- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
gyrobot
One China One Nation/Weeping for Concord
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Planet base just had that shtf the moment your colonists touch down while not only dealing with natural disasters but the odd lot of hostile people looking to ruin your day.
Surviving Mars outside of Mars Gate don't have hostile political forces trying to put an end to your colonization mission by sending hover tanks and angry space men shooting at you and having to build an appropriate defense network that gets in the way of colonist development
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
My main issue with it is that it goes hard into two things: Simulated people who can fuck around instead of actually doing things directly, and major storyline stuff that gets in the way of a potential simulation game.
Unfortunately, I do not want to experience the space version of "the Dwarf Fortress that died because everyone was too busy to grow food", or "psychic artifact ruined the weather" when I am trying to make a space colony in a sim.
When I'd rather go to Terra Invicta for space colonization gameplay than your dedicated space sim you have a problem, entire genre because fucking none of them aren't DF in space.
Stop making it so the game tracks every colonist individually! I want population to just be a stat on the chart with the rest of them so I don't need to micromanage if Dave the miner has personally had enough engagement to not decide to take a day off.
I don't play The Sims for a reason.
tankdrop24
Tread First into Hell
- Location
- The Center of the Universe: Toronto, Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Frankly calling it the sims is something of an unfair comparison. Sims are supposed to have personalities and characters you can get attached to. Colony games that lean towards city builders annoy me when they do this, because all the pops in question just boil down to being little more than ants in an ant farm.
- Location
- Russia
I think that Dwarf Fortress is the only one that ever succeeded at making it work at city scales. Rimworld only managed it by massively decreasing the amount of colonists you have.
gyrobot
One China One Nation/Weeping for Concord
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Goddamnit, this so much. Having to filter out colonists that don't have certain bad traits when you send them out to mars or having to cater to their specific needs even if they are the only one who has that specific need.
TbF Dwarf fortress itself is much more engaging when you slam down a low soft popcap and just focus on the lives of a dozen odd drunk doofuses and their increasingly inbred children.
At least for me
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
Slay The Princess is pretty far off from your typical save-the-world RPG plot. Its big hook is figuring out what exactly the Princess is, and by extension what the Narrator and you (the Long Quiet) actually are. The Princess ends up being your character's one real tie in the world, because you never see the 'worlds' you're saving or anything about them beyond the Narrator assuring you that they totally exist and are important enough for you to die over and over trust me bro.
In retrospect it's kind of the reverse of your typical RPG: instead of starting with personal stakes and building up to saving the world, you start with save the world and build up to your final conversation with the Princess.
Have you tried Stellaris?
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
- Pronouns
- It/They
... do you mean "have you become frustrated with how Stellaris does that for space empire games too?"
Because my opinion there is that Stellaris also suffers from this problem, and the literal Space Empires series of games is something I consider better because population is in fact just another planet statistic instead of an over complicated mess.
Edit:
Unless they changed that again, it has probably been a year since I last played and who knows how much that game has been entirely reworked since then.
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ApocalypticFish
Been reflecting lately.
I would not even remotely describe Stellaris as DF in space.
That being said, much like every other 4X game, Stellaris is not a good game
That being said, much like every other 4X game, Stellaris is not a good game
HalfTangible
Only half sane (it's less cringe)
- Location
- Valkyrie, Primus
Planetary population is a statistic.
I don't recall when exactly it stopped being a tile system, but it did.
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
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- It/They
Oh no. It stopped being a tile system, but last I knew they still tracked every single unit of population independently.
I think the specific system I last attempted had them go between "jobs" with somewhat variable delay based on how each individual pop needed time to shift what they were doing. Also notable performance issues with high population saves because they were doing that under the hood.
... again, I do not know if this is still the case, because my main problem with Stellaris is that it is no longer the game I purchased, in fact is no longer the game it became a relatively short time after I purchased it, and quite possibly is no longer the game it was when I last tried to play it.
They officially hit "you have reworked your game too many times after release" a long time ago for me, and I am not even going to bother looking at the game again until they stop development. Maybe then I can trust it to not fundamentally change again.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
Due to how the stellaris backend works they basically have to track population on a per-unit level. It is notably hilariously bad in a game as complicated as stellaris and causes a bunch of lag problems (though not as bad as it used to be).
Generally as you play you just stop caring about individual pops at all, but the game will track everything at that level.
Generally as you play you just stop caring about individual pops at all, but the game will track everything at that level.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
I do like seeing the little pop aliens on the social hierarchy stack though, it's fun. And leaving probably bad design aside that's the big reason why I'm biased towards Stellaris overall. It has the most customization and randomization options, and it's the most playable and toyetic. Which I'm going to call a good thing.
The last Galatic Civilizations I played (4?) had a similar array of options (sans portraits), but it had no faction randomization. Both of those things are hard line for me for space 4X.
And I have to say Stellaris DLC is a lot more sensawunda for your dollar compared other Paradox games. Like if a new Hearts of Iron game comes out you can probably just predict what DLC is going to come out based on what's missing.
Stellaris doesn't really have any rel population management. Pops grow on their own and fill up job slots automatically. If you want a specific job to be prioritized you just have to favorite the job on the planet screen, then it'll fill up.
The last Galatic Civilizations I played (4?) had a similar array of options (sans portraits), but it had no faction randomization. Both of those things are hard line for me for space 4X.
And I have to say Stellaris DLC is a lot more sensawunda for your dollar compared other Paradox games. Like if a new Hearts of Iron game comes out you can probably just predict what DLC is going to come out based on what's missing.
Stellaris doesn't really have any rel population management. Pops grow on their own and fill up job slots automatically. If you want a specific job to be prioritized you just have to favorite the job on the planet screen, then it'll fill up.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah, you manage buildings far more then you manage pops.
I don't think having to care about the happiness of your people in a game where you're playing as a government is a bad thing. There should be consequences for unrest and discontent.
If anything Stellaris' biggest issue on that front is that internal happiness doesn't matter in any way that's interesting and factions are a joke that serve as a Unity sink rather then anything comparable to IRL interest groups/lobbies.
- Location
- Ether
Surviving Mars is just too twee and colorful imo, The Sims in space is a good way about it. I wouldn't be against a space colonist simulator game but I just can't take Surviving Mars' presentation seriously. Either go full Oxygen Not Included / Kerbal Space Program or go full Ixion / Outpost / Frostpunk, I want some seriousness to survival sim, not hopepunk nonsense.
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
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- It/They
Honestly, I only tried one Galactic Civilizations (number 3), and it did not seem favorably placed compared to the game I started out on.
Which is Space Empires 4, the game I still find the most fun of the genre.
Mostly because it actually has customization available. I distinctly recall Galactic Civilizations 3 advertising that you could make super customized ships.
... and that meant "visually customized" because you could only put a handful of actual functional components on any given ship, and I mean "5 things is for really high end ships" from my memories.
Going to that from being able to overbuild on crew quarters in order to protect against damage to crew quarters, or mixing in some fighter bays just for fun.
I'm admittedly not any good at these games, but at least SE4 let me have fun while not being good.
So, the difference I'm talking about with Surviving Mars and its like is they require you to care about the happiness of specific people or your build can die. The way it works is over-complicated and messy in a way that doesn't really add much to the game over it being just hard limitations and values because of the added "tracked at the single person level".
Space Empires for instance has happiness at the planet level, with a number of ways to modify it based on your research and empire setup, consequences for poor happiness that can be quite bad, and benefits for having it go up.
Admittedly it doesn't try for the politics angle of Stellaris, but honestly I only wanted to play the hive mind options to the extent that I very happily purchased that DLC back then to have those.
... actually, that DLC might have been a purchase with the game itself because I wanted the hive mind stuff enough to buy the game for it.
- Location
- Ether
Aurora 4X is DF in space, Stellaris doesn't even come close. There's at least Distant Worlds (Universe/2) that's closer to that than Stellaris is.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
True, there are many differences between Stellaris and Aurora. For one thing, Stellaris actually has basic FX and even slightly serviceable UI
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
The problem with internal stability in Stellaris is that you basically need everything to go wrong for happiness to kick shit off, and major changes like big ethics shifts happen with events rather than RNG.
Really the best way to may the big funny happen when the game gets boring is research projects and tech. You need to be whipping your scientists hard atleast until midgame for more stuff to happen.
But Stellaris has the furries and Star Wars aliens, so that's what I'm playing.
Really the best way to may the big funny happen when the game gets boring is research projects and tech. You need to be whipping your scientists hard atleast until midgame for more stuff to happen.
But Stellaris has the furries and Star Wars aliens, so that's what I'm playing.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
Generally the way to cause everything to go wrong is to enter a critical resource shortage, then just ignore it, while in a war that you are not winning.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Now for a take that might be somewhat controversial as it's a generally well regarded game, Ender Lilies has the worst map I have ever seen in a video game (Metroidvania or otherwise) and it has an enormously negative effect on gameplay.
It completely lacks anything approaching readability beyond the most basic utility. It represents each level as a basic white box with either blue (if there's items still be found) or orange (if everyone's found) background and a little red dot to represent undiscovered paths to new maps. On paper this should be sufficient but it very much is not. The lack of any actual detail means that the map is only useful in the broadest scope for traversing the whole game world, it has no use in navigating within specific stages. But the most damning and frustrating aspect of it has got to be the area exits, as mentioned each undiscovered exit is marked with a red dot. While this is theoretically sufficient in practice it gives zero indication whether to access the area you need ground pound, the triple jump, a special key, or if you can just walk through. This means that once you uncovered a decent amount of the map you're forced to endlessly try each red dot with no way to know if you're going to be finding something that can be overcome. It's deeply boring and tedious.
It's not the only area I have an issue with but it's the only one that stands as the biggest obstacle to actually enjoying the game. Combat could do with a less restrictive healing system but otherwise it's still fun, the music is superb, and the lore seems interesting. I want to like the game but it inexcusable that a game could be released several years after Hollow Knight with such a horrible map. It's something out of a flash game.
Otherwise EL is a fine game. Buy on sale.
It completely lacks anything approaching readability beyond the most basic utility. It represents each level as a basic white box with either blue (if there's items still be found) or orange (if everyone's found) background and a little red dot to represent undiscovered paths to new maps. On paper this should be sufficient but it very much is not. The lack of any actual detail means that the map is only useful in the broadest scope for traversing the whole game world, it has no use in navigating within specific stages. But the most damning and frustrating aspect of it has got to be the area exits, as mentioned each undiscovered exit is marked with a red dot. While this is theoretically sufficient in practice it gives zero indication whether to access the area you need ground pound, the triple jump, a special key, or if you can just walk through. This means that once you uncovered a decent amount of the map you're forced to endlessly try each red dot with no way to know if you're going to be finding something that can be overcome. It's deeply boring and tedious.
It's not the only area I have an issue with but it's the only one that stands as the biggest obstacle to actually enjoying the game. Combat could do with a less restrictive healing system but otherwise it's still fun, the music is superb, and the lore seems interesting. I want to like the game but it inexcusable that a game could be released several years after Hollow Knight with such a horrible map. It's something out of a flash game.
Otherwise EL is a fine game. Buy on sale.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Try conquering a FE homeworld without proper preparation. That's a lot of angry pops very very quickly
Aurora 4x is DF in space in the sense of being a weird personal project that for both good and ill is blind to many of the lessons and concerns of studied game development.
However, it's certainly not in the sense of sharing much in the way of thematics or particular concepts. Though I wouldn't say Stellaris is either.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
Sorry, I can't hear you from under all my happiness and ethics shift buffsTry conquering a FE homeworld without proper preparation. That's a lot of angry pops very very quickly
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- He/Him
I said without proper preparation for a reason, but also, even with those, two hundred pops all fanatically opposed to your ethos and also mad about being conquered and probably suddenly lacking in planetary amenities because of exploded buildings, unrest/devastation penalties, and a sudden tech downgrade is, in fact, a bit rough
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