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Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
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You realize that most of their games are doing things that are pretty wildly different from 4x convention?
Stellaris, not as much, it's pretty reasonable to call it a 4x by me.
But "Hearts of Iron is a 4x" or "Crusader Kings is a 4x" would be a fairly weird take IMO.
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IMHO, they're about as far removed from the other examples of the 4X genre as, say, Homeworld is from Warcraft. Or Overwatch is from Call of Duty. Or Fallout 3 is from Baldur's Gate 2.
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Many Paradox games aren't really 4X games in the proper sense. They tend to be deficient in the "explore" and "expand" departments, seeing as they're built around taking place on a playing field that is already fully mapped and where all available territory has already been claimed by someone at the start of the game. So at most, they're really 2X games.
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Ah, sorry, I misunderstood that as your suggestion for an alternative name for the genre.
edit: Grand Strategy games are named after the political concept of grand strategy, by the way, in that they revolve around making decisions on a similarly high level. They're distinct from other strategy games in that you (generally speaking) do not control individual units or build individual structures. Instead, you set policy and designate theatres of war.
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I've always seen Grand Strategy as like, a subgenre, of 4X. Like, they do do some things VERY differently(Is it really a 4X when the Exterminate parts are essentially handed off to an AI to handle for you?) But at the same time, the differences are like... They take the 4X formula and just narrow down really hard onto certain parts while mostly zooming out. Like, outside of Stellaris, you don't really determine what your troops are doing at any level lower than "this is the front", but you do a LOT of setting up what your armies even look like at the level of abstraction you are working with.
And like, Endless Space has combat that's kinda... not very player controlled? Same for like, Deadlock: Planetary Conquest and Shrine Wars. Dominions has a wego system that means, while the player has a lot of ability to say what things SHOULD be doing in a fight, players don't have control DURING the fight itself. I played a bit of Civ6 before getting utterly frustrated with how they liked to pretend that I had control of what was happening in fights while having combat mechanics that didn't reward or even really permit much micro at all. Like, it's not hard to find 4X's that are heavy on the "Exterminate" part or heavier on the "Expand" part, or heavier on the "Exploit" or "Explore" parts, Grand Strategy is just another word for being heavy on the Exploit and Expand parts while minimizing the Explore and Exterminate parts to give the player room to focus on what the game is actually built around. But like... Deadlock: Planetary Conquest and Shrine Wars are both already explored. Dune:Spice Wars added mechanics to make Expanding slower because the map is largely known immediately, Total War's maps have always been preset so even though there's fog of war it's not like you don't know where things are after enough time playing/looking stuff up.
Like, 4X is already a subgenre of Strategy Games that mostly communicates Scale, Grand Strategy is the exact same thing just for 4X itself.
And like, Endless Space has combat that's kinda... not very player controlled? Same for like, Deadlock: Planetary Conquest and Shrine Wars. Dominions has a wego system that means, while the player has a lot of ability to say what things SHOULD be doing in a fight, players don't have control DURING the fight itself. I played a bit of Civ6 before getting utterly frustrated with how they liked to pretend that I had control of what was happening in fights while having combat mechanics that didn't reward or even really permit much micro at all. Like, it's not hard to find 4X's that are heavy on the "Exterminate" part or heavier on the "Expand" part, or heavier on the "Exploit" or "Explore" parts, Grand Strategy is just another word for being heavy on the Exploit and Expand parts while minimizing the Explore and Exterminate parts to give the player room to focus on what the game is actually built around. But like... Deadlock: Planetary Conquest and Shrine Wars are both already explored. Dune:Spice Wars added mechanics to make Expanding slower because the map is largely known immediately, Total War's maps have always been preset so even though there's fog of war it's not like you don't know where things are after enough time playing/looking stuff up.
Like, 4X is already a subgenre of Strategy Games that mostly communicates Scale, Grand Strategy is the exact same thing just for 4X itself.
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I mean, that they have a lot of overlap can't really be argued with. There are a lot of things in grand strategy games that more conventional 4X games don't have, though, as well as things common to 4X games that you won't usually find in a grand strategy title. I'd personally say they're more like... different branches growing from the same fork? Or however you'd phrase that metaphor in English. Same root, but going in different directions.
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Giving yourself infinite (or at least rapidly regenerating) FP in Elden Ring doesn't seem to make the game particularly easier to play, from what I've discovered. It just means that you are now looking out for different windows of opportunity and have to avoid different attacks from what you're used to. You basically replace melee with the base Glintstone Pebble as the default attack option. At the end of the day, time is the only real resource that matters.
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It does. You just haven't picked up Comet Azur yet.
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I see that as the equivalent of, say, picking up the Chaos Zweihander in DS1. There's always a way to flatten virtually any boss basically effortlessly in almost every Souls game.
Maybe less resource investment?
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The difference is that one is just a sword. The other is a pocket Death Star that you can now spam at will and maintain forever. If you're good at aiming without lock-on, then you can even use it to snipe enemies from a distance, because Comet Azur considers "within maximum range" to mean "you can see it."
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Doesn't Comet Azur also consume a shitload of Stamina? Or is that just because I keep only seeing it in videos of modded playthroughs >>
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Nope. Once you're casting it, you don't use stamina until the spell is over. I know for a fact that I've held down the button for almost five minutes once, just to see if the game has some kind of hidden cap on how long you can keep casting a channelled spell without stopping.
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Huh. Then I guess it really is because I keep only seeing Comet Azur being used in modded playthroughs lol.
stormbringer951
Against Eternity
Dominions has elements of 4X (ticks all the X's) and grand strategy (coming up with a national strategy tailored for the next war and force design) but the daily experience of play in multiplayer is pretty much a wargame.
Grand strategy: You come up with a strategy for defeating opponents or otherwise growing national power to eventually contest and win X thrones. Picking opponents because you will have a scripting advantage they struggle to match (e.g. you can cast foul vapours, they have no native nature access to cast poison resist) and because they enable you to win the game (if you conquer all their land you will have access to more thrones so you can more easily throne rush later). Here you commit to force design decisions: what mix of mages and troops do you make; what strategic summons do you make; what non-native magic paths do you need to break into ASAP to win the next war? How do you spend your gem bank? How much reserve do you need to keep for wartime use; what spending of what sort and in what volume do you expect in a war? If you are frontrunning, how do you plan to stop or fight the coalition that's going to form?
Strategy: You need to anticipate and forge the correct items (resists, GSS or duskdaggers to counter a thug/supercombatant nation, morale items for WW nations, etc), choosing how many of your mages to mobilize, how wide or tall do you go (lots of raiders or big doomstack) driven partly by who wins mintakes/medium size/doomstack battles. Does your doomstack beat theirs right now or do you need to play for time/attrition? If you think you might lose a doomstack fight, how will you prevent yourself getting held down inside a fort or otherwise outmaneuvered into a position where you are obligated to fight? Can you afford to give up a throne fort for now and come back for it later? Do you have enough gems to carry out your battle tactics? Three people have coalitioned you; who do you cede some free land to so they peace out, where will you conduct a defence in depth vs where will you hunt for a decisive battle to knock someone out of the war? Do you evac that fort now? How and where are you going to reconstitute the next army on this front if your current doomstack gets wiped out?
Operational-level: Where do you move your doomstacks and raiders? Do you ping their army with a suicide unit to discover their script? How do you stop them getting intel on your main battle scripts? Where are they likely to move? Can you predict where the battle will be and then commit smaller forces to cut retreats if you're fishing for a doomstack fight?Can you afford to commit to multi-province movement or will some units get separated out if they take land in between in magic phase? Appropriate forces need to end their turn in labbed provinces or be accompanied by gem scouts so they can reposition or continue fighting. You may need to pre-place scouts with equipment swaps for SCs, or hidden astral mages to cut the cords on mind hunters, in anticipation of where your enemy will move so you can freely drop your very valuable supercombatant on them next turn. If you didn't do that when you dropped an SC last turn, do you cover them this turn by setting them to retreat and holding retreats open, or dropping more stuff in magic phase to counter any counter-thugs? How many troops do you risk to patrol a fort to stop the garrison being unable to move and only sally next turn if the enemy takes the province the fort is in? If you're an elemental nation, do you have enough gems to afford to ele-dump into potential gemburners?
Tactics: Do your mintake raiders beat theirs? What's the win condition in their doomstack script which they showed to you? What's your win condition? How do you risk-mitigate your battle enchant caster taking an arrow to the face on turn 1 of the battle? You're going to need to place and script all 15 mages so they stand 3 to the square and are casting the correct mix of spells so you get good layering of the defensive buffs on each particular mage and simultaneously paint your troops with the correct mix of buffs. Do you need to surround a mage clump with an anti-air escort or are they going to evo you so you should disperse your mages? How does your script counter gem-burners? How does your script counter SC, or a thug army, or people who winds of death and then run away. What's your counter to a berserk SC and taking you to the turn timer? What happens if they fight you with something that doesn't even trigger gem spending?
Doing a single Dominions mid-to-lategame turn in PVP can take between 2 days to a week of planning, scripting probably at least one doomstack and a whole bunch of smaller supporting forces, and sequencing moves so your forces mutually support when necessary.
Night
Widow Null
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And the term was coined to describe Master of Orion.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
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So? Term has to appear somewhere first. 4X was first used to give a tongue in cheek rating for MoO, but that doesn't mean that people can't recognize earlier examples that fit
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Why does everyone keep repeating that as if it's some sort of gotcha? What game caused the term to come into existence doesn't exactly mean that suddenly that game immediately becomes the golden standard from which nobody must deviate from. Civilization absolutely is a 4X.
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...I'm not seeing the connection.
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I think what they were trying to say is that the genre wasn't named "global strategy" because Master of Orion did it first and it was, well, multi-globular. What with being in space and all. The point wasn't that this makes Civilization not a 4X game, because it is.
I still don't really agree with the reasoning, though. A 4X game can take place on a smaller than global scale as well. The Age of Wonders series is a 4X game despite the individual maps representing only parts of the world, and not necessarily even big ones. "Global" strategy still wouldn't apply.
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Especially considering that "Global Strategy" isn't even a term as far as I'm aware, it was literally just me being dumb due to a migraine and mistyping Grand Strategy.
Saying "Global Strategy", for at least some people, excludes space games. Excluding space games from 4X is dumb. As a piece of evidence that it's dumb Master of Orion being the Genre namer works.
Nobody has excluded Civ from 4X. Master of Orion being the genre namer does not exclude Civ. People are not bringing it up to exclude Civ. People are bringing it up because your misnaming of "Grand Strategy" as "Global Strategy" really annoys a subset of people who then cannot be bothered to read through the rest of the thread.
Because the quote chain is.
quoting
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Also true, but Master of Orion is still the first thing to pop into plenty of people's heads.
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Not denying it, just pointing out that this probably had nothing to do with it. The same reasoning behind the name would've applied at any scale.
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See if you just called them Orionlikes you'd have less worries-
