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Video Game Thread
What are you playing? Are you having fun or just killing time?
This week I was able to sink quite a few hours into Deus Ex. I'm going to use spoiler tags because there's always someone who has not yet played the game but might want to do so.
Mostly Darktide. My brother only started recently, after it was mentioned on the Motte and subsequently I prompted him to. But he really took to it, and is playing at his usually very high level of time investment, ambition and skill, and I have a hard time keeping up with him! But that's for the better; I prefer being challenged over being able to cruise. Sadly this is leaving our usual gaming buddies somewhat behind; they're of the opposite disposition. I'm trying to get him to play Nuclear Option with me (even gifted him a copy!), but he refuses. His focus on Darktide is unbreakable.
I also gave Civ 5 another try, with the Vox Populi mod, and I'm finding it thoroughly disappointing. There are too many systems that are hidden away in menues, completely invisible from the main view. The main view itself is very wasteful with screen space and player attention. The UX as a whole is not to my taste. City-States are a complete miss for me; I find that they weaken the coherency of the game by introducing a completely separate class of pseudo-civilization that plays by different rules, and their quest-based interactions are straight out of the wrong genre as far as I'm concerned. I'm ambivalent on the wars: They are a slog thanks to a combination of one-unit-per-tile and short movement ranges - forcing players to either commit to wars of attrition in which units are sent into the grinder to inevitably perish and never retreat, or into maintaining a defensive posture in which units are rotated back out to recover. On the one hand, I think this is kinda neat; it slows most wars down and gives players time to actually observe, instead of just resolving in a few turns, and makes offensives a risky gamble. On the other hand, there often seems to be no real tactical solution; the only way forward is to outproduce the enemy and absorb losses. Overall I think Old World (a later successor to Civ4) has done it better, although Old World overcorrects and gives too large an advantage to the attacker. But in the end, I don't really want to play Civ5 in any case because I find it ugly. I'd rather be looking at Civ3, Civ4, Call To Power or Alpha Centauri. Civ5 has very drab, boring terrain combined with cartoonish units, an art deco UI, garish UI representations of units and buildings, and a fatal case of too damn many icons floating around in the map, many of which cannot be hidden.
Today will be the 1.0 release of Quasimorphosis. I ragequit my last mid-to-late-game campaign - a serious time investment! - when a quick trip to the asteroid belt and back gave the npc factions enough time to permanently out-tech me so that all missions became prohibitvely frustrating, effectively soft-locking me out of further progression. But the devs assured me that balancing and mechanical changes now allow players to claw their way out of such scenarios, so I'm carefully optimistic about trying it out agian, when I find the time.
I have hundreds of hours in VP. I was a lifelong Civ player (started w/ Civ2 when I was 10) up through VI, which I mainly experienced with an iPad. My days with VI was during a 10 year period where I had pretty much stopped playing any games other than a few things like iPad VI and Xcom. VI BNW on iPad I believe was a complete experience. And I was able to win a few games on Deity, at which point I felt like I had solved the game.
When I bought a new desktop pc a few years age I was going on a tear through big mods and came across VP. The attraction there was that it radically tuned up the difficulty, set me back to noble/prince, and became a new puzzle to solve. To me, it still retained the core Civ feeling, but designed for someone with 30 years of prior Civ experience. The complexity was a bonus, not a problem.
I had dabbled with Civ4 Realism Invictus during this period, but I bounced off hard. I was looking for something for Civ4 like VP. Something designed for an experienced Civ player.
About a month ago I got that Civ4 itch again and found Advanced Civ. This is a rebalance mod that keeps 80-90% of the vanilla machines, but add in a much improved AI, UI improvements, and a very slight textures update. I’m now completely hooked on Civ4.
In my current campaign, Nazi Germany (me) just declared war on Rome and successfully razed on city and we’re a few moves into enjoy territory marching on Rome. The Holy Roman Empire saw that I had nearly emptied my garrisons in Munich (border city) and attacked with a 12 unit stack. I reloaded to try again with a smaller warband marching on Rome and delt with Charlemagne just fine. Several turns later I took Rome, but as I did, Gilgamesh attacked my northern city of Frankfurt. I think I need to reload again and pump out more units to defend the rear before taking Rome. It’s unclear to me if the AI is declaring war due to my weakness, or because I’m getting too powerful if I Vasselize/destroy Rome. I’m hoping there is a solution here to salvage the game. This is on Prince difficulty btw.
All of this is to say is that the core mechanics of Civ are absolute pinnacle game design. Expand cities, capture luxury/strategic resources, make GDP/science, war with neighbors. This makes it even more baffling to me how badly Firaxis fucked up VII. I find every entry in series, except VII has value. My biggest issue is that the vanilla AI are intentionally designed to be pushovers when it comes to strategy. Vanilla Deity is the same, just with bigger bonuses.
It’s hard for me to understand how people with a lot of experience with 4x games in general or civ specifically can have fun with the stock difficulty. I need the mods to make the underlying systems become meaningful and engaging.
I can see why it’s not for everyone though. I recall that I found the base game V to be the worst offender from a mechanics and difficulty standpoint. That’s why VP is so meaningful to me.
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