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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2667 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 20, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So I've been playing a lot of Master of Orion. I simply adored Master of Orion 2, and the pages of Computer Gaming World considered it the apex of 4X games until Galactic Civilizations 2 came out in 2004, where they begrudgingly admitted GalCiv2 was at least as good as Master of Orion 2, maybe.

Going back to the first one, I'm struck by it's simplicity. No more building individual improvements on planets, it's all more abstract with sliders for different production. Tech makes these cheaper, more efficient, etc. Combat is just the one two punch of fleet battle, and then sending in the shock troops. And that's just as easy as hitting the "TRANS" button to send population, the same way you'd shuffle it between your own colonies. No need to build specialized troop transports or anything. I kind of love it. It has a simple, but good enough, system of setting rally points for ships you build. And if you ever get tired of slowly conquering planets and then getting them up to speed and productive, you can just glass them from orbit instead. Easy peasy, no special tech required. You get nuclear bombs from the start, and it seems like all sorts of different weapon tech can bombard planets.

I find the end game to be a breeze, unlike almost any other 4X game I've played that devolve into micro management hell. I remember encountering people who always sword Master of Orion 1 was better than 2, and I think I can see why. In a world where 4X has grown into grand strategy, MoO1 is downright casual, and it's fucking fantastic for it.

Yeah. Its a rare case where the first in the series really nailed it, to the point where there was almost nowhere left to go and they had to change things up. The first really captures the feeling of "expand, expand, EXPAND," and being the dictator of a vast galactic empire. Other games add more details, but they make it feel you're more small scale, micromanaging things. Plus, the simplicity means that the AI is actually a decent opponent.

Been meaning to try writing about this, but it always comes out as old man yelling at clouds.

When I was a kid there was a ton of autistic joy in civ micromanagement, building recycling tanks in every city, telling which pop to work which forest tile to minimize overlap with other cities, you know the stuff.
My enjoyment of that has really soured as I've gotten older and peeked behind the curtain of optimization and gameplay loops to see what pointless busywork it all was.

Like early civ games gave you all these tools to play with, and every late-game turn ten year old you would spend hours clicking through dozens of bases to build them the new nanotech hospital you just researched.
But playing "optimally" actually meant not building any of that stuff, and tiling the map with an ICS grid of size 3 cities running free market economies for per-tile bonuses.
So optimal play is tedious and unexciting, and my casual play was just a baby hitting shiny buttons on a busyboard.

Dwarf fortress is an even better example because it throws the player into a mass of absurdly complex systems that often don't even work.
Players larp at optimizing and copy-paste received wisdom over and over on reddit: "hammers are good against undead because blah blah." When someone does real testing and reveals that blunt weapons are bugged and useless it doesn't stop the bad advice, because those people were only engaging the game mechanics like a kid playing alone with action figures and giving them cool +5 maces of smiting.

Multiplayer games don't get away with this because you're trying to out-think a person; there's still an evolving meta in StarCraft Brood War 26 years after it came out. But most of these complicated single player games now look to me like (at best) a tool to play with your imagination under someone else's constraints, or (at worst) cookie clickers with a lot of makeup on.

That's why I've stopped playing them to make time for other hobbies. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a cloud outside that doesn't know its place.

Yeah, I'm not quite that cynical about slightly more complex 4x games. I do still love everything Civilization up through 4. But I can see where you are coming from. But to me, it's not a waste to treat a 4x game like a story telling device. Sub optimal play is fine. Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun. I'm reminded of the starvation strategy in the board game Stone Age. Or the Halifax Hammer in A Few Acres of Snow, although I'm skeptical how game ruining that strategy actually was as the story behind it, so near as I've seen, is interesting.

It's been probably 20 years since I played MoO3, but I remember the game just sort of ran itself. It was difficult to tell what impact anything you did had on anything, so much was automated, indirect and abstracted. I've been watching Tex play Ultimate Admiral Dreadnaughts, because I love to listen to him sperg about history while he plays. But it seems to be a game of similar qualities. He acts like he knows what he's doing, and these arbitrary decisions he makes in budget allocations and ship design are yielding concrete results. I can scarcely tell by watching it.

I think it's also why I avoid a lot of grand strategy games. Especially the grand strategy games with dozens of different DLC. I remember looking into Endless Space 2, because I enjoyed the first one, and it was like land mines which DLC were good and which break the game with bullshit. And how does a game like that even work after 20 expansion packs worth of modifications? Fucking what? Back in my day, a solid strategy game got a single expansion pack to round out it's short comings, if it even had any.

Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun.

In fact, I would argue that perfectly optimized play is almost always the enemy of fun. Given the opportunity, gamers frequently choose to optimize the fun right out of a game.

Absolutely! I've been playing the Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection that just came out and the game there most were waiting for was Marvel vs Capcom 2 (MvC2)

The main selling point of MvC2 was its gigantic roster (like 50 characters). Competitive play over the like 24 years the game existed identified that there are like 5 actually viable characters. That meta is stronger than in other fighting games, there is only one competitive player known to be able to beat it and yeah, he's been playing 24 years so no one's catching up to him. Other than him, forget about situations like happened at EVO this year for SF3 Third Strike: forget about a cheeky Hugo or Elena making it far into the finals.

The community had to create the norms to resolve it. Picking a meta team when your opponent signaled he was not going to play a meta team makes you an asshole in the eyes of the community. People have to purposefully play suboptimally and run low tier teams otherwise the competitive meta sucked all the fun out of MvC2.

The ratio system has helped keep MvC2 interesting. You have to resort to banning characters or super arts in 3S to mix things up.

That's really interesting. Good on the MvC2 community for not letting the fun die from the game!

Sub optimal play is fine. Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun.

If I'm not in an actual competitive environment, but rather am goofing off with friends or doing a good ol' comp stomp, or when I literally just want to enjoy myself and not sweat my ass off, then I try to optimize for FUN.

FUN IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE GOAL, if pride or money or some other incentive isn't on the line. Not sure why you'd be 'optimizing' your play without accounting for the "Am I having fun" variable!

So yeah, once a game has become so well understood that 'optimal' builds, strats, items, and such are everywhere, it loses almost all appeal to me because it squeezes out the room for experimentation and the 'game' is now just about following a set strategy with as little deviation as possible. I'd argue that when it is reduced to a contest of who can execute the proper script more accurately/quickly, it ceases to be very game-like, where the challenge comes from the unpredictable elements.

I blame it to a large degree on ELO making skill levels more legible.. Now if you're NOT using the optimal strats, but instead playing around, everyone can see your ranking and make judgments about you.

I don't know if we have a similarly objective framework for identifying how much 'fun' a person is having in a game.

One of my great joys playing old school games was TRYING to force the game into weird edge cases or find a completely unique path to victory by trying less popular strategies and using the mechanics in otherwise sub-optimal ways that could still combine in such a way as to lead to a good outcome. Or setting little sub-goals or handicaps for myself so I have to actually get creative rather than just follow the optimal strats that I've memorized.

I think good game design should make it possible to use largely ignored mechanics or combine weak items in such a way that, with a certain amount of risk, you can 'surprise' a more skilled opponent who was following an established strategy but literally never encountered the scenario you've created and thus either adapts quickly or loses.

Of course said player will immediately adopt that strategy if it replicates, and soon it just becomes the meta. And that takes the fun away again.

And if I'm not having fun first and foremost, unless something else is on the line, I'm just not going to spend time on it.

I think simplicity in strategy games is vastly under rated. Game devs always want to add more, and gamers are always excited by being promised more. But in practice, even a very simple game like chess has enormous amounts of emergent complexity and new strategies being discovered. A well balanced game with straightforward but engaging skill tests is better than an unbalanced super complicated game. Because when something's complicated but unbalanced, you can often pick out one overpowered strategy that actually makes a game where you choose between dozens of options easier than one where you pick between 3 options.

Its interesting because we're entering a period where you can use a computer to determine with certainty the optimal moves in a given scenario. Stockfish does this for chess, but I'd wager that you could take any given computer game and machine learning could produce an engine which can beat 99% of human players at said game given the same input/output signals.

So if you want to give your players a crutch in game, just simplify the mechanics down to "let the computer suggest three mostly optimal moves, and let the player select from among them." Leave the actual mechanics of the game under the hood and invisible to the player, let the AI figure out how those mechanics play out, and then give the player the 'choice' that will actually move the state of play along.

In this scenario, the player who takes time to learn the mechanics and fiddle around under the hood and decides they will make decisions without the AI advisor is almost certainly at a disadvantage, there's no way they can discover a better move that the AI missed.

But is the player who is at least trying to develop mastery of the game having more fun?

MAYBE!

What do you think of Masters of Orion 3?

What do you think of FreeOrion, that has been version 0.4.x or 0.5 for the last two decades?

FWIW, I played a whole lot of MoO3 back when it came out. It was obviously unfinished and hat a host of issues, but I very much appreciated what it tried to do; i.e., offering a higher-level experience with greater scope and perhaps a little more realism. Of course it failed, but the idea of it had merit to me.

Classic MoO and its myriad copycats I continue to bounce off of.

Moo3 bored me to tears when it came out. I don't know if it ever got "fixed". Galactic Civilizations 2 became my goto 4x after that, then Endless Space. After that 4x just got weird imho. Just endless dlc platforms. I can't stand it.

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