, fond memories.

Port Royale 2

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Not a real "strategy game", basically an early 4X. Still, one of my favourites of that time for the same reasons as the others. It holds up to this day, I'd say.

Knights and Merchants

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The first game I played that meaningfully connected the economy with your war efforts, was hard to play and I maybe finished a third of the campaign as a child. I still have a soft spot for this one and replayed it once or twice as an adult.

Die Siedler IV (Settlers)

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I exclusively played this on peaceful maps and never even tried the campaign. Very cozy.

Honorable mentions should go out to Fallout Tactics, which I loved back then, but when I replayed it, found it to be very bad; and to Advance Wars II: Black Hole Rising, which when I replayed found it to be exactly as fun as I remembered. Both are "tactics games", but seem to fit here.

I won't post any pics of AoE and its many successors, but I played them heavily too. Does anybody have pet theory why AoE III didn't work?
#10
I think to me, a lot of the appeal of RTS games (and indeed, all games), was to experience something truly great. The Age of Mythology campaign is probably the best singleplayer experience I have ever had. You play as great heroes attempting to save the world from a colossal impending force, and the weight of this is felt deeply the whole time. Your units feel more like actual soldiers that fight for you rather than fictional figures you toss aside and kill. Every mechanic becomes integral to the plot, and it makes the game feel more real, more intense, than in multiplayer where you treat it more as a game than an experience.

A lot of modern RTS campaigns feel far more shallow than in the past. You tend to notice the difference between singleplayer campaigns made solely to be a sort of construct intended to shuffle you around between battles and actual campaigns telling you actual stories. The biggest problem with basically every shit RTS game that doesn't get sales is that the story exists only to facilitate gameplay. You could do a similar comparison with Smash Bros between Brawl's Subspace Emissary and the dogshit campaign Ultimate has. One is made to tell a story, give an experience, and succeeds immensely well, while the other is just a series of fights, and no one remembers it.
#11
Mandatum?
Ich willen!
Chopper.
Gatherer.

Without Age of Empires 2, IDK who I would be. I found out about it from Good Game Spawn Point (video game show in Australia made for kids), and decided to download the demo.


Later on I found out my Aunt was big into RTSes and she gifted me her Gold Edition copy, but couldn't figure out how to install it on the beatup family computer. Eventually my Dad bought me the Collector's Edition + AoM Gold Edition which somehow worked on the PC. For some reason I never got into AoM, I think it didn't work on the XP machine we used (I wasn't allowed to install any service packs because of administrator privileges being locked behind a password), and eventually I lost either the disc or the key.
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Most of my time in the game was playing Skirmish against easy AI bots, where I would just build a huge city and eventually buy a massive army and wreck all the bots. I tried my hand at the campaigns, but barely played most of the them (or not at all) because of my inadequate historical knowledge (What the hell is a "Byzantine" Empire?). The only one I really got (besides the Wallace one because it was the tutorial) into was the Joan de Arc campaign, because it featured the Britons. I had a vague awareness that I was ethnically English, probably only because we spoke English, so I always chose them to play as. I never read the history text as I was like 7 at the time.
What I *did* read was the book "500 FACTS WARRIORS", gifted to me by the same aunt who partially got me into AOE2, which was far more digestible for my brain at the time.
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There is no coincidence that the "civilisations" that I played or at least cared about in the game always seem to appear in this book as well (again, sorry Byzaboos).
It's fair to say that without me getting AOE2 that there's a high chance I would be completely different. The based portrayals of warriors and their culture exposed to me at an early age, along with my sudden decision to read the Bible from start to finish at like age 9 (I think because my family had begun to go to church again and I was bored and saw it as a challenge, and also because the Bible had history in it), steered me onto the right path.

Sorry if this was a bit too off-topic for the thread.
#12
Dominions 6 has been announced.
#13
(07-27-2023, 03:50 PM)fox Wrote: Dominions 6 has been announced.

I was wondering how they could justify a new installment and was pleased by what I read. I always thought the mage-spam and power of magic was a bit absurd, especially online where conventional armies just stop mattering very quickly. An army-focused and greater scale focused retouching of battles seems like a great idea to me.More of what people want when they're getting in I think. The mage tuning meta is kind of interesting but really just too much work and made games homogeneous.

Very happy to see these guys are still going.
#14
Great thread!

(05-13-2023, 10:50 PM)anthony Wrote: This is still fascinating to look at for me in a way newer games don't really match. When I was very young this wasn't a "game". I didn't know mechanics, I didn't know how anything worked. I had a few caveman looking guys, a little patch of gathered stuff, and ominous darkness in every direction.

It's not a "strategy game", but there was this shit-old Macintosh game called Scarab of Ra where you get to be an explorer and crack your whip at lions and ambulatory mummies as you search for the eponymous forbidden treasure. It's a very vivid memory to me, what you said reminded me of the feeling I got from it which I would call "games that make you feel like you've got your boots on."

Fallout is also like this, it's a feeling which is simultaneously cozy yet thrilling. Of facing danger and just barely scraping by, and then getting suitably equipped to face a greater danger. You can literally put your boots on and walk around with a firearm in real life but it sadly doesn't feel remotely the same because there isn't any hostile wilderness full of treasures into which to tread forth and keep whatever you can win.

Fallout is a beautiful game. I was surprised to learn about the love that trannies reputedly have for Fallout: New Vegas, because Fallout's prescient grand theme is all about restoring the world to order and goodness via imposition of technoreligious law onto unwilling tranny mutants, i.e. melting them into piles of sloppy gore. But I only played Fallout because the 3D sequels look hideously ugly to me; I gather that the civilization themes of the original game got watered down in pastiche, in much the same way as what happened to Halo.

(05-14-2023, 12:23 AM)a system is failing Wrote: There's something very stimulating about the isometric view. Even as a young kid I felt there was a certain inexplicable magic to RCT2 that wasn't present in RCT3 due to the full 3D style. Bonus points if there is a grid. There is something essentially artistic to designing around to a grid to nonetheless make things have complex non-grid shapes.

Heartily yes, and I think it's for the very literal reason that every region of the screen presents detail at the same scale. It's very legible, everything is laid out with no changes in apparent magnitude due to distance, and little obstruction from objects in the foreground.

In 3D games like Anthony's hated Halo remaster, most of the screen real estate is going to be environmental stuff like grass and boulders, most of the time. I think this poses a temptation to the developers to oversaturate these areas with extraneous detail, as though it would be an embarrassment to them if the player were able to stand right next to a cliff looking directly at it and not be visually excited at that moment. And the shallowminded response to this is to spam ferns all over the map to brute-force "richness" (i.e. continual overstimulation) onto every second of the game. It's even worse when they do this with frenetic particle effects.

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The baffling thing about RCT3 is that the isometric sprite graphics in the original games were made out of 3D models in the first placeThey could have kept the artstyle exactly the same, there was no need to make it more wacky and cartoonish when the original style would have translated seamlessly back to its native format. They could possibly have even have gotten the original assets from Chris Sawyer to work from, but instead we got hideous lime-green grass, and this. Realistically though the switch to 3D would have had to have been a downgrade no matter what due to polycount/performance reasons, and even though visual fidelity is not the be-all of visual quality, it does sting when you're coming directly off from lush isometric sprites.

(05-13-2023, 10:50 PM)anthony Wrote: Age of Empires is a good example. Because it's built robustly and thoughtfully enough to function as a competitive "game", a competitive challenge with lots of nuance and room for experimentation and mastery. Especially the second game. But it's also built to serve as a foundation for solitary experiences which are aesthetic rather than competitive, using the same parts which form the competitive game.
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Like I've written about Bungie's Myth and a few other strategy games I really like, the main appeal was really something more like a little simulation of war, or an interactive and self-generating dynamic war movie playing out inside your computer. The fact you could try to develop a capacity to play as a kind of skill was just a bonus, and a really niche appeal.

I'm going to venture off-topic from strategy games again to talk about something I find disappointing.

Making war against an intelligent and skilled competitor in a well-designed PvP is a much better simulation of the experience of violent conflict than single-player. You have to play on the knife's edge because your enemy is much likelier to exploit your mistakes.

But for the same reason, whoever can break the aesthetic spirit of the game in the most gimmicky way possible often gets the advantage. And developers who inherit things that they couldn't have created sometimes even react to this by formalizing said gimmicks and mutating the original purpose of the game. For example when I play MechWarrior I want my team to win because we did a better job stomping around the city obliterating their armor with our cool lasers and giant sci-fi cannons. Not because we minmaxed our builds to sit behind cover and attrit them from beyond range of their weapons. The most viable way to win is often by having less fun.

That aside, sometimes you don't even want a visceral simulation of brutal pitted combat but just a fun little toy to play with.

(05-14-2023, 01:29 AM)a system is failing Wrote: The older games because of their limits had to think more logarithmically, they couldn't just hard-code a zillion different templates or options into the game and instead were stuck with a smaller number of systems which ended up more robust. But the robustness of those systems results in complex interactions that build on each other in the way you mention, the aformentioned "multiplication" and "exponents" (when systems of systems are able to build on each other and interact meaningfully).

The first time I played Fallout I helped Killian, the sheriff/general store manager of Junktown. Then I took it upon myself to murder all the gangsters in the hotel, after which the next time I saw Killian he attacked me for breaking the peace and I had to kill him and his guard in order to survive. If there had been any "mission" or "writing" or "morality system" spoonfeeding the consequences to me it would have only diluted the effect; instead, it just happened, and then it was over, I completely got away with it, and I had to feel my own remorse.

(05-14-2023, 07:20 AM)Guest Wrote: AoE and AoM were some of the first places where I was made eager to read about history etc. on my own. I know there's more than a handful of people who had a similar experience. In school, we got the boring stuff. In games, we got the good stuff.

The tutorial for Crusader Kings 2 alone is worth more for historical intuition than the entire public schooling curriculum.



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