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Recently I've been having a good time with ICBM and Capitalism Lab. The former is a small indie game where you balance between researching technologies (satellites, two kinds of radar, SLBMs, ABM or MIRV tech) and producing those weapons, so you can dish out more megadeaths than you take.
Capitalism lab is probably the most detailed and intricate consumer run-your-own business game. Build farms, factories, stores, trade stocks, research products, borrow money and advertise, import and export goods between cities... It's very much a creature of the early 2000s graphically but I find it quite charming.
Both have a couple of mods that add huge amounts of extra content. In the case of Capitalism Lab's 'Real World Mod', too much content. Does there really need to be separate categories of 'cars' 'luxury cars' 'cabrio cars', all using the same inputs? Are pistachios, oysters and ducks really needed as agricultural goods? In ICBM, there is Dawn at Midnight and Parabellum that adds armies and special forces, superweapons, ASW helicopters... The AI can't really use armies and they don't really fit the style of the game - ICBM is about nukes and nukes hard-counter slow, unstealthy, vulnerable armies. These mods are fun to play but they're not a really coherent experience.
Nevertheless, I think it's a sign of quality for a game to get people so invested in it that they make all this extra stuff for free. I think the difference between a soulful game and a soulless one lies in how dedicated people get about them. For instance if you go to the Civilization V or VI Steam Workshop, it's a barren wasteland in terms of high-effort content. There are a few quality of life mods, things that add a little extra flavour, cultural unit packs, a few techs here or there. One half-baked Game of Thrones mod for Civ V.
None of it holds a candle to Civ IV. There are true total conversions there - stuff like Realism Invictus, History Rewritten and the Fall From Heaven family that stripped out and replaced every unit and technology along with half the game's mechanics in a thoughtful and intriguing way. And then there's the final boss of bloat, Caveman2Cosmos! They put in buildable aquariums, Cislunar O'Neill Cylinders and Tamed Llamas into a 4X strategy game that's really just supposed to be about 6,000 years of history on Earth, not hunting prehistoric animals or going to the Big Bang to start the universe. It's basically unplayable in its slowness and complexity yet it still inspires awe in that real people thought a game was so good that it needed all this extra stuff. Better that a game entrance and mystify the somewhat-autistic people who make these works for free than mildly entertain the great masses of the people, those of us who'll never make high-effort mods.
Anyway, that's my two cents on soulfulness in video games.
I'm drunk and didn't read half of this. Not that it will stop me from making a comment..
Civ 4 is indeed the big boy pinnacle of the Civ series. I spent many a shift reading Sulla's comments on the civfantatics forums over 15 years ago. The consolisation of games continues its steady march, crushing the thinking man's games under it's treads.
Sulla's wise words are neatly compiled here for a final, damning condemnation of what went wrong: https://sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html
He's right on many things, but I'm not sure I agree with him on the penalty point. At least for me, Civ4 games always go through the same trajectory: Early game is boring( unless I play a fantasy mod where exploring is actually dangerous & interesting) because nothing much is happening. Mid game I have the best time because there is enough to do every turn but still almost every decision matters. Late game is just tedious because I'm spamming cities, buildings, units, etc. Every mouse click is on its own unimportant, but I still have to do it because collectively it matters, and without penalties it's actually mostly optimal.
Penalties, if done right, minimize this problem: Spamming isn't optimal anymore since you only want to do it if the benefits are greater than the penalties. As he points out himself, city maintenance from civ4 was a great way of limiting city spam without removing it, and what's that if not a penalty? Likewise, "I'm penalized for something good" isn't a good argument either imo; Ideally you want several different viable paths, and without penalties you end up with boring obvious plays way too often. I like when I have to make a situation-specific call for every city whether it's worth it to connect it (yet), and this decision comes up different for different cities. Without a penalty, it's just "of course I do".
Did you know that there is a rally point function and 'all cities build this in queue' function? Alt-click cities bar to select all cities, click what you want them to build and right click a tile for them to rally there. Once I discovered this late-game with 20-30 cities became much more enjoyable.
I like early game because I aim to start a war by turn 75 and conquer a civilization. Or sometimes I'm trying to grab wonders and eco up really quickly.
City maintenance can be quite oppressive early on, when I've just conquered another civ. But I suppose it has to be to stop me snowballing incredibly quickly, taking another couple of civs. If things have investment costs to balance the rewards, that's alright. It's generally good to have more cities in 4, albeit they take time before they pay off their investment. But in 5 it's suboptimal to have more than 4 cities, as I understand it, due to Tradition's bonuses. Tall play dominates.
I think Sulla is unhappy about how V isn't so much about investment costs as fixed or proportionate costs. Cities make each tech or social policy more expensive in perpetuity, there are going to be many cities that can never pay off their science/culture debt. In addition to mere opportunity cost you get endless costs.
Yes, although I admittedly barely use it. Maybe I'm a bit too much of a perfectionist, so I tend to micromanage every city. Could be that I need to put more work into optimizing the ratio of suboptimality vs micromanaging tediousness more.
You still frequently click through like 30 turns with nothing happening except exploration though, and I don't like the ratio of unit speed vs tech advance in the faster modes.
Maybe it changed, but Sulla in that rant is complaining about the opposite? According to him, spamming cities in 5 is always strictly optimal since happiness doesn't scale appropriately - you only need to make sure that they don't grow too much, and only have a limited number of big cities. But smaller cities are always worth it, the opposite of Civ4.
In general though, I've increasingly grown somewhat disillusioned with 4X games. Imo the real reason why empires had a limited size historically is the limitations of army movement speed and communication speed, so that past a certain distance from the capital any state was de-facto independently managed, even if officially subordinated. From there, true independence often wasn't a large step anymore, and trying to micromanage at a distance leads to so much dysfunctionality that it speeds up the process if anything. Even worse, Emperors of large empires may have a decently sized crownland that they personally manage but are really mostly wrangling a bunch of subordinates. If you don't do that appropriately, or you are just plain unlucky with a bunch of spoiled brat troublemaker heirs of your originally competent subordinates, everything falls apart fast. Happiness, upkeep etc. increasingly seem to me like extremely stupid, gamey workarounds to the problem, and as a result large empires are always either way too stable in games, or the mechanics for instability also feel random and gamey. Only CK at least attempts to simulate internal politics. But the AI isn't really there yet to consistently make games fun that force you to set up subordinates. CK is fun for a few runs until you understand the blind spots of the AI, and then it also increasingly feels silly.
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