The First Three Xes

"Rid min hest
Stormen stillnar
vil i veg, vil i veg"

 

Wardruna - EhwaR

(Don't worry, I don't know Norwegian either. Translation.)

 

 

Either I've gotten worse at strategy games over the past year or Stellaris' toxoids patch vastly improved the AI to where it's now actually possible to lose late game. Which I've been doing. A lot. Also mid game. And early game. And just quitting when I get the Grunur precursors chain, since their terraforming payoff's useless to my eighth empire type.

I'll stand by space-dragon-robo-nannies as a totally valid ScieFie concept, but in practice I'm having an awful time getting it to work. Granted, the bigger issue is workforce: if my seventh empire's void dwellings' limited carrying capacity gave me a dozen failures' worth of trouble, taking a reproductive speed malus for a race that can't import labor has left me hopelessly lagging in early productivity. Might as well run with it though.

-1000% happiness penalty. Yeah, okay, that's fair...

 

The nice part about encountering pre-space species before fellow space empires is exterminating the primitives without any diplomatic repercussions - a lesson I learned the hard way by trying it late game and getting flattened by the whole rest of the galaxy. (Hey, my Prime Directive reads: "TERMINATE!") Better off yanking the band-aid early than giving my enemies free workers later. Much as with necrophages, quite a few of my machine intelligence early games have revolved around managing native conquests, trying to guess whether a species is worth keeping spayed (lithoids usually) or in other cases whether they can be stabilized quickly enough to get some work out of the filthy beasts before I need to pretend they never existed... or whether a clean start with machines will be less trouble.

 

Eight Stellaris empires so far, and each one has played different. Rushing to bury planets' worth of corpses before the neighbours see me?

That's a new one.

 

Aggravating being stuck on this Stellaris run, having recently blown a fair chunk of cash on its more established cousin within the Paradox clan, Europa Universalis 4, when the latter finally appeared on GoG. While I haven't gotten the chance to play it yet, I did notice a couple of glaring additions right in the start-up menu: customising your own nation and/or randomizing the New World landmasses for true exploration. It got me thinking back to 1996.

When Fantasy General 2 came out I was surprised to discover its original boasts quite a vocal little clique of old fans, and since you can pick it up as abandonware or during promotions as a freebie, decided to see what the moldy old hype was about. Turns out: not much. Fantasy General was a standard hex-based TBS, and much as with WH40K: Armageddon two decades later, its orcs and knights are clearly just thinly spackled-over Nazis and panzers, except lacking Armageddon's unit variety or more experienced level design to make you ignore the fact you're playing Battle of the Bulge with a pointy-ear surcharge. Nobody would be reminiscing about it now if not for the game industry's abandonment of thoughtful genres like turn-based strategy/RPGs in the mid-2000s and only recently renewed interest. Still, while it was nothing special, it was also nothing especially terrible. It even pays due attention to many minor and sometimes overlooked mechanics like bridges as choke points, flying units occupying the same hex as ground, ranged retaliation against attacks on bordering allies, etc.

 

Fantasy General did grab my attention for coming out in 1996 though... the same year as Heroes of Might and Magic 2, its direct and far more successful competitor. In fact Fantasy General was likely churned out in a hurry after the original HoMM to capitalize on the fresh interest in fantasy TBS and undercut the sequel by several months. While HoMM2 lacked some of the other's hex-based finesse, anyone who played the series could sum up its greatest advantage in two words: "adventure map." But clippity-clopping over deserts and fields claiming mines and fairy breederies was only one part of an overarching policy of marking the player's growth, from heroes leveling up to pushing back the fog of war to incremental creature tiers to other upgrades.

Town upgrades and skill trees are unquestioned standards now (albeit usually perfunctory) but back in the day of Warcraft 2 and HoMM 2 this was rather the exception to video games' accepted arcade-style norm of simply clearing each new level as it comes within no greater structure. Gamers, after all, are not meant to think but merely react.

 

Europa Universalis has more than earned its strategy gamer in-crowd acclaim yet runs to a lesser extent into the same problem as Fantasy General, and EU4's customization/randomization features are meant to bridge the gap in appeal between the EU series and Stellaris or the various other series' map generators like Civilization or Age of Wonders. You could chalk it up to replay value, and that's certainly true, but the 4X formula's early stages also offer the opportunity of taking the unknown and making it one's own, beating an imaginary world into our own image. Chaos and order at the same time. Ah, but EU already has its own image, despite its endless grand strategy options. WW2 re-enactments even more so. Stellaris' advantage isn't just that I never know whether or whither I'll run across any empty or inhabited planets (whereas everyone knows where Norway is) but that I get to scour, enslave, uplift or naturalize in my own particular... ... ... idiom!

Not just novelty, not just personal choice, but the feeling of turning the tide of self vs. world. Not just defeating an enemy but taking his power. Not just constantly returning to an emblematic focus for your adventures, but shoring it up, building it up, solidifying a lifeline into an unshakeable foundation, turning a barren patch of land into dwarf cottages and unicorn paddocks. Not just leveling up but mixing and matching level-up bonuses into your own personalized transcendence of your humble origins. This pattern accounts not only for the success of the 4X genre but that of survival city sims or party management, and it's another reason why so many loathe linear walking simulators or level scaling and other similar "adaptive" features which flatten our narrative arc to a linear slog through inflationary spending. And, though most gamers may not consciously realize they want to strategically transmogrify a brave new world (much less verbalize their desire) they do want it, as shown by the gradual trickle of RPG-lite or base-building features into other genres. Even collectible card collectin' and cash shop status symbols can be seen as shortsighted, fumbling attempts at cheating toward such tide-turning, seeing an advantage, a potential from the nebulous OUT THERE and making it one's own. Merely winning is nothing to incorporating victory into an overarching constructive effort.

As the medium struggles out of its Betty Boop stage, I can't help but think more genres must embrace exploration>expansion>exploitation (or more generally a narrative pattern of discovery>conflict>assimilation) as a core principle of audience participation much as novels embraced the idea of a singular narrative instead of disjointed events or cinematography grew past simply filming theater sketches on a static stage. The RP / Grand Strategy routine's just the gamiest gaming there is.