Arcen Games
General Category => The Last Federation => Topic started by: Misery on April 27, 2014, 05:01:18 pm
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Ok, this one I'm copying from the Mantis ticket that I just made up for it. This is in response to a whole bunch of things said by many different players when describing their own experiences with the game, and to some degree I can agree with some of it and see where they're coming from with this one. Certainly the RCI values are a bit broken, but it seems like it's a whole pile of things, as well as the simulation speed perhaps.
But I'll just paste this here:
Ok, this is one complaint I'm seeing often now, which is the idea that the player's actions really only have very small effect, which are quickly papered over by the simulation itself. I keep hearing "Well it doesnt really matter what you do, the simulation just keeps going in it's own direction regardless", and to some degree I can see where they are coming from.
For example, the RCI values are all sorts of messed up right now.... there's next to no point to bothering with these. Things like armada production are totally out of the player's hands, in terms of being able to do something with it... influencing the different races to go to war or to not go to war, or things like that, often seem to take way too much to achieve, to the point that it might not even be possible.
To some degree, this can also be exasperated by the speed at which some things happen as influenced by the RNG. For example, in my own game, everything was going relatively normal, I was doing stuff with the Andors and Peltians, and there wasnt TOO much loopiness going on. The Burlust had been attacked a few times, as had the Acutians, while the Thoraxians had both been ignored, and also had done very little themselves, and the Hive Queen's mood had been neutral for awhile. I go to do a quick dispatch mission of some sort, which isnt a very long one, taking maybe 4 or 5 minutes of time... and in that rather short amount of time, the Skylaxians declared war on the Thoraxians, the battles in space around the planet had time to fully occur and resolve, and then the Thoraxians were defeated on the ground and killed off entirely. All in a very short amount of time, in the space of just ONE short-ish dispatch.
This strikes me as being way too fast. I mean, if I *hadnt* been in a dispatch, what could I even have done about this? Their actions were too strong, and too quick for me as the player to have any real effect on. And that's just one example of this. There's all sorts of other examples, most of which dont even involve wars, though wars are usually the big nasty one, but they can all be frustrating. Considering the way the player's actions work, where most decisions and actions you make, be they dispatch or political or helping/sabotaging, take a bunch of time to fully work, having something like that burst into the scene, and fully resolve itself in the space of just ONE rather short dispatch is definitely a problem.
I know that the player is supposed to be influencing things in at least a somewhat subtle way, but that idea may have gone a bit overboard. I dont think that it's all completely broken or anything, but there are definitely many things that feel this way, and alot of new players are getting that feeling about the entire game.
I dont think the core mechanics are at fault either... this seems more a set of balance issues to me, numbers being all out of whack, but this problem as a whole does need to be looked at, and I'd say it's a high-priority issue currently.
So there we go, that's what I wrote up about this. And as I said, while I used a war as an example in there, it's far from the only thing that can occur in this way... all sorts of things can happen that the player just cant seem to really do something about, or at least that's the feeling.
This being a big issue, at least by my view, so if anyone has any thoughts or feedback on this one, it'd help alot if you'd like to chime in a bit! Feel free to add notes to the ticket as well if you'd like, which can be found here: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=14751
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I've not been playing for long but I tend to agree with the above. There's not much you can do to alter the course of a landslide event once it's started because more often than not it has started /and ended/ within the tiniest of timeframes. I've seen nearly 1 million Space power fleets get all but 'one shotted' by only a few thousand points in defence; I heard two explosion sound effects and the 1 million power fleet was dead before I could even hit the spacebar. I have no idea how such a thing could happen (but I suspect it's another example of wonky maths in the simulation).
My two biggest gripes about the game are the completely ignorable RCI mechanics and the very clearly wonky Power bonus maths (which I suspect pervade many of the less visible simulation elements where multipliers are accumulated; for example, the above 'one shotting' of a 1 million power fleet). Fix those and the game will immediately play less capriciously.
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I feel a large part of the general feeling of powerlessness comes down to there being very few options for influencing inter-species diplomacy. Outside of being the big awful thug that blasts every armada from orbit before it gets too big and steals every bit of tech as it's researched your hands are basically tied when it comes to trying to contain aggressive powers. Beyond some one shot deals that provide a one time boost to relations the only long term changes to how the factions interact that you can cause are:
- Federation yes/no
- Trade yes/no
- War yes/no
Honestly I feel that the existing features in game are more than adequate, for the most part, and what is needed now more than anything to enhance the experience is a general cleanup of the simulation. Fixing some of the wonkier numbers, Improving AI's behavior in war and clarifying/simplifying the RCI scores to name the big ones.
Really the only major addition I feel the game needs to enhance the apparent meaningfulness of player actions is more Long Term Deals that can be made by the various races either independently or with the encouragement of the player like Non-Agression Pacts, Defensive Alliances, Research Share Agreements that can lead more naturally to a unified government. Being able to see visible effects of your actions like a minor power fighting off an invasion thanks to an allied intervention fleet coming to break the planetary siege would be really cool.
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I feel a large part of the general feeling of powerlessness comes down to there being very few options for influencing inter-species diplomacy. Outside of being the big awful thug that blasts every armada from orbit before it gets too big and steals every bit of tech as it's researched your hands are basically tied when it comes to trying to contain aggressive powers. Beyond some one shot deals that provide a one time boost to relations the only long term changes to how the factions interact that you can cause are:
- Federation yes/no
- Trade yes/no
- War yes/no
Honestly I feel that the existing features in game are more than adequate, for the most part, and what is needed now more than anything to enhance the experience is a general cleanup of the simulation. Fixing some of the wonkier numbers, Improving AI's behavior in war and clarifying/simplifying the RCI scores to name the big ones.
Really the only major addition I feel the game needs to enhance the apparent meaningfulness of player actions is more Long Term Deals that can be made by the various races either independently or with the encouragement of the player like Non-Agression Pacts, Defensive Alliances, Research Share Agreements that can lead more naturally to a unified government. Being able to see visible effects of your actions like a minor power fighting off an invasion thanks to an allied intervention fleet coming to break the planetary siege would be really cool.
Totally agree with the thread creator and this quoted post in particular. I'd like a little bit more of diplomacy in-game among races and among races and yourself in the form of formal stuff, not only numbers. (pacts, contracts, partnerships, and so on).
Also :
the meaninglessness of the player is already pretty evident in combat. The game should be a sort of dual stance :
1) Powerful mastermind in the solar map.
2) Weak (as only one) in the combat screen. (guerilla warfare or intelligence warfare)
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I still feel there is too much disconnect between the player and the underlying simulation. I don't know if it's just issue of lacking interface, or a deliberate attempt to hide the "math stuff" from the player lest they be overwhelmed, but I find it to be very off putting.
Now, this game is in a genre of it's own, so it's hard to compare to others, but there is definitely a bit of an underlying 4X (for example, Endless Space) that is more or less playing out behind the scenes, and that the player only has indirect control over. I've also seen it compared to Crusader Kings 2 by others because of the political manipulation aspects. A major difference between those games and this is that they don't hide the mechanics from the user. I can find out exactly how much science is being generated by each planet in Endless Space, and even check the math if I were so inclined. In CK2, I can figure out exactly where all my taxes are coming from, and see what bonuses and penalties are applied. I can work out how long it will take for a castle upgrade to pay for itself because the mechanics aren't hidden from me.
I like crunchy number stuff, it's why I generally like PC strategy games, as well as board games. I can work out a plan because I understand the consequences of actions. I have no problem with randomness in strategy games, because it's an element that forces you to adjust your plans and account for contingencies. Even when things don't work out as I hoped, I can still understand the sequence of events that lead to whatever outcome I ended up with.
What is my point in all this? In The Last Federation, I feel like I'm pressing random buttons on a black box. It's not very engaging to me. At best, my actions are more reactive than active (cleaning out fleet buildup somewhere for instance).
Many actions, buildings, events deal with RCI (the majority of them), and this is what I feel is really the weakest aspect of the game. I have no idea what a -20 vs a 0 vs a +80 RCI value even means. Didn't the tutorial say something like "what affects these values, I dunno, a butterfly flaps its wings..." I feel like I'm the goddamn butterfly, and that's not very engaging. Chaos theory is certainly an interesting concept, but I don't think it makes for engaging gameplay.
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It does feel like I can't control or do anything indeed.
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I feel that there are aspects over which I have a modicum of control, but the impression that I've got even less control than I feel I should. (A full year and I can improve the relations between two races by 3.6 and I need 90? This takes twenty five years per race!?)
Then there are other aspects that I have a massive amount of control over, but little to no information. "You. Colonize that moon. Now that one. Now make a trade route with those guys. Now. K, thanks, bye." Hot damn, look at that influence gain. It's been like two months and its already gone up by the amount I can do in a year!
Also, this reminds me of a thing (http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~mmj29/temp/20Gallon.html) I did a bunch of years ago. I intentionally hid the exact results of any given action, but provided a description that implied what it was supposed to do and the exact costs. Sometimes the description was an outright lie, but at least it was a believable lie (and with as complex as the underlying system was, it was really hard for the player to go "that didn't actually do that"). Essentially it was a complex simulation of "the president does not control gasoline prices."
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I agree with all this. We need more nuanced political and deceptive actions; right now we're thugs who can make some large, blanket suggestions, but we all want to be the crusader king/wormtongue/varys of space.
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I really would like to have more impact regarding the RCI values. Just like the tooltip says... hamper their economy, destroy they country... this must have more effect and it will be fun to tinker with it.
I really tried in some to hold down the Acutians down via RCI manipulating. It didn't have any noticeable effect. But I think if it works it is a fun mechanic, it just need more balancing.
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Having read everyone's impressions of the games diplomacy above, I have to heartily disagree that player actions need more of an effect. My reasons are as follows:
0- The player is the Broker of Destinies. Its largely up to you how a race develops, what outposts they have, what tech they have to an extent ( the evucks and skylaxians are almost always state of the art, but thats because you want to steal or trade from them all the time for this very reason and beef up other races).
1- Player actions such as bribing and using the more "social" races such as the boarines, andors, skylaxians, and peltians means that you have an enormous ability to impact what other races will do and how they will treat other races. The boarines alone can make two races have as much as a+15 influence rating towards each other...thats huge! Now, you cannot get this without some effort on your part and the boarines liking you ect, but its still very possible and very powerful.
2- The players can use informants on planets to do some nasty stuff like frame other races, steal technology, perform terrorism. These have impacts on a race that will cripple them or make them do your bidding.
Also concerning RCI, I find that it is a big deal...crashing a races economy can stall warfleet production big time, medical crashes is a great way to contain a race that constantly wants to expand when they reach their population equilibrium, environment crashes can do the same as medical as well as devestate their infrastructure putting them far behind the curve ( over a couple of years or so), and finally public order can cause all sorts of chaos.
On the flip side, positive RCI is a huge boon because nothing bad happens and they can receive some really cool buffs...so you cna make sure the empires you want are succeeding.
I think the players have a ton of influence on the game from the above, and I did not even list everything. :) Hope this helps you enjoy this great game more.
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I find that there's a good balance between what we can control and what we can't.
There need to be situations where a race is just utterly hosed, or a powerful empire can't be stopped. Your job is to not let those situations arise in the first place, or adapt to their occurrence.
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I find that there's a good balance between what we can control and what we can't.
There need to be situations where a race is just utterly hosed, or a powerful empire can't be stopped. Your job is to not let those situations arise in the first place, or adapt to their occurrence.
Totally. But nobody's arguing for tons and tons of control, just more options are more noticeable effects from what we can do. For example: RCI values have very little effect. We're asking for them to be more impactful, not that it should be easy to cripple a planet's economy in a few months. Just that it should be possible to do it eventually
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More to the point, the effects you do have should be collected in a way that makes it much clearer to the player what impact they're having. For example, lets say you were to use the same mechanics for the player adjusting RCI as the game has right now, but you make it so that special things happen at -100, -50, 0, 50, and 100 in each RCI category rather than having very gradual effects. Then the player can set a mental goal 'okay, the game told me that at 50 points this thing happens, so I just have to push them up by another 10 and...'
A simple way to do it, albeit somewhat forced, would be to make more of the player friendly and political actions have RCI requirements. Maybe you can only help them research tech if their economy is good enough, otherwise there just isn't the money. Or perhaps if Public Order gets too low, the government won't speak to you since its busy trying to hold it together. Or things like that. Basically no change in the actual underlying simulation, no increase in the potency of the player's acts, but a clear increase in the significance of things that are already there.
Personally though, I'd prefer that those threshold events would actually have a stronger effect on the simulation, but perhaps weakening some of the overpowered options like helping Armada construction or brokering trade routes. What if, for example, trade between planets where one of their Economy ratings was negative actually hurt relations between the races rather than helping? Then not only do you have to broker trade routes, but keeping the Economy up becomes critical to getting races ready to Federate. If the better the economy ranking was, the better the trade routes worked to improve relations, then you have even more reason to watch those values.
For high environment, you could have jealousy from low-environment races and tourism (improved relations) from ones that are only mildly worse. For medical>100, that race might get the ability to wage biological warfare or be very resilient to it and automatically fix their own plagues. And so on.
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Also concerning RCI, I find that it is a big deal...crashing a races economy can stall warfleet production big time, medical crashes is a great way to contain a race that constantly wants to expand when they reach their population equilibrium, environment crashes can do the same as medical as well as devestate their infrastructure putting them far behind the curve ( over a couple of years or so), and finally public order can cause all sorts of chaos.
Well, since when do I see effects then? Acutians Economy was -80, Public Order was -35 and still over years they outproduced everybody else and fought simoultaneously two wars. Adaption to their planet was 0.50 or something, Ecology and Medicine where negative, too (lower numbers). They had the most fucked up RCI in the system, still...
Are these numbers too low to have any effect whatsoever? I don't think it did something, at least nothing I could notice.
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Having read everyone's impressions of the games diplomacy above, I have to heartily disagree that player actions need more of an effect. My reasons are as follows:
0- The player is the Broker of Destinies. Its largely up to you how a race develops, what outposts they have, what tech they have to an extent ( the evucks and skylaxians are almost always state of the art, but thats because you want to steal or trade from them all the time for this very reason and beef up other races).
1- Player actions such as bribing and using the more "social" races such as the boarines, andors, skylaxians, and peltians means that you have an enormous ability to impact what other races will do and how they will treat other races. The boarines alone can make two races have as much as a+15 influence rating towards each other...thats huge! Now, you cannot get this without some effort on your part and the boarines liking you ect, but its still very possible and very powerful.
2- The players can use informants on planets to do some nasty stuff like frame other races, steal technology, perform terrorism. These have impacts on a race that will cripple them or make them do your bidding.
Also concerning RCI, I find that it is a big deal...crashing a races economy can stall warfleet production big time, medical crashes is a great way to contain a race that constantly wants to expand when they reach their population equilibrium, environment crashes can do the same as medical as well as devestate their infrastructure putting them far behind the curve ( over a couple of years or so), and finally public order can cause all sorts of chaos.
On the flip side, positive RCI is a huge boon because nothing bad happens and they can receive some really cool buffs...so you cna make sure the empires you want are succeeding.
I think the players have a ton of influence on the game from the above, and I did not even list everything. :) Hope this helps you enjoy this great game more.
Hmm, you might be misunderstanding what I meant originally.
It's not that the player doesnt have all of these cool actions available to them or something. All of the different possible things that you can choose, they all really do fit the whole "mastermind carefully influencing things from the background" idea. Like some sort of hidden puppetmaster.
The problem is that alot of these actions available, in terms of pure gameplay and numbers, simply dont have enough effect. Assisting with armada construction, for instance. As best I can tell, this does nothing. Or the example of the explosive sudden war I mentioned originally. Something like that massively affects the overall simulation, and more importantly, the strategies being implemented, but it happened and ended so fast that I couldnt do ANYTHING about it... it went by even faster than a very short dispatch mission. Even if I hadnt been on a dispatch at the time, I still just could not have done anything about it in the 6 or so months that the war took. I have political options, but they're not strong enough. I can sabotage things.... but not enough to have a true effect on the situation. I could improve relations.... very, very, VERY slowly.
And that's just with that example. Even something like a much longer conflict seems to generally suffer from this same problem.
And I'm sure that it's all just imbalances, not problems with the core mechanics, really. Lotsa numbers being off. But one way or another, alot of players are getting the "I cant REALLY affect much here" feeling, which definitely says that there's stuff that badly needs fixing.
I still feel there is too much disconnect between the player and the underlying simulation. I don't know if it's just issue of lacking interface, or a deliberate attempt to hide the "math stuff" from the player lest they be overwhelmed, but I find it to be very off putting.
Now, this game is in a genre of it's own, so it's hard to compare to others, but there is definitely a bit of an underlying 4X (for example, Endless Space) that is more or less playing out behind the scenes, and that the player only has indirect control over. I've also seen it compared to Crusader Kings 2 by others because of the political manipulation aspects. A major difference between those games and this is that they don't hide the mechanics from the user. I can find out exactly how much science is being generated by each planet in Endless Space, and even check the math if I were so inclined. In CK2, I can figure out exactly where all my taxes are coming from, and see what bonuses and penalties are applied. I can work out how long it will take for a castle upgrade to pay for itself because the mechanics aren't hidden from me.
I like crunchy number stuff, it's why I generally like PC strategy games, as well as board games. I can work out a plan because I understand the consequences of actions. I have no problem with randomness in strategy games, because it's an element that forces you to adjust your plans and account for contingencies. Even when things don't work out as I hoped, I can still understand the sequence of events that lead to whatever outcome I ended up with.
What is my point in all this? In The Last Federation, I feel like I'm pressing random buttons on a black box. It's not very engaging to me. At best, my actions are more reactive than active (cleaning out fleet buildup somewhere for instance).
Many actions, buildings, events deal with RCI (the majority of them), and this is what I feel is really the weakest aspect of the game. I have no idea what a -20 vs a 0 vs a +80 RCI value even means. Didn't the tutorial say something like "what affects these values, I dunno, a butterfly flaps its wings..." I feel like I'm the goddamn butterfly, and that's not very engaging. Chaos theory is certainly an interesting concept, but I don't think it makes for engaging gameplay.
I agree with this too. More graphs and info and whatnot, not a bad thing here. I dont think there's really a concern about overwhelming the player... let them explore things like this on their own, it's not like you have to toss 50 number-filled screens at them in the tutorial. And it seems like players into this game or others like it tend to prefer that these things be there, it's not like they're an unwanted feature.
So yeah, MOAR NUMBERS!!!!!
Well, since when do I see effects then? Acutians Economy was -80, Public Order was -35 and still over years they outproduced everybody else and fought simoultaneously two wars. Adaption to their planet was 0.50 or something, Ecology and Medicine where negative, too (lower numbers). They had the most fucked up RCI in the system, still...
Are these numbers too low to have any effect whatsoever? I don't think it did something, at least nothing I could notice.
The RCI numbers seem just unbalanced right now, is all. I'm pretty sure the devs are well aware of this one. They are indeed meant to have real major effects on things in the way that you say, but the math behind them needs a bit of tweaking.
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Assisting with armada construction, for instance. As best I can tell, this does nothing.
Armada construction? Oh, that definitely does something. Now, harvesting space junk? That does nothing. (Well, it makes the space junk go away, but it doesn't do anything else.)
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To shamelessly parrot what Mick has already said; more numbers is better. Or rather being able to hover over a number and see a tooltip describing the number's effect on the simulation. For Example "1 Medical = -0.01% Planetary Death Rate"
I want an endless conveyor of maths directly feeding into MY SKULL or at least there on the side so I can always make my own spreadsheets and get all analytical and stuff.
So yes, I'm adding nothing new here. Better clarity of the value of a particular action and a general cleanup/streamlining of what is already present in the game. To get all folksy, my friends and I played a game of their own devising that they called Ten Thousand the goal being to get ten thousand points. Each goal was worth one thousand points, even as a kid I remember being bothered by this because if the goal is to get 10 baskets why not just call the game Ten? The thousands were literally just extra zeros. I think I have adequately demonstrated that I was a weird kid. But the point still stands!
Also all the extra diplomacy stuff can come later, that's more of my own wishlist than anything. Or maybe it won't, it's hard to get over the desire for the game you want to be created vs the actual game being made.
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To shamelessly parrot what Mick has already said; more numbers is better. Or rather being able to hover over a number and see a tooltip describing the number's effect on the simulation. For Example "1 Medical = -0.01% Planetary Death Rate"
I agree in general with many suggestions in this thread, but this one is specifically great and should be very simple to implement.
I've made a mantis for it:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=14770
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Assisting with armada construction, for instance. As best I can tell, this does nothing.
Armada construction? Oh, that definitely does something. Now, harvesting space junk? That does nothing. (Well, it makes the space junk go away, but it doesn't do anything else.)
It never seems to do anything when I try it.
I'll jump in and do that for like 20 months, and come away from it thinking "Yay! I made like.... er.... 1/6th of a ship. ....joy?" after seeing the related numbers not change at all.
Though, something like that is also going towards the need for more stats and screens and all of that. I'd love to be able to open something up and see exactly WHAT is affecting all of that... just how much of an impact I did have, and what other factors may have been contributing or impeding progress, and why/how they did so.
Typically I aint a fan of math.... cant do a damn bit of it without at least a calculator.... but in the case of things like this, I'm not the one doing the math anyway, the machine is, and I *do* like to be able to look at the results and effects in a very detailed way. It's usually the way I approach strategy games as a whole.
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The problem is that alot of these actions available, in terms of pure gameplay and numbers, simply dont have enough effect. Assisting with armada construction, for instance. As best I can tell, this does nothing. Or the example of the explosive sudden war I mentioned originally. Something like that massively affects the overall simulation, and more importantly, the strategies being implemented, but it happened and ended so fast that I couldnt do ANYTHING about it... it went by even faster than a very short dispatch mission. Even if I hadnt been on a dispatch at the time, I still just could not have done anything about it in the 6 or so months that the war took. I have political options, but they're not strong enough. I can sabotage things.... but not enough to have a true effect on the situation. I could improve relations.... very, very, VERY slowly.
The wars starting and ending suddenly with the conflict really only happens if you are busy elsewhere for a number of months..unless you are just spamming the 2x speed button that really throws shit into the future fast.
However, I find that you can influence things very well...but you MUST use the other races for their specialties in order to have these big effects. Like the boarines or peltians giving you a large boost of influence for races ( or making two races like each other by +15 in just a month, thats awesome!)....or the evucks generating a disease for a race that they hate ( and that you also hate as well)...or the burlusts going and knocking down the doors of any race you tell them sucks...
I have done all of the above...and I think they qualify for effecting the game on a big scale.
If you are referring to the dispatch missions, they are more useful for a broad spectrum of credit, influence, and a particular effect ( that is usually smaller but a bonus to the task generally). It can be useful if you need a few small bumps of money or influence to do more things...but it is not a method of conquering the game, its merely a small tool in your belt.
To shamelessly parrot what Mick has already said; more numbers is better. Or rather being able to hover over a number and see a tooltip describing the number's effect on the simulation. For Example "1 Medical = -0.01% Planetary Death Rate"
I agree in general with many suggestions in this thread, but this one is specifically great and should be very simple to implement.
I've made a mantis for it:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=14770
The tooltip is a good idea but I know for a fact that medical does more than just this. But I heavily agree with the concept, I would love to see everything that medical does do for or against a race...if only it is somewhere in the games built in encyclopedia or something.
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Armada construction really is one of the more potent ones you can do. I managed to get the Peltians, ravaged by disease and down to 1m population, to defeat an Acutian Fear Empire by just doing 60-month 'help with Armada Construction' dispatches. Plus there's a nice graph feedback of the effects - you can really see the fleet-size spike.
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Plus there's a nice graph feedback of the effects - you can really see the fleet-size spike.
Assuming that your actions resulted in that spike. Here's two screenshots. They are 9 game-years apart. I was actively doing NOTHING.
(http://s17.postimg.org/x8c4g2vzj/2014_04_24_00033.jpg)
(http://s30.postimg.org/gt0ryp1n5/2014_04_24_00040.jpg)
And if that isn't weird enough, have a third. Compare it with the second. Less than 1 game year has elapsed.
(http://s7.postimg.org/tpf9vua2j/2014_04_29_00001.jpg)
Uh.
Where did that 1m Skylaxian army come from, around year 76?
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The problem is that alot of these actions available, in terms of pure gameplay and numbers, simply dont have enough effect. Assisting with armada construction, for instance. As best I can tell, this does nothing. Or the example of the explosive sudden war I mentioned originally. Something like that massively affects the overall simulation, and more importantly, the strategies being implemented, but it happened and ended so fast that I couldnt do ANYTHING about it... it went by even faster than a very short dispatch mission. Even if I hadnt been on a dispatch at the time, I still just could not have done anything about it in the 6 or so months that the war took. I have political options, but they're not strong enough. I can sabotage things.... but not enough to have a true effect on the situation. I could improve relations.... very, very, VERY slowly.
The wars starting and ending suddenly with the conflict really only happens if you are busy elsewhere for a number of months..unless you are just spamming the 2x speed button that really throws shit into the future fast.
However, I find that you can influence things very well...but you MUST use the other races for their specialties in order to have these big effects. Like the boarines or peltians giving you a large boost of influence for races ( or making two races like each other by +15 in just a month, thats awesome!)....or the evucks generating a disease for a race that they hate ( and that you also hate as well)...or the burlusts going and knocking down the doors of any race you tell them sucks...
I have done all of the above...and I think they qualify for effecting the game on a big scale.
If you are referring to the dispatch missions, they are more useful for a broad spectrum of credit, influence, and a particular effect ( that is usually smaller but a bonus to the task generally). It can be useful if you need a few small bumps of money or influence to do more things...but it is not a method of conquering the game, its merely a small tool in your belt.
To shamelessly parrot what Mick has already said; more numbers is better. Or rather being able to hover over a number and see a tooltip describing the number's effect on the simulation. For Example "1 Medical = -0.01% Planetary Death Rate"
I agree in general with many suggestions in this thread, but this one is specifically great and should be very simple to implement.
I've made a mantis for it:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=14770
The tooltip is a good idea but I know for a fact that medical does more than just this. But I heavily agree with the concept, I would love to see everything that medical does do for or against a race...if only it is somewhere in the games built in encyclopedia or something.
As the war bit goes, it happened over a VERY brief period. About 5-6 months was all it took for total annihilation. The derpy bit? There WASNT major hate between the two... they were kinda neutral. The Skylaxians just suddenly decided "KILL ALL THE THINGS", and BAM.... it was over. Typically though, once a war starts.... that's it. I can screw with political actions all I want, it wont stop it. The only real thing that I can do is try to get a race to attack one of the warring ones... but this just makes things worse in most cases. And I'm not the sort to leap forward by 60 months in one go or anything... I get too much of a loss of control that way. Typically, the max I'll do for a single dispatch is 10-20, unless it's a darned important tech that needs to be gotten ASAP yet has a high-ish cost. That's rare though.
All in all though, my core point in all of this isnt so much what options do what, and how much.... it's that the overall impression that alot of players are having is that they just cannot affect things enough to truly HAVE an effect. Not a good impression for players to get with a game like this. I only agree in part, and I know what options ARE stronger, but the main fact is that there's still alot of weaker ones. Some dispatch missions, for instance... they're an important way to get money, albeit a bit dependant on playstyle, but a good number of these are just too weak/slow. Typically the main ones I do are research/construction, with many of the others being too weak to be of much use. Which is a shame, because there's so much potential depth in the dispatch system. And all of this affects their impressions and thoughts of the game, and their opinion on it as a whole. It's the reason for some of the negative reviews I've seen from players in various places.
The RCI is definitely the worst though, the numbers just cant be dealt with even remotely fast enough by the player to have an actual effect, since they seem to need to be quite high/low indeed, but they can only truly be dealt with in tiny increments most of the time. But overall, this is a general issue that's been mentioned quite often, which is why I bring it up.
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The problem is that alot of these actions available, in terms of pure gameplay and numbers, simply dont have enough effect. Assisting with armada construction, for instance. As best I can tell, this does nothing. Or the example of the explosive sudden war I mentioned originally. Something like that massively affects the overall simulation, and more importantly, the strategies being implemented, but it happened and ended so fast that I couldnt do ANYTHING about it... it went by even faster than a very short dispatch mission. Even if I hadnt been on a dispatch at the time, I still just could not have done anything about it in the 6 or so months that the war took. I have political options, but they're not strong enough. I can sabotage things.... but not enough to have a true effect on the situation. I could improve relations.... very, very, VERY slowly.
The wars starting and ending suddenly with the conflict really only happens if you are busy elsewhere for a number of months..unless you are just spamming the 2x speed button that really throws shit into the future fast.
However, I find that you can influence things very well...but you MUST use the other races for their specialties in order to have these big effects. Like the boarines or peltians giving you a large boost of influence for races ( or making two races like each other by +15 in just a month, thats awesome!)....or the evucks generating a disease for a race that they hate ( and that you also hate as well)...or the burlusts going and knocking down the doors of any race you tell them sucks...
I have done all of the above...and I think they qualify for effecting the game on a big scale.
If you are referring to the dispatch missions, they are more useful for a broad spectrum of credit, influence, and a particular effect ( that is usually smaller but a bonus to the task generally). It can be useful if you need a few small bumps of money or influence to do more things...but it is not a method of conquering the game, its merely a small tool in your belt.
To shamelessly parrot what Mick has already said; more numbers is better. Or rather being able to hover over a number and see a tooltip describing the number's effect on the simulation. For Example "1 Medical = -0.01% Planetary Death Rate"
I agree in general with many suggestions in this thread, but this one is specifically great and should be very simple to implement.
I've made a mantis for it:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=14770
The tooltip is a good idea but I know for a fact that medical does more than just this. But I heavily agree with the concept, I would love to see everything that medical does do for or against a race...if only it is somewhere in the games built in encyclopedia or something.
As the war bit goes, it happened over a VERY brief period. About 5-6 months was all it took for total annihilation. The derpy bit? There WASNT major hate between the two... they were kinda neutral. The Skylaxians just suddenly decided "KILL ALL THE THINGS", and BAM.... it was over. Typically though, once a war starts.... that's it. I can screw with political actions all I want, it wont stop it. The only real thing that I can do is try to get a race to attack one of the warring ones... but this just makes things worse in most cases. And I'm not the sort to leap forward by 60 months in one go or anything... I get too much of a loss of control that way. Typically, the max I'll do for a single dispatch is 10-20, unless it's a darned important tech that needs to be gotten ASAP yet has a high-ish cost. That's rare though.
All in all though, my core point in all of this isnt so much what options do what, and how much.... it's that the overall impression that alot of players are having is that they just cannot affect things enough to truly HAVE an effect. Not a good impression for players to get with a game like this. I only agree in part, and I know what options ARE stronger, but the main fact is that there's still alot of weaker ones. Some dispatch missions, for instance... they're an important way to get money, albeit a bit dependant on playstyle, but a good number of these are just too weak/slow. Typically the main ones I do are research/construction, with many of the others being too weak to be of much use. Which is a shame, because there's so much potential depth in the dispatch system. And all of this affects their impressions and thoughts of the game, and their opinion on it as a whole. It's the reason for some of the negative reviews I've seen from players in various places.
The RCI is definitely the worst though, the numbers just cant be dealt with even remotely fast enough by the player to have an actual effect, since they seem to need to be quite high/low indeed, but they can only truly be dealt with in tiny increments most of the time. But overall, this is a general issue that's been mentioned quite often, which is why I bring it up.
Pretty much. RCI and dispatch missions need to be rebalanced. The entire game is very wonky sometimes. It claims to give player feedback for their actions but then it doesn't give the player clear feedback on why the simulation is doing what it does or the mathematics behind the simulation. The reason I say that is because there is so much weirdness and lack of clear action behind WHY the (using above 2 posts up example) skylaxians just lost their entire fleet with little to no effect on anything else, and it happened instantly. The AI makes some really dumb decisions in terms of its tactics, and really needs to become aware of the odds and effects of its actions. It's ridiculous that the AIs war system at this point basically boils down to "well, we reached x population, and the random chance dictates that we go to war, so lets blindly go to war with no consideration for the political or military situation with some random neutral guy for no apparant reason! And then lets blindly send all of our fleets to their doom due to either poor strategy or lack of situational awareness!" I'd understand a stupid decision like this from races like the burlust, but when evucks and skylaxians just seem to do things for no reason it really paints a poor picture for the player.
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Pretty much. RCI and dispatch missions need to be rebalanced. The entire game is very wonky sometimes. It claims to give player feedback for their actions but then it doesn't give the player clear feedback on why the simulation is doing what it does or the mathematics behind the simulation. The reason I say that is because there is so much weirdness and lack of clear action behind WHY the (using above 2 posts up example) skylaxians just lost their entire fleet with little to no effect on anything else, and it happened instantly. The AI makes some really dumb decisions in terms of its tactics, and really needs to become aware of the odds and effects of its actions. It's ridiculous that the AIs war system at this point basically boils down to "well, we reached x population, and the random chance dictates that we go to war, so lets blindly go to war with no consideration for the political or military situation with some random neutral guy for no apparant reason! And then lets blindly send all of our fleets to their doom due to either poor strategy or lack of situational awareness!" I'd understand a stupid decision like this from races like the burlust, but when evucks and skylaxians just seem to do things for no reason it really paints a poor picture for the player.
Actually, perhaps I phrased it wrong, but the Skylaxians werent the ones that got deleted.... it was them that crushed the Thoraxians. Which.... actually seems a bit loopier.
Somehow the honorable Skylaxians became unstoppable galactic terrors because.... I have no idea.
Their actions throughout my playthrough so far actually seem more like the work of a glitch or something, but it's hard to tell.
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It's hard for me to know how unbalanced RCI missions may or may not be, because I have no clue what +10/20/30/... of any RCI value even means.
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It's hard for me to know how unbalanced RCI missions may or may not be, because I have no clue what +10/20/30/... of any RCI value even means.
Times like this, I wish we could read the source code for ourselves to sanity check it.
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It's hard for me to know how unbalanced RCI missions may or may not be, because I have no clue what +10/20/30/... of any RCI value even means.
Times like this, I wish we could read the source code for ourselves to sanity check it.
Precisely.
There are very good reasons why Paradox produce some of the best grand strategy games available today, and chief amongst those reasons is the ability to view all present (and sometimes past) modifiers that are applied to any given number; they also do a very good job of imparting the necessary knowledge to understand how 'valuable' any given number is, i.e., you always know exactly what a number is worth to you.
TLF does the polar opposite of those things: it doesn't tell you what modifiers are being applied to any given number, and it doesn't give you any help in understanding the 'worth' of any given value. The RCI numbers are an excellent example of where, in my opinion, TLF gets it wrong: I've got no idea what modifiers were/are in play to explain why, for example, the Skylaxian Economy went up by 500% in the space of four years, and I have no clue what 'Economy +1905' actually means. (All I can say is that +1905 is 1905 times better than 1 – but actually is it..?! I have no idea!)
I'm a fairly intelligent chap and I consider grand strategy games to be my favourite genre (a genre now almost entirely dominated by various Paradox offerings) but TLF constantly leaves me baffled as to why something just happened, and I find it completely impossible to even part-way-accurately predict what's about to happen. I don't mind it when crazy things happen in grand strategy games so long as they can be traced, examined, and ultimately explained; in TLF that process is, by and large, impossible because every meaningful concept is agonisingly opaque. I suppose I'm just meant to 'trust the simulation' but-- well, I don't because I suspect that the maths is fundamentally wonky.
I like TLF – or more accurately, a really want to like it – but to my mind this game has a very long way to go before it call believably call itself a grand strategy game, and a very large part of that journey would be accomplished by simply (yeah, if only it really was 'simple') making the numbers transparent to the player.
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I agree that more transparency on the exact effects is needed. There's good tooltips, but there should be something like if I mouse over the RCI value for economy it doesn't just give me flavor text of what it does, but directly shows me the stats it is effecting, and by how much. (The stats on the planet detail view? I don't even know what stats the RCI affects)
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Have any mantis issues been created from the discussion in this thread? I've considered it, but I don't feel comfortable compiling a "consensus" into a ticket (because it feels like I'm speaking for other people). Would it make sense to kinda work out a summary of the of the complaints within the thread itself and post it once enough people have signed off on it?
Although maybe it's really just as simple as "Have the game show how the numbers work, especially in the case of RCI."
It's much easier to talk about the balance of various player activities once that is done first.
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Sure, mick, if you want. I haven't bothered to create mantis tickets since I've been getting enough feedback from the dev here, but I'm sure they probably check mantis just as much if not more, so go ahead.
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Have any mantis issues been created from the discussion in this thread? I've considered it, but I don't feel comfortable compiling a "consensus" into a ticket (because it feels like I'm speaking for other people). Would it make sense to kinda work out a summary of the of the complaints within the thread itself and post it once enough people have signed off on it?
Although maybe it's really just as simple as "Have the game show how the numbers work, especially in the case of RCI."
It's much easier to talk about the balance of various player activities once that is done first.
I'm not all that familiar with what Mantis is (open source bug tracking tools?) but if that's they way changes are influenced around here then I'm all for it.
I can summarize my view expressed in this thread quite simply, in non-specific terms:-
All numbers need to be transparent.
In more specific terms, for two examples:-
- I need to know what modifiers are presently influencing a number and in some cases what modifiers /used/ to be influencing it. (What factors are currently influencing a planet's Economic RCI number and why did said Economy mysteriously improve by 500% over the last four years?)
- I need to understand the 'worth' of a number and not just its value, e.g., '+50' means nothing to me but '+50%' means everything. (Does 1,000,000 Science power mean that the Skylaxians are going to be researching tech 250,000 times faster than the Thoraxians on 4?)
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Have any mantis issues been created from the discussion in this thread? I've considered it, but I don't feel comfortable compiling a "consensus" into a ticket (because it feels like I'm speaking for other people). Would it make sense to kinda work out a summary of the of the complaints within the thread itself and post it once enough people have signed off on it?
Although maybe it's really just as simple as "Have the game show how the numbers work, especially in the case of RCI."
It's much easier to talk about the balance of various player activities once that is done first.
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=14751 That's the original Mantis ticket for this.
I know the devs dont have much time to be reading the forums lately, so I dunno that they've seen this actual topic here. Being that this topic has alot of good ideas/thoughts in it related to this though it wouldnt hurt to attach them to the ticket somehow so they're apparent.
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Whaddya talkin' bout they don't have time to read the forums? x4000 has been doing an amazing job with that, imo.
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Whaddya talkin' bout they don't have time to read the forums? x4000 has been doing an amazing job with that, imo.
He's stated it on numerous occaisions, actually. Go look up in the "stickied" section for this forum, there's a "PLEASE SUBMIT FEEDBACK TO MANTIS" topic up there, which explains a bit.
PARTICULARLY after release, there's just too much chaos both here and on the Steam forums for the game in question... and the devs are already so busy! And the thing with forum topics is that some of each topic is direct feedback info, but then there may be a pile of posts that are merely discussions about that, which are often not helpful in a direct way.
Mantis though isnt used for discussions, and is an easy way for them to keep track of feedback and bug reports, so it's definitely the preferred way of doing it. And it's easy to forget this, too, which I suppose is why he made that topic about it. Heck, I tend to forget Mantis is there myself half the time during testing, despite just how much testing I've done overall for their games.
Overall it's just alot easier on them for us to try to put direct feedback on Mantis as much as possible instead of just here, where it may be missed.
And heck, this is a BIG game for them. In my opinion there's been enough chaos as it is just after their last couple of releases... but this one goes waaaaaaayyyyyyyy beyond that. Normally I like to try to help out over on the Steam forums by constantly answering questions and such right after a release, since I tend to have the free time that most people dont, but THIS one.... I gave up. There's just too much over there. Way too much.
I dunno how they're even able to keep up with Mantis as it is. As always it's impressive that they manage to do all of this stuff.
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Ok, a bit of an update to this:
The more I mess with the game, the more I'm convinced that this is a really major issue. Alot of getting federations started seems to be luck, based on what the simulation and RNG does. Typically, if a given race has started doing something, or they have some event going that's screwing with the RCI, or whatever, the effects I can have on those things, regardless of method, are so weak/slow that they simply do nothing.
I've restarted the game multiple times, experimenting as I go, and it takes very little time before I reach a point where I've run out of strategic options that will actually DO something, making "wait and see" the only true effective option. Needless to say, this isnt very interesting.
For example, in my current game I decided to work on getting the Evucks and Acutians going into a Federation. At the start I had a few options.... start a trade route, stuff like that. Very quickly, the Evuck planetary situation went bonkers and just started falling apart. There is *nothing* I can do about this. Nowhere in the game is there any action I could take that could make even the slightest dent in the plummeting RCI values, among other things. It doesnt help that they've got a 200-month long negative event going on that I can also do nothing about.
The Acutians are a whole other issue; as they and the Skylaxians do sometimes, they are going out of control with sheer power... and again, I cant do anything to halt them. I have enough influence that I could take hostile actions to slow them down without making them loathe me, but the actions I can take are all pretty weak and will only very briefly slow them down. They simply advance WAY faster than I could do damage. Even with weaker races, this is typically the case.
Political actions tend to be too weak, having minor effects over time. Dispatches tend to be too slow, requiring absurd amounts of time before they really do much; only research and sometimes construction are worth doing. All of the other dispatches seem pretty useless most of the time. And of course with the political stuff, I cant even do that if I dont have the influence... and if there are no techs to give, and no pirate bases to crush, getting influence is very slow, which further weakens the effectiveness of most political actions, particularly if I've needed to do anything hostile at all, or anything that lowered influence, since those tend to have very heavy penalties. The super-slow influence gain can make political options worthless, as by the time you can use them, it's much too late for them to be of much help.
And that's just in my current game. Every other game I've started didn't take long at all before I hit this point. One way or another, the player's options/actions need to DO something more than they currently are. Situations spiral out of control quickly, but unlike with combat, the player's actions do not grow stronger or more effective as the game progresses. Only research/building is an exception, but these are nowhere near effective enough simply by themselves, and it's hard to target these at any specific situation to work on it. That being said, buildings/research ARE actively effective once done.... the numbers on these seem closer to the proper balance overall. Much much closer. I think this fact is important. To me it's one of the reasons why the tech/building mechanics are so good: Because when used, they feel like they have real IMPACT, that you're accomplishing something with them. But much more is needed than just these. If other options were brought up to be more in line with these, it'd help ALOT. THough, of course, some techs/buildings are REALLY powerful, and it's not like political/dispatches all need to be crazy strong, but still, being closer to that type of balance would be very good.
Currently I'm holding off on playing further until something changes... with my lack of patience I very quickly lose interest in any strategy title if a point when there's either too few options or too much "stand around and wait" occurs, and this is currently doing both at once very heavily. The balance is just too messed up. Combat is still very interesting, but it's of little use on the solar map itself, aside from dealing with outposts. I can understand that overpowering things could be a definite issue... it would shorten the playtime of each game, and for a game like this, that'd rather suck. But it isnt much fun if a good chunk of that playtime is waiting/hoping for something to happen that gives you an opportunity to really DO something.
Of course, if anyone has some overall tips, or thoughts on what I may be doing wrong, by all means, lemme know. But so much experimenting so far always leads to this same result, even with me trying wildly different tactics each time. And of course, the core reason I brought this up in the first place remains true, which is that new players seem to be still getting this same impression.
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Ok, a bit of an update to this:
The more I mess with the game, the more I'm convinced that this is a really major issue. Alot of getting federations started seems to be luck, based on what the simulation and RNG does. Typically, if a given race has started doing something, or they have some event going that's screwing with the RCI, or whatever, the effects I can have on those things, regardless of method, are so weak/slow that they simply do nothing.
I've restarted the game multiple times, experimenting as I go, and it takes very little time before I reach a point where I've run out of strategic options that will actually DO something, making "wait and see" the only true effective option. Needless to say, this isnt very interesting.
For example, in my current game I decided to work on getting the Evucks and Acutians going into a Federation. At the start I had a few options.... start a trade route, stuff like that. Very quickly, the Evuck planetary situation went bonkers and just started falling apart. There is *nothing* I can do about this. Nowhere in the game is there any action I could take that could make even the slightest dent in the plummeting RCI values, among other things. It doesnt help that they've got a 200-month long negative event going on that I can also do nothing about.
The Acutians are a whole other issue; as they and the Skylaxians do sometimes, they are going out of control with sheer power... and again, I cant do anything to halt them. I have enough influence that I could take hostile actions to slow them down without making them loathe me, but the actions I can take are all pretty weak and will only very briefly slow them down. They simply advance WAY faster than I could do damage. Even with weaker races, this is typically the case.
Political actions tend to be too weak, having minor effects over time. Dispatches tend to be too slow, requiring absurd amounts of time before they really do much; only research and sometimes construction are worth doing. All of the other dispatches seem pretty useless most of the time. And of course with the political stuff, I cant even do that if I dont have the influence... and if there are no techs to give, and no pirate bases to crush, getting influence is very slow, which further weakens the effectiveness of most political actions, particularly if I've needed to do anything hostile at all, or anything that lowered influence, since those tend to have very heavy penalties. The super-slow influence gain can make political options worthless, as by the time you can use them, it's much too late for them to be of much help.
And that's just in my current game. Every other game I've started didn't take long at all before I hit this point. One way or another, the player's options/actions need to DO something more than they currently are. Situations spiral out of control quickly, but unlike with combat, the player's actions do not grow stronger or more effective as the game progresses. Only research/building is an exception, but these are nowhere near effective enough simply by themselves, and it's hard to target these at any specific situation to work on it. That being said, buildings/research ARE actively effective once done.... the numbers on these seem closer to the proper balance overall. Much much closer. I think this fact is important. To me it's one of the reasons why the tech/building mechanics are so good: Because when used, they feel like they have real IMPACT, that you're accomplishing something with them. But much more is needed than just these. If other options were brought up to be more in line with these, it'd help ALOT. THough, of course, some techs/buildings are REALLY powerful, and it's not like political/dispatches all need to be crazy strong, but still, being closer to that type of balance would be very good.
Currently I'm holding off on playing further until something changes... with my lack of patience I very quickly lose interest in any strategy title if a point when there's either too few options or too much "stand around and wait" occurs, and this is currently doing both at once very heavily. The balance is just too messed up. Combat is still very interesting, but it's of little use on the solar map itself, aside from dealing with outposts. I can understand that overpowering things could be a definite issue... it would shorten the playtime of each game, and for a game like this, that'd rather suck. But it isnt much fun if a good chunk of that playtime is waiting/hoping for something to happen that gives you an opportunity to really DO something.
Of course, if anyone has some overall tips, or thoughts on what I may be doing wrong, by all means, lemme know. But so much experimenting so far always leads to this same result, even with me trying wildly different tactics each time. And of course, the core reason I brought this up in the first place remains true, which is that new players seem to be still getting this same impression.
No, no, that about sums it up. I would really just copy+paste this entire post into mantis if it was appropriate, but it's too long/isn't appropriate (maybe it is iunno.) I hope the devs read this, because it really is spot with the issues it raises. The only routes that really feel like they do anything, are, as said, research/construction. And even construction feels very weak.
There's not much more to say than what misery already said. I agree with everything in this post, and it is also the reason I'm not currently playing. Maybe start a mantis tag or something, but if there's something else I want the devs to hear it's miserys post here. By "something else" I mean they've already done a ton of troubleshooting/bugfixing on my "inspiration" as the patch notes say, which is amazing, and while I don't think I even deserve to be listed as that, it's nice of them. They've been doing a great job, and I think this is the next route to go down imo.
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Misery's post sums up why I have lost interest in this game. I find it unfortunate, because I do love concept, the races, the setting, and many of the ideas, but... well ... what Misery said.
I still follow the updates waiting until something is done to address these concerns. I understand such changes won't happen overnight though, as there are still a lot of bug and balance issues to sort through.
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Yep, I already stuck all of that into the Mantis ticket for it as a comment. Again, feel free to leave your own comments there as well.
The good thing overall about this whole issue is that I dont think it'd be all that hard to fix. It's not the sort of balance issue that's like "Well, THIS thing over here is too strong, this other one is very weak, this bit over here costs too much, this option explodes when you use it". It's more of a general theme, with alot of things simply being balanced too low. An overall increase is probably all that's needed. Though, nerfing the Skylaxians and Acutians a bit might help also, but that's a seperate issue.
Also, the RCI values, fixing those up would help alot. It'd make more sense to me if, say, 100/-100 were ultra good and ultra bad, respectively, rather than having these values go into the thousands. Particularly considering the rate at which dispatches affect these. The various buildings that affect RCI also seem balanced around a 100 or maybe 200 range sort of setup.
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Now that I think about it, if you increased the effectiveness of the players actions, it would make the game shorter, because all they devs did to make it longer is decrease the effects of the players actions.
They need to find a way to increase the length of the game to 30-50 years, without simply turning that game into sit-and-wait or watch-and-grind game.
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I don't really have an issue with actions having a long term ROI. I enjoy CK2 (Crusader Kings 2), where building improvements sometimes don't pay for themselves until 50-100 years later, and that's perfectly fine. The difference is I can understand the inputs and outputs as they are presented to me. If a castle town improvement in CK2 had a tooltip like "Gives you more tax income", I would be extremely frustrated because I'd be getting the impression that it was doing NOTHING.
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I don't really have an issue with actions having a long term ROI. I enjoy CK2 (Crusader Kings 2), where building improvements sometimes don't pay for themselves until 50-100 years later, and that's perfectly fine. The difference is I can understand the inputs and outputs as they are presented to me. If a castle town improvement in CK2 had a tooltip like "Gives you more tax income", I would be extremely frustrated because I'd be getting the impression that it was doing NOTHING.
Yeah, there REALLY needs to be more transparency on the games effects. I also play paradox grand strategy games, and they're somewhat similar in the fact they both this game and those games have complex depth/interactions. The problem is that even though the game claims to be open to both depthful experts and casual players it doesn't give any exacts on what is happening, so both casual players and experts suffer.
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I’ve only played this game for about 20 hours so I’m still very much a n00b in grand strategy career terms with TLF, but I do now find myself in a very similar position to Misery & Co.
By far my biggest frustration with TLF is the opacity of not just my own actions but also the actions of the Races themselves, and for the actions that I do have some seemingly useful numbers for they appear to be absurdly ineffectual. I too am a child of the Paradox machine – Vicky, CK, EU, HoI etc – so I am very much aware of the concept of the long term investment but by the time any of the long term actions conclude in a typical game of TLF the impact of those actions amounts to almost nothing, largely because several crazy things have exploded out of control^Hinfluence, concluded, and then exploded out of all control^Hinfluence again all within the timeframe of one such long term action. I end up resigning myself to watching a wild, unpredictable and often illogical simulation playing out on my screen feeling rather powerless to do anything about any of it. (In fact, I usually end up starting a game of Faster Than Light instead!)
I want to trust the simulation but, you see, I can’t because I frequently see mad things like 1,000,000 Science power drop by ~250,000 points at the loss of one Outpost when earlier on in the game that same single Outpost only added 25 to that Race’s Science output. I know why this happens, mathematically, but thematically and logically stuff like this makes no sense at all. Grand strategy games rely on the player buying into the plausibility of the events that are likely to happen but TLF’s parade of one bonkers event compounding the next does little to help the player immerse themselves into the simulation.
I am falling out of love with TLF. I’m very much in love with the concept but the game mechanics themselves are leaving me increasingly cold. This makes me a rather sad Peltian. /QvQ\ <-- Look at my sad Peltian eyes.
I don’t think I’ll be firing the game up again until I read a patch note that states that all of the numbers in the game now have meaning instead of just value, i.e., “+50 Economy” means absolutely nothing to me but “+0.05% Economy / month” means everything, and that every action that a Race takes, no matter how bonkers (and I see an awful lot of bonkers actions), has an explainable and accessible audit trail.
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I’ve only played this game for about 20 hours so I’m still very much a n00b in grand strategy career terms with TLF, but I do now find myself in a very similar position to Misery & Co.
By far my biggest frustration with TLF is the opacity of not just my own actions but also the actions of the Races themselves, and for the actions that I do have some seemingly useful numbers for they appear to be absurdly ineffectual. I too am a child of the Paradox machine – Vicky, CK, EU, HoI etc – so I am very much aware of the concept of the long term investment but by the time any of the long term actions conclude in a typical game of TLF the impact of those actions amounts to almost nothing, largely because several crazy things have exploded out of control^Hinfluence, concluded, and then exploded out of all control^Hinfluence again all within the timeframe of one such long term action. I end up resigning myself to watching a wild, unpredictable and often illogical simulation playing out on my screen feeling rather powerless to do anything about any of it. (In fact, I usually end up starting a game of Faster Than Light instead!)
I want to trust the simulation but, you see, I can’t because I frequently see mad things like 1,000,000 Science power drop by ~250,000 points at the loss of one Outpost when earlier on in the game that same single Outpost only added 25 to that Race’s Science output. I know why this happens, mathematically, but thematically and logically stuff like this makes no sense at all. Grand strategy games rely on the player buying into the plausibility of the events that are likely to happen but TLF’s parade of one bonkers event compounding the next does little to help the player immerse themselves into the simulation.
I am falling out of love with TLF. I’m very much in love with the concept but the game mechanics themselves are leaving me increasingly cold. This makes me a rather sad Peltian. /QvQ\ <-- Look at my sad Peltian eyes.
I don’t think I’ll be firing the game up again until I read a patch note that states that all of the numbers in the game now have meaning instead of just value, i.e., “+50 Economy” means absolutely nothing to me but “+0.05% Economy / month” means everything, and that every action that a Race takes, no matter how bonkers (and I see an awful lot of bonkers actions), has an explainable and accessible audit trail.
Yep. Pretty much this. You guys are saying it much better than I could ever put it, but I kinda agree with everything here. Maybe only paradox is capable of performing the grand strategy formula we're asking for. I don't know. I just hope (and I have not lost any hope at all, infact if anything the past week has had me gain hope) that they will fix these problems. We need plausibility in the simulation, and clear descriptions on the interactions of both the player, and the AI.
It's a wish I hope to see fufilled by this game, but I don't know if this game will ever reach that point if arcen keeps up the rate of game releases it has now.
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There is another balance option, besides buffing all of the player actions. And that is toning down the wild swings the game takes. If instead of a race declaring war on a neutral race and wiping them out in a solar month or two, if the escalation and then eventual war was more gradual, it would give us more time to alter the universe.
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It's funny because on the AI war arcengames page is says this: "Because you love RTS games or 4X games, but you hate it when they're click-fests, involve a lot of sitting around and waiting, or just require you to memorize a bunch of spreadsheets to win."
And the second "sitting around and waiting" is exactly this game now.
(I'm not a player of AI war, though I am looking to get into it, hence why I was even there. I bought it with a humble bundle a while back.)
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It's funny because on the AI war arcengames page is says this: "Because you love RTS games or 4X games, but you hate it when they're click-fests, involve a lot of sitting around and waiting, or just require you to memorize a bunch of spreadsheets to win."
And the second "sitting around and waiting" is exactly this game now.
I think "sim" style games have more sitting and waiting by definition compared to most other game styles. :)
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It's a wish I hope to see fufilled by this game, but I don't know if this game will ever reach that point if arcen keeps up the rate of game releases it has now.
The concept behind TLF is most definitely worth more than the fairly short-lived, volcanic affair that the game’s mechanics currently afford it. (AI War has oddles of replayability so Arcen certainly aren’t strangers to what works.) It just needs to settle down a bit^Hlot, be (far) less capricious, and give the players a window into the intricate mechanics that drive the events that we see on-screen. So yes, perhaps take a leaf or four hundred out of the Paradox book of how to make a grand strategy game. (Let’s not forget that early Paradox grand strat games were rough too – Europa Universalis was bloody awful until a few major patch cycles down the line. EU4 has been their smoothest “v1” launch yet but that’s only come off the back of many years of experience in the genre.)
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I don't have an issue with "sitting and waiting" (that really means more or less accelerating time forward). I don't mind slow paced strategy games where I have to comb through and plan out my next move. I spend a lot of time in CK2 either paused, or 5x-ing the game forward to some other "decision point". When I'm in the pause/plan mode, I just want to be able to make informed decisions, not just look at screens of meaningless numbers. A lot of the events and techs and actions all filter down into adjustments of RCI, but I have no idea what the RCI numbers mean - that's the problem.
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... If instead of a race declaring war on a neutral race and wiping them out in a solar month or two...
I had a game last night where everyone was neutral and everyone (bar one) was at war. ??? Could I find out why any of them were at war? Nope. You should be able to ask them, “why are you at war with such-and-such?”, and they should be able to give you an answer.
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I don't have an issue with "sitting and waiting" (that really means more or less accelerating time forward). I don't mind slow paced strategy games where I have to comb through and plan out my next move. I spend a lot of time in CK2 either paused, or 5x-ing the game forward to some other "decision point". When I'm in the pause/plan mode, I just want to be able to make informed decisions, not just look at screens of meaningless numbers. A lot of the events and techs and actions all filter down into adjustments of RCI, but I have no idea what the RCI numbers mean - that's the problem.
I play crusader kings in the same exact way, and I agree with you. What I meant by that was that this game kinda just has you sit back without any actual effect (or without knowing the actual effect; basically what I'm saying is: dispatch missions.) but I guess that's not what the quote meant. My bad.
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I don't have an issue with "sitting and waiting" (that really means more or less accelerating time forward). I don't mind slow paced strategy games where I have to comb through and plan out my next move. I spend a lot of time in CK2 either paused, or 5x-ing the game forward to some other "decision point". When I'm in the pause/plan mode, I just want to be able to make informed decisions, not just look at screens of meaningless numbers. A lot of the events and techs and actions all filter down into adjustments of RCI, but I have no idea what the RCI numbers mean - that's the problem.
That's how I would play CK2 if I understood how to play CK2, because I literally have no idea what the goal is, much less what actions are available to me and how those actions relate to my goal...
It's like playing a game in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, with a Dealer who won't tell me the rules, and the other players keeps giggling.
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CK2 doesn't really have a goal besides.... not lose. Generally people set their own goals, initially being things like: don't get killed before the end of the game or take over Spain, but as you gain proficiency they expand to things like, put members of my family into all other countries leadership positions.
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CK2 doesn't really have a goal besides.... not lose.
And what's losing?
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CK2 doesn't really have a goal besides.... not lose. Generally people set their own goals, initially being things like: don't get killed before the end of the game or take over Spain, but as you gain proficiency they expand to things like, put members of my family into all other countries leadership positions.
Usually it has built in mini-goals besides "conquer the world" like forming an empire, kingdom, etc. I got fed up with the stupid magic stacks that were added a while back so I stopped playing.
Anyways enough offtopic about ck2. I think this thread is kindof concluded to be honest, there's not much more to say besides just reposting the same complaints. I just wish the devs would acknowledge our concerns about this but I doubt they have the time to read through all of that. It's mantis'd, though. Right now I think they are focusing on what they can do in the short term, which is what you do on a daily update schedule. But eventually they'll address these concerns, hopefully.
CK2 doesn't really have a goal besides.... not lose.
And what's losing?
Having your entire dynasty die out. You could just be a count and continue playing. Ofcourse you can also switch to a completely different in-game character/country at any time, whenever you load a save you can choose. Same applies with any other paradox game.
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Reading the patch notes for the upcoming version, I discovered that the environmental RCI value affects planetary compatibility.
- Previously, for every 1 Environmental RCI above 50 that a race had, they would gain 0.1 compatibility with their planet.
- Now that has been dropped to 0.02, since the RCI values vary upwards so much higher nowadays.
- Previously, if a planet's Environmental RCI was below 0, then it would lose planetary compatibility VERY fast until it hit 0.1 total compatibility, or -100 RCI, whichever came first. Then it would actually go bonkers and possibly increase; the math was still assuming that -100 was the lowest RCI could go, which hasn't been true for a long while now.
- Now it works more like the positive environmental RCI does. For every Environmental RCI below 0, it loses 0.02 compatibility, until it hits 0.1 total compatibility, below which it will not go.
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I'd like to point out that "raping the planet for resources" should be a viable option. But here all it does is f*ck the race over, turning everyone into hippie elves (that is: compatibility boosts everything, ergo compatibility is good, ergo high environmental is good, ergo in order to have a good economy you need to not exploit natural resources for economic gain, wait what?).
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Reading the patch notes for the upcoming version, I discovered that the environmental RCI value affects planetary compatibility.
And I'd just like to note that such crucial mechanics should not be buried dark in the code, left for us to identify the same way we find black holes: by observing their results on other objects.
Tooltip everything, and break out calculations so we can see what's happening. It has to happen, or it's less a game of strategy and more a game of guessing the mechanics.
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Reading the patch notes for the upcoming version, I discovered that the environmental RCI value affects planetary compatibility.
And I'd just like to note that such crucial mechanics should not be buried dark in the code, left for us to identify the same way we find black holes: by observing their results on other objects.
Tooltip everything, and break out calculations so we can see what's happening. It has to happen, or it's less a game of strategy and more a game of guessing the mechanics.
Exactly. I've been trying AI war recently, and while I don't particularly like it (just preference I guess, I don't like RTS games, but I love grand strategy, and TBS 4x games. AI war feels too much like an rts.) it has amazing amounts of detail in its stat interactions, and gives all this to the player. While maybe they didn't show this because they thought it would overwhelm new players; what I'm typically seeing in the community hubs and the forums now is that the players don't know what to do because they don't know how anything works!
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I agree with much of what's being said here. What's the point of making the game length go from 20 years to 50 years, if 30 out of those 50 years are spent waiting/doing nothing and slowly grinding credit? Too much filler between the actually fun stuff at the moment, though I am enjoying the game. Looking forward to see how it progresses.
On another note, the devs have definitely seen this thread; they're frequently on the forums and it's easily the biggest/hottest suggestion thread happening at the moment. I wish we could get some sort of response from them on this stuff. So many good suggestions here.
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There is another balance option, besides buffing all of the player actions. And that is toning down the wild swings the game takes. If instead of a race declaring war on a neutral race and wiping them out in a solar month or two, if the escalation and then eventual war was more gradual, it would give us more time to alter the universe.
This, this is a very good point.
I'm not against the idea of doing something, but having it take some time to really perform it's task. That's fine.
But that idea utterly breaks down when different things happen fast enough that you CANT do anything about them with the options that you do have. And this is currently the case. The game's pacing is still too fast. The solar system descends into chaos quickly, and there's little that can be done about it.
Heck, part of the point of the Dispatch system is to advance the time, but in a way that you are doing an action WHILE you wait, making it more meaningful. That alone suggests a slower pace to things overall. But right now it's like "Ok, I'll just take 8 months to do this here, allright, let's see what happ- OMIGOD THE ANDORS EXPLODED", and that is.... pretty frequent.
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There is another balance option, besides buffing all of the player actions. And that is toning down the wild swings the game takes. If instead of a race declaring war on a neutral race and wiping them out in a solar month or two, if the escalation and then eventual war was more gradual, it would give us more time to alter the universe.
This, this is a very good point.
I'm not against the idea of doing something, but having it take some time to really perform it's task. That's fine.
But that idea utterly breaks down when different things happen fast enough that you CANT do anything about them with the options that you do have. And this is currently the case. The game's pacing is still too fast. The solar system descends into chaos quickly, and there's little that can be done about it.
Heck, part of the point of the Dispatch system is to advance the time, but in a way that you are doing an action WHILE you wait, making it more meaningful. That alone suggests a slower pace to things overall. But right now it's like "Ok, I'll just take 8 months to do this here, allright, let's see what happ- OMIGOD THE ANDORS EXPLODED", and that is.... pretty frequent.
Very. The amount of techs that gets researched in the period of just one 10 month dispatch is insane. Especially considering it's basically always 3 people who research it. If they're going to increase they length they have to decrease the frequency. I really don't understand the point, though, if that time is just going to be spent fast-forwarding.
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I think armadas and troops not costing any maintenance hurts the long-term strategic planning of the game. Right now a military buildup is totally normal, and it means that a race can be wiped out before we can even see the war start.
Now, I think we all agree that war declarations should automatically pause the game and maybe even prompt you to cancel your current dispatch mission. However, wading into a war that's already started should be a last resort. We're supposed to be masterminds here: we should see the war coming and try to either stop it or redirect it.
If a race had to pay maintenance on its armadas, and even higher maintenance when they were stationed in orbit around a hostile world, there would be a real strategic tradeoff to building up the fleets. Build too many armadas and you're not able to spend on stuff that will make you stronger in the long-term, like your science and RCI buildings. Build too few and pin all of your hopes on the late game though, and you'll find your planet hosting a new Thoraxian hive.
If armadas cost maintenance, a large military buildup would send ripples through the solar system. Neighbors would see the growth and respond in kind. Now in possession of new, expensive hardware, races will start looking to make those fleets pay for themselves, so everyone definitely doesn't want to be seen as the easy target. Mutual defense pacts and non-aggression pacts can help calm the tension, but if races aren't already friendly they might need a credible force willing to work the backchannels for them...
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If we take war declarations that seriously, then so should the races. I lost count how many times the event 'planet attack' which seems to be the war declaration equivalent is called by like 5 races, and then everyone... sort of sit there doing nothing, and if I am lucky, I do get to see a siege over the attacked planet 6 months down the line.
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If we take war declarations that seriously, then so should the races. I lost count how many times the event 'planet attack' which seems to be the war declaration equivalent is called by like 5 races, and then everyone... sort of sit there doing nothing, and if I am lucky, I do get to see a siege over the attacked planet 6 months down the line.
I got the same problem in my game.
And, just now, I played the patched game.
In one year, I won the campaign. All the ships flying around the burlusk planet finally attacked, eradicating them. Then the boarines died, out of the blue, because of the thoraxians, and then the acutians got killed too.
I think they can fix it by simply having the races maintaining only minimal military forces when it's not the war. Something like "we got some pirates here and here, but we don't need that giant battleship, a cruiser will be enough" followed by "The acutians are declaring war on us? MOBILISATION !! EVERYONE TAKE A GUN AND FIGHT THE ROBOTIC INVADER, LET'S DO IT SPACE-SPARTAN STYLE, EVEN THROUGH WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA IS"
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If we take war declarations that seriously, then so should the races. I lost count how many times the event 'planet attack' which seems to be the war declaration equivalent is called by like 5 races, and then everyone... sort of sit there doing nothing, and if I am lucky, I do get to see a siege over the attacked planet 6 months down the line.
I got the same problem in my game.
And, just now, I played the patched game.
In one year, I won the campaign. All the ships flying around the burlusk planet finally attacked, eradicating them. Then the boarines died, out of the blue, because of the thoraxians, and then the acutians got killed too.
I think they can fix it by simply having the races maintaining only minimal military forces when it's not the war. Something like "we got some pirates here and here, but we don't need that giant battleship, a cruiser will be enough" followed by "The acutians are declaring war on us? MOBILISATION !! EVERYONE TAKE A GUN AND FIGHT THE ROBOTIC INVADER, LET'S DO IT SPACE-SPARTAN STYLE, EVEN THROUGH WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA IS"
How did you win in one year? With the new patch observer games take like 200 years to resolve.
Also how is what you're saying related to what he is saying? He said it took a long time for the AI to do things, you're saying it took only a year and it all happened instantly.
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How did you win in one year? With the new patch observer games take like 200 years to resolve.
Also how is what you're saying related to what he is saying? He said it took a long time for the AI to do things, you're saying it took only a year and it all happened instantly.
Because there are (correction: WERE) ships all over the place. The patch just activated them somehow.
And also, while it may happen that over the course of a slight misunderstanding, I feared that he might be victim of the following boring handicap named "haven't patched it". To remedy to say problem, I presented my situation, that you obviously understood as "GNEUU I HAVE SHIT AND THEY DON'T DO SHIP", who magically (devs are wizzards) turned into "OH MY GOD A SPACE STEAMROLLER ! WHERE IS DIO?". Alas, one could say that these statements are not related, to which I would say "I used to have PEOPLE ARE GETTING ON THE PLANET ! PREPARE THE BOOZE announces, and then I learned to stop worry about it and it magically turned from a flying magical circus of ships to a general steamroller with only one zOMG THEY ARE COMING THE SKYLAXIANS ARE COMING, ROLL FOR NASAL CIRCUMFERENCE announce, followed by a THAT PATHETIC RACE OF OVERWEIGHT LOSER GOT STOMPED IN THE GROUND SO HARD WE'RE GOING TO CONFUSE THEM FOR DINOSAURS WHEN WE'LL START DIGGING THAT STUFF TO FIND SHINY".
TL;DR : I also got these "planetary assault" messages. Then I got the patch. Now they are relevant, as they signed the death of three races.
EDIT : Also, by "I won in one year", I meant "it was a stalemate that lasted for 20 years. Everything got resolved in one year because the new patch is so awesome it makes my computer smells gooOH MY GOD THERE'S A SPIDER IN MY ROOM
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How did you win in one year? With the new patch observer games take like 200 years to resolve.
Also how is what you're saying related to what he is saying? He said it took a long time for the AI to do things, you're saying it took only a year and it all happened instantly.
Because there are (correction: WERE) ships all over the place. The patch just activated them somehow.
And also, while it may happen that over the course of a slight misunderstanding, I feared that he might be victim of the following boring handicap named "haven't patched it". To remedy to say problem, I presented my situation, that you obviously understood as "GNEUU I HAVE SHIT AND THEY DON'T DO SHIP", who magically (devs are wizzards) turned into "OH MY GOD A SPACE STEAMROLLER ! WHERE IS DIO?". Alas, one could say that these statements are not related, to which I would say "I used to have PEOPLE ARE GETTING ON THE PLANET ! PREPARE THE BOOZE announces, and then I learned to stop worry about it and it magically turned from a flying magical circus of ships to a general steamroller with only one zOMG THEY ARE COMING THE SKYLAXIANS ARE COMING, ROLL FOR NASAL CIRCUMFERENCE announce, followed by a THAT PATHETIC RACE OF OVERWEIGHT LOSER GOT STOMPED IN THE GROUND SO HARD WE'RE GOING TO CONFUSE THEM FOR DINOSAURS WHEN WE'LL START DIGGING THAT STUFF TO FIND SHINY".
TL;DR : I also got these "planetary assault" messages. Then I got the patch. Now they are relevant, as they signed the death of three races.
EDIT : Also, by "I won in one year", I meant "it was a stalemate that lasted for 20 years. Everything got resolved in one year because the new patch is so awesome it makes my computer smells gooOH MY GOD THERE'S A SPIDER IN MY ROOM
Did someone forget to take his ADHD meds today? Haha, I know the feeling. Alright, so the patch changed the rules of the game you were playing and caused everything to resolve. Thanks for explaining.
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Did someone forget to take his ADHD meds today? Haha, I know the feeling. Alright, so the patch changed the rules of the game you were playing and caused everything to resolve. Thanks for explaining.
Don't joke about medicines.
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Did someone forget to take his ADHD meds today? Haha, I know the feeling. Alright, so the patch changed the rules of the game you were playing and caused everything to resolve. Thanks for explaining.
Don't joke about medicines.
Sorry, I go to a mental health institute for a daily program so it's something I've become accustomed to.
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Sorry, I go to a mental health institute for a daily program so it's something I've become accustomed to.
I try to laugh about everything (including my lack of skills at TLF) because that's what humour is, but there are still things I can't joke with. Addictions being one of them.
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Sorry, I go to a mental health institute for a daily program so it's something I've become accustomed to.
I try to laugh about everything (including my lack of skills at TLF) because that's what humour is, but there are still things I can't joke with. Addictions being one of them.
Okay man, I understand, not here to argue/go off topic, sorry.
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Okay man, I understand, not here to argue/go off topic, sorry.
No problem, it's my fault as well.
Now that's being said, I started a new game, and I can tell you, the patch definitely got rid of the "we're circling over your head" bug. I'm fighting to keep the acutian alive here.
EDIT : and it bothers me how everything will declare war on each other despite their relationships being "neutral".
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EDIT : and it bothers me how everything will declare war on each other despite their relationships being "neutral".
Is there more going on here though then just that?
For me, if playing a strategy game, "neutral" just means "one less variable to worry about". SO if for example my military is much stronger, and politics/diplomacy/ internal order all say "good enough" then I ATTACK, because...that is what strategy games say to do? I have this expensive military...gotta use them for something, right? And if no bigger threat oppose me...and I'm a bad guy already...why not attack?
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Is there more going on here though then just that?
For me, if playing a strategy game, "neutral" just means "one less variable to worry about". SO if for example my military is much stronger, and politics/diplomacy/ internal order all say "good enough" then I ATTACK, because...that is what strategy games say to do? I have this expensive military...gotta use them for something, right? And if no bigger threat oppose me...and I'm a bad guy already...why not attack?
In that case, there's a balance problem. In my last (I mean current, but since I ragequitted after healing BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD) game, the Acutians were one of the first accessing spacefaring (the third), and yet the thoraxians and burlusks declared war on them, despite accessing spacefaring way later.
And frankly, it's making my game impossible, since I spend all my time defending the acutians instead of boosting my diplomacy, my influence, or researching techs.
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Is there more going on here though then just that?
For me, if playing a strategy game, "neutral" just means "one less variable to worry about". SO if for example my military is much stronger, and politics/diplomacy/ internal order all say "good enough" then I ATTACK, because...that is what strategy games say to do? I have this expensive military...gotta use them for something, right? And if no bigger threat oppose me...and I'm a bad guy already...why not attack?
In that case, there's a balance problem. In my last (I mean current, but since I ragequitted after healing BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD) game, the Acutians were one of the first accessing spacefaring (the third), and yet the thoraxians and burlusks declared war on them, despite accessing spacefaring way later.
And frankly, it's making my game impossible, since I spend all my time defending the acutians instead of boosting my diplomacy, my influence, or researching techs.
There should be time for that inbetween, no? If not, then that's weird because from what I could tell ship production has been massively nerfed. The AI is still kindof war-crazy, but the wars take a lot longer, ships build slower, etc. Also, the time that races access spacefaring really doesn't matter in terms of what techs they have or how big their fleets are.
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slower accumulating conditions for war and slower mechanics on the solar map are all well and good, but can we as players effect the RCI values enough to stop the Thoraxians from shredding the Acutians? Or to cure an illness that is killing the Andors? Many of the RCI values are still not affected (only by 1 or 2 percent) of some of those bad events, meaning it the planet will be dead before the player can change the RCI value enough to make a difference. Which seems more like the player sitting on the sidelines watching the game play itself, instead of playing the game.
Just my two cents, thanks for listening,
-Teal