biz

it was tense for me too... and then i did it for 30 hours and it was just repetitive

boring playstyles (i.e. staying back, moving in very small increments) seem to be the only way to win ironman (classic/impossible)

game's starting to make a bit more sense... some guy posted it

turning off ironman. i may never understand how the game actually works, but I'll be reloading instead of raging

if there are random bugs (shots going through cover, percentages being a lie) that should not happen, then the game is purely luck-based but if the damage is limited to the game being unintuitive and explained poorly, over time you'll be able to understand and manipulate the systems so that you can maximize your chances for favorable outcomes (without necessarily guaranteeing them)

is there a guide somewhere that explains the LoS / accuracy / shooting angles (i.e. how to actually play the game) i'm getting by on 'intuition' because I know real-world geometry, but the game seems really bad from that lens

i saw a xbox 360 controller option in the PC demo, so the consolized interface isn't necessarily bad. for things like camera rotation, controllers are often better than mouse/keyboard. this could be actually turn out awesome. firaxis is a great developer, but i hate to see them release half-assed civ games because they fail at AI, multiplayer, and balance. xcom sounds like something that they might actually succeed at.

Remember that "solving" the game probably involves winning often (whatever that means), but not winning all the time. I don't think anyone can argue that you can learn the game well enough to win every time. Every game might be winnable if you play it a certain way, but there's no way to know that unless you save + reload. What you can do is make educated decisions that maximize your chance of victory (if you look at a sufficiently large number of games at a time). It's a shame that they don't expose the specific information in the game, but it is exactly the same every time. For example, each encounter has a fixed probability distribution of outcomes, based on your high-level equipment and crew types. Each store has a fixed probability distribution of items. Each universe is procedurally generated (with a procedure that admittedly needs refinement). If it was random, then choice would be irrelevant and people wouldn't improve as they keep playing. It reminds me of Civ-like games which still rely on strategy despite random tribal village events, random maps, random combat, and random chance of punishment/reward for choosing to spend resources on X instead of Y. It's a fact that this kind of luck completely ruins many matches, and there are games that are completely impossible to win versus a competent opponent. But this randomness comes with irreplaceable benefits. My favorite is suspense. No game has been able to match that feeling in civ4 when the enemy is going for my city and I have no idea whether my force is enough to defend it. All I can do is watch as the turn timer winds down. I swear I get 120 beats per minute during those turns. it's probably not healthy... Anyways, FTL (with some basic balance + UI + information enhancements) would be quite awesome because it's so rare for a game's difficulty to depend entirely on making tough choices about how to spend resources. Luck is part of the system, but it isn't responsible for your overall skill. Your average score improves over time because you make smarter decisions and get a better idea of risk vs reward (through quest knowledge and game experience), not because you're getting better dice rolls as you play more and more. It's also nice that the game is easy to learn and that the process of improving is so enjoyable and rewarding and fast-paced. It's one of the few strategy games where you get better simply by playing the game the way it's mean to be played instead of by micromanaging excessively or by learning complicated rules and subsystems or by figuring out the quirks of some cheating AI.

I agree that FTL can be reduced to an optimization problem, just like every other strategy game. the difference is that FTL will still provide a challenge, whereas a typical strategy game will just have you hitting the win button for a dozen hours once you "solve" it. this is because FTL's threat model and risk reward equations work well, whereas every symmetrical strategy game is basically crippled by incompetent AI. I do wish FTL had more strategic variety and less randomness, but those are almost mutually exclusive in a game like this. FTL's unpredictability is the reason why it works. Without that, finding the "right move" would be too easy. I don't know if every game is winnable, but people improve as they keep playing it because experience is a crucial part of understanding the potential risks and the potential rewards. It's a welcome change from the typical "spend 50 hours learning the rules. then win every single match"

i finally beat this on my 47th game (playing on easy). for me, the first 20 hours of playing this game has done "just 1 more game" much better than any standard strategy game has done "just 1 more turn" I hate the lack of transparency and huge reliance on luck, but despite that it's the only singleplayer game I've stayed up til 6 AM playing. the decisions are way more interesting than optimizing some routine against incompetent AIs in a typical 4X Blindly boarding a drone without oxygen is a great surprise the first time, but trying choice A 10 times and getting a bad result every time is just game-ruining. There's a very strong case for just spelling out that it's a 90% chance of outcome A, 10% chance of outcome B and then letting the player weigh the risk against the reward. I think FTL is fun as a strategy game, but pretty poor as a narrative which makes me favor transparency. There simply isn't a large enough variety of interesting events to sustain a story after a few hours of playing it, especially when you are replaying the same encounters in the early levels over and over and over again. Consulting wikia during the game in lieu of a reference manual (like the Civiliopedia) just to see what decisions you are making reduces some of the frustration. At its core, FTL is a resource management game, and knowing the specifications and costs of weapons / drones is important to that decision-making process. The game's simplicity is awesome because it lets you learn the rules very quickly, but I found it confusing to keep track of which weapons were worth having without having the tables open. The game does a very poor job of making the "upgrades" feel like upgrades because the damage per power consumption often goes down. I think the game needs more customization / variety early on. Maybe randomizing the starting races of your crew or the starting weapons would be a nice mode. Right now you get that by playing different ships, but unlocking those is a very very very slow process. And some things are just too unbalanced. Getting bad luck or good luck shouldn't alter the game as much as it does.

Turn-based strategy developers are basically in this mode where they design an extremely incompetent AI and try to make up for it with an extreme amount of cheating The difficulty comes entirely from learning the unnecessarily complicated rulesets and then learning the AI's patterns. almost none of it is actually from making non-obvious and informed strategic decisions When players are upset at cheating, it usually isn't because of the cheating. If they hated the cheating, they would never pick that difficulty level in the game setup screen... It's because it negatively impacts what they really want out of the strategy game, which usually involves some combination of interesting decisions, challenge, and victory When someone is heavily invested in a strategy and it fails solely because the computer cheats, then the player is upset (eg. going for a wonder or religion in Civilization games) When the player actually achieves what he made the optimal sequence of moves trying to do, he isn't upset if the computer cheats. He might even feel a greater sense of accomplishment Players hate cheating opponents because the path to victory usually involves randomly manipulating and exploiting AI weaknesses instead of making informed decisions based on the cost/benefit analyses with which the game was designed. Completely closing off entire strategies and subsystems to the human is such bad game design... and it's so commonplace.

It's sad that the genre is still stuck on making competent AI and hasn't progressed towards making interesting opponents. it would be nice if more developers took the asymmetrical approach or actually prioritized AI, because they are completely failing with their current approach (in terms of game quality) most strategy games being made are still very symmetrical in terms of starting resources and abilities and goals, and the mechanics are still designed for competitive play in an adversarial setting (not like e-sports competitive, but competing in combat, competing for land/resources, competing for victory, etc.) gamers are in this odd situation where a typical strategy game is kind of useless once you learn how to play it. (oddly enough, a lot of games are also kind of useless until you learn how to play... that alone says a lot about the health of the genre) It should be the other way around, like in board games, which become way more fun after you learn the rules. the actual strategy game is the gap between learning the rules (boring chore) and mastering it (mindless execution). from a design level, the games are really good (imagine if the opponents were human), but that rarely translates successfully to singleplayer. There are some solutions though that don't involve giving up symmetry. The AI development could be outsourced. Community-driven AI probably won't work if you need an AI to ship with the game, but it's probably more efficient to have a team of AI specialists work on a game during the few weeks/months before release rather than to have each studio maintain its own AI group (which can't really specialize in AI because it isn't relevant during all phases of development). It doesn't help that so many strategy games are these low-budget passion projects that don't have an AI group. The game could be asynchronous. Instead of trying to plan moves for each opponent one by one in the fraction of a second between turns, they could do it while the player is making his move. this way, each opponent can think independently and therefore in parallel (utilizing our supercomputers or the cloud). (That's 100-1000x more thinking time. It's how 1 move ahead becomes 3 moves ahead) The AI could cheat. Developers use this as a quick-fix, but they tend to implement it poorly. It's probably because they haven't mastered the game and don't really know what to scale and what to leave untouched and how to do the scaling. Units moving in stupid ways is still a dumb AI, regardless of how many extra units there are.

So some people have some challenges getting into certain strategy games or deciding which ones to play. Could they be classified to assist discovery / accessibility ? Then people can look for games based on a variety of criteria: Similar mechanics, similar theme, different theme, similar genre, etc. More/less complex, slower/faster paced, more/less challenging, etc. better UI, more accessible, better graphics, better AI, etc. example query: Rise of Nations: similar mechanics, faster paced example output (maybe describing the relevance): Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, Starcraft, etc. if you want to play something relatively complex, you might be able to look for similar more accessible games that would reduce the learning curve would this be useful? anyone want to help populate it? could be as simple as a shared spreadsheet. don't really need all combinations of possible queries to work

The gathering and obstruction of information accounts for most of the strategy in RTS games. It's not very apparent as a mechanic, but it's the deciding factor in games when the micromanagement skills are about even. Fog of war works great, when it's not impenetrable like in a typical TBS. Espionage is probably the only method for turn-based games to incorporate those mechanics because their design tends to make scouting impossible. They are usually so defensive in nature, and don't really have the concept of a fast unit being able to live long enough to see what's going on. They tend to hide how workers are distributed, what cards a player has, what's inside cities, and other customizations. I think it could be done well if the game was designed for it instead of tacking it on at the end and trying to flesh it out by tacking on things like theft and sabotage.

Customization can actually reduce the learning curve. It's easier to learn about pizza ingredients and then order the pizza you want rather than memorize the 100 different names for all the different combinations. If hyperthrusters enable +1 speed for everything, then you know the exact effects of researching hyperthrusters. If they enable +1 speed for a subset of units, then you need to memorize. If there are 30 technologies just like this, then you have to memorize a lot or spend a lot of time looking ahead in a tree.

good luck with the pathfinding / AI

Civ5 is a ridiculously hard game to write AI for, especially compared to civ4. If I were to program it, I'd say civ5 would take 10 times as much time, and still not be as good. there's no clear objective. AI's aren't intelligent. they just try to maximize stuff, and when it isn't clear what to maximize, the AI is lost. in civ4 simply growing each city to its local happiness limit isn't too far from an optimal strategy. turns need to be fast. with AI programming, the challenge is always that there isn't enough time to think. combat has too much dependency and non-determinism. you need to see what happened with unit 1's attack before you can decide what to do with unit 2. this leaves very little processing budget for thinking. Stacks can just move in unison. Which specific units live or die isn't as important. turns are sequential instead of simultaneous. doing some planning during your turn and making final decisions between turns is a mess to program and manage. humans probably spend several minutes making turns. the AI needs to do it in a second or two. 1 unit per tile restrictions make movement harder to plan, and much slower to calculate. hexes make things much slower to calculate the game has lots of randomness/blindness. the AI cannot make many assumptions, so it's hard to assess its own strength. civ4 graphed out things like food/power/gold. the AI could at least know if it was ahead or behind. there's a simple decision tree there that results in at least some semi-intelligent behavior. in civ5, an AI has no clue whatsoever about what to focus on. planning is so important in civ5, and it's really hard to program and manage for an AI. things like civics are very AI-friendly. social policies are all about long-term planning. even stuff like which tiles to improve or build roads on or buy culture for are these hard decisions in civ5, but so much easier in civ4. basically everything makes gameplay more strategic makes AI programming that much harder. The strategy genre has been set behind so far because so many people confuse AI and difficulty. Figuring out how to have fun against cheating computers is game design, not AI design. Interviews/talks are full of nonsense where developers complain about how a good AI would be no fun to play against. An unbeatable opponent would be no fun to play against, but we are nowhere close to the point where improvements to the AI will make a game worse. Handicapping a good AI and making it play a role will almost always result in a better game than making a bad AI cheat. It also doesn't help that there's this misconception that all the online players are really enthusiastic about the multiplayer. A lot of them only play it because there's no AI, but they hate all the baggage that comes with multiplayer gaming. It's sad how I have to make a game myself just to play a good 4X ...

It's weird how civ is so many different things for so many different people. it makes me wonder what the designers actually thought they were making Here's my perspective (I'm kind of an expert in terms of competitive skill, haven't played civ 1 or 2 or smac): civ 3: this is the last one that actually functioned as a single player product for me, partly because of the "poor design". the mechanics weren't totally transparent, and there were a bunch of step functions for everything instead of linear formulas. very crude and inelegant there were pretty severe limits to excessive expansion. these solved some snowballing, albeit inelegantly AI behavior was kind of mysterious. playing well usually meant checking/trading every single opponent's "stuff" every single turn. This is "balanced" by how tedious it is to do (so you won't do it often) All this made it hard to play, which sounds bad. But that also means it's hard to play optimally which is good i don't know if this was intentional or things came together accidentally, but despite doing so many things to make me rage, the game functioned as a 4X civ4 singleplayer. this game is all about tile optimization and order of operations. I can do it easily. firaxis's AI can't. My power grows exponentially. AI bonuses are linear. There's too narrow a window between "impossible to lose" and "impossible to win" Successfully targeting that window doesn't depend on strategy, but on the luck of the game. i'm not waiting several hours just to see if the game might be playable... There may be a way for me to play this and actually have fun, but I bet it involves lots of long experimental games and writing a custom AI... sounds tedious civ4 multiplayer it's very standard 4X gameplay, but the rest of the genre is so far behind that civ4 doesn't even need to be very good to stand out For the first 1 or 2 hours it offers pretty good strategy. Choosing between growth / wonders / military / technology isn't completely obvious, but it's still pretty easy. But there is one huge problem. Player skill (strategy) isn't enough to win the game. Offense is around 2-3x more expensive than defense. It's really hard for a difference in skill to result in a sufficiently large force. This makes games drag on really long until that ratio can be upset by late-game units. Thus land quantity and quality plays a bigger role than skill. Starting resources are hugely important in the early game, and those are based entirely on luck. Land quantity is based largely on starting off well. Non team-based games are decided by who doesn't get sucked into an early war, which depends on the luck of who your neighbors are. I think the main reason this stays fun for so long despite the issues is because of the combat randomness. The feeling of suspense when there's a critical battle has not been reproduced by any other game. The early trade-off between safety and speed is awesome specifically because of the risk-reward equations. civ 5: this game had the best design of them all. it combined solid mechanics with choices that were non-obvious and actually meaningful. in civ4, fast production/growth let you do everything with slightly varying pros and cons depending on the order of operations. in civ5, the decisions have consequence and how you spend resources is important. it's less about tile luck and optimization, more about strategy civ5 also balanced exponential growth with social policies. there was now actually a disadvantage for mindlessly expanding. the person with the best starting position or weakest neighbors wouldn't automatically win the trade-offs of land vs policies and weak immediate bonuses vs strong delayed bonuses was the core of the game. this was more strategic than civ4's "pick whatever works best right now" approach i talk about this in the past tense, because that game no longer exists. the patches took away a lot of the balance that made these decisions so interesting. I think the problem was that people couldn't see the real design behind all the distractions (no AI, speed-based multiplayer, city-states, hexes, animated leaders) Firaxis hastily made huge gameplay decisions based on fan backlash and here we are. still no AI and an even shallower, speed-based multiplayer... Multiplayer (especially the competitive, punishing kind) presents a totally different perspective on the game mechanics. It's a painful way to play civ, but it's the only way to see the full extent and intricacies of the game's design. I'll remember civ5 as the great strategy game that lasted only a few weeks (literally, since steam's forced patching will never let us play the original game)