Weregamer's Game Musings

Paradox just shipped a free update to Stellaris featuring a story written by Alexis Kennedy. That's enough to get me to think about trying it again. I checked out the patch notes, and I see a lot of clean up of things that bugged me about the game. But wait a minute. These are the notes for the fourth major patch, and they clean up things that were wrong (sometimes obviously) from the start? I'll chalk it up to development priorities; certainly there was a lot missing that needed to be added, and since the main point of the game is to look like a 4X while actually being a 1X bolted on to a standard Paradox set-piece political game I guess problems with the other three Xes were not as high a priority. I'm certain I'll try Stellaris again at some point, especially if they get more good writers in on making snippets for it. But I doubt it will ever really be my kind of game.

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...

The silver lining for me on having my appendix burst was that my at-home recovery time fell mostly right after Stellaris shipped, so I got more time to play it than normal in the first week. In its release state, it's not quite the 4X Messiah I'd hoped for, but I'm liking it more and more over time, with some caveats. The early part of the game is actually more fun than anything I've played in quite a while. The random mini stories spice up the explore/expand phase really nicely. I've still not gotten through to see the endgame stuff, partially because there are so many ways to destroy yourself that are unfamiliar to a pure 4X player. The complexities of politics and diplomacy, which would be familiar to fans of Paradox's other games, killed me outright once and made an otherwise great start go bad midgame once. It's nice to see that the studio head nailed exactly the two biggest pain points I feel as the targets of the first big patch: borders preventing...

I may be setting myself up for a disappointment. I rarely let myself get this excited about a game that's not only unreleased but doesn't even have any hands-on early reviews out. That said, I can't help it. Stellaris, if it even manages half of its goals and doesn't completely screw itself up trying, could be the first really new space strategy game in a very long time. Of course, the last time I was excited about an ambitious 4X space game it was Spore, and that turned out to belong in the dustbin one step up from the Com Outpost heap. But if they pull it off - if they keep the micromanagement optional enough that those of us with families and limited gaming time can play without getting ultra-frustrated by dumb AI assistants, and manage to make a game with enough surprise variations to make several plays in a row all feel different, they'll have done something as seminal and remarkable as Civilization or MoO2 (or, though RTS isn't my cup of tea I have t...

Thea is a hard game for me to review, because I'm having a hard time deciding if I like or hate it. Seriously, I find myself playing Thea for a couple days straight, deciding that it's just too boring and repetitive, and barely deciding not to delete it. Then a few days later, I find myself firing it up for a few games to get one of my deities to the next level. I think the best unified comment I can give is that the concept and design of the game as a whole are very compelling, but it starts to get repetitive because there just isn't enough different on each playthrough. If there were many more of the interesting story vignettes, and if they were triggered more based on what you are doing instead of randomly, the story of each individual game could get compelling. But as it is, every playthrough starts to feel the same, both in what happens on the map and in what vignettes I see. The first dozen or two games were satisfying to me as a builder, but eventually there just...

Hmm. They are the last company that still has it, but with their last few releases, Firaxis has almost lost my unconditional buy-it flag. In particular, the wartime diplomacy system in Rising Tide is so restrictive of player choices that Sid Meier ought to be turning over in his chair. This, and the other ways in which the new diplomacy system removes player agency, are well covered in the RPS article (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/08/beyond-earth-rising-tide-review/) so I don't need to repeat them myself. (Although the actual bug involving allies and war declarations was patched almost immediately.) Overall, Rising Tide is a definite if not quite good enough improvement for BE, roughly like the first expansion to Civ5. It adds some important systems and addresses some balance issues, but is still not "done" yet. I hope the next expansion, like the second one for Civ5, will make it a complete and satisfying game. One of the biggest handicaps that BE has co...

The elemental series has (with the exception of the totally broken War of Magic) been a series of "great almosts". Each game in the series has gotten more finely tuned in gameplay and balance, but they've just never gotten the UX elements to the point that the game stopped being annoying to play. I bought Sorcerer King (with the loyalty discount for having tried all the others) expecting that the fresh take on the 4X genre would be worth playing, even if the long term replayability was still a mess. I was thus very happily surprised to discover that this time around, the game is as playable and engaging as it is conceptually interesting and balanced. There are several elements to this, but the one I'm astonished by is how much finally cleaning up the graphical appearance of the game world mattered. This is the first game in the series where figuring out what something is on the map - be it a wandering enemy, a visitable location, or a mountain (!) no longer require...

First a disclaimer. The tiny company developing this game is made up of friends and former coworkers, so I can't claim a total lack of bias. That said, I have a very positive impression of what this game will be like when it's done. At first blush it seems like a prettier, less intense version of Dwarf Fortress, and I think that's a fair comparison but not a fair accusation. As the blurb I saw in the stream store mentions, there's less of an overarching story and a lot more room for personalization. Their main goal is that you can grow your own personalized town, with as distinctive a visual and mechanical identity as you want to put effort into. In Dwarf Fortress there is a constant stream of events - attacks, natural disasters, the arrival of immigrants with special demands. You rarely have any time to just enjoy building your town. In Stonehearth, even if you play in the normal mode instead of the sandbox one, the number and pacing of such things is much less of...

This one is a credible improvement in the series, even if the hyped up ship model building doesn't mean much (the actual ship design process and results are really unchanged from galciv 2, what's new there are just more cosmetic options). The big meaningful changes are in the planetary economic model. Buildings are located in specific hexes on a randomized planet map, with adjacency bonuses that make clusters of related buildings important. Since even excellent planets have more unusable than usable hexes, it adds real depth to growth planning. And shifting all building bonuses to percentages makes the base population more important and population buildings as desirable as production or research or money. The new scheme for shipyards is also a good idea that meshes well with the revised planetary economics, and the full integration of racial tech tech trees and the cleaned up alignment system work really well. All that said, the game pace and flow are pretty similar to the...

The Steam Summer Sale is an evil plot an excellent opportunity to try the games you were curious about or didn't want to pay full price for. It's been my chance to pick up some of the 4X space games that have come out recently. First up is Galactic Inheritors. This is a cool and innovative little game. Some of the traditional mechanics are bare-bones, and the overall turn-by-turn flow is a bit clumsy, but the new stuff is interesting. In particular, your military ships are built by contract with private companies, and each company "levels up" on a skill tree; you can thus specialize each company in one area, though they only gain "XP" from building ships and ships are a big investment. All in all, this game felt like something that I could get involved with and dig into, except for two factors. One is that the main screen color scheme is hard on the eyes - the grainy white background, like that of Distant Worlds when zoomed out only more so, is a short...

This game was on one-day sale on Steam this week, and it had some really glowing reviews (especially at Rock, Paper, Shotgun which is one of the sites I trust most). After playing for a couple nights, I have realized that I like this game a lot but I'm not enjoying playing it. Some of the problem is the inept Windows coding and lack of display settings. No video settings at all - it can only run at desktop resolution, and while it might have been OK in 2010 when the game was first written, that makes things just too tiny on a moderate screen at high resolution. A bigger part of the problem is that the screen is uselessly cluttered for manipulating stuff or watching the details of what happens when there are more than a couple things on screen. If you are used to EVE, or otherwise can adjust to a UI where you see things on the screen but have to use menus to select and manipulate them, it's only annoying (like EVE, but without the good reasons EVE has this problem). But if...