Talvieno wrote:This is good. It pretty well sums up my dislike of CK2 and, to a lesser extent, 4X games in general. I don't like games where you "fiddle around and hope you don't randomly die". Personally I think that's bad game design. Something went wrong there. It's not presenting enough info to actually be playable as a game, but rather as a "fiddle around" simulation.
4X games I dislike because of long stretches of "there isn't anything to do, so I guess we wait" punctuated with "this turn took half an hour to complete due to all of the necessary micromanagement". In a well-designed game, I feel like you should always have something to do - but never too much to do. Most 4X games fail at this rather hard. Stellaris does better for me because I always feel like there's something else to tweak - but if it comes down to it, I don't really "have" to tweak any of it; your empire trudges along without too many glaring problems on its own. (This is part of why I don't consider Stellaris a "true" 4X - and really, it isn't. It's a cross between 4X and grand strategy.)
If Endless Space 2 turns out to be an exception to this rule, I'd gladly play... however, given the turn-based format, I'm highly skeptical.
Yep, well-said. That's definitely a difficulty with turn-based. I find it stressful to think "ok, have I done enough this turn?? Maybe one more glance over the empire...". Whereas in something like Limit Theory, time is time. Spending time analyzing how your projects are doing is time not spent doing something else. I actually find that more relaxing, since you can never actually hope to achieve 'optimal' time usage. It doesn't even make sense, because continuous time is always a trade-off. Compare with turn-based, where time
isn't a trade-off...you could, conceivably, do everything under the sun in one turn, which means there's more of a concept of 'optimality.' And I play games to
escape from my own perfectionism, not to feed it
I actually had that problem
more with Stellaris than I did with ES2, turn-based-ness aside. When you think about it, the ability to accelerate time (as in Stellaris) is not so different from turn-based in the sense that you now have the option to try to optimize your time. You
could play a whole game on 1x time. But dear god would that be painful. I guess this isn't a problem in multiplayer? To be fair, I'm sure Stellaris MP is a lot more fun. But I love my SP games, and ES2 makes the SP experience fun.
Oh, and I think
all games of this scope should have automation facilities to alleviate tedium. Which is why I
really appreciate ES2's planet automation. You can select a 'focus' for the planet and let the AI do what it thinks is best. It actually does a pretty darn good job, especially once you've got the planet 'reasonably' established. This is really nice since you basically don't have to worry about your well-established systems, you can focus your time on your current war, or colonization effort, or whatever...and hit 'next turn' without fearing that you're going to be demolished because you haven't put enough time into microing every crevice of your empire.
I desperately hope Stellaris gets some kind of automation help (last time I played it didn't have anything...has that changed?) I spent
way too much time looking at planet tiles trying to think about how I'm going to power my next research station
I actually find Stellaris to have quite a bit more micromanagement than CK2. Am I doing something wrong?
Still need to carve some time out to play Factorio. Maybe this weekend.