Tinto Talks #1 - February 28th 2024

[Dongerino]

Immersion and a believable world:
Something I've always wished about EU4 and would love for notEU5 is the map feeling big and vast. The distance between Europe and the Americas or China should physically feel huge.
As for which already released game makes me feel immersed, I'd have to say Victoria 2. I love seeing capitalists building factories and railroads on their own. If notEU5 were to have a pop system, I'd love for it to be intertwined with the estate system, where nobles build stuff and accumulate their own wealth, while the merchants grow in importance as the game progresses and your trade income grows. Merchant republics could start with this flipped over, with an already powerful and established merchant class, whose pops behave differently. Of course, a peasant pop that is influenced by occupation, and so on... I think that's a way to make the game feel alive and organic.
Which game has the most replayability?
EU4 of course. Rich in flavour events and vastly different starts and all the different achievements to go for.

 

[VVolfmaster]

To answer the question of which games I think work well with the pillars mentioned by you:
1. Most of the RPG genre - anything from The Elder Scrolls franchise to CD Project Red games is believable, immersive and replayable as long as there are story choices along the way and the games themselves are interesting enough. Those are of course usually massive projects and, supposedly, a different genre than you would like to focus on.
2. Civilization franchise - here the replayibility comes from randomness, immersion from world generation, AI/players and choices, and world from generation as well. But this kind of a game is already being adressed by Paradox
3. Mechanically difficult games or games with hard levels such as Cuphead, Manor Lords or even Dark Souls. Something about difficulty deags some players into those games and keeps them wanting to improve and optimize their playstile. It is actually what got me into Eu4 back in the days before mission trees - wanting to optimize my gameplay.
4. Mount&Blade Bannerlord and Warband (and similiar games though i can't name any) - the set (also a map!) is given to a player with a stroy already inside it. You as a customizable hero have to fit into it and somehow resolve it with the ability to play literally almost any way you want to. The battles (which can be looked upon in correlation to the Total War franchise) have elements of randomness and strategy. With the amount of impact you have on the world as a player you ought to be immersed, yet the world changes regardless of your actions anyway. And these games are highly replayble with the addition of great modding potential!

 

[Lys91]

VICTORIA 4 CONFIRMED!

TBH, I would love this.

 

[Caracus]

Many truths in that opening DD and there are a couple of things that resonate well with me. I strongly endorse the attempt to make the world feel realistic and grounded upon reality. As a lack of that are some of the worst aspects of my favorite titles.

Vic 3:
For example Victoria 3 artificially pushes pop growth to high SoL in order to gamify the system and to encourage those goals of high SoL. While in reality this early pop growth is exactly the reason social issues and food demands explode and create the struggle or why massive wars became possible. By shifting the focus from realism to incentification they break this cause and effect which snowballs into multitude of nalance issues as we only have the historical causality available after which we can model. Also for such a deeply rooted pop simulation they entirely lack pop pyramids and related effects so wars and other things are a lot less significant and indiscriminate.

EU4:
My biggest gripe with Eu4 is its lack of a pop system. It does not need to be as complex as Victoria 3 but it should be able to model prosperity and devastation and its effects on power through population over the centuries. Creating manpower out of nothing is a sin and so is this arbitrary construct of development.
You spend all these years map painting ehile Eu4 should be the game where you form an identy and have a long lasting impact on the land. Basically you take the malleable ck3 realms and turn them into something on its path to modernity.

Stellaris:
Its a great game that is its own biggest enemy due to bad performance and a lack of deeper space economy simulation that truly reflects space mining and resource aquisition. Habitable world should be rare meaningful gems and not just "another guaranteed planet"

To sum it up; the lack of detail or foundation is often the cause for much bigger gripes down the line.

I would have loved to give my feedback to some of these things earlier before the mechanics were set in stone and all that was left to discuss were tweaks on conrete that has already set.

 

[AndrewT]

First of all Tinto stands for “Paradox Tinto”, the studio which we founded in Sitges in 2020, with a few people moving down with me from PDS to Spain. We have now grown to be almost 30 people.

That's bigger than the whole of Paradox was when I first started working with you!

 

[Dimo87]

Believable World

You should be able to play the game and feel like you are in a world that makes sense, and feels rich and realistic. While not making the gaming less accessible, features should be believable and plausible, and avoid abstraction unless necessary.

This may sound strange, but the most believable world to me is Don't Starve. You have to find food and/or grow it or you'll die of hunger, storage is limited, things are incredibly deadly without the proper equipment, and your sanity is tested and can go down. The world is made up, but everything within it makes sense. I would expect to see giant eye stalk creatures in a world like that while also not sacrificing real issues regarding survivability. They have stuff in that game that isn't always useful or that good, but it just makes sense that they are there. Not everything in the world has to be useful, sometimes something interesting can really fill out the world. It's also as challenging as being thrust in that scenario would actually be which is more believable than a cake walk that some PDX games can sometimes end up being.

Setting Immersion

Our games thrive on player imagination and “what if” scenarios. We ensure both a high degree of faithfulness to the setting which will give a “special feel” to the game. We will strive to give this game the most in-depth feeling of flavor possible.

It's not perfect but HOI4 and it's focus trees is what first comes to mind. You get tons of what if's and some you control and others are chosen by the ai. I legit never know what the ai is gonna do and sometimes it can screw me over or be beneficial, but I can never perfectly plan for it. The newspapers are great at telling you about big changes in the world and many times the map can reflect that.

Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.

Rogue-likes are the main games that come to mind. Particularly Hades, Balatro, and Slay the Spire. In most of these games, what you get at the start determines how you want to make your build. So even if you have a broken or go to build you're not always gonna get it, but it gives you a chance to try something new out and literally develop and discover new strategies as you go. I think reacting to what you're given is far more interesting than picking a specific path and following it. There's more chaos and thinking on your feet when reacting.

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

Believable World

You should be able to play the game and feel like you are in a world that makes sense, and feels rich and realistic. While not making the gaming less accessible, features should be believable and plausible, and avoid abstraction unless necessary.

Setting Immersion

Our games thrive on player imagination and “what if” scenarios. We ensure both a high degree of faithfulness to the setting which will give a “special feel” to the game. We will strive to give this game the most in-depth feeling of flavor possible.

These two points are too entwined for me to treat separately. What follows will be a semi-structured section covering this combined topic.

It wasn't Spain that landed in America, it was Christopher Columbus, who was funded by Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, and named the first settlement after the queen. It wasn't Spain that defeated the Aztecs, it was Hernan Cortes. Not the Polish led the charge at Vienna, it was King Sobieski III with his Winged Hussars. Not the British beat the French at Trafalgar, it was Nelson who won the day. Not the French conquered Europe, it was Napoleon. And he wasn't stopped by the British, but by the 1st Duke of Wellington.

Events are driven by people, and history remembers people more than the flag they fought under. Deeper characters would be something to look forward to in any potential PDX game.

To this I say: by people, not by famous faces. That history remembers only a handful of famous faces is a reflection of the limited capacity of the human brain. It creates the stock standard fantasy of "if only we went back in time to kill Evil Name, we could have stopped Disastrous War before it happened". When in reality, a great many individuals were involved and if it wasn't one slightly special person, it would have been another whose face would be associated with the social situation that drove the events.

So having said that, the players also have those same limited human brains. There is desire for seeing famous faces with names attached to certain things. If those faces become interchangeable, e.g. because all they really are is a bag of stats and weak modifiers, then there is dissatisfaction (immersion break). Limited human brains want the simple abstraction that "this face is special, it has to be this face who will do the best job for here" applies at the geopolitical scale of GSGs. Indeed, that rule of thumb works in real life for small teams. It worked in the era that Crusader Kings covers: a small team of nobles given all the power of the state so sentimental things like family relations became legal bedrocks for which people killed over. For later eras, the irony for the GSG developer is that this unrealistic abstraction is what limited human brains consider to be believable.

Assuming Project Caesar is a historical GSG, a fictional character thrown together by a few dice rolls narratively cannot compete with a historic character due to the level of detail the latter has. Even if the game doesn't represent all that detail, the players will feel they know the historic character a lot better. But there aren't enough historic characters to explore alt-history scenarios (which is the bread and butter of replayability: not being railroaded). That makes me think characters should not be mechanically important for many historic eras. Sure, famous faces and names can still be included but be clear they only showed up because Something happened at the right time and place.

especially the games featuring strong emergent narratives like Dwarf Fortress/Rimworld have shown me that to get that feel of a living, "real" world things need to be taken a step further.

There's a title I hadn't expected to see here. Dwarf Fortress goes down the path of So Much Detail that strange things happen and the players get immersed just figuring out the causality of it. For those who don't know, this is a game that used ASCII graphics. The Steam version has tiles-based graphics so new players aren't scared away, but it was originally a game where you see a brown 'd' and just know this is a puppy which you ordered to be tied (with a finely crafted cave spider silk rope bought with leftover change from the merchant caravan) to the entrance to spot kobolds sneaking in. A few red commas nearby would draw your attention that there's been blood spilled. Hover over the details and you'd see whose blood it was.

A couple illustrative examples of So Much Detail:

Vomiting Cats

After a patch, cats spontaneously died while vomiting. Everyone (including the dev) was collectively trying to get to the bottom of this mystery. It turned out, it was because cats licked themselves clean. The patch had introduced taverns. Dwarves would carelessly spill their booze on the floor while enjoying time off (the player has no control of this beyond having the tavern be set up). This left puddles of booze (plump helmet ale, because you wanted some staple food and alcohol without worrying about above-ground seasons). The cats would walk in those puddles, thus mark their paws as dirty. Cats clean by licking themselves, this counts as ingesting the liquid. The cats got so drunk from a few licks, they vomitted in their sleep and choked. ASCII graphics, so the only way you can tell this is happening is by reading text descriptions of the right tile at the right time.

This was amusement for the players, but they took the lesson to heart when another patch introduced (for evil biomes) toxic rain (of some specific species' blood). The community adopted footbath policies: fort entrances would include a section of shallow, flowing water so dwarves would get this toxic substance wiped off after venturing outdoors.

Not so Abstract Undead

Early on, Dwarf Fortress got rid of using Hit Points (tales of carp oneshotting dwarves was from before that patch). Creatures died from blood loss, brain damage or heart damage. Everything else made it more likely one of those three would happen, such as being in too much pain to remain standing, allowing a combatant to easily land a killing blow. Some time after, a patch introduced undead and players quickly realised these weren't ordinary game zombies. They don't have blood, nor do they have some organ that flags them as dead if damaged. All you could do was knock them around a bit that they'd revert back to corpses. If your fort was in an evil biome, corpses would automatically be reanimated. Before the dev released a patch with "zombies now get pulped to the point they can't reanimate", the player base came up with their own solution: the butcher's workshop.

A corpse was associated with a creature, so was fair game to reanimate. The butcher's workshop turns that into a pile of meat (each organ becomes a different named item of meat), bones and other leftovers. The meat and bones knew the species name of their origin, but were no longer associated with a creature. The leftovers though... skin was still associated. Now the dwarves were fighting undead skin. This 'bug' was considered too hilarious to fix. The solution was the tanner's workshop: get that skin processed into leather to prevent reanimation. Hair was another leftover which needed to be processed into thread so it stopped being associated with a creature.

When the players thought they'd mastered undead countermeasures, someone put a fort on an evil shore. They reported being demolished by undead whales. Aquatic creatures usually don't move to the land because they "air drown". Undead don't drown, so there was no longer any restriction to the whale pathing onto land.


The key to immersion is picking the right details to keep while abstracting others away. Computers have finite CPU and memory, abstraction is always necessary somewhere. What you refuse to abstract away is what defines the world your game conjures. Dwarf Fortress abstracted away graphics yet kept a lot of details you'd think are irrelevant if you can't see them. The details can be wonky, the world might be unrealistic but the players will still be immersed (especially if it's fantasy, not history).

Now assuming Project Caesar is a map-based GSG, in my opinion the crucial detail to not abstract away is the social environment that drives conflict. "This province is experiencing starvation", "that province is a conflux of conflicting perspectives", "this neighbouring state has beef with you which that other state is instigating for their own interests". EU4 covers these topics but it feels a little thin to really get the flavour out. When I get an event that "there's been a disease outbreak in this province", I don't want it to be because "the dice rolled that way on a 5 year pulse". Instead, I want some causality to it like "so you increased trade a couple years ago in this province, which brought lots of foreign bodies and they brought diseases with them".

Then to make the world feel alive, the player shouldn't be able to pause the game and pay attention to all that causality simultaneously. This is potentially controversial: a large part of Paradox GSGs is having perfect information and to depart from that would be... like Vic 3 abstracting away armies (not something to announce late after months of talking about every other topic). As an example, in one campaign the player's state will excel at spotting trouble from intermingling cultures but will be blindsided by economic disasters as the state hadn't invested in proper accounting. At a level deeper than "I picked Espionage Ideas so I get these pulse events", i.e. "I'm getting tooltips and notifications informing me of upcoming conflicts among these people because I picked Espionage Ideas, now I go take some actions on the map so I get the best outcome from that. Oh wait, foreigners crashed my market and the information wasn't available to me in-game because I hadn't picked Economic Ideas". Knowledge is power and the player has too much of it in EU4, leading to boredom by midgame. Similar tale in HoI 4: you know how WW2 is going to go so you know whether you've won the war well before the final peace deal. Stellaris mitigates this only by having a lot of difficulty sliders and endgame tags that show up from off the map.

Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.

Yeah, sounds ambitious right?

Which games do YOU think represent these pillars well?

For replayability, the best example that comes to mind is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Another ASCII game (with tiles graphics added on top). Open-source roguelike that emphasised functional replayability over all else. Realism is nice so long as it doesn't get in the way of replayability to these devs. Yet they still built an immersive world from description text, unprompted dialogue, particular details in the game rules and map layout.

You only know your starting kit, what milestones you need to achieve to win the game and that there will be a lot of enemies functioning as obstacles to victory. You don't know how you will be overcoming those obstacles by midgame. Maybe the RNG spawned the perfect midgame spellbook but you started out not knowing any magic. It's viable to transition so your primary means of solving problems is magic not might. Provided you can fit it in the EXP budget: only so many enemies before the content gets harder. The RNG is shaping your options and opportunities as well as your obstacles and the terrain of your journey.

A slightly more mainstream title doing Replayability would be Path of Exile. Every 3 months, new content comes out and there'll be some crazy opportunity that flips common sense meta out the window. Familiar mechanics need to be re-considered. Old content interacts with new content and for the semi-casual player, the rare drops opening up new opportunities come slowly enough that it revitalises interest whenever they show up.



The pillars you've presented sound good. What I'm really interested in is what you'll offer to the various player psychographs. Some people actively seek a railroad (may even be outside the game: see guides), while others actively jump off it (and many are plain indifferent to it). Some people ignore everything else to play pure military, while others don't want to think about armies at all as they do something else. Magic the Gathering came up with 3 psychographs to guide their design: Timmy wants to experience things (savour the flavour, build up for a big payoff, hang out with friends, etc); Johnny wants to express things (aligning together an absurd set of options to tell their own story); Spike wants to rise up to challenges. What psychographs will you cater to?


Footnote: I've seen this in Dwarf Fortress players too. Some didn't care at all for the crafting or civilian management - they just wanted epic battles against all manner of enemies. Some didn't care for the details of individual dwarves (like favourite metals, mood or aspirations), they just wanted to architect mega constructs - Minecraft then got published to serve exactly that market demand... well almost: can't make some things in Minecraft.

 

[Kingsleydale]

Regarding the pillars for this new game (I am making the bold assumption this is EU5), I have a few thoughts about how they can implemented well to make for interesting and enjoyable experience. Not going to list them by category as I feel like some of them are applicable to several of the game play pillars. These are also in no particular order.

1. The AI should be capable of achieving similar feats of players i.e. forming new countries and forming coherent empires
2. The AI should have believable goals. i.e. uniting culture group, forming new tag, dismantling rival
3. The behavior of the AI should be transparent to the player. You should be able to determine why the AI is taking a certain action.
4. The map should be as granular as possible within the constraints of performance.
5. Systems should be abstracted as little as possible i.e. use pops/population instead of dev.
6. Missions should be dynamic. There should be shared missions, cultural/religious missions, and unique missions for specific tags.
7. There should be branching missions for a multitude of nations.
8. Not all historic events (assuming the game is historical) should be guaranteed to take place at all or at a specific times.
9. Characters should have an impact on what missions are available to nations.
10. Trade should not be tedious to manage

 

[CSDragon]

I think CK3 did them really well unlike Vic 3, so if they went with that style I wouldn't be opposed to 3D portraits

Don't they use the exact same system tho?

 

[Kingsleydale]

Don't they use the exact same system tho?

You seen the kids in vic3. They look like goblins in tuxedos.

 

[CSDragon]

Something I'd like to see, regardless of what game is coming: AI Co-pilots to help newbies learn the game.

If a new player is intimidated by managing their nation and their army and diplomacy, and all the 50,000 other things in a Grand Strategy game, let them set certain tasks to be done automatically as if they were an CPU player. That way they can focus on learning just army micro, or just economy, or just diplomacy.

Ideally, the AI-Copilot would not be as efficient as an actual AI player (like, let's say in EU4 a real AI might build a workshop at 100 gold, but a copilot wouldn't do it until 500 gold in case the player wants to build an army), giving the player incentives to learn the game and do these actions for themselves.

But this also gives you good ideas of what players consider fun and/or necessary. If even veteran players always just assign Religious Conversion to automatic, maybe that mechanic needs to be reworked.

Stuff like that

 

[Standstill]

Johan asks, I answer, simple as. Here's a quick opinion with a few titles, top of my head.
I won't list any PDX games, given they are obvious picks, and also not limit myself to strategy games only.

Believable World

Arma 3 feels very belieavable (especially when the bugs don't happen), but I guess that's the whole point of the game, given it is THE military similation game.
If we go for something more recent, Helldivers 2 also feels quite believable while more on the "arcade" gameplay side of things. It has nice touches, like orbital bombardments always coming from a ship above you in the sky, and the shells landing diagonally the farther you are from the ship, etc. I guess it's details like these that make a game feel "believable".
For strategy games, I think Wargame (especially Red Dragon), is the most "believable" title I have ever played. The intros to the single player campaigns are amazing.

Setting Immersion

Again, Arma 3, Wargame: Red Dragon. Thinking about it, aren't "believability" and "immersion" intrinsically linked together? If a game isn't believable, I can't get immersed in it. But maybe the conditions are different from person to person, based on personal preferences?

Replayability

Civ IV was very nice. I think it's superior to its successors as well. Not all kinds of victories were achievable with the same ease, but I remember being able to go after a different victory condition basically every game, depending on how my civ was developing early on.

 

[Idle America]

Is this the secret project podcat left HOI4 for?

 

[Kondio_patrona]

Bring back EU3 start date. Honestly it's more interesting time than the EU4 start date.

 

[Ketzerian]

I'll be concise and direct: replayability and a lively feel can be achieved if you have different ways to reach success. Examples: In CK3 I can "win" by being a pious and beloved man, by being a man of war, by being an architect, by being a backstabbing creepy man... this allows me to RP and win at the same time. Everything that smells of "meta" takes away my desire to play, those thousands of tutorials of "how to play with Spain", "opening for Ottomans", having to restart a game because I got such a country as an opponent, simply kills replayability. What fun is there in having a "meta" where if I don't do it I don't win?

I understand that there will always be balance problems, but there has to be a minimum of success no matter how you play, high, expansive, aggressive, dialoguing... after all, history is there to show us thousands of successful countries based on totally different points of approach. And successes in the same country with different rulers who achieved success by doing different things.

Thank you for asking and sharing with us.

 

[Mauer]

First step to immersion
Stop Indians from conquering Tibet after crossing the Himalayas
Seriously this annoys me in every paradox game. Yes even HOI4

Yes! This, so much. Geography has shaped human history so much and like 99% of historic and even modern borders are shaped by, yet in Paradox games it gets reduced to a handful of province modifiers.

 

[Krey_Lollipop]

Whatever led to the CK3 devs suddenly make their game about characters and not realms/nations, I think they hit a nerve here, and it's worth exploring in other games as well. Humans, and I assume most players of PDX games are humans, usually respond well to having virtual people they can identify with. Not just a name and/or a portrait of a leader, but actually *being* someone in that world, seeing the world through the eyes of that person, making decisions *as* that person, having other people react to one's own actions.

When thinking what I'd love to see in EU5 this new mysterious game, it would certainly be a deeper character focus. Doesn't have to be as elaborate as CK3, as feudalism was on the downturn in that era. But historical events are still driven by people, not nations. Reducing nations to a bunch of colors and numbers on a sterile map reduces the appeal of a game for me.

Playing as a character is the reason I struggle to get into CK3. I just can't relate to characters good enough for that type of gameplay to grab me.

But that's strictly my experience, because I do think you're onto something. Looking at say France in EU4, and reducing it to "big blue blob" perfectly distills what I wish that game did better. I personally would have solved it by adding more internal divisions to countries and making how you deal with them a bigger part of the game - but of course, many of these internal divisions were spearheaded by people like Hernán Cortés, or reigned in by people like Louis XIV.

Then beyond that you've got all the figures we might associate with one country, but in reality came from another, or could have come from another. What ifs like a Swedish Blücher going head to head with an Italian Napoléon. I wouldn't like this as a system you game to get certain characters to spawn, but seeing a name you recognize show up somewhere unexpected could make for a fun encounter, something to reflect the dynamic nature of the game and reinforce that you have changed history. Now, to be clear I do know that EU4 already has country-neutral characters through some events, I just think it could be done more dynamically, as well as be presented better when you play against the AI.

So even if I'm not a huge fan of them, I definitely think characters could go a long way in improving immersion - at least for a game like EU4.

 

[mikewock18]

Regarding the pillars for this new game (I am making the bold assumption this EU5), I have a few thoughts about how they can implemented well to make for interesting and enjoyable experience. Not going to list them by category as I feel like some of them are applicable to several of the game play pillars. These are also in no particular order.

1. The AI should be capable of achieving similar feats of players i.e. forming new countries and forming coherent empires
2. The AI should have believable goals. i.e. uniting culture group, forming new tag, dismantling rival
3. The behavior of the AI should be transparent to the player. You should be able to determine why the AI is taking a certain action.
4. The map should be as granular as possible within the constraints of performance.
5. Systems should be abstracted as little as possible i.e. use pops/population instead of dev.
6. Missions should be dynamic. There should be shared missions, cultural/religious missions, and unique missions for specific tags.
7. There should be branching missions for a multitude of nations.
8. Not all historic event (assuming the game is historical) should be guaranteed to take place at all or at a specific times.
9. Characters should be have an impact on what missions are available to nations.
10. Trade should not be tedious to manage

Disagree about point 3. The behavior of the AI shouldn't be transparent. That makes them predictable and too easy. You want the AI to be competent, capable of trickery that the player can later see and learn from. Every time I see the AI dogpile a country getting destroyed it honestly makes me smile. It makes the AI seem opportunistic. Competent. Something a player would do. Seeing the AI do stupid things ruins immersion.

I do agree with transparency as important though. My biggest gripe with Vic3 is it feels like there is a blurry wall in between me and my nation. I get the devs were trying to make it feel like your not just this King who can do whatever, anywhere at anytime, but it feels very strange. I actually do agree that there should be parts of national decision making outside of your hands - interest groups are pretty decent overall. But many other elements of Victoria III feels arbitrary "foggy" in a lot of ways.

 

[Cry_Havok]

"Believable World

You should be able to play the game and feel like you are in a world that makes sense, and feels rich and realistic. While not making the gaming less accessible, features should be believable and plausible, and avoid abstraction unless necessary."

This is something I really like train of thought wise, I think this could be a cool direction to focus in on

I really want from a believeable world for the game to not be a map painter. Vicky3 actually does this well, you can play the whole game without taking an inch of land and still have stuff to do. Stellaris is OK about this as well as it's perfectly possible to win without an offensive war. EU4 however this does not happen, with infinitely blobbing great powers with no constraints other than ham-fisted otto-splosion and ming-splosion. Grand strategy games need room for tall strategies, mid powers, and minor powers. They should be able to recreate historical outcomes (for example, North Africa should remain unconquered by Europe most of the time and any hold be tenuous at best), as well as a-historical ones (Pomerania as the dominant power in North Germany, the Rebirth of the North Sea Empire, a Tatar dominated Eastern Europe)

Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.

Yeah, sounds ambitious right?


Cheers, and next week, we’ll talk about the most important things in the world.. Besides family, beer, friends, and the Great Lord of the Dark… MAPS!

I think all PDX games offer great replayability, but also most of them have a chronic "mile wide, inch deep" problem. Too many systems don't interact at all and feel orphaned. Stellaris in particular is awful about this. If I could have anything on my wish list beyond room for mid an minor powers its that all sub systems remain relevant and have consistent interplay.

Edit: fixed an East/West mistake

 

[Lightwell]

If this is the EUV thread: I've got suggestions.

I'm a player who likes to tackle games from the MP angle. I can see "experiences" being varied without sacrificing the gravity that comes with those systems being designed for both/all parties to use. Culture-dependent options, mission trees, and tag-specific units are all very cheap-feeling ways to keep players busy in a way that 'feels' engaging, but it's just a waste. I believe designing systems with freeform play and a lack of railroading will make the best possible experience for both SP and MP players. This is a simple way you can keep from undermining your game.

Please balance tags so we can fill out multiplayer lobbies, even if it isn't necessarily balanced via development size. I hope that, between a loan mechanic rework, a trade war rework, and possibly a development overhaul, we can get a game that's faithful to the setting.

Unit options from each tech and administrative wrangling options, I believe, should be fleshed out to encourage varied unit compositions within and between runs, with terrain and defenses playing well against particular options.

I'd like the game to work out. I'm always worried about it, since EU4 seems to be headed further in the direction of mission trees, but EU5 does have the potential to be better.