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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2947 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 22, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Gaming subthread.

Dream video game subthread:

  1. An XCOM-like, but one that eschews turns (even interleaved ones) in favor of real-time with pause. Small unit tactics, but with realistic weapons (scifi stuff allowed). More emphasis on training and hardware versus soldiers shooting enemies till they become Majors and develop not only better aim but a resistance to bullets. You can, by expending some kind of currency or skill point, manually seize control of a soldier and puppet them in first person. Otherwise they semi-autonomously follow your orders, think being a squad leader who tells Ramirez to hole up in a Burger King, as opposed to having to choose the exact toilet stall he needs to occupy like in XCOM. Land vehicles as special units, air units as call-ins or on rotation.

  2. Civ/EU/CK/Total War hybrid: An ungodly behemoth where combat between armies is either resolved with Paradox-style stats, or you can manually fight the battle TW style. There is literally an existing mod that does that, you initiate a battle in CK2, and then the mod imports units and stats into a Total WR title and then the results back into CK2. Realistic AI, in the sense that other leaders or generals act like simulated characters, rather than generic optimizers or min-maxers (which is why I don't play multiplayer in these titles). This could be done today by having an LLM make overarching command decisions or RPing, while delegating the micromanagement to more real-time AI.

Imagine if you could negotiate with Julius Caesar about the petroleum in Sicily, and use your own wits to argue with him. Imagine if you could convince Roosevelt to support you to stave off the Commie menace. What if you could talk to your subordinates, every general or governor being simulated entities that have their own thoughts and feelings that aren't just thinly veiled stats?

Hell, have a hardcore mode with true fog of war. If you're Caesar, you might send several legions off to Germania and only get old, vague reports. They might vanish in Varrus's hands, and you need to find out the hard way. Are the taxes from Asia Minor having too much skimmed off the top? Do the plebian demands have a point? You have to vet and trust agents to find out, unless you absolutely must go there yourself.

Are you familiar with the Combat Mission series? Real time with pause (…and turns), small unit tactics, obsessed with hardware, semi-autonomous, models the limitations of command. All the features you’d expect from a milsim in a strategy game. Has campaigns where you have to preserve your assets; I don’t know if anyone has made ones that let you progress in tech.

I have my own submission for the dream video game question. Maybe I’ll write something up for Friday.

I have heard of Combat Mission before, but haven't had the pleasure of playing it. Looking at it, definitely seems up my alley. I'll see about tracking down a copy, thanks!

There’s a great YouTube channel which covers the different games. He’s also got PvE and PvP matches. I’ll see if I can dig up the link when I get home.

I have long ago dreamt up my ideal game, and started working on it about ten years ago. SInce then, I have learned a lot about making games and even more about how to not make them and I still have nothing playable to show for it. At least it gave me good practice for starting a career in software development.

Here's the pitch: First-Person Kenshi (*) in a low-tech high-existential-horror sci-fi setting.

  • Sandbox game, no plot or story whatsoever. You have some freedom in character generation, and then you're just dropped in there.
  • Low-fidelity simulated world. Everything that you see in the game is interactable, nothing is mechanically empty set-dressing. There would be economics and politics simulations running in the background for NPCs, but the only way to interact with those is through the NPCs themselves; not through menus.
  • Realistic scale, speed and precision. The world is big, there's a lot of space, vehicles move fast, and when you see something impressively big, then it really is big.
  • To pay the performance price for the two points above, the world is also largely empty. Many may dislike this, but it suits my aesthetic sensibilities.
  • There should be basic survival mechanics - humans need food, temperature matters, injuries don't heal magically, inventory management needs to be done - but it's not meant to be a survival game. The player should be able to just hire a servant to handle all that.
  • Optional automations for the player character. I don't want players to ever be forced to do reptitive, mindless actions - you should be able to just do some light scripting to have your avatar do those for you (or hire NPCs to do them).
  • The player characters and NPCs to a lesser extent should have a sort of inner world, a collection of notions linked by associations that serves as a sort of semantic database.
  • Most content is procedurally generated. This includes meshes. Consequently, graphics would be very low-fi.
  • The world would be a large wasteland planet like everyone knows and loves from all kinds of fiction, with dramatic landscapes, ruins to explore and small civilizations scrabbling for survival on the surface. There would be a space layer with some orbital infrastructure and activities and microgravity gameplay. Technology would be constrained by the setting being a sparsely populated economic backwater, even if the game is set many millions of years in the future. The world is under constant threat by economic collapse, war, universal expansion, unfathomable AIs eating whole worlds, moral decay, and god switching off the universe because he's done with it, and the NPCs are aware of it - but all these threats loom at realistic time-scales, which is to say that it's in the far-off future for everyone. It's more background than game mechanic, thematic rather than interactive - how do people deal with the fact that for all their acitivity and thought, it will all come to nought in the end?
  • It would be full of cool things I like to see. Spaceships, guns, swordfighting, hiking, stargazing (yes I thought of actual stargazing mechanics), intergenerational contributions to the commons in the face of inevitable annihilation, conversations about one's role in the universe, megastructures, things going fast, big wide open brilliantly blue and golden skies, synthetic aliens, geology, nation-building, and the player free to explore or reject all of it.

Obviously this is all a big technical ask, but over the years I have done little other than tinker up various technical solutions for these various challenges. Some work. Some don't - yet. What I haven't really gotten around to is tying all that together into an actual game, and of course in all my experimentation over the years each individual component ended up being incompatible with most others. It's been a journey, and it's entirely unclear whether I'll ever reach any kind of destination.

(*) A note on Kenshi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/): I had my concept largely worked out long before Kenshi ever became visible to the public, but it does hit a lot of the same bullet points. And then goes a completely different way. Still, it's the closest equivalent to what I want to do. I recommend Kenshi as a game that breaks with many conventions and really strikes out to do its own thing.

Dream game recently has been something I've thought about making.

A mix between the Wuxia genre and the Heroes of Might and Magic overworld mechanics. Instead of controlling a civilization and multiple heroes. Its just one hero, or not really a hero, but a cultivator. The cultivator you control is trying to advance in realms. An end goal of true immortality and full unkillability. Massive world to explore.

Thoughts on fun/cool features:

  1. World is only randomly generated once, and then hand populated with a bunch of cool features. World is large enough that a single playthrough would only let you see 1/100th of it. But online guides to cool spots, or the joy of finding your own cool spots could carry over in different playthroughs.
  2. Game is about cheating. I always love wuxia stories where they have cool "cheats". An absurd ability to make money, turn back time, or gain stats that no one else can. Difficulty mode at the start of a game is chosen entirely by how many "cheats" you want to turn on.
  3. Roguelite option. One of the cheats could be resurrecting with similar character stats in the same starting place (or stats that improve based on past lives).
  4. Areas or parts of the game are brutally and stupidly difficult. They are possible to avoid with knowledge about the world. Or possible to beat with some of the cheats. Or are endgame challenges.
  5. Reactive world. Over one very long life or multiple lives watch as the world evolves. Demon factions take over if not stopped. Cataclysmic beasts destroy wide swaths of land. Beast tides sweep through human cities. Humanity paves over and extracts the hell out of all available resources in their area.

I just have this feeling that the lore of such a game could be like Dwarf Fortress adventure mode. A kind of cool organic story telling. I've thought about making the game as a dwarf fortress mod rather than its own standalone thing.

Its one of those true dream game ideas where it just keeps growing way out of proportion and obviously its a pipe dream cuz I just keep stuffing so many features in it. I likely wouldn't even be able to enjoy it that much if I made it, because someone would have to know the secrets. But part of me wants to find a way to use AI in the creation of it, and have it modable enough that I could build the system of the game, and then just input an AI mod folder that makes everything new and fresh for me.

Have you heard of The Matchless Kungfu? It's practically beat for beat what you're looking for, even if it's closer to Wuxia than Xianxia:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=o-4snPeCyWw

Another game of potential interest, Amazing Cultivation Simulator:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wJxM3POU92w

Warning- Sseth's videos are both incredibly funny and incredibly NSFW.

Awesome videos. I'd seen the amazing cultivator simulator one. And it is part of what makes me think this genre has untapped potential.

I had not heard of The Matchless Kungfu. It does sound of potential interest.

My dream video game is to get a Final Fantasy VII remake which is actually good. :(

Actually, this is why I'm hoping AI gets good enough to build complex software. I can never build something like that myself (I can program but I can't do music, 3D modeling, etc), but it would be neat if I can have AI build something like that for me someday.

I have! I enjoyed it quite a bit, though I did not enjoy the emphasis on dodge/parrying and wound up using a mod to make that easier. But that aside the game was quite fun and the story was very moving. Excellent game, I look forward to more from that team.

I’m hoping Ascent of Ashes lives up to the hype I have for it. Getting another real time with pause colony sim would be a dream come true, especially if it’s more focused on exploration and combat than Rimworld

I've been keeping tabs on that one. Ex-Combat Extended modders from Rimworld, one of the mods I simply can't play without. It turns the combat in the game from two retards with bent muskets shooting each other in a greased room after sunset into something with a semblance of realism. Unfortunately, the game had had a very rocky development. The previous publisher went bankrupt, the new one was only able to provide partial funding. They were forced to release into EA in a very barebones state, and it's simply not a very good day circa today. I remain cautiously hopeful, the idea has great potential.

There is real-time X-Com. X-Com Apocalypse, IMO the best official game out of all the X-Com games.

It wasn't released entirely finished (they cut a lot of content) but it was still very, very good.

I've heard about Apocalypse, but I've never seen anything beyond screenshots. I need to look up a good overview, I heard the lore went to some strange places.

Not really, no. It's an invasion by entirely different aliens, this time someone was messing around with dimensional portals and fucked up. There's actually one common element - you can find a certain alien race as prisoners in the other place, and it canonically takes place in the same setting.

Find a copy and play it, if you have time. Once you get used to the graphics, it is a very fine game. The real-time mode was quite good, some people hated it but I liked it. I actually wish you could have that in OpenXcom.

Oddly, since it was realtime, it felt so slow and repetitive or maybe I just got too involved with the faction wars of my sonsors and bogged down. I never really got into this one.

Civ/EU/CK/Total War hybrid

Dreaming up a game like this, I'd put the emphasis on it being a living world rather than a very complex, but largely static boardgame (you do touch on this with the fog of war bit, in a way).

Take playing "tall" in baseline EU4 - it amounts to stacking modifiers and clicking a button when you have the points; if you don't click, nothing happens. Compare to EU4+MEIOU - goods flow and populations rise, development increases along the trade routes, you can at most shape the flows. I love in particular how, with low state capacity and sky-high corruption (includes local, non-state interests), you initially are barely in control, and how you get to take this inefficient, inert society and get to build its momentum, rolling towards modernity.

Gimme a game that does that better, and preserves player agency.

One of the reasons I threw Civ into the mix is because I think the additional latency from LLM calls would be less of an issue if it was turn based. Hardly an insurmountable problem, you could phone home on in-game triggers or after X time in a real time game, but it would simplify things.

Age of Empires II, except terrain matters, troops don't immediately break rank and jump into a mosh pit when you click attack and walls are both tougher and more expensive, so you have to put your farms outside the city.

That sounds like Total War my guy, with the exception of the farms (maybe in Napoleon or Empire). Very different game, of course. I think Manor Lords might be relatively close to your vision.

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