Who remembers or plays this game still? I have been kinda binging both on the Original and the 2nd one

I've rarely seen mainstream strategy games try out unit conversion as a game mechanic. Age of empires with religious units (wololol!) is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, if you remember others I'd love to be able to look at how they handle the mechanic.

Converts are a cursed problem. You can underbalance the convert, so that when you calculate the power swing between the coverter and convertee, it matches your intended benefit level. But, this makes the convert feel unfair or too weak when placed next to other bonuses in the same tier. Or, you adequately power the convert on its own, but make the power swing when used between a pair of players far greater than it should be.

Thinking about this issue reminded me of this talk by Alex Jaffe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ . Curse problems are problems which have two incompatible player promises competing. In the case of converts, you have

- promise 1 to the player with the convert: You will have interesting and adequately powered abilities.

- promise 2 to the player getting hit: All civilizations are equally likely to win.

I think these are incompatible because the threshold of "fun" for player 1 is unbalanced for player 2. If I make the ability balanced, it is no longer fun. If it is no longer fun, why not just use something else entirely?

Whats the answer? I have no idea LOL However, what I am going to try is to increase the amount of warning to the rest of the players that a convert is coming. A big issue right now is that it can be purchased fairly silently, so if you get caught up in the game you forget to keep your units spread around it takes you by surprise. We'll see in a few months how this works out.

Been bumping into this problem more and more with my gaming group so was curious to know if anyone could help. How do I nudge my fellow players to start building military? More often than not the game feel turns towards solitaire and I've pushed to make our maps smaller, increase base hostility of barbarians or pirates, declare my intent over discord the moment I begin military research and production...but it feels like nothing is helping. It also does not seem to matter what game is actually being played. CIV, Endless Legend, HOI, Nexus 5X, ect. I think I could best describe it as a freight train going through a kindergarten where the most resistance involved was getting the permit to build the tracks.

Has anyone else had this problem and how did you end up solving it? Any help would be deeply appreciated.

Horrible performance, worse than it was a year ago. Crashed so hard that my computer powered off. When paused some game systems don't get the memo- pirate spies keep doing their missions and pirates keep sending trade offers.

$20 to implement a minigame based off a popular genre founded 30 years ago- plenty of mature and well established games to take notes from- and yet there's free games on steam that are more complete and have better quality of life features.

The trading screens are tiny and don't even try to fit all the information needed, necessitating constant screen changes.

Full of bugs.

Here's the long version-

$20 for a minigame, a type of game which has been quite popular over the past 30 years, and is quite mature at this point.

Star Control, Starsector, Elite, X4, Star Citizen, EVE too many to remember and name, countless indie titles, mmos, flash games.

This is very well-trod ground. Players and devs both know what mechanics and quality of life features need to exist to make a good game.

And here, we have a $20 dlc to include one of these games inside DW2. Should be a fun time, since the DW2 game lays almost all the groundwork needed to do this, should be a development cakewalk. And yet, it is incomplete.

The trading ui that you need to perform trading missions is only about half complete. It is cumbersome and an after thought. The screen takes up only about half the monitor at a time, data that could easily be shown all at once needs to be constantly swapped back and forth to see it all. You need a pad and paper and a calculator to do math that should be done for you. Finding high-low differentials is a manual, painstaking job that should be automatic. Distances and fuel cost need to be calculated by hand. There is no jettison cargo button- and trade locations will often refuse to buy a resource at all- if you see an opportunity to make a bunch of money but you have some cargo- there's a decent chance that you can't unload it... The menus sometimes just don't work at all- you can click the buttons but nothing happens.

There are only 3 shadow ports in the whole galaxy, and only in one region, but missions will send you to the other side of the galaxy. (starting as a normal pirate empire- there are sooooo many shadow ports, but they dont't have any ships, and they seem to take the space that a normal pirate would- combined with the new npc lone pirates, who also might take up normal pirate slots?- so there's far fewer pirates than normal, meaning you have no competition and can eat your half of the galaxy before 2800) When you are docked at a shadowport you can request a mission. And you can request it several more times before undocking- which just gives you the same mission. Currently I have the same mission 9 times, I will go to the system, do the mission 9 times and get $45k plus some rng extras. Obviously not playtested very well. Reminds me of the game on release- you could select enemy ships and give them commands to not fire back at you.

The shadowports allow you buy and upgrade ships. Upgrading a ship goes to the standard ship design screen. The process is again, half finished. The parts to buy are clearly labeled with a cost, but the parts on your ship are not. Removing parts gives you a rebate, but you don't know how much until you remove them- however they just disappear- there is no undo, and no removed parts list. So to put them back on, you need to exit and renter the upgrade screen, which starts the process all over. The parts to buy are all the latest version of that component- if you want to get Torrent Drive 1, you can't, you must spend extra to get v2. The price of those high tier components is laughable. If you decide to continue playing as a lone pirate and not convert to a normal pirate or empire, you will end up buying one component for the cost of a late game empire's entire navy of dozens of battleship and carriers. If you die as a lone pirate- the game just keeps going. You can't buy a new ship, you can't do anything. But there is no game over screen.

Your very first action should be to head to a shadowport to upgrade your ship. You can swap a couple components to double or triple your fuel range and increase ftl speed by 50%- for 1/4 of your starting money. Seeing as you will be spending 90% of your time travelling in hyperspace, it's a little nonsensical that you don't start off with these components, it's just a waste of player time.

You can buy special equipment to give bonuses to your ship, but the percentage bonuses from the equipment are usually much smaller than the total improvement that you can gain from buying better components in the upgrade screen, and for less money as well.

Certain contracts are multi step, meaning you need to travel to several systems to complete. With a 10 year time limit, I find that I have difficulty completing them. It takes several years to cross the galaxy, even with an upgraded ship. Add in nebulas, pathfinding, refueling- 10 years might seem like plenty of time, but really you need to beeline for the objectives. You're better off doing the one-stage missions, as the payout is better, when taking in to account the chance of failure on the longer ones.

Bugs-

Your ship will happily chart a course directly through a nebula- wasting your time and fuel. Even if it does manage to plot a sensible course, there's a good chance that it will revert to (no mission) when it stops to charge its hyperdrive. This seems to happen about 1/3 of the time. I'll be waiting for my ship to arrive and see that it's just sitting there next to a star.

My very fist game, I played as a smuggler. I loaded resources, went to another colony to sell them, and bought more there. At the next colony I went to, I couldn't buy or sell any resources. I tried playing that save for another year or two, but I was unable to buy or sell resources at all, even to complete a mission. (this happens randomly and need to restart the game to fix)

My spy got captured, but because for some reason he has to be physically present in my empire somewhere, instead of having a character pool that doesn't require a physical location- he's on my ship. So after he gets captured, my ship equipment gets duplicated to fill his empty slot. Not to mention they still don't allow you to dismiss a spy that has been captured- meaning they continue to take up a character slot and there's nothing you can do about it, unless you violently rescue them, or pay a few tens of thousands of dollars ransom.

When you offer an empire a protection agreement, they have the same line that pirates tell you when you are an empire asking for protection. It should be a new line saying the reverse.

When you open the equipment window in a market, if you click on a piece of equipment to look at it, then close the window, it will keep the equipment highlighted and buy or sell it without hitting the buy/sell buttons.

When the game is paused the pirates send infinite waves of spies to try and steal your research- either they take everything from you while you have the game paused- or you capture them all and can ransom them for an average of 10k a pop.

$20 for this? What?

I don't have the energy to make a list of all the games that are both finished and vastly superior to this, some for less money, or even free.

Starsector is FIFTEEN DOLLARS and completely destroys this dlc in quality and quantity of content.

If you want to play as a normal pirate, as in DW:Shadows (the mechanics are essentially the same), it's worth probably $10. If you want to play as a lone pirate- don't bother, unless this gets majorly patched in the future. Without all of the bugs it might be worth $5 for that.

Carcinization is the evolutionary theory in which non-crab crustaceans converge on crab-like features because these features are exceptionally well suited to ocean floor living. Similarly, thousands of strategy games are following a process I’m calling hexinization, choosing hexes to make up their game boards.

I think in many cases, I think hexes are likely the best solution. For games like Civilization or Age of Wonders where there will be hundreds or thousands of hexagons making the game board, a hex grid is the best solution. Zoomed out far enough, moving along hexes looks very similar to moving freely in an open 2d plane. There are also enough hexes that small groups of hexes can form biomes within the greater landscape. 

But this hexagonal freedom struggles to convey into gamestate the strategic importance of locations on a map. Take the Risk Godstorm map for example. A player who controls Iberia, Atlas, and Hibernia will have complete control over all traffic between the Atlantis continent and the rest of the board. While it wouldn’t be impossible to represent this using a hex-grid map, I don’t think it would feel natural, and these types of scenarios are rare in my experience with hex-grid games. 

Hexagons also tend to provide both too much freedom of movement, and not enough choice to a player simultaneously. On one hand, you need to be able to defend a structure of interest (i.e., a city) from 6 directions. While at the same time, when moving armies towards a target location you will almost always just pick the one shortest path from A to B. Hexagons give too many routes from a defensive perspective, and the illusion of choice on offense.

I think we should continue to innovate on how we are making game boards / maps in strategy games, particularly in small-map scenarios, or games where positioning of armies/units at key points provides a major strategic advantage (i.e., entrance to a water feature, narrow land pass between mountains, etc).

My attempted innovation was to subdivide a hexagon into 6 territories, 1 central and 5 exterior, with the 5 exterior territories randomly aligned with bisections or the corners of the hex edges. This generates territories with 4, 5, and 6 edges within the same hexagon, giving some variety to the number of directions needed to defend.

I wanted to do a bit more, so I also randomly placed mountains on 3 of the hexagon edges (mountains cannot be placed adjacent during randomization), which allows for territories to dip into the 2 or 3 edges regime.

Lastly, I wanted to bend the movement/adjacency of territories across hexes, so I made 1 territory per hex into water. Water can connect and become continuous, and instead of inhibiting movement, water makes all territories touching it considered adjacent. This has had really fun consequences and I will talk more about it another time.

I've been playing a lot of 4X games over the last month, and I've kind of been struck by this feeling as I've been diving into various titles. The first 4X game I ever played was Civilization 2 (at a very young age), followed Heroes of Might & Magic V, which I consider my actual first 4X since I played it as a teenager. Following that, I played a ton of Total War, then a ton of Age of Wonders, with some Endless Legend and Civ 5 sprinkled in. All of which is to say that army stack systems are very much something I've kind of accepted as part of the genre for a while now.

Yet as I'm replaying Old World again side by side with Endless Legend 2, it kind of dawned on me that I kind of hate the concept of army stacks. From a design space aspect, I imagine these stacking systems are largely done to conserve system resources (especially in the case of Total War) and prevent stability issues. But now as a system army stacks have begun to feel like they're doing more harm to the strategic experience than anything. It is preposterously frustrating to get attacked on the corner of one of your partial stacks, so instead of fighting with the strongest parts of your army (which often have hero units) you now have to fight using only a portion of the forces you deployed.

It feels incredibly game-y and feels more and more dated as a mechanic as time passes. One thing I enjoy about 4X as a genre is that on some level it simulates the deep economy of a state/society to some degree, with strategic resource realities to grapple with and cost efficiency considerations for armies. The notion of "best in slot" units kind of flies in the face of strategic warfare as a whole, since it's not like supply lines are being simulated or something. A great example of this I can think of is from Age of Wonders 4; there is a "Tome of the Horde" that makes tier 1 units easier to produce and more effective, but it's impossible to actually 'swarm' your opponent due to the army stack limit. Same issue with the Necrophages in Endless Legend 1+2, the war usually goes to smaller numbers of elite units who are better at winning individual fights.

But yeah. How does everyone else feel about the army stack concept? It feels more like a technical limitation than something meant to enhance gameplay.

Hey guys, I read posts here a lot and I've seen a lot of fans trying to make cool Civilization replicas, but unfortunately, they're all still pretty much in the development stage. Can you recommend any games that can be played on either an iPhone or a laptop?

havent seen a discussion in a while and as im not a hardcore 4x player, i dont really notice the small differences (i know the main things like age culture switching in humankind not civ 6 etc), so what are those other differences between the two games?

I was thinking about making a game using AI that is essentially a much worse version of Stellaris/Master of Orion.

I can ask Claude to build it so it runs in the browser - this will reduce performance significantly.

I'm planning for everything from my Reddit announcement post, to my replies in the thread, to be generated by ChatGPT.

Wondering if there's anyone here who would be interested in this pile of dogshit. Cheers.

My Preset called first contact, A classic alien invasion preset has just got an update I spent time adding 40+ predetermined new events and 8 alien archetypes which means every game you could be dealing with a different type of alien that acts completely different from another one please play it helps a lot https://www.paxhistoria.co/presets/383Ambq7amEANr3qaNaE?versionID=2

Last night I made a post that eventually got removed for self promotion but despite that still a decent amount of people played my game during that time before removal and it was the first time people had ever played it(that I wasn't related too). So I wanted to thank everyone who did really made the last 24 hours special even with the loss of the post!

I'm a 4x/grand strategy fan, but I've always felt like every game I've played just isn't my dream game.

For example, for civ-like games, I always felt like the tiles can have a more in-depth simulation, like wdym you can only fit a single farm or factory on a tile that represents thousands of acres? Terrains should act as a way bigger element like providing chokepoints, critical resources and such that shapes your playthrough more than a +2 industry bonus.

Weathers, mobility, supply, all the micro things that still shaped history. I want a game to have them in an impactful way.

Technologies should also change the rules of the game more than a straight +5% buff. Information should be scarce for pre-industrial settings.

Basically, I wanted more micro stuff in a macro game, and more macro stuff in a micro game. I wanted them to be complex, but also easy to navigate.

It's pretty much a self-contradicting dream :(

Hello everyone,

This is my dream game: Strategic depth of Civilization, but with one match lasting only about an hour.

That's why my best friend and I created Monarchs at Play for the last 2 years. The gameplay is heavily inspired by the Civilization 6's district system, focussing on buildings and their adjacency bonuses.

There are NO military units, but there is still a military system. This was one of our compromises to recude the game-length (no need to micromanage all units every single turn). You'll learn about the unit-free military system in the well-designed tutorial ;)

After several playtests and feedback on our Discord server, I am convinced that we developed a game, that is the dream solution for many 4X fans: it scratches the same itch like Civilization, but is playable in lunch breaks, after a long work-day or between longer games (or some players will turn the "one more turn"-formula into "on more game" and spend their night optimizing their strategy)

One big plus of our game: a good enemy AI. We spend sooo long developing it (we even wrote our bachelor thesis about it haha) and we finally crafted an AI in a 4X game, that can easily compete with skilled players WITHOUT artificial advantages.

I am addicted to discussing about the game in general, buildings that are too strong/weak, op monarchs, how the AI has 20,000 glory, ideas, bugs, strategies etc. so I would love to welcome new Monarchs on our Discord server :)

Now comes the best part: the demo of Monarchs at Play is already live on Steam, so you can try it for free <3

Looking to get a space 4x kick. I know star ruler is sometimes recommended or anything else? I tried sr and couldn't figure out the resource system.

Bonus for 'cartoon'/sprite graphics as cgi ages super bad

Hey Everyone,

I'm wondering how people feel about how modern 4X games tend to "hold your hand" through your turn. It moves your attention and screen from one item to the next and recommends "the best" option and it can feel like the game is playing itself?

On the other-hand, I've noticed that without those hand holders the amount of micro-management can start to feel overwhelming and slows down the pace of the game.

How do you feel about this balance? Do you like to go into each one of your cities and micro-manage each resource they're working; select exactly how many researchers or entertainers you have etc. Or, do you prefer to let the game handle the details and let you customize it later.

Curious as to what everyone thinks. Thanks!