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AFAIK it might have felt like unfairly penalties to the player. Sid Meier has discussed in an old interview the prototyping rise and fall of civilizations in th
by nafey 9y ago
AFAIK it might have felt like unfairly penalties to the player. Sid Meier has discussed in an old interview the prototyping rise and fall of civilizations in the game. He concluded that it was not fun for someone to see the civ they built over the course of hours being taken from them.
- ben_w 9y agoHe’d be right. That’s one of the reasons I dislike the standard browser-based civ-inspired games such as Travian. Not to say there is no was around that — when I last did game development I had an idea, but I don’t want to risk breaking my NDA by saying what, only that a potential solution might exist.
- glenstein 9y agoI agree. As a person who has not played Stellaris but is aware of its excellent reputation, I got to the part of the article where it said Stellaris breaks up it's late game bloat, and was expecting the second half of that sentence to be very different. I thought it would be something about abstracting away the tedious low level details, and shifting toward supermassive macro scale problems, maybe going up a higher level like Spore, but in some salient strategic sense that fits the feel of Stellaris. I was disappointed to learn but the actual solution was just random punishments.
- breischl 9y agoIt's not really random punishment, it's challenges. eg, if you use certain dangerous technologies extensively (eg, strong AI, subspace drives) then a strong late-game enemy may appear at an unpredictable time (eg, rampaging AI bent on killing all races, rampaging fleets from another dimension). I think this actually works well for Stellaris, because of the vassalization dynamics. In most 4X games, if you get defeated then you're dead and may as well quit. In Stellaris you can get defeated, become a vassal of another nation, and later break out to defeat your former masters. Having a powerful late-game enemy appear makes that sort of shakeup much more likely, as the smaller/vassalized empires may be able to pick off systems from the more powerful, but weakened or distracted, empires.
- dtech 9y agoThey're not really punishments, but difficult crisises that the player must overcome. For example, two ancient powerful but inactive empires might become active and start a war. This allows the player to align with either one of the powers, or form an independent coalition with a chance to become the new "leader" of the galaxy. These events throw existing borders up relations up in the air, thus effectively making the game interesting again right as its becoming stale.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago"not fun for someone to see the civ they built over the course of hours being taken from them." Depends on the definition of "fun". A DwarfFortress-like definition might say "fun" is desperately trying to prevent or simply deal with things falling apart.
- oblio 9y agoI guess the player numbers for both games kind of clarify the appeal of both types of games :)
- emiliobumachar 9y agoI remember that video. Playtesters would simply load a previous save when struck with serious calamity.