Once upon a time, it wouldn't be that time again until four times.

Digger

"But in your head
You're all dead
Your brain's cold
From what's been told
And there you sit
Begging change
Don't you get it?
You're still in the shooting range"

 

Switchblade Symphony - Ride

 

 

Like Unsounded or What Birds Know, Digger's another comic I'd meant to talk about from this blog's very inception (given it was just wrapping up about that time) but continually put off until forgetting about it. So, to the assuredly bountiful "stylized black and white fantasy wombat / hyena / demon / Ganesha / troll / shrew / squash / rat / veily monk and absent dwarf epic" fan demographic, here's one for you. Looking back now, Digger seems like the most precise delineation between webcomics' early years when their very validity as a medium was being questioned and even successful ones mostly consisted of pencil-drawn and scanned disjointed scribblings, and this current stage of fancy-schmancy drawin' tablets and Patreon.

It started as basically a five-page riff on Bugs Bunny failing to turn left at Albuquirky: a wombat gets lost while tunneling and comes up in a weird spot far from home. After that, the author freely admits to making it up by the seat of her pants, up to page 50-ish in its entirety and still adding largely random elements all through its run. You can basically see her fleshing out the mythology via concatenation: shadow?child! servants?cold! dead?skins! with those qualities later lent relevance and weight. In this it was very much akin to any number of early webcomics (e.g. Sluggy) but unlike them it increasingly cemented its setting and theme as it went. Instead of jumping haphazardly between genres and promoting an endlessly bloated character cast to sequential prominence, Digger doubled down and tied together its early brain farts into a single narrative.

 

It straddles the dividing line before the explosion of politically correct insanity as well. I've seen a rumor that Ursula Vernon's been quaffin' the woke-aid in recent years. But back around 2010, for all that Digger sported multicultural aesthetics (Balinese and Indian statuary, south-Asian garb) and gender inversions (keep in mind much of the story concerns hyenas) little in it pushed the currently prevalent anti-white, anti-male, heterophobic supremacist propaganda. The almost entirely female cast does contain both stupid and evil portrayals, the women routinely argue and confront each other, the heroine's sidekick's a highly sympathetic male, and in a style reminiscent of that other Ursula's The Telling, Jhalm the recurring male antagonist is portrayed as respectably stalwart in his misinformed lawful neutral obstructionism.

 

All in all, though trying to write a story with no plan is usually just a quaint exercise done for its own sake and not for the result, Digger's one of the few projects to ever make good on "LOLrandom!" In this case, constantly playing fix-up with half-baked ideas likely yielded a better story than would've come from overindulgence in any one aspect.

Once upon a time, there was an opening narration.

999 words

"Whattodowheretogohowtodowithoutyou?

You're-my-pole-star!"

Caravan Palace - Jolie Coquine

 

Watching the first half of the latest Dune movie, I was reminded of one difficulty in adapting the book. A disproportionate slice of its events are interpreted through omniscient narration of various characters' internal monologue, especially Paul's. Think of scenes like the vision after his and Jessica's escape. It's not so much the event itself as an intelligent, highly educated young man's awareness of its implications that lends it its gravitas, that ego-effacing triskelion of convoluted cross-purposes and pitfalls, of being turned into a channel for the flow of history against one's will, of standing on the brink of apotheosis and at the same time a potential end to all that has been. I won't deny young Timmy Shammy's a durn fine thesspeen and did what he could with it, but the scene simply does not work in film. Instead of momentous, it feels dragging. Certainly you're not left with the spine-tingling impression of having just witnessed the story's cusp, and in turn that lack saps subsequent chapters of much of the change in tone beyond "ah crap, dad's dead" or a change of palace/sietch scenery. Yet trying to convey visually the verbal description of Paul's inner realizations would not only eat up screen time but turn the scene into a truly Lynchian acid trip. (And that's what the water of life scene is for.)

But other alterations can be excused far less readily. Take for instance excising Princess Irulan's epigraphs and replacing them with Chani's cheekbones for the sake of shilling the pop tart. Irulan's narration helps not only foreshadow coming chapters but contextualize the story's conflict in historical terms, not merely as the aimless lurching and clashing of hordes of brainwashed simpletons but as the informed machinations of superior intellects within a sophisticated social milieu. And in this case, they could easily have been overlaid on establishing shots as voiceovers.

In other adaptations (sticking with good ones) even omissions minor in length lose their justification for the original passage's illustrative scope.

Unlike some, I never saw much problem with leaving Tom Bombadil out of The Lord of the Rings, he mostly serving to work up the fairytale atmosphere without plot tie-ins. I did lament removing the entire greater Old Forest / Barrow Downs sequence, which presaged both the ents and wraiths of later chapters and showed the wide reach of evil in Middle-Earth, and let the hobbits earn their plot-critical shortswords. Worse yet: leaving out the dunedain. Aragorn is not only the son of Arathorn, not merely royal brat #594 riding into town on his high-horse and demanding a throne jus' 'cuz, but the latest leader of a millennium-running guerilla resistance movement. Gathered support from his northern kinsmen cemented the good guys' historical, geographic and political continuity. Replacing them with a random visit from a lone Elrond not only came across as... a bit goofy... but partly restricted the scope from Tolkien's more mature worldbuilding approach toward a standard power fantasy adventure wherein designated heroes save the world.

Or take as another example Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, set in a world experiencing at least partial ecosystem collapse - hence the title, artificial pets having become a luxury item as more species die off. Blade Runner pretty much ignored that angle, but I've always been irked by the loss of a very minor scene in which a tiny spider futilely struggles to bite through human skin. The various juxtapositions of human/android/animal interactions set up a creeping existential dread backed by "as above, so below" comparisons* largely absent from the more character-centered movie... albeit partly compensated by Rutger Hauer's inspired rewrite of his final speech.

 

While we're on PKD and creepy-crawlies, Linklater's otherwise excellent adaptation of A Scanner Darkly left out the recounting of a sexy chick who'd rallied three male junkies to her apartment to rescue her from a bug invasion. Though eager to get in her good graces (and pants) they protest the singular bug in question is harmless. Her reply "If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself" becomes a lynchpin of the novel's attempt to humanize addicts in comparison to nominally healthy, mockingbird-slaying human psychology. Given the exchange's brevity and its reflection on the rest of the story (hint: where else does the word "harmless" show up?) was it not more plot-relevant than the sex scene?

Sometimes changes truly are warranted by the medium. The Road was brilliant in both book and movie form, but the book winds up with a passage which never fails to bring a tear to my eye:

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

I don't care how many screenwriting/directorial awards you've won, I give you little chance of doing that paragraph justice on screen. It was replaced, however, in poignant fashion, with the screen fading to black and fading in aural ambiance evoking a different brand of irreparable loss of the mundane. A well-conceived and well-executed compromise.

But more often than not, such changes are simply concessions to the movie-going public's presumed mental feebleness compared to the page-flipping public. Innumerable books' nuance or emotive punch has been sapped by a Hollywood happy sappy ending. Even when the ending itself is not ruined, its setup still can be. The classic adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine from 1960 omits a short episode after escaping the Morlocks. The traveler stops so far into the future that the Earth has become tidally locked with the Sun. No trace of civilization lingers, not even ruins. Along an endless, freezing beach naught survives but smears of planktonic scum and oversized, scavenging crabs. No sound greets him but the wind, and the chill of eternity encroaches ever closer. Faced with the futility and finality of existence, the time traveler hops back to his own time, to save the degenerate, yet cozily familiar and reassuring, Eloi. In the movie version, omission of the final shore leaves the impression of a hero rushing to the year 802,701 to lead a glorious rebellion of the meek against the predatory. But in the book this doubles as a retreat from ultimate reality. Is continuing the good fight a quixotic limitation of human intellect then? The vapid gesticulations of a short-lived and short-sighted ape incapable of grasping the fullness of its own place in infinity? Or a humble admission of same limitation and resolution to work within one's means? And why is this added layer presumed off-limits to the payer of a ten-dollar movie ticket yet not a ten-dollar novel?

_________________________________________________

 

* I still maintain PKD hit that theme more solidly in his best story, Second Variety.

Once upon a time there was a <blank>

Then it got shot.

Naive Little Pieces

"They'll never know where she got her weapon"

Kidneythieves - Arsenal

 

Hold it!

Stop everything, we need to address this very pressing issue.

Whenever cartoons, video games or whatever want to pepper their natural landscapes with something colorful that isn't flowers, they often default to the familiar white-speckled red mushroom. Case you didn't know, it's poisonous! Well, not horrifically poisonous... some even try to get stoned off it. Also, almost everyone already knows about it... but! But being colorful it attracts the attention of small children, whose low body mass increases the likelihood of a toxic dose. And here our entertainment products are promoting this vile peril!

I hereby decree that everything must be done to combat the menace of toadstools! All products featuring them must be yanked off the proverbial shelves and replaced with products promoting nice, safe tofu, which despite clearly being the superior foodstuff has been unfairly mocked and marginalized for generations. Obviously that toad-humper Mario's first on the chopping block.

What?

What're you looking at me like that for? Why are you not dropping everything to join my cause? Clearly my only course of action is to start an anti-muscarinic activist group and begin forming hashtag mobs to hound every author, every graphic artist, every movie and game studio until they conform to my demands for combatting shroom doom! Soon, I trust, a multibillion-dollar publicity campaign shall spring up, and any shroom sympathizers will be blacklisted as we righteous ones morally cleanse all media and all society beyond. All of society shall be defined by anti-toadstool, pro-tofu affirmative action.

 

Sound ridiculous?

Now consider this is an actual, verifiable, physical danger (children are in danger! won't somebody please think of the children?) not some nebulous "institutionalized prejudice" demonstrated by the fact I'm not king of the world yet.

 

On a completely unrelated note, The Lord of the Rings Online added Umbar in the last months. While less virulently stupid on average than the Gundabad zone's quests, whichever "writer" was responsible for the previous pile of garbage is obviously still on the payroll. Or at least one of them. Though, amusingly, her (safe to assume "her") influence is only discernible in unfiltered, unedited form in half a dozen quests on one isolated island in the earliest corner of Umbar. The good orcs are back:

 

And they still sound or act nothing like Tolkien's orcs but that's okay because we're standing up for marginalized minoritorcs and that's good because fantasy racism is bad, mmkaaay? Meanwhile the entire new main plot centers on a warrior princess countess baroness whateveress sailing off to save her kid while her husband repeatedly sings her praises. That at least could still be salvaged, but time will tell.

 

And of course the newest Dune adaptation needs to crank up Chani's appearances waaayyyy before she ever appears in the story. Is there anyone who didn't predict that utterly groundbreaking minority viewpoint?

And yes of course the latest Dominic Deegan chapter is some ridiculous conflation of fantasy dwarves with Taliban misogyny. What else could there be to talk about?

Or you could look at Baldur's Gate 3 whose companion roster permits nothing but sexy young bisexuals. At least its homognomos and trans-dimensional ringmaster don't take up the whole plot... but you do realize that shit ain't mandatory, right?

Not everything needs to be about the toad tofu.

Do none of you find it odd that in the name of diversity, every single one of you flaunts the exact same badge of moral superiority? Shemales and shefemales and the almighty glory of yaoi, all lightly dusted with melanin for a more exotic flavor? We used to express other themes in fiction! Strategic resource dependence, nuclear disarmament, EXPLORATION, the weighing of one's legacy against the public good, entitlement and modesty, the worth of a life, living a life of worth, fear both personal and societal and the overcoming of same, artistic expression, the environment, honor, compromise, industry and the working class, the yoke of material possessions, home and belonging, freedom vs. authority, safety vs. adventure, superstition vs. reason, future vs. present, crime vs. oppression, snobs vs. slobs, tradition vs. adaptation, intellectual isolation, integrity and the isolation that comes with it in turn, driving passions beyond sexual pair-bonding like revenge or greed or fanaticism (though I can see why the snowflakes of all people would want to dodge discussing that last one) or fuck it, anything, anything, ANYTHING other than yet another garish little wail and moan about the evil oppressive patriarchy and female empowerment!

 

When every. single. mother.fuckin. book/movie/comic/game/painting/song/tweet or particularly melodious fart must in every instance pay homage to your desire for more power, you already hold all the power. And what are you doing with it? What is our society's net cultural output channeled towards under your absolutist control? Endlessly complaining that you don't have enough power!

Of course the real mafioso grave-digging sadistic twist of this gigantic moral cleansing campaign lies in who's actually doing the work. 'Cause for the most part it ain't the trannies. It's heterosexuals promoting homosexuality, men glorifying women and white guilt to the thousandth generation, all of them brainwashed, bullied and blackmailed with the threat of blacklisting into producing racist, sexist propaganda against themselves.

 

There is no surprise as to the provenance of her weapon. He made it, loaded it and handed it to her.

How is a raven unlike a writing desk?

The Sacred Cause of the Results

"It killed the craving for the remedy they made you buy"

Kidneythieves - Placebo

____________________________________________

 

 

From Wikipedia's article on Koran burnings in Sweden in 2023:

 

"The most notable of them occurred on 28 June 2023, when a 37-year-old Iraqi Assyrian refugee ripped out and set fire to pages of the Quran outside the Stockholm Mosque. This incident caused international protests and condemnation, particularly among the Muslim world. On 20 July, this person desecrated the Quran again in Stockholm, resulting in more protests and attacks, including arson, against the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad, starting a day before."

Class exercise time! Find me three lying verbs in that one single paragraph.

Give up?

"caused" - "desecrated" - "resulting"

Would you say that a bad grade caused a school shooting? That a restaurant critic desecrated a Long John Silver's?* That airlines showing Adam Sandler movies on flights results in plane hijackings? (Urge to kill... rising!) Yet you'll find such wording shifting blame away from the perpetrators crops up routinely whenever our society tries to discuss faith-based oppression and violence.

 

Now, I may be going out on a limb here, but let's postulate that subscribing to a ludicrous, sadistic death cult does not entitle one to any more murder&mayhem than is allotted to the rest of us. I mean, I like Robert Heinlein's writing. If you roasted a few choice passages of Farnham's Freehold (which, given the book's infamy, I'm guessing must've happened a few times) and I then torched an embassy, would my act "result" from your SF cookery experiment? And what about those poor, oppressed otherkin who have to watch their peoples' holy knowledge endlessly abused by children's cartoons? Why should drawing Oberon be any less sacrilegious than drawing Mohammed? Pretty sure Oberon has seniority, in fact. Do you believe them any less fervent or founded in their beliefs than the Sikhs, Catholics or Sunnis? (Prove it.) How many embassies do the otherkin get to burn down?

 

Do you not see the defeatism in discussing the lunatics' lunacy on their own terms? Oh the poor darlings, they can't help it, they have to murder, they have to burn and pillage and rape and enslave and repress and redact and revise history and torture and censor and continually use violence of every sort against the rest of us. They believe in it. Well I believe that anyone playing a computer game incorrectly should be skinned alive, boiled in piss, torn apart by rats and raped to death with your own spines. How many children need I beat to death before I'm considered a moral paragon on par with the great religions, to have my retribution against sacrilegiously bad gamers implicitly justified?

Oh, I'm sorry, I meant how many of the "unenlightened" do I get to "educate" before mass media consider the gift of my gospel an inevitability?

 

I don't actually support koran-burning, being flatly opposed to censorship in general, even symbolic, and I'd extend that protection even to trash fiction like bibles, torahs and korans. (Believe it or not, I own a bible.) But either we're all living in the same society or we're not. Harry Potter was subject to numerous public burnings and other "desecration" back at its peak of popularity (and boasts as many adherents as some official major faiths) but if Harry Potter fans had turned to arson or bombings in retaliation, I cannot imagine Wikipedia now claiming that burning a book caused and resulted in burning a church.

Being a fabrication to begin with, faith fabricates its own justification. Can you not admit that the cause of religious violence is religion itself, that the initiative behind faith-based violence is faith itself? That in fact it exists largely to fabricate such pretexts? What does it say that your "holy" book cannot be held to the moral standard of even a children's story? If the faithful cannot be expected to match the moral maturity of Harry Potter fans, if you tacitly treat the sheep's crimes as inevitable, do you not realize what you've admitted? What you already know about the religious mindset? That religion is inherently and inextricably worse than infantile, that it is primitive, irrationally animalistic, sub-human, and in the long run always incapable of coexisting?

______________________________________________________________

* I would've said McDonald's, but "desecrated long johns" was too funny to pass up.

strate-GY

The Paradox-published games I've given as examples so far in the last couple of posts still shy away from fundamental changes to how factions operate, aside from, say, AoW4's necromancy using souls as resource. EU4 puts you through a seminomadic tribal stage merely as a preamble to more modern government types. Even Stellaris' robots or space zombies are still one unit of worker each. Gold, mana, food, production, town levels, star claiming, is all much the same for everyone, albeit with priorities shifted. So let's look at a handful of other examples.

 

Gladius, while a markedly weaker strategy game in general, makes a surprisingly good show of radically altering the economy from faction to faction. Marines are a single-city challenge using guard towers to control the map, tyrannids spam lower-quality towns everywhere and don't care about any resource but food and hero summoning, necrons are restricted in build locations and regenerate continually, chaos ritually sacrifices basic mooks or population for production bonuses and can get random buffs and upgrades, etc.

 

Northgard's early (pig, goat, horse, etc.) factions mostly depended on small numeric shifts and different mechanics for their hero units, but later additions got a bit more adventurous.

Squirrel worshippers combine ingredients from various zones into meals, dragon buys slaves to sacrifice continually, the rat doesn't use the game's most basic "house" building. But even before all this, the raven clan's ability to teleport-attack across the map made it stupidly overpowered. The more divergence, the less balance.

 

We used to pretty much take it for granted. Heroes of Might and Magic, the series now replaced by Age of Wonders and which largely defined the intersection of RPG/TBS, was always weak as a strategic challenge. As just the most persistent and glaring example, giving vampires % life steal (and even allowing them to resurrect dead vamps in their stack just by healing) combined with unlimited stack size allowed you to build a vamp stack effortlessly healing back any amount of damage.

 

Since we're on oldies, recall Starcraft.

Starcraft was never balanced. Even the famous "zerg rush" was coined as a phrase from zerg being able to spawn six attackers before the other races could even start unit production. But cyclical imbalance was always part of Blizzard's marketing strategy for every game, giving every class or race periods of invincibility, over-buffing each option in turn as a matter of policy to give all players, no matter how stupid, unearned feelings of competence and keep them playing to chase dem feelz. To a large extent, it is simply a game industry standard. Players want to be saved from their own stupidity. Players want unfair advantages. Players want to cheat. Companies sell cheats and unfairness and easy ways out. And let's admit multiplayer vastly exacerbates the problem.

 

don't get me started on their refusal to ban griefers

 

While one can easily accept power fantasies as an element of games, movies, comics, books, triumphantly heroic paintings, what-have-you, in multiplayer games they become the main selling point. Legitimized cheating. Legitimized griefing. It's why every collectible card is always more overpowered than the last, every new character is always overpowered on release, and why Counterstrike had the AWP - and I'd be surprised if the AWP isn't a paid DLC now. When faced with the proposition "pay or lose" you'll pay.

So let's address THAT can of worms. On a basic level, developers never want to invest in different game mechanics - more work hours sunk into what is to them the same product. Sure as TV loves sports and "reality" TV with no production costs beyond a camera, if game designers in turn can get away with charging you for merely reskinning mobs or for fancy hats, they will do that every time. But when explicitly marketing new content in discrete blocs like DLCs, they're more motivated to show that content actually... y'know... contains something. In FPS it's a gun, in RPG it's a class or race, in city sims it might be a new map type or buildings. For strategy games "new" factions make the most dramatic-sounding ad copy.

Note one problem right off: if you're a developer in the mindset of continually spamming DLCs at the customer, then the current one you're creating can never get too creative, for fear of leaving no room for the NEXT DLC you want to cram down the marks' throats next month, and so on to infinity. Alpha Centauri can provide one famous cautionary tale from the pre-DLC era. The original seven factions had been designed to cover all human societies in general terms: theocracy, technocracy, communism and democracy, corporate, military and hippie commune. Most of the seven factions added in the expansion could not help but come across as trite knock-offs of those. The industry learned its lesson, and no company will make that mistake these days. They will never sell a full game on release.

But far more damaging is the intersection between DLCs and multiplayer. Even basic game version compatibility has long been used to force buying the latest expansion, but when that was ONE expansion a year after the full release, it left room for players to take it or leave it. When DLCs come out every couple months, you're instead forced to keep paying into the same game merely to maintain your access to the other players. Like status symbols, it's just another way of getting customers to force each other to pay, regardless of what they're actually buying. It's also a way of sneaking monthly subscription fees back into games.

Except you're sneaking subscriptions into single-player!

Every one of the games I've been discussing makes some pretense of offering multiplayer mode (even Europa Universalis, one of the worst suited, is trying to get players to out-score each other in world domination) and none of them can truly justify it. The number of users actually playing them online is infinitesimal... but the number which feel compelled to buy every new DLC at release pricing to keep up with the Joneses, in hopes of recreating that one fun online match from three years ago, now that's a different story. It's no accident that the smallest in scope and time-frame (to shorten online match length) Northgard and Gladius, are also the ones most glaringly pushing individual factions with exclusive mechanics, while Paradox' endless DLCs skew more towards new flavor text, new missions, new customization options designed to work with older content.

A more honest example of what could be possible necessitates a deeper dig into indie obscurity.

Though necessarily limited and also bogged down by a tediously repetitive 2D arcade-style space combat mode, The Last Federation did offer factions thematically and practically different from each other, mainly by skipping the pretense of parity mandated by other games' multiplayer modes. They're not meant to be a match for each other one on one, but rather offer different paths for you, the federation-maker, to curry favor and play them against each other.

 

We could do more of this. Individual factions could be individual game modes, so long as they don't have to compete for the high score on some leaderboard. Screw balance altogether. Screw high scores. Take the idea of multiple victory conditions (tech, territory, last man standing, etc.) and run with it, basing each faction on different routes to different victories.

I started this one post that turned into three because looking back to the heyday of SMAC and HoMM, I honestly can't see that even the best titles on the market like Paradox' offer much in the way of variety. Playability, complexity, detail, yes, but not true variety. And you won't get more creative either, not while the appeal of DLCs as subscriptions prompts developers to restrict every new release to the terrans so they can keep the zerg and protoss in reserve as ten dollar expansions. And to disincentivize that mindset you have to remove the guarantee that players will force each other to buy new DLCs, or the need to keep upping the ante to motivate purchases as cheating.

Stop pretending that strategy games are board games played around a table. This has not been the case for decades, easily demonstrated by looking at any predictably sparsely populated multiplayer lobby.

Stop tacking on multiplayer lobbies to what should be designed fully for individual use.

Separate multiplayer games from single-player games.

stra-TE-gy

My recent Teut-teutoning in EU4 got me a-thinkerin' on how far we've come in terms of strategy faction choices since I started playing computer games.

 

It was primarily Starcraft's popularity which redefined megalomaniac genres in this regard, with the Zerg/Terran/Protoss raising bases by different means, but I'll get back to that next time.* Most strategy like Warcraft or Command and Conquer up to that point (and to a lesser extent still after) merely used cosmetically different but virtually identical factions. Chess colors, so to speak. Civilization thereafter set the still extant tone for using common mechanics with small but meaningful stat differences. Is it enough? Well, in Old World at least I've found myself gravitating toward Babylon, which combines most of my were-turtle preferences:

- shrines with mountain and wonder adjacency bonuses

- archers with splash damage, closest you can get to spellcasters

- most importantly, families include both researchers and traders (which come with that old Civ 4 favorite, India's fast workers)

And I always, always (almost) always lock the throne within Amorite technocracy, even as the other families start revolting. Nerd rule 4evah!

 

Okay, that's slightly grander strategy. So let's call that our baseline. What else is anyone trying?

Ah, Age of Wonders, whose wonder is lasting an age before the series got good. One of its more interesting quirks was always taking Heroes of Might and Magic's neutral creature recruitiment and running with it. In #4 your race only gives a couple of bonuses, with your actual roster depending on

- culture

- magic specialization

- vassalized neutral towns

- captured locations

- quest rewards and captures

Admitting the caveat of watering down your faction's identity (especially since you can pursue completely different magic after you start) after trying eight combos I've nonetheless been finding synergies make a noticeable impact.

 

- My nature/arcane predilection relies on strong casters and shores up its front line with summons, packs of wolves, and weirdly enough, ogres. Due to the many summons, flyers, rooting and nuking, battle lines tend to be chaotic at best.

- My second faction (chaos/materium rats) were pretty much the opposite: high cash flow, low mana. Still high turnover, but by production not summoning. Less squishy than expected due to materium magic and industrious culture providing some of the game's toughest melee, they've been the most prone to rush tactics so far, rapidly stacking buffs/debuffs with every attack (instead of spellcasting) to tear down enemies. The challenge there is recruiting any support casters to keep the swarms of Leeroys alive. If you can hold the line they're a slow tide of ratty death, but whenever the enemy broke my ranks, it pretty quickly wiped me out.

- Weirdly, my avian reavers and my slaving goblin barbarians play less aggressively, with fewer repeating attacks but strong initial ranged volleys or charge offensives, meaning first strike timing tends to be everything. (Especially with magelock muskets in play.)

- My order/materium high culture dwarves or feudal hobbits proved the most defensive options, sitting there buffing until the enemy attacks One strange difference: the dwarves worked better as a wide front line with casters shifting behind to buff/heal where needed, while with the hobbits I've tended to form cute little tercios around their few ranged options (bannermen/zephyr archers) and rely more on the feudal adjacency bonus.

- Shadow magic seemed difficult to work into combos at first, as it follows the precept of necromancy not playing nice with others and only creating/affecting undead, but given it also offers many of the game's debuffing and crowd control effects, it's actually a workable "who needs defense" alternative, especially if you're building a squishier, magic-oriented faction.

And that's barely scratching the economic and town building aspects. Strangely, my orderly chosen uniter dwarves tend to be the most aggressive strategically while defensive tactically. Economy's shit but everything's on sale, no point trying to build up cash, and since you need vassal cities, the best thing you can do is declare war early on to vassalize two or three enemy towns. Was going to bitch Triumph out on this discrepancy, but noticed the crusading tyrant aspect of order was very much built into the faction... well played, players... well played.

 

The highest replay value I've seen though comes from Stellaris. From planet preferences to workforce to means of expansion, I've gotten a different flavor with every attempt. If nothing else, consider that fanatic pacifists cannot initiate wars, a notion strategy games in general don't even bother toying with. Before giving it a couple years' break, for my ninth empire I decided to bite the bullet and try my habitually antithetical concept: fanatic spiritualists.

While I was at it, I paired it up with the origin I knew I'd hate the most, Teachers of the Shroud, which gets its own quest chain about psychically exploring the alternate dimension. Ooooo-eeee-oooooooo...

 

Unsurprisingly, superstitious cretins turned out to be the most idiot-friendly choice, easy mode, a faction with virtually no weaknesses, from industry to social order to expansion. Even its logical weak point of intellectual progress is, if anything, even stronger than other societies' thanks to the game's most blatant gimmie: psychic powers. I ended up effortlessly maxing out my fleet and letting the clock run out to victory, not bothering to finish the aetherophasic engine.

In a "word": imba.

Of course, that's gonna happen when you implement radical differences, features accessible to some factions but not others. The more divergence the less balance. Due to the lack of unit stacking and zones of control, even minimal changes like archers with splash damage really are a bit overpowered in Old World, duplicating what is otherwise the role of catapults. AoW4's Chaos magic and its corresponding empire skills center on destruction, pillaging, razing cities... but there's no real call for that in AoW4, where you can vassalize infinite towns for continuous income instead of a frankly paltry pay-off for razing. Chaos also reduces upkeep for tier 1 units... in a game with five unit tiers and limited stack size. It's about as useful as Civilization's bonuses to basic warriors.

 

So how far can you split strategy game faction mechanics, and is there some major confounding variable here we're ignoring?

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* No, you don't get any bonus points for figuring out I'd write a third post titled strate-GY.

Pomerania universcrewis

This, children, is what we call a clusterfuck:

 

And it's exactly why I've avoided HRE entanglements like the plague until now.

Freakin' Pomerania. It's not even 1618 yet!

STRA-tegy

Got sick of trying to make Savoy work in EU4 for the moment, and so turned my ambitions to the septentrional, specifically to the Teutonic Order.

Prussia Universalis!

 

Why am I feeling so deeply blue about myself?

 

That'd be the opinion mapmode. If Brandenburg-Prussia forms in this timeline, it won't be by peaceful means. Gimme a break, this is still better than I usually do at the game and we're only a century in. I did just manage to take a tasty chunk out of Denmark at least, while clawing my way out of near-bankruptcy, and maintaining an alliance with Lithuania as buffer has kept me safe from the south and east so far.

But for all that Europa Universalis is billed as the definitive "grand strategy" title, little to none of that comes of any coherent plan on my part. Rather, half of it comes of predetermined events with predetermined outcomes, like being instantly billed for two decades' worth of income by the HRE's peasant revolt. The other half is just opportunistically exploiting the fumbling AI, which for a series so heavily dependent on politics and alliances, still flatly refuses to coordinate. I jumped into war against a Denmark weakened by Sweden, only for Sweden to react to my coming to its rescue... by ceding half its territory to Denmark. Nice one, Sven. Between that and the AI randomly giving itself massive opinion penalties against you whenever it feels like turning its coat, plus tech advancement limited by neighbour bonuses/penalties, plus peaceful vassalization/annexation almost impossible due to the economic base exponential penalty or foreign support penalty, playthroughs mostly boil down to keeping up with the Joneses while making land grabs when alliances randomly drop. With EU3's infamy for conquest nerfed and compensating mechanics like coalitions failing to pick up the slack for the AI's aforementioned fickleness, the rich just get richer faster. It's all about the superpowers now and scoring top points.

Don't get me wrong, at least you're no longer constantly playing whack-a-mole with revolts as in EU3, and I love the historic details and the delightfully convoluted economic side more than ever. Still, that approach has its downsides. Despite different idea groups or national bonuses, EU 3/4 has always felt too restrained for my tastes. Nations' opportunities might differ based on their place in the world, but their character always feels rather similar, names and sprite packs notwithstanding. Which admittedly suits EU's historical focus (monkeys are still monkeys, no matter what barrel you toss them into) and it is good <Strategy> sure, but so far of overstated grandeur.