Skip to main content

Why Stellaris diplomacy feels so bloodless

By

I'm still playing stellaris in almost all my gaming time, and enjoying it, primarily because I've found and either used or stolen ideas from a bunch of mods that fix problems that are fixable.

To be honest, some of these I like because they straddle the line carefully between moving it more toward a pure 4X game and losing the fresh voice in 4X coming from the Paradox grand strategy sauce. Some of the resource constraints pot such limits on early strategies that you are forced to let the early game become just the randomization step for a mostly static patchwork of essentially equivalent-powered empires, so the midgame looks just like one of their historical games. But removing them entirely is too much; I dial then down so the decisions of the early game become significant ones about how to grow my empire - how much physical expansion, how much infrastructure, how much defense - instead of meaningless firefighting while waiting for the static nap to evolve.

But all that said, I'm realizing more and more that it's in the diplomacy - the very heart of what should be Paradox's homeland, that I'm feeling the worst about the game. They've admitted that the lack of visible personality or goals in the opponents us a big problem, but there's also a horrible lack of options. Basically, if you are in conflict with another error, you can either declare war or suck it up. You can't make demands, you can't make threats, you can't warn that something they are doing will lead to war.

Most of this would require a lot of development time, and i do hope that Paradox's reputation for great ongoing improvements will address that. But why on Earth it in the stars is there o option for an ultimatum? Give me that colony you just started along the border, it I will take it by force? As things are now, I just have to declare war, and in doing that there's no advantage to keeping the war goals in the declaration small. In fact, because they will be free to do whatever they like for ten years after the war ends, a limited war is a really bad idea - you need to hurt their infrastructure enough that they will take those years to rebuild.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This article didn't quite change my life, but it was the most worthwhile thing I've read in a while

By
I like the games I like, and I'm no longer in the business of making games, so in many ways this article is not to my address. But it was still really worth my time to read carefully. It never gets anywhere near the stupid misogynistic pseudo-editorial "defense of games" crap that I'm not naming to avoid the still-raging humans pretending to be flamebots, and it comes from the opposite, and very constructive direction. And it quotes Tim Gunn more than once, in a very on-topic way. Tim Gunn is an awesome individual, even though I doubt he's ever been in the same room as a videogame for long. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring
Post a Comment
Read more

GW2 Heart of Thorns, after some serious play time

By
The first week or two after Heart of Thorns went live, I was a bit disappointed. Playing on, first because four of my friends and I always play together on Mondays, I got a little more of a philosophical handle on how the expansion changes the game, and I'm no longer ambivalent about having bought it - I love some parts, and I just had to learn that the "different kinds of fun as you feel like it" game design is now painted in broader strokes - especially you should only go into one of the new zones if you feel like the activity that is going on in it. Roughly speaking, HoT adds four things to the game: A new character class, a new "elite" subclass for each class, a new form of progression at L80, and a bunch of new zones with their story. Of these, the zones are the most visible and important, and the mastery tracks are the most novel and IMO successful, so I'll leave those for last. In thinking about these changes together, I think I see a philosophica...
Post a Comment
Read more

The highest bang-for-buck thing in Fallout 4

By
So, I had a hankering for some first-person murder hoboing the other day just when Steam put Fallout 4 on sale, so I gave up my plan to wait for the GOTY edition. It's mostly living up to my expectations, good and bad, based on reviews and on previous Bethesda games. The ostensible plot hook (lost baby) is completely underwhelming (sorry, clicking a blob of pixels a couple times can't compare to bonding with a real baby) but irrelevant to the game anyway. The main plot sounds potentially less stupid than the one for FO3. The settlement stuff is not quite as bolted onto the side of the game as I expected - taking time and perks to improve your settlement network can pay off in upgrade mats. But the thing that surprised me most pleasantly was remarkably simple. If you choose a somewhat common name for your character, the voiced robot butler will actually call you by name (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names). I didn't know this going in, and my first ...
Post a Comment
Read more