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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2614 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

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Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.

Yeah that's why pretty much stopped playing - to have a good game takes at least a whole weekend, maybe longer, for pretty much every game I'd enjoy. And I can't justify spending that much time to myself. I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it, but probably won't do anything like that again for a while.

And I can't justify spending that much time to myself.

My trick is to just focus on games with support for more than 2 players. If my video game time also counts as quality time with the wife and kids: boom, justified! (at least for a few hours a week - our multiplayer Civ games take months)

I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it,

Heh, me too, though I regret the time sink a little bit. Not really something to share with the kids, though.

What gets me is, when I do have something single-player to share with the kids, I appear to have inadvertently implicitly taught them that only multiplayer games are worthwhile. Only one of my kids beat Portal, one of them never even tried it, and the third quit before even getting to the good part! Makes me feel like a failure of a geek father. If I can't get them into The Outer Wilds (which might work? it's good for spectating and ideal for turn-taking) I'm going to have to reevaluate entirely.

Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.

In an ideal world, video game ratings would not cover violence but addictive content.

On the surface level, it's hard to tell the difference. Mario Kart is harmless. Civilization is risky. World of Warcraft is potentially life destroying. Only after you fall into a few traps yourself can you spot the difference from a distance.

I think addictive potential is individual, both in the type of game and the degree.

I never found the hooks World of Warcraft and Diablo try to deploy appealing, but Civilization or Factorio are like crack for me. I also banned myself from ever getting Baldurs Gate 3, after sinking four digits worth of hours into BioWare's discography during my youth.

This is a point in favor of my thinking that video games are better now than ever. All of the video game equivalents of crack cocaine have generally released within the last 15 years. I got horribly addicted to Caves of Qud, Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (I think @TracingWoodgrains may have played all three of these? He had an AAQC on roguelikes on the subreddit), Escape from Tarkov, Mount and Blade Warband, and likely others that I don't remember right now. Maybe that's just my brain being different as an adult somehow, but "gaming crack" seems like it's alive and well. Plus, you can still play all the old stuff!

Civ dates back to the early 90s, and Dwarf Fortress to the early 2000s. For another example, people used to get in trouble playing Doom at work because the game was just that good. There were very addictive games being made 20-30 years ago too.

Doom in particular got people in trouble not only for being ridiculously addictive, but also because it used broadcast packets to run its multiplayer code. So a few people gaming could have a disproportionate impact on the entire office LAN.

Civ dates back to the early 90s

It frustrates me occasionally that the first and second installments in the franchise have never been (legally) available digitally that I can tell. I played them as a kid but the CDs got lost over the years. I wouldn't mind trying the first one again.

Why the first one specifically? Civ 2 was one of the best of the series, but it was a pure improvement over Civ 1.

I'm not even nostalgic for 2 (4 was better in every way and 5 the best overall IMHO), but if you're missing the Civ 2 ruleset and don't mind a different user interface I believe that the Freeciv default settings are pretty similar and the available feature set greater.

If you were a Civ 2 fan, can I assume you played through SM Alpha Centauri? If not then forget about the Civ series and just fix that now.

https://playclassic.games/games/turn-based-strategy-dos-games-online/play-sid-meiers-civilization-ii-online/play/

You can play 2 online, via this emulator I linked.

I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time, I'm just trying to push back against "gaming's golden age ended decades ago" point. I like that there's good stuff in the 90s. I'm happy it mostly still exists for weirdos who want to play through the best stuff. I would be very sad to give up the more recent stuff in some hypothetical world where gaming was executed for writing crimes against humanity sometime in the mid 2010s, like I suspect some hardliners might want.

I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time

That is definitely what I understood you to be arguing when you said "All of the video game equivalents of crack cocaine have generally released within the last 15 years". If that's not the case, fair enough.

Either way I disagree with your broader point, lol. Gaming really is in a slump after the golden age of the 90s-00s imo. But I don't have any arguments you probably haven't seen before, so we can agree to disagree on that point.

I appear to have missed the words "video game equivalents of crack to me" in my statement. My bad!

My dad was a 90s computer gamer, so I probably have a more unique view on gaming than most. From my perspective, I discuss games from more recently more than I talk about old stuff. My favorites from the 90s were probably Fallout 1, Planescape: Torment, and Marathon, which had some pretty meaty things to talk about, and Fallout was totally oozing style. But more recently (and using the term "recently" loosely), there's stuff like Hotline Miami, Spec Ops: The Line, LISA: The Painful, OFF, Katana Zero, and Dark Souls that put together some very unique combination of mechanics and writing that are really fun to think about and interact with, basically all of them having honed their own unique style in a way that was impossible back then. Maybe it depends more on the genre you like? Like, CRPGs have definitely suffered, I think. But if you are writing off indie games, I think that's generally a bad idea, because those are a lot more true to the company culture that composed 90s gaming companies.

I don't care if I've heard it before, I like reading about things I'm interested in. Please, write more about video games, all the time, everywhere. If my examples seem dated, that's mostly because I'm cheap and only buy cheap old games.

I agree that good games (even great games) are still to be found, especially from indie devs. My observation is just that there has been a decrease over time in the rate of getting those great games. Early on (like in the 80s), devs were strongly limited by technology, but in the 90s they started to be unshackled from those limitations and were putting out incredible games that blew everything before them away. Doom, Fallout, the various Infinity Engine games, FF6, FF7, Deus Ex, Starcraft, Alpha Centauri, etc etc. And that torrent of classics kept up for a good long while. But at some point it slowed down - around 2010 is where the inflection point seemed to me to be. Not that we don't get classics any more (we do, some of my favorite games are from after the golden age), but that something changed and now (to make up some numbers) 20% of the games are classic instead of 60%. We can still get a lot of great games while it also being true that we get fewer than before

I suspect that the primary driver here is because AAA game development has become way too expensive and time-consuming. When it takes 5-10 years and a team of 200 people to make the game, there's always going to be pressure to play it safe so as to recoup the investment. Not to mention that long dev times hurt because games (like other software) benefit a lot from iteration. If you make a game in a year or two, you can test out your ideas and learn from your mistakes so much faster than at the current pace of AAA dev. And I bet that this is why so many of the great games in recent memory have been indie games. Free of the constraints their AAA colleagues face, they can focus more on quality for their intended audience than safe broad appeal. They can iterate faster and dial in what makes the best games. But even though the indie devs still knock it out of the park a lot, time was that all the devs were doing that! It really does strike me as a golden age that we aren't quite experiencing any more.

Okay, those caveats are enough for me to be satisfied. I agree that there is not as much quality and much less actual diversity in game genre and creative liberties in general. I think you make a good point about game development and iteration. Insects lay 200 eggs that hatch every time they reproduce and this affects their speciation rate not an insignificant amount compared to primates which spend more than a decade raising their young.

I'm not sure there's enough cause to worry yet, though, because the art is young still, comparatively, and we know movies to have gone through different phases throughout the decades. Also, there's an absolute firehose of video games now compared to back then, so even a picky gamer can choose to play only good games. Unless he plays every day and gets bored quickly, I suppose.

I am annoyed that a space like this is one of the only places you can even bring this problem up. Why is that? Anywhere else, and the premise is questioned hard and it's assumed that you hate gay people. I'm guessing GamerGate made it so you can't question the choices of the industry anymore or something.

but that something changed and now (to make up some numbers) 20% of the games are classic instead of 60%.

How many games were there released per year in the 90s, and how many are released now?

My impression is that there are, to put it simply, a metric fuckton of games now and even if a smaller proportion of them are good, that still means way more good games than in the 90s.

It's a fair question. My subjective impression (i.e I have zero data for this, just a gut feeling based on the games I have played) is that there are fewer of those gems in absolute terms even though the overall number of games has increased. But that's not data, just how it has seemed to me.

Yep, CIV is especially dangerous in this regard.

Filthy addicts... :P

Was it a good campaign, at least? What civ did you play?

Maori on the classic Terra map. Got the whole continent to myself and got to play a nice relaxing dev game.

Sounds like Civ 6? I'm still on 5 (by choice). Skeptical towards 7 too.

Civ 3 was peak except for the stupid global warming mechanics. 4 was really good, especially with the live map editor. 5 and onwards have been sore disappointments for me, and the more I look at 7, the harder I gag.

Civ 3 really overpenalized playing "wide" instead of "tall". My father was a Civ fanatic but hated that one until I edited IIRC the corruption equation values.

Did you try Civ 5 with all the DLC? If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable, but other than that it became a great game.

If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable

That change is the best change in the game! Warfare is so boring in Civ 4 because there's no gameplay to it, if you have a stack that counters their stack you win. I am sympathetic to the argument that doom stacks were better because the AI was more competent with them, but can't really understand preferring them as a game mechanic.

If you want more complex combat, maybe consider Shadow Empire? It's a deep dive and some stuff is just opaque logistics-autism but there is fun to be had with encirclements, reconnaissance-in-force, spoiling attacks, preparatory artillery barrages before the armoured thrust...

That change is the best change in the game! Warfare is so boring in Civ 4 because there's no gameplay to it, if you have a stack that counters their stack you win.

That doesn't do the combat system in Civ IV justice. Unit types have inherent bonuses and penalties against other units or in specific situations, and can further specialize by taking promotions. An longbowman that is a sitting duck in the field becomes a killing machine with placed behind city walls with the garrison promotions. There is no best unit; every unit has a counter. And huge stacks can get demolished by collateral damage, so you have to make careful decisions about how to split your stacks, whether to attack and if so with what units, whether to take an extra turn lowering a city's defenses but risk more defenders showing up, etc.

And that's all just tactics. Strategy is just as important. You need to decide whether to invade an enemy or defend, how many units to send in an invading stack vs how many units to leave home, which types of units to build, whether to spread out your defenders to cover all of your cities or concentrate them at the most likely point of conflict or concentrate them on your most important cities, and so on. Geography is also surprisingly relevant; the second easiest way to win a war in Civ IV is to defend against an intercontinental assault, because amphibious invasions are hard. You have to decide when and where to land, whether it is better to disembark close to an enemy city or in a more defensible square or to attack directly from the boats despite the penalty, etc.

But most important of all is economy and technology. By far the easiest way to win a war in Civ IV is to be one tech level ahead of your opponent. When two equally advanced opponents duke it out, the one with the higher production tends to win, because they can replace their losses while the other can't, and there is only so much tactics and strategy can do to tilt the kill ratio.

It's an impressively complicated system that the AI can handle almost as well as a human. Civ IV is truly one of the greatest games of all time.

Alright, you've convinced me to give Civ 4 warfare another shot. I'm not exaggerating my experience - I really do remember combat being completely boring and without any nuance in that game - but it was my first Civ so it's certainly possible I overlooked depth to be found in it. Are there any good guides for Civ 4 tactics? I know the game has strategic depth, but something which helps to reveal any tactical depth would be welcome.

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I did play plenty of 5, more of 6, before the dumbass AI in the latter threw me off for good.

You're correct to wonder if I dislike the single unit per tile limitation. I think it sucks, and makes warfare a matter of attrition (across dozens of turns), traffic control, micromanagement and heavy reliance on choke-points. I'd rather take doom-stacks any day of the week.

Back when I played 3, I didn't have any internet access, and didn't know how to mod it. If I were to revisit the game, I'd definitely look to do what you did, corruption was a pain.

It hardly even counted as a "mod"; I think I just edited two numbers in an ASCII file.

I loved it when game companies didn't even bother compressing their text. As a kid I replaced all my Civ 1 Civilopedia entries with my own bad-imitation-of-Dave-Barry-style humor just for the hell of it.

If I was actually any good at modding, I'd have figured out how to get 5 to penalize doom stacks (something like the bombardment area-of-effect damage mechanic in SMAC?) without outright forbidding stacking. I still like 5 best overall, it's better than every other version in almost every way, but that one awful change nearly outweighs all the rest.

Civ 7 looks so bad. It's not even Civ any more, just another game with Civ branding. Then on top of that you have the legion of bugs that it launched with, and... yeah it's not a good look for Firaxis. People try to defend the game by saying "oh the new Civ game is always controversial on release", but I was there for Civ 5 and 6. Neither was even close to being as negatively received as 7 has been.

And don't even get me started on the sheer level of "diversity hire" leader picks they sunk to. This problem was in 6 as well (looking at you, Catherine de Medici), but 7 takes it to the next level. It's ridiculous.

Civ 7 heavily cribbed off competitors like Humankind, and for all the wrong reasons.

The ability to change civs could have been so good. All they needed to do was to be sensible about it.

Start as Rome in the Classical era? Become some kind of post-Roman state in the medieval era, be it Byzantium, France, Germany, England or, if you want to stretch it further, the Ottomans.

Go English? Get the option to remain that way post Enlightenment, or perhaps fork off to America.

You could add more leeway, especially for dead-end states, but avoid absurdities like Caesar running China, or America being a thing in the fucking Stone Age.

The idea of their being an ebb-and-flow to progression, with setbacks at the end of each era, that works great in theory for preventing rampant snowballing, but the current execution is utter ass.

Sigh. I'll go back and look lovingly at my copy of Civ 4. Last entry I wholeheartedly enjoyed.

Yeah, I agree that those sounded good in principle. That's why I was excited for Humankind when it came out, because I thought the idea of growing your civilization over time could be a really fresh take on the genre. In practice it didn't turn out so well (at least to me, and it sounds like to you) because the lack of identity just made civs feel soulless and disconnected from any historical flavor.

Accordingly I was already skeptical with the direction for Civ 7, because they were building on ideas that I already knew I didn't like when they were in another game. And unfortunately it seems like they too have gotten things completely wrong flavor wise (seriously, why does Firaxis think that the leader is what we players care about??). Not to mention the harsh age resets, which seriously undermine the core thing people like about Civ (building stuff up over time).

I find it especially galling because according to Firaxis, this all was in service of trying to get people to finish more games of Civ, since stats show most people don't finish the game. But I do! I find the entire arc of a game of Civ fun, and while the late game isn't quite as good as the early game, it's still really fun to me. So with Civ 7 they are trying to solve a problem I don't agree that the game has, by using methods that I don't like (and which go against the core identity of the series). It's very frustrating.

I find the entire arc of a game of Civ fun, and while the late game isn't quite as good as the early game, it's still really fun to me.

Which one do you play? I find the late game of 6 to be quite a drag, and 5 isn't much better. Early-game civ is easily 10x as fun for me.

Early-game civ is easily 10x as fun for me.

I agree. Everything has got higher stakes in the early game. Things that later seem like insignificant motions to go through, like securing a new unique luxury or defending/taking a city, or getting a trade route going to boost your growth, are very fun in the early game. Because it matters and because the future of your civ is uncertain and at risk.

I think you can use mods to help with this though - sort of. You can cap the tech at a certain age, or cut the build times by half or more, which effectively makes the early game last longer if you play at a slower game pace. Here's one such mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=664327211

Now you can e.g. conquer the world long before the modern era.

Are you trying to suggest that Harriet Tubman was not one of the great leaders and stateswomen of civilizations? Do better.

I'm trying to suggest that Ada Lovelace (much as I respect her) wasn't a leader of people by any stretch of the imagination. You can at least argue for Tubman in that she was a kind of leader. It's not a very good case, but you can make it. Lovelace? There's absolutely nothing there besides pure diversity quota thinking.

Wait what? I never heard about Lovelace being in Civ before now. A mathematician and "the first computer programmer". They have no business making her a leader of a nation. Or several nations across history, as is the case in 7.

But on the note of how to label these 'woke practices', I have started thinking it's more about female chauvinism/favoring women than about merely increasing diversity.

Yea civ 6. 5 is a lot better in some ways, but playing tall in civ is far better than wide, which makes the game not quite as fun as civ 6 where you can constantly be expanding.

To be fair wide is perfectly viable in Civ 5, I play that way myself. You will have a harder time in the early game (pro tip: settle cities on top of new luxuries so you get the happiness bonus immediately), but it's quite doable. Unless you're playing against humans, 4-city tradition is an optimization, not a necessity.

Civ 6 is currently free (including expansions and DLC) on Epic, for anyone who doesn't have it yet.

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