Race the Ennui

On one hand I hate the retro game fad. I already went through the '90s once and once was enough, thanks, I've done my time, not interested. Go pixel yourselves. On the other hand, I'm always intrigued by little garage projects that try to do more with simple elements, even if it means letting myself get ripped off by blank polygons passed off as "stylized" artwork. So methought fine, five bucks for something that might give me a couple hours of entertainment, and I haven't played a racing game in so long, let's give Race the Sun a try. At least its catchy visual gimmick of racing west as the light dips toward the horizon makes it palatable enough at first.

Zoom-zoom, swish-swish... that's about it

Then it sat uninstalled in my collection for years because I remembered I hate racing games.

 

Hey! Hey, it's not just because I'm terrible at them! Sure, for a guy who's spent his whole life clicking I have remarkably poor reflexes and always did even as a teenager. Not the point! Race the Sun's fog barrier admits only two or three obstacles ahead in your field of vision and obstacles can often obscure each other, especially with its exceedingly fast pace. Thus much of my successfailure so far is based not only on reaction speed but also a need to memorize the algorithm's propensity to chain certain map elements after each other (horizontal barriers after long corridors for one obvious general gimmick) and that takes lots and lots of mindless repetition. And given this is a retro "hardcore" arcade game knocking you back to level 0 for every crash as a timesink... well, I got through two levels, that's pretty good, right? Sure. So I'll be uninstalling it now. Bye.

 

Interestingly though, I don't experience the same revulsion on getting war-decced three hours into a TBS campaign and having to start over.

No zoom, little swish, lots more about it

It took a few re-picks and even more re-rolls to secure victory with my latest Stellaris empire, but I managed to screw myself in a different direction every time. Pissing off stronger enemies, overdrawing on my early exploration budget, over-colonizing until I couldn't support their unproductive early stages, unbalanced consumer goods flow, name a pit and I've fallen in it. So it gives me something different to consider every restart: planets, spacelanes, obstacles, resources, everything. So how is that different from, say, Darkest Dungeon 2, which pulls the same restart through newbietown routine.
 

1) First off, a strategy map is more cerebral than a racetrack. More factors to consider allow for more interesting combos (even before the game starts) than wondering which of two powerups will spawn in the archway this time.

2) In a more practical sense of time investment for a pay-off of game content, one longer replay at twenty times the length still gives you more time before returning to start.

3) With any sort of algorithmic randomization there's always the gambling factor to consider. The more linear the game, the more a bad start is a game over, whereas more diverse factors keep you imagining everything else that could go right. (Assuming you have the imagination for it.)

4) How does sunk cost play into this? All those character/faction creation options in a TBS/RPG are expected to shine at some later point. Race the Sun with its loot magnet (or DD2 regardless of offering more features, given how enamored it is of wrecking your presets) doesn't make you work yourself up into anticipating payoff for your assuredly brilliant theorycrafting and/or roleplaying.

 

In any case, the genre wasting more of my time on a loss also makes me less averse to starting over. Gilding the lily's not always a bad thing.

Lockstep 5: Closing Doors

"Upwards, onwards, I hope I can rebound and flow
I just hope for one more chance to prove what I can do"

 

Prong - Close the Door

 

 

I did end up buying Darkest Dungeon 2, having heard it places more emphasis on team interconnection, but the way that's implemented is... wrong. Oh, so, so wrong...

 

Could've been worse. Could've been the flagellant.

Yes folks, the plague doctor and the leper are in love. If you'd like to buy them a wedding present, they're registered at "gauze and brain bleach 'R us" - but I guess this plays aptly enough in a game about horrible revelations.

(apropos, since when's da peedee a dame? I always thought it was just a stereotypical shrimpy little male nerdling)

But aside from socially awkward the relationship system is also (like every other part of the game) overly-randomized. Characters mostly stack random points with each other during combat, and though you can use whiskey to make them socialize at inns, its availability is also randomized, and depending on their point total they randomly might get a positive/negative relationship upon leaving each inn.

That quirk is also, of course, random

Using skills tied to that relationship buffs/debuffs each other respectively. The only nonrandom part? If negative relationships pick a skill you hadn't slotted, the game forces you to do so, ruining your range/melee/defense/support balance in the process. Meaning this emphasis on team strategy actually does more to ruin your team strategy compared to DD1. To add insult to injury, you discover only upon leaving the inn, as you're boldly going into a new adventure, that you've basically received an automatic game over. Seriously, there is no coming back from that level of dysfunction above.

I also got nostalgic for Stellaris, and though I'm not shilling out the absurd release prices Paradox demands for the latest DLCs, I did grab a couple from years ago and opted for an origin I hadn't tried yet: clone soldiers!

While their clone vats spew them out lightning fast, outstripping all but the fastest explosive breeders' baseline, their top population is hard-capped at 5 vats x 20 pops each. Combined with my rustiness at the game and some welcome (but surprising) changes made to governance (multi-leader governments and dual roles) and policing (rebellions are on a hair trigger now) this yielded a few embarrassing failures. Not to mention I neglected that my "incubator" trait doesn't affect cloning.

But finally I adjusted to leaders that die by 30, nailed down a good rate of building construction to deal with the initial overflow and then learned not to overdevelop and overshoot the hard-capped population, and got an archaeologist high enough (it was "the guest") to finish these guys' origin quest, at the end of which you decide whether to remain dependent on clone vats or switch to regular breeding while losing some of your bonuses.

I chose... poorly.

I had assumed that remaining dependent on clone vats would remove their construction limit or in some way make it scale with empire size, which would still leave your early pop cap memorable and give you a later economic hurdle of maintaining clone vats on every planet. But no, apparently not. The five you can build to start is the absolute limit. Which means, first off, my founder species could only be present on five planets so I couldn't even use them as a sparse ruling class. But more importantly, in a thousand-star galaxy one hundred is a comically, insultingly, uselessly, irrelevantly low limit. Even with a low number of habitable planets my previous empire by the end had accrued fifteen thousand total population and while sure, much of that will be other species and robots, if I'm completely dependent on those others... I may as well pick one of those others to start.

And it's a real bitch learning so five attempts plus fifty years into your campaign!

Then there's Homeworld 3, where I got annoyed and abandoned the campaign weeks ago at mission 9 (Warsage Citadel) to be picked up after I'm done gnashing my teeth. Even from back in the days of HW2, the series' developers got a bee in their bonnet about making you fly around gigantic space megastructures. That big dumb object fetish is back in force with #3.

Much of the original's charm lay in the uniquely grandiose mothership itself being the biggest, most important structure on the map, sole lifeline for your species after your homeworld's destruction, a ponderous and stately "delocalized center unto itself" for all your endeavors. Now they sped it up and every mission has you rolling past space malls a hundred times your size. Why they would go to such lengths to cheapen their own most memorable symbol is beyond me. If I wanted anachronistic subway tunnels, I'd fire up Dwarf Fortress! In case you can't tell, that's the new mothership outlined in green above, hidden behind scenery. Not quite as impressive, is it?

But the outlining brings me to the more practical impediment those big dumb objects pose. Homeworld is a game about maneuvering in space, in three dimensions. "Terrain" such as it was, consisted of ship formations and the odd asteroid. Mission 9 crams you between gigantic walls and debris, scrambling to destroy objectives on those walls as enemies just spawn infinitely everywhere around you. Meaning that half the time you're bumping your camera into the damn scenery or you find your vessels hovering in place getting shot to pieces because the AI formations can't navigate and adjust to vertical surfaces at the same time.

Leave aside the question of reasonable difficulty vs. just spawning infinite adds from random points. A claustrophobic escape room scenario is just not what I signed up for when ordering a SPACE game! In SPACE! With plenty of SPACE!

 

One of the core caveats in game design concerns control. Never actively take control away from the player, or even give that impression. Yes I must contend with inimical forces acting of their own volition, but by and large my own character, my own domain does what I tell it to do. That's the point of actively playing instead of being told what happened.

Once I set up my skills, don't change them for me.

A completely fixed constraint in a genre based on escalation retroactively cancels out all my plans and needs a clearer warning as departure from normal mechanics.

Turning spaceflight and fleets into yet another guerilla cityscape feels like false advertising and robs me of that sweeping, grandiose 3D motion.

 

Be wary of cancelling out basic gameplay features after you've established them. I do get that basic concepts need to be expanded, but if your idea for keeping things fresh consists of strangling your own baby... maybe keep brainstorming.

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?

______________________________________

 

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

Player Values Environment

"Slickback, wisecrack, I can smell a rat
Ransacked, setback, down another cul-de-sac
Bullwhack, maniac, sitting on the train track
Crookback, lumberjack, think I better backtrack"

 

Oi Va Voi - Dusty Road

 

 

While Kingdom Come: Deliverance will never hold my attention quite like Mount&Blade, it's still an undeniably expert piece of work and even its infuriating melee combat, savegame potions, stripping down to sneak or other minor chores can't stop me from returning to polish off at least a majority of quests, basking in recherché medieval immersion and hardcore mode's lack of pointers forcing you to navigate by landmarks and cardinal directions.

Having bemoaned the loss of such mechanics repeatedly in the past and clung to the few attempts at rebuilding video game pathfinding (like Miasmata or Sir, You Are Being Hunted) in the era of Skyrim map markers, I had to note how KCD makes stumbling around the woods so engrossing. Largely, as it turns out, by stepping back and giving control to the player (ironically where its overscripted melee combat fails in the opposite direction) and giving you tools and goals but few direct procedures (alchemy recipes aside, natch) letting you game the system via your own aptitudes. Most important among such tools is shaping the terrain itself as to encourage the player to deliberately get his bearings and plot a course.

 

Having snuck out of Ledetchko in the dead of night for some innocent deer poaching (and incidental deer-poacher-poaching; turns out poachers are a territorial breed) I made to turn in their RAW DRIPPING LIVERS to the butcher of Sasau only to find myself yet again hopelessly discombobulated after my adventures and unaware how many roads or woods I'd crossed in the dark. I ambled rather aimlessly downhill in hopes the river may lead me to civilization. Luckily, first light broke just as I broke through the trees above one of the land's many mills and (praise be unto Saint Christopher!) gleamed white against the distant unmistakable squarish sight and newly raised bell tower of Sasau monastery. A quick glance at the map unmistakably pinpointed the mill itself and thereby my own position.

Knowing this helpful landmark would be once again blocked by the upland fields once I descended down the escarpment to the river, I made my plans (as I had business in town) not to cross the fields but skirt their border with the woods. Sure enough I soon hit the final landmark, the roadside shrine to some mysterious benefactors (read: kickstarter donors or somesuch) and was home free!

Other games have tried to reward you for walking, sometimes by such insulting metrics as simply counting the number of steps you've taken (looking in your direction No Man's Sky) or giving you levelups for such a freebie action. But whatever KCD's other faults or accolades, Warhorse Studios displayed unimpeachable artistry in making good on restoring travel's due relevance, not by arbitrary carrots or sticks but by employing the terrain itself in its own traversing: well-drawn maps, rises and rivers, recognizable mills and camps, towns with individual traits, breaks in the trees, vantage and markers and the ever-glimmering stars.

But of course, when we think of terrain interaction, we mostly think of combat advantages. Aside from maneuvering your archers to high ground, many a fight in Bannerlord will center on keeping your cavalry on open ground or breaking your enemy's charge using fences, trees or rivers to effortlessly pincushion them while slowed.

More interestingly though, even the overland map yields positioning advantages and disadvantages, some unexpectedly... economic.

Much as I bitched out my emperor for gifting me a low-yield string of castle fiefs, the southmost of these, Akiser, reaped an unexpected windfall in ransoms when wars broke out with the Southern Empire and Aserai. Aside from defending it myself, friendly armies fleeing sieges tended to take refuge at the nearest unblockaded castle, and as the AI apparently unburdens itself of prisoners at the first dungeon... ka-ching!

 

In Stellaris as well, much use can be made of third parties or game events punching holes in your rivals' territories.

Around mid-game, the marauders which had heretofore remained contained in their original systems might balloon in strength thanks to the rise of a "great khan" and begin expanding. During other runs it spelled my death. Here I was able to sit on defense and let the khan chew up my opponent then sweep up its systems without risking a diplomatically self-destructive open war. Or take one of the end-game events:

Like the khan, extragalactic invaders can be particularly nasty because instead of claiming territory they wipe existing ownership and take over, even rendering planets uninhabitable. Here one of the systems they "liberated" happened to include a jumpgate which once neutral I used to move up behind their lines and snatch up the conquered stars. Joined by other opportunists, we knocked the Raxycodium Alliance completely out of the running for victory with a third of its territory nibbled off... all perfectly peaceful and legal and even heroic in our timely appllication of squatters' rights. In case you're wondering, it works in reverse as well: under #3 in this post, the different colored territory in the bottom of the image resulted from a Gray Tempest event paired with my ill luck in finding half a dozen L-gates inside my borders. Hey, sometimes you're the Swiss and sometimes you're the cheese...

 

Once you've seen so many games make such creative use of maps and positioning and logistic opportunism, it becomes particularly annoying to see so many more treat theirs as only a flat surface on which to farm ten to the tenth rats. Even some attempted terrain features can be worse than useless for lack of integration.

11bit did brilliant work on Frostpunk, but their earlier offerings fell rather short of that standard. Anomaly Defenders, a tower defense I already bashed here, filled one mission with random meteor strikes destroying your towers. In a better game, this would've entailed some means of detecting, deflecting or intercepting said meteors in such a way as to inform your construction going forward or be deliberately used against your enemies. Here, it's merely more whack-a-mole: the strikes are truly random and inevitable and give little forewarning. "Rocks fall, everyone dies" indeed.

 

The most insulting attitude though would have to be that of mindless arcade-throwback twitch-games in which enemies simply teleport in on top of you to be popped off like skeet. Doom, a classic which should never have remained an aspirational goal, remained a worst offender as of #3, where I quickly learned to mechanically, mindlessly twirl after picking up a health/ammo pack and plug the enemies inevitably spawning to "ambush" me. Diablo-inspired loot grinds like Warframe are at least up front about such idiocy being their core feature, one-upping MMOs without the pretense of larger (nonexistent) events. It's a lot more galling in games like No Man's Sky where exploration presupposes some preparedness, or Mechwarrior which at least facetiously touts some tactical elements but where units are flat-out too fast relative to weapon ranges, making positioning largely irrelevant from second to second. Instead of fabricating the shallow "feels" of enemies coming over the rise and turning this into mere whack-a-mole, why not allow the rise to be deliberately used? Get a rise out of your rise!

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.

Gaming Imperfect

"But please, you know you're just like me

Next time, I promise we'll be - perfect"

 

Smashing Pumpkins - Perfect

 

 

If you've ever played an MMO (or even some single-player open world games) you've run across the mindless beachcombing vulgarly touted as exploration achievements. In theory "exploration" should mean taking stock of your surroundings, finding paths, shortcuts and secretive nooks and crannies or alternately scenic or significant landmarks.

 

Worse: it's past another marker, so you probably stopped searching the area.

 

In game designer jargon though, "exploration" means tagging indistinguishable patches of dirt with the idea that exactly 3.91km outside of town on the highway counts as exploring that road - but not 3.90 or 3.92! City of Heroes ranked the worst offender for its coin-sized markers you literally had to step on, because finding lost pennies on a sidewalk is the equivalent of discovering Vinland. Compounding the problem, you must usually find absolutely every last marker to complete the achievement. Obviously Marco Polo didn't truly visit China because he never hit madam Wang's noodle steamery on 35th street. Without that, the whole trip's void.

 

We could comb every step of every map just fine when Doom consisted of twenty pharmacy-sized levels of featureless corridors with predetermined demon spawns for your shotgunning pleasure. But in the era of hundred-square-kilometer virtual worlds, asking players to find the exact ten spots where your dog shit last week might as well come with HUD markers, because nobody bothers doing that without cheating off a wiki. The only way to keep such challenges playable without rendering locations too obvious is to stop demanding full completion, which would also address another issue of the absolute faceless lack of player identity in modern games. It might be quaint to compare notes with someone else and find the 10/13 spots I found to complete an achievement aren't the same 10/13 he did, that he likes beaches while I prefer hills, and neither of us thought to crawl up a troll's ass to find the exploration marker it swallowed.

 

But this is just a small manifestation of a larger, older issue. Mammalian play is supposed to be explorative, and as a heavily neotenized species we enjoy that feeling of rifling through grandma's kitchen cabinets for the sheer hell of it. For anyone with more brains than a hamster, it stops being fun when grandma just orders you to take out exactly five forks from the second drawer on the right. Playing games should be an inherently creative endeavor, an intersection of your personal style with novel challenges, not fucking cookie-cutter builds, "meta" team comps, enforced min-maxed optimization and completionism!

 

I've probably logged hundreds of hours in RimWorld without ever bothering to pursue the supposed win condition of escaping the planet. I'd rather see how cyborg cannibals fare against giant ants. My current gimmick is technophilic primitive nudists in the taiga. One colony some time ago started with Labrador retriever pets. Properly trained they made passable if unimpressive combatants, but the economic angle proved more interesting.

 

Their larger litters give them twice the population growth of mightier beasts like cougars, but their nutritional requirements soon had me considering sterilizing them all to stem the voraciously adorable beige tide. Turns out they sell well though. Lacking any other tradable commodities (sculptures, couture, beer) during the early, dirt-farming years of my colony's development, my colonists' lives began revolving around Labrador breeding to such an extent even when they did get around to sculpting, it was all about the damn mutts. I organized their schedules around properly timing trade caravans to rid myself of each new sackfull of puppies before they eat me out of house and home. Thus planet <whatsitsname> acquired its first dedicated puppy mill.

Am I winning at RimWorld?

Maybe not officially, but anything with that many puppies sure feels like a win.

The stars can wait. Why would I ever abandon puppy-farming?

 

Albeit hardly games' biggest problem at the moment (that would be microtransactions) the fixed idea of "winning" by completing the game is holding back more promising genres, and it's rooted in the industry's beginnings. The early success stories like Space Invaders or Frogger were by necessity limited in their interactivity. Getting the high score was a worthy endeavor in a context which never stretched beyond strafe/shoot/strafe/shoot anyway - but we have more options now.

Take a Stellaris playthrough in which I outlawed robots. Normally, the machine uprising event (if you research sentient AI but don't give them their rights) is a mid-game challenge, with individual fleet strengths on the order of tens of thousands. Mid-game came and went, late game saw me polishing off some of my more threatening or profitable neighbours... one of which had AI-driven ships... which tech I inadvertently acquired from battlefield salvage. I was nonplussed when the unprompted machine uprising warning signs began to pop up here and there, decided it must just be a little glitch... and another one... and OH, SHIIIIIIT !

Turns out the event scales.

When the robot mafia spawned from my galactic frontrunner, late-game empire, it spawned with individual fleets of 1.5 million and more in strength, for a total of ~15mil, when my combined fleet strength, matching the whole rest of the galaxy put together, could barely take on one at a time. And I did take on one at a time, traded for alloys, retreated and regrouped at citadels, and eventually managed to recover thanks to the skirmish/attrition-obsessed AI never massing against me, wasting its superfluous strength on undefended systems.

That should count as a win right there.

A single one of those fleets would trounce the entire Contingency which spawns as the official end-game artificial intelligence crisis faction. Anything after the terminator swarm stretching across whole systems can't but come across as a firecracker echoing a nuke. After surviving the Robot Mafia, telling me I won by outscoring the Lokken Mechanists in energy credits or whatever comes across as an insult... butchoo gotta beat the game, right?

To their credit, Paradox have started experimenting with more nonstandard endgame scenarios like blowing up the galaxy for the win. Such alternate victory conditions (the classic example being Civilization's spaceship launch) are currently lacking in the recent TBS which started this whole train of thought, Old World.

In one recent playthrough, I found myself putting quite a bit of effort into breeding Labrador retrievers... errr, I mean, inter-breeding with the Vandals, securing an alliance and wedding new heirs into the tribe. But, given Old World's emphasis on dynasties as principal selling point over Civilization and its copycats, I'm a bit disappointed at the absence of some kind of victory condition relating to inheritance. Y'know what? Scrap the "victory" part. Winning by completing achievements is decent, but give me more ways to deliberately finish the game without just outscoring everyone, maybe legitimize the Vandals by my imperial authority and parentage, install my mostly-Vandal grandson Abdosir (isn't he cute?) as their god-king, turn them into a divinely sanctioned rampaging horde and set them loose upon an unsuspecting Fertile Crescent, ending civilization as we know it. Cue credits. You don't win. You don't lose. But you played it your way to the bitter end.

This is MY sandstorm.

I criticized plenty about Shadowrun: Dragonfall after my playthrough, but applauded its setting, characters and especially its stellar reinterpretation of a "bad" ending as simply your character's choices taken to their logical conclusions, without beating you over the head with a bunch of shallow moralistic posturing about how you should've played the hero. And, just as city simulators have a lot to teach other genres about decentralizing the action, we should remember grand strategy is just a way of saying roleplaying on a civilization scale. Not every campaign should be measured against an arbitrary perfect win, ticking all checkboxes on the achievement list, chasing down every last monster in every last zone for 100% completion, marrying the prince for a golden ending. Instead of advancing toward ruling the world, merge the ideas of strategy tech/culture/military victories with RPGs' "where are they now" end-game slideshows. A little good. A little bad. So it goes.

On the flip-side, cRPGs themselves almost invariably get easier as you advance, sometimes to the point you can one-shot the final boss. Justified, to a large extent, because a late-game unwinnable state would cheat the player of a lot more invested time than getting eaten by the first giant spider in the prologue. This can be addressed by implementing more "bad" endings without treating them as losses, without propping up a single "golden ending" as the goal of the entire campaign. Yes, building the Civilization spaceship means you'll never rule the Earth. So what? Screw you guys, I'm going home... to Alpha Centauri. Start legitimizing pyrrhic victories, desperate last stands and glorious resistance movements instead of merely ranks on a podium and "second place is another word for loser."

Sure, games have rules and goals, otherwise they disintegrate. If you want complete creative freedom, buy some art supplies and paint your way to victory, compose some music, scribble disjointed short stories and post them to your blog, whatever. You don't need fifty space marines and a gluon gun for that. But there must be a middle ground between everything and nothing allowing for interactivity in an interactive medium instead of just practicing Mario's jumps. Whether it's imposing a victory condition on a sandbox, 100% achievement completion, golden endings, nominal victories dwarfed by preceding gameplay, anticlimactic but mandatory final boss fights, we have got to distance ourselves more from the idea of perfect scores, first place or complete domination as the only goals worth pursuing.

And if you don't see any social commentary in that yet, I'll just leave you to it.

Six Stellar Space Soaperas

That Stellaris' fifteen content packs add up to four or five times the base game's price is merely a sign of the insanity of current game marketing, of which Paradox is guilty in no small measure. However, that under those conditions the base game is still listed at $40 almost six years after release should draw your attention. While yes, of course that sum's deliberately inflated to offset "sale" prices, you have to wonder why so many of us are willing to drop $100+ on a 4X with little to no glamour factor.

 

While much of Stellaris' success has to do with the complexity of basic gameplay and successfully keeping its mountains of information accessible through the interface, maybe the best way to convey this is via the immense replay value achieved by mixing and matching races, planets, governments, diplomacy and other options... and also I just felt like gushing about my various empires, so here we are.

I should admit that I'm no champion at the game and have no intention to ever become one. It would cut too much into the fun of trying various themes and often sacrificing utility to roleplaying spin. Given I always play in a large, slightly underpopulated, minimally habitable galaxy, assume I lost at least a dozen times with every setup due to overexpansion, absence of colony sites or getting blindsided early game, despite playing only on "captain" (medium, minimal AI bonuses) difficulty. In the screenshot above, though ultimately successful, I had a devil of a time keeping up with my Hegemonic Imperialist ally who I swear started more wars than the rest of the galaxy put together, leaving the heavy fighting to me and just snatching up easy claims every time. Assholes gave me no chance to reach the (admittedly extended due to my love of marathon sessions) end year.

1)

Three to two years ago, my first runs defaulted to my preferred setup of research focus in any strategy game, with the ethics:

Fanatic Materialist / Egalitarian

(The nerds.)

They were alpine mammalians, alternating between genetic modification or cyborg ascension perks with other minor changes from run to run.

Especially since I visualized my mountain wolves as slow breeders, the lack of expansion bonuses made for a slow early game, high dependency on robots (better pray to all-powerful Atheismo that you get the right techs for them quickly) and susceptibility to the robot uprising event. They were, however, extremely productive per population unit and not very finicky. Interestingly, in Alpha Centauri terms it starts out like the University but feels more like the Human Hive after your robot workforce gets off the ground. This was also the most neutral culture I've played along the good / evil axis.

2)

Fanatic Xenophobe / Authoritarian

The cannibals.

Desert arthropoid / avian with syncretic evolution and slaver guilds. I envisioned them as basically xenomorphs ovipositing in captive, brittle but fast-reproducing pretty birdies.

Lightning-fast expansion due to claim discounts and influence bonus; if you like the classic 4X land grab strategy, this is the one for you. The most massive investment in slaves I've ever run, especially since I decided my xenophage race would expand its culinary / reproductive tastes to anything resembling its instinctive victims and proceeded to, on principle, enslave every avian race in the galaxy as livestock, and the rest as workers. Combined with repeated extermination campaigns against non-delicious, non-sexy, non-muscular species, this not only made me the galaxy's most hated empire by a wide margin -

- but required two precinct houses on most planets just to keep the peace.

Still... working to death or simply eating your superfluous workforce gives you both raw power and flexibility, and though it was hard staffing research planets, slave labor bonuses and low support costs made me an industrial powerhouse. Best of all, as a capper:

- I took the Worm-in-Waiting's offer to become unliving abominations (I'd started as repugnant anyway) and turned my trinary starting system into a clockwork of tomb worlds spawning around every collapsed star.

It's good to be bad, baby.

 

3)

Fanatic Pacifist / Egalitarian

The decadent subversives.

Molluscoid, life-seeded. Terraformed every planet into a gaia world. Nicest squishies you'll ever meet (to balance out my arthropoids' karma) to the point everyone was so gosh-doggonned happy with my amazing standard of living that I needed no police precints! Caveat: in possibly the biggest departure from classic 4X gameplay, fanatic pacifists cannot declare war, and while in the early game it's possible to diplomatically taunt enemies to attack you, as soon as you build up your fleet the AI refused to risk it, and though that's gradually being addressed in recent patches by the galactic U.N. declaring you a threat, my empire's abundance of diplomats and angelic publicity meant I pretty much WAS the Galactic Community, pulling strings nonstop to censure whatever and whomever I wanted. I could do no wrong. Combined with the then-new espionage system, this made for a hilariously, insidiously passive-aggressive playthrough, culminating in the most Balkanized endgame galaxy I've ever seen.

"border gore" the fanboys call it

Note the chaos increases the farther you get from me and my allies. For a long time I was at a loss as to how I could expand, until I realized just because I can't go to war doesn't mean everyone else won't, and planets will rebel against their cruel (and war-weakened) masters... and unable to survive in a hostile galaxy will beg to join the best option available. Which was me. I recruited rebel after rebel, one system at a time to the tune of literally dozens pockmarking the galaxy above in gold dots, mopping up after crises, inciting wars via spycraft or "helping" my confederates defensively, waiting for empires to splinter from diplomatic pressure and just effortlessly picking up the pieces.

It is, apparently, also good to be good. Baby.

4)

Fanatic Militarist / Materialist

Rock the house down.

Lithoid, calamitous birth origin with the "very strong" trait, and rushed Supremacy as my third tradition. Basically Prussia. My credit economy was shit, even with robots and lithoid pops' resource-shedding, and influence (the all-important expansion-limiting resource) was a bigger problem than for my xenophobes. However, industry was decent, and combat bonuses don't just make for powerful fleets but amplified build-up so you're never in much danger even if surprised. Also, the AI cannot account for this and is more easily baited into attacking you despite your ability to instantly crank out several pugnacious little fleets in record time. Where my arthropoids devoured or worked to death their victims, I built my lithoids for outright extermination, and given this made me <almost> as reviled (seriously, not even blowing everything up matches eating everyone's babies) and given this was my first playthrough last year after the Nemesis expansion came out, I opted to Become the Crisis(TM)

 

 

Luckily this turned out to mostly involve military bonuses amplifying my main advantage, escalating to blowing up entire star systems (where normally you can only blow up individual planets) and finally collapsing every star in the galaxy at once for an instant game over. For my money it's a bit too straightforward and definitely needs further fleshing out. I especially dislike this path forcing you into a communion with psychic space-ghosts or whatever, given my usual stance on telepathy in science fiction. Still, it fit my rampaging ethos this time around to a decent approximation.

5)

Fanatic Egalitarian / Xenophile

(More like xeno-erotic, amirite?)

The teacher's pets.

I decided I liked alternating and so opted for another "nice" race of short-lived plantoid scions of a fallen empire (initially overpowered but stagnant neutrals) with the free haven and idyllic bloom civics. The faction influence bonus doesn't kick in for twenty years and building up trade value is a centuries-long process. Budding made robots a no-go proposition due to overlapping with biological pop cloning. Slow expansion with assured rapid population / economic growth afterwards.

 

 

Sadly, this turned out the most boring of all runs. Not only can nobody attack your fallen empire master and you can't go on the offensive as a vassal (I definitely like turtling but this made it too easy) but also, by some accident my galactic region featured few or no neutrals around me, no L-gates and a marauder empire that only threatened me twice then shut up for two centuries. In a show of poor planning on my part, my vassalage prevented me from building a federation to leverage my egalitarianism, and while I did put my diplomacy to use here and there to squeak out a narrow victory with a last-century rebellion and wave of expansion, overall it was just a snooze.

I did however manage to get many biological races fucking each other, littering the galaxy with half-whatevers. That's gotta count for something.

(edit: I had actually tried these ethics at first, instead of scion, with the origin option placing you immediately in a federation with two other empires, which presents its own challenge of struggling to edge your allies out of early expansion, but giving me buddies from the start just rubs my lycanthropic, hermit-at-the-edge-of-town fur the wrong way; never again)

6)

Fanatic Authoritarian / Militarist 

The zombie apocalypse.

Necroid necrophages with once again the slow breeder malus (since necrophages' growth is already gimped) plus the venerable trait and philosopher king civic to bank on immortal leadership offsetting my workforce issues and stability/ethics/anti-crime edicts stabilizing my considerable but not overwhelming slave population. Basically the opposite of my plantoids' rapid growth and subservience, less dependent on slave labor than my bugs and as obedient as my fanatic pacifists for entirely different reasons.

 

 

A new addition this past year, necrophagy throws an interesting wrench into your delicate population balance, forcing you to maintain slave pools which you convert into your own species. Expect critical dependency on thrall worlds pumping out more slaves. The fact they can also convert biological enemies in ground combat makes planetary conquest practically their modus operandi (no blowing shit up this time) but combined with my barren galaxy setup (with only one guaranteed colonizable world) this gave me the most difficult early game yet, unable to grow quickly enough to become strong enough to conquer and convert my neighbours once I meet them.

Interestingly, necrophagy doesn't carry nearly the same attitude penalty as sapient-phagy, so my zomblies ended up more politically favored than my bugs or rocks, but it just isn't enough. Maybe I've just been unlucky but there seems to be some unwritten malus to necrophages starting you off next to hostiles. In all attempts I've started near marauders, fanatical purifiers, hegemonic imperialists or all of the above. May be meant to help you, since early on it's easier to let your rivals grow planets which you then conquer and convert than it is to grow your own... but it just conflicts with my turtling tendencies. Not even counting the score of attempts failed in the first decade or two:

1- Death by angry grandpa. Mismanaging my pops set me so far back that I lost in mid-game by being forced to sign ill-advised defensive pacts with some idiots who immediately pissed off a fallen empire.

2- Death by Gray Tempest. I wasn't nearly strong enough by the time competition forced me to open the L-cluster.

3- Death by Great Khan. Successfully blocked off all potential enemies by starbases with the Unyielding tradition, but had encircled marauders without fortifying and lost track of hitting middle game.

4- Keeping my fingers crossed so far. I got lucky early on with enemies suiciding into my defensive station instead of taking the long way around to flank me, quick conquests via the nanite interdictor (exploration jackpot) and a great khan prioritizing an enemy empire, plus managed to lock down the L-cluster. Near-death by Paradox patch's influence/unity system revamp yesterday (yes, yes, I should've checked the patch notes) wiping my edicts and sending my economy into a spiral before I managed to recover thanks to a freshly-minted ringworld.

Two centuries in, for all its early difficulties this setup is proving an overpowered mid-game juggernaut ideal for the biological ascension path to optimize both your main population and fertile thrall breederies. It basically gives you a "single" race fully adaptable to any planet (as your converts inherit their homeworld type) and therefore combined with authoritarianism a highly cohesive, law-abiding, efficient society once you overcome your early growing pains... and every conquest not only adds to but amplifies my advantage.

 

Mechanics are still advancing six years after release. Every new combo has developed differently, building upon without detracting from core gameplay like other TBS/RTS' "no navy" or "infinite resources" standard alternate game modes. While your ethics most frequently determine your style, the combination of origins, civics, astronomy and a shuffle of scripted events play just as much of a role. I'm thinking maybe a "fuck the galaxy" fanatic xxxenophile(TM) race next. I might even choke down my bile and create a spiritual empire at some point, though I'm more prone to revisit materialists, and I have yet to play around with voidborne, hive mind, machine consciousness, aquatics, clone army, remnants or so, so many other options.

Buy it.