Lockstep 6: Porosity

"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken."

SMAC

 

 

Having polished off newbietown's side-quests I decided to break from Cyberpunk 2077 before continuing the main event. Time fer sum-a-dem stragety. But not only did my insectoid imperialists take me many tries to get right (they depend heavily on early expansion where I usually prefer to turtle) but halfway through my one successful campaign with them, AoW4 decided to wreck its crafting system.

 

When introduced a year go, crafting ran the straightforward old premise of breaking down loot you don't need for parts used in making whatever you want, learning new effects from magic materials in your territory. Uncreative but useful and satisfying. The addition of dragons threw a kink into it by rewarding you for maintaining unused loot for a draconic hoard economic bonus, but it still worked fudamentally the same. The new system now adds a second crafting currency. In order to make high-tier crap, you need to break down high-tier crap. And only high-tier crap. A reminder of how often crafting ends up a half-assed freebie in any genre not built around it.

 

While conceptually sound to prevent hobbits from leaving The Shire with mithril chain shirts and vorpal excaliburses, the lack of permeability between tiers wrecks the very appeal of gradual improvement directed by the player, creating upgrades and not just side-grades. Moreover, they now allow looting items from defeated player armies, which mostly happens in the end-game. All this fabricates three needless problems for a previously functional system:

1) Since your trash loot can only create more trash loot, it tends to just pile up uselessly.

2) By the time you find your first few 3rd-4th tier items, the amount of vespene gas you'd get by dissassembly wouldn't compensate for their own utility, so you're better off just using them even if they're not ideal for your heroes. Meaning your crafting is still stalled.

3) Once hitting the late-game wars you're looting so many top-shelf baubles that you blow through your heroes' demand pretty much instantly. Then ALL loot is worthless.

 

It's especially annoying to see bad decisions made to compensate for other bad decisions. The way AoW4 starves you through the early game then inundates you with overpowered gear later can't help but remind me of Tyranny, a brilliant game in its own right... except, infamously, for its pacing! In the screenshot above, I broke down my stockpile toward my AoW campaign's end. I could afford to outfit several more heroes than I could even recruit, and that's after gorging my existing goons on all the vorpal they could swallow. An inelegant, overcompensating strut to support a crafting system which itself needlessly breaks a principal rule of gaming: allowing the player to invest directed effort into advancement.

 

You may as well have only two item tiers in the game to begin with. Setting a hard limit between (1-2) and (3-4) is like setting timers on when wars can or can't be declared, or level scaling in RPGs or officially declaring all D&D characters must be hopeless one-shottable murderhobos until lvl 10 then unstoppable demigods from lvl 11 onwards. It's designers micromanaging the player. See D&D's skill points built so closely into your class role, upping exactly the same skills every level from 1-20, or DA:O's skill points in the fade, tossing freebies into what should be YOUR progression. But a core element of building either a character or a faction is picking your strengths and weaknesses, advancing different aspects at different rates.

 

If I want to melt down all four hobbits' shortswords and cooking utensils to make one chain shirt for Frodo, that should be my decision, damnit. And don't just throw a pile of mithril chain shirts at me right at Mordor's doorstep; that should be something I've worked towards all along. Not that there shouldn't be different phases to a campaign's progression, but they need more overlap, more permeability. Stellaris has early/mid/late phases, but events don't all just instantly pop up when the calendar flips over. EU4's institutions spread slowly but can be mitigated with a cash buy-in. In fact I've recently jumped into Medieval Dynasty. Much like other sandbox crafting / survival games, it sticks to a gradual climb up a tech tree.

 

Sticks and stones form the very bottom rung. But you don't just use them at the start. Stones begin as hatchet-heads and transition to construction materials. Trees, of which you'll be chopping an ungodly amount for logs, give sticks as a bonus (in addition from growing on every bush) to where I was getting annoyed at them piling up uselessly.... until I discovered I could just toss them into a resource chest for my villagers to grab as firewood instead of using up my precious logs. Then when I start crafting more arrows I'll likely want to save up a few again. See that? A bit of back-and-forth, a bit of leeway, a bit of player decision in allocating scarce resources, a bit of... I don't know... game-playing!

 

(And weirdly, in every other respect except the crafting, AoW4 displays masterful escalation.)