Help, help, I'm being scraped!

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.)

I've got so many old alts I could found my own Altgeria.

Revisionism's Reservoir Host

"So what are you waiting for?
You got what you asked for
Did it fix what was wrong with you?"

 

NIN - Less Than

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"The important thing to note is that the aboriginal believed the present world, as a natural and cultural environment, was and should be simply a detailed reproduction of the world of the ancestors. He believed that the entire universe “is now as it was in the beginning” when it was established as left by the ancestors.

[...]

But when we are informed that [Dog–chases–iguana–up–a–tree–and–barks–at–him–all–night–long]* had two wives from the Spear Black Duck Clan and one from the Native Companion Clan, one of them being blind, that he had four children with such and such names, that he had a broken wrist and was left handed, all because his ancestor had exactly these same attributes, then we know [though he apparently didn’t] that the present has influenced the past, that the mythical world has been somewhat adjusted to meet the exigencies and accidents of the inescapably real present.

There was thus in Yir Yoront ideology a nice balance in which the mythical was adjusted in part to the real world, the real world in part to the ideal pre–existing mythical world, the adjustments occurring to maintain a fundamental tenet of native faith that the present must be a mirror of the past."

 

Lauriston Sharp - Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians, 1952

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Growing up, I always thought the jokes about Jamaicans lovin' tha ganja a bit too much were just comedic exagerration... until I discovered they based their homegrown Christianity on an Ethiopian king from the mid-20th century. Don't get me wrong, he sounds a decent enough king as kings go, but he also doesn't seem to have done anything particularly supernatural in the course of his usual monarchin' routine. On the other hand, the fact that Rastafarians continue to worship him as The Messiah despite croaking in perfectly mundane fashion fifty-one years ago murdered by a military junta like endless millions around the world, well that's, by this point in history, par for the course for any brand of religious insanity. I'm guessing they must just work the martyrdom back into the divinity angle somehow, and keep going. Makes good ad copy. Maybe he'll come back from the dead. I guess by this point, what's one more Osiris on the pile?

 

Now look North a bit. Whatever else Trumpism is, it's also a religious movement. Whether or not they consciously believe him supernaturally imbued, the vast majority of his voters have no inkling of just how exactly demolishing their government will make it work better. He's spewed so many nonsensical campaign promises they don't even bother remembering his constant babble. But they are utterly assured their gestures of obeisance, wearing the hats and chanting the slogans, will induce favor from above. If the rites are observed with due performative fervor, then surely some higher power will shine down upon the faithful! They offered their votes to the booth like blood on the altar, not as a choice but as a grand radical gesture, as a tantrum, as an auto da fe.

 

Whatever its many roots, you don't get to ignore the pot and fertilizer for such madness. Sure it made little sense for Jamaicans to expect much from some rando' king on another continent, but they were sick of their white anglo-saxon protestant preachers and wanted a black messiah. And as for trumpists, even when not painting their charlatan king as best buds with Jesus**, the symbolism and rhetoric employed throughout his crackpot movements like QAnon is explicitly religious, rallying against perceived demonic influence with claims to occult secrets and prescience.

 

But more important than overt dogma, it's the underlying mentality, the recurring etiology of such mental infection, which begs the search for its reservoir host. Imagine doctors' offices start reporting epidemic levels of facial trauma. Black eyes, broken noses, cracked cheekbones, the works, everywhere you look. And one day you suddenly notice you're living next to the University of Punching-Yourself-in-the-Face complete with courses in splitting your own lip and whole departments dedicated to recursive fist angling and tooth-cracking self-chin interactions. Would you imagine the trend to be unrelated to the institution? Those who expect miracles from Trump-as-Jesus have been socially obligated all their lives to treat as true the blatant nonsense spewing from preachers' mouths: that Jesus pirouetted on water and had a Star Trek replicator in his pocket, that snakes peddle apples and some schmuck spent a long weekend camping in on a whale's liver. Why do you throw your hands up in despair at each passing fad in irrationalism while ignoring the entrenched institutions championing irrationalism as a core value? Religion not just is insane, but foments insanity.

 

Now, the interesting question is what comes next, because like any messiah, Trump will not fulfill whatever expectations the imbecile masses might hold of His Holiness. Failed prophecies always prompt a flurry of dogmatic backfilling to continue propping up the delusion. So he tossed a bunch of latinos over the border but you're still waiting for an invitation to your dream job, and the fraudulent department of "government efficiency" has already cost taxpayers more money than it'll ever save*** and His Orange Imbecility has been backpedalling away in panic from his trade war with the entire world... so what now? Well, just like Dog-chases-iguana-etc., trumpists must constantly revise their mythology to ignore the sting of reality, and we know they're very, very good at make-believe. Remember, the loser didn't lose the 2020 election, it was "stolen" instead. So every failure and mistake gets reinterpreted as part of some master plan on the swindler's part.

 

I'm sorry, did I say "master" - I meant "divine" plan. I was curious how rastafarians handled the death of their immortal. Predictably, how every other sect handles the failure of their divinities: pretending that's what they meant to say all along. Selassie's not really dead. Or he lives in spirit. He plans to return. Jesus always meant to die on the cross, standard stuff. Is this a rerun, a spin-off, a sequel? Misery on Earth is just a test to get into Heaven, fossils were deliberately planted to test your faith, drowning everything on the planet was way more efficient than just sending humans a viral infection, there's no evidence of jews leaving Egypt but believe it anyway... meanwhile please try to ignore the price hikes 'cuz "trade wars are easy to win" and try to eat around the salmonella because companies don't need government supervision. Trump's not really failing every single thing he promised, he's just playing fifteen-dimensional chess with visions of the future! It's all part of the divine plan.

 

The magical thinking fostered, legitimized and glorified by religion does not conveniently stop at the church door.

 

To reiterate an observation from five years ago:

"Ever notice the people on Star Trek tended to be smart? The redneck hero with a shotgun doesn't play well in that setting. We know, intuitively, that retards wouldn't live long on their own in a century when half the mundane devices surrounding you can disintegrate you in an instant, when even your pants can teleport you straight into the nearest solar corona in retaliation for passing a wet fart. Modern humans can barely handle automobiles and electric ovens... and you want to give them teleporter-armed spaceships?"

It jumped to mind when reaching this statement in the story of steel axes:

"The totemic ideology can no longer support the inrushing mass of foreign culture traits, and the myth–making process in its native form breaks down completely."

Except those "foreign culture traits" are quite often facts. Metallurgy and geography and actual, provable medicine instead of some wrinkled old hag rubbing you with spit and chanting psalms. Technological advance and realism go hand in hand. They must, because every new technology is a force multiplier for stupidity, and the more interlocking elements in a society, the less room for pretending something works instead of understanding how it works and fixing it.

 

When 99% of the populace did nothing through its short, miserable life but hit dirt with a stick hoping it'll turn into food, pacifying the rabble with delusions may have seemed the lesser evil. But there's a reason we use "voodoo economist" and "cargo cult science" as slurs. Even if you're not religious, you may have fallen back in the past on the apologia that others around you have a psychological need for supernatural belief. But we're now awash in the vomit resulting from imbibing such poison, and you may just have to admit that if we wanted society to survive, believers should long have been left to go the way of those monkeys that ate the red berries.

 

 

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* and that was just one of the guy's names!

** Seriously, just search for "trump jesus painting" and prepare to be amazed.

*** But that's ok, DOGE's real purpose was always not to save money but to destroy the agencies preventing corporations from eating you alive. Hint: if you really want to save some serious cash, look to military contractors!

Now Where Was I Then?

"I cannot see your face
Behind the tracks you claim to have erased
And since your place is gone
I cannot feel where you and I belong"

 

Chiasm - Incision

 

 

Having started ranting so long ago, I'm having some trouble adjusting to how fast games change these days, and the general wealth of options in newer generations of strategy or RPG. More than once I've bitched about something here only to fire up the game in question three days alter and find the developers had already patched the issue. The first I saw growing into its full scope gradually was Mount&Blade, but that took a decade and mostly fleshed out existing features. The DLC spam subscription model, while so often exploitative, has at least inculcated a mentality that games can and should be improved. This was not the case in the '90s or 2000s, when only fan patches made many classics bearable and fan mods were often more popular than the original product, e.g. Half-Life or Warcraft 3.

 

Which is to say, I was finally making some headway on 3/4 difficulty in Frostpunk 2 when the latest patch altered heat management and froze a chunk of my populace to chunks, turning the rest riotous and forcing me to start over. But I'm not mad, 11bit, I'm not mad, that's okay (assholes) because the change is a positive one, giving finer control over heat distribution and setting the stage for playing favorites with various districts, so it's a good thing, it's good, it's good they killed my city.

(*sob*) SOBs!

I don't know when I'll try again. For now I'm busy bein' Skawtish in EU4 instead, then maybe I'll jump into some medieval village life, then maybe an old-school RPG (I'm gettin' the squad management itch) if Rogue Trader's big content patch isn't out yet. Point being, this ain't 1995. I'm not playing "the" game that's all the rage at the moment, but picking my way through a hundreds-strong collection dating decades back. It may be a month before I return to the frostlands, and there's no guarantee I'll remember my friends' faces.

Did I already run the fishing cliffs map? Did I try the machinist/thinker combo yet? Have I run on oil alone? Have I ever sided with the frostlanders? Ponder the road not traveled, future me!

 

But of course even a city-builder's options pale before Paradox' replay/roleplay-oriented strategy titles. The Age of Wonders Pantheon of Nyctimus now contains nineteen werewolves, and it's making me feel senile while creating a new faction struggling to recall whether I've used particular skills and feats. Hence:

Hey, shut up, this is not weird at all. I'm sure perfectly normal, well-adjusted individuals maintain checklists like this! But since every single publisher is most likely already tabulating this information from all its users as part of marketing datamining of its customer base, why not make it available and sortable and cross-referenced for us individually in-game? Display it where relevant. Export it effortlessly in a clean, sorted, sortable format.

 

Why not give us access to our own character sheets?

 

Older cRPGs at least toyed with this idea of letting players export text summaries, and given the march of progress I don't doubt you could squeeze an image or two in there nowadays with little enough added memory usage. It's an issue that never cropped up until replay value itself increased in recent years. With strategy games taking on (or back?) so many of the features of RPGs, and both genres now offering so many options, and city sims following suit, isn't it about time to start offering me a sheet of my own overall character? Cross-referencing a plus, but even little tidbits like "you've sieged Diathma 13 times" might be funny to look up upon returning to the game after a long pause. As opposed to that vague feeling of "shit, I've already done this one, haven't I" halfway through a campaign.

 

To a limited extent, companies have already been doing this for a long time through achievements, but keeping track of your adventures is a personal concern. It's not well served by conflation with pissing contests over the most headshots or the platformiest jumps.

A good measure of a healthy mountain meadow: how many different wildflowers could you grab at once one-handed?

New story's up in its own page: Emotional Labour. This isn't the spite-driven project Re-habilis was. However, I've also taken less time to edit it, so it's still a bit rough, even by my standards.