The trend these days at paradox, is to "reduce the amount of micromanagement" in your Grand Strategy Games, as if it was the black death itself.
The main culprits are Stellaris and HOI4 here, who appear as weaker titles, after the golden age of CK2 and EU4 who are enshrinement of the paradox mastery.
This is not just my opinion, within my gaming community there is a group of ardent fans of paradox games who all preordered these 2 games based on paradox accumulated goodwill and expertise and were left severely disapointed. I remember that as soon EU4 was released we organized a Grand multiplayer game that lasted months with more than 15 people and we continued with a strong rythm of MP games, sometimes with several sessions a week. We all accumulated hundreds of hour of playtime in the first months and couldn't put the game down. And that's from people who already palyed a lot of EU3.
That's just how good it was.
On to Stellaris and HOI4. I played a few games of both, put them down, and concluded, let's come back next year when they're good.
I don't think it has to do with the games being dumb, or having bad game mechanics, but there simply not enough for the player to actually do in the game. The early game usually work well as you put things in motion, but soon enough you go through the same loops, go speed 5 and the rest of the game is mostly predictable, you can even mostly ignore whole aspects of the game without much consequences, like air warfare in HOI4. Tell Hitler he could have ignored building an airforce, he would have had a good laugh.
So what went wrong with these games ? Why me and my friends got bored of them in weeks in single player and cancelled all our MP plans ?
That's where i come back to this thread's premise : please end the war on Micro-management. You streamlined so much of the grand strategy "gameplay" that the player is not required to do anything meaningful. You give him toys then have a dumb AI play with them instead. You reduce the choices and options the player has in the game by simplifying core game mechanics. And when the player do face choices, they're often unconsequential.
1. I, Robot
or how the player got replaced by The Machine
I remember johan said once "if you have to automate it then it means the feature is not fun", but here it seems it turned into "Even when a feature is fun we'll automate it"
In Stellaris i'm not even starting to have an infant galactic empire that you takes my planet away from me and give them to a stupendously stupid AI. Why ? To reduce micro-management ? What else is there to do in Stellaris but managing fleets and planets ? Especially when the rest of the features like diplomacy is so lackluster compared to other PDS games.
The Sector AI will no doubt become better but it won't solve the issue that you're automating a core aspect of the game.
In HOI4, i build this grand army, 200 divisions, all ready for war and get rid of the nazi menace, I finally order them to attack and then watch the spearhead of my panzer corps strategically redeploy to the other side of the front without ever having givent that order.
Bad AI and bugs aside, those will be fixed eventually, i have to question the battleplan system. I was all for it when it was explained to us in videos and dev diaries, but now i have the game i ask myself : what am I supposed to do if i can't manage my army and ongoing campaigns ? Yes you can micro, but the battleplan system is made mandatory by the game mechanics
Production ? Don't worry that's automated too, just set your production lines and wait for them to pump out equipment and units. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the game playing itself.
The issue here, is that paradox not only handle the control of the game to a necessarily dumb AI (AIs are, at least for now, necessarily inferior to a player), but integrate that into the game mechanics by making them mandatory, and have other features depend on them. In HOI4 i can't lauch a naval invasion without fighting against the battleplan interface. Any one who conquered Oceania and the Pacific (or tried) as Japan will know how painful it is.
Now imagine EU5 having the same design as Stellaris and HOI4 : provinces manage themselves, your army auto train itself you just have to set a target amount of inf/cav/art and when the time for war has come, you don't even have to click anywhere the army will automatically seek and destroy the opposing army then divide itself to siege the province. If you think that would be a terrible game, you're right !
2. I don't think, therefore i'm not.
Grand Strategy Games are supposed to be games that make you think more, not think less.
Recently in the last Stellaris DD, @Wiz explained how they simplified the planet habitability so that the player don't have to think too much about which types are habitable and which are not.
This illustrate another issue with design in Stellaris and HOI4. The player is made to think less. by streamlining some features, making them perhaps more logical, but often more simple, you also often reduce choices.
Currently in Stellaris there is 7 planet types, and 5 habitability levels : 100% (home and gaia) - 80% (starting choice) - 60% (close) - 40% (far) - 0% (farthest)
In Heinlein there will be 9 planet types and 4 habitability ievels, and a threshold set at 30% : 100% (home and gaia) - 80% (starting choice) - 60% (same group) - 20% (different group).
Conclusion : the system is indeed more simple, but there is also one less choice for the player to make. We're going from a nuanced system with shades of grey to an almost binary choice which boils down to habitable or not.
You won't even be able to colonize an unhospitable planet for strategic reasons (extend border, claim resources), and bear with the consequences of it being a shitty planet, because the threshold will kill off your pops.
As for how the habilitability, or indeed pretty much any modifiers in game, is calculated, this is honestly not even remotely an issue. All you need to do is display the final habitability result for your species and the tooltip breaking the math down. That's precisely how everything is handled in CK2 and EU4 no matter how obscure the modifiers are. My vassal has 99 reasons to hate me in CK2 and i can explain every single one of them. But somehow in stellaris we become incapable of managing mutliple factors ? Malarkey !
Please don't confuse streamlining the interface, and simplifying the core game mechanics. You don't need to do the latter for the sake of it.
3. A Victory without Danger is a Triumph without Glory
The player should feel he earned his victory, not that it was already decided.
Sure you can give a hard settings, with buff to the AIs, or have advanced empires that steamrolls the players before he has any means to do anything. But that's not what i'm talking about. In effect those artificial difficulty settings just tip the scales in favor of one or the other but don't make it more difficult to master.
The gameplay of the GSG game (which revolves around clicking on buttons in the UI) should be hard enough to master over long period of time. There is no place for instant gratification.
Civilization 5 and EU4 were released ages ago and i'm still not mastering those games. It again boils down to the quantity and quality of choices you can make. It's not enough to provide choices to the player, they must be 1. Not obvious (like picking Industrial techs first in HOI4) 2. They must have high impact (chosing to invest in a good airforce to support your troops should pay off huge dividends if the enemy can only fly biplanes)
Corneille, a french playwright, was known for the harsh dilemmas facing his protagonists. Cornelian dilemmas. There is no obvious choice, Rodrigo can focus on Honour or on Love but not on both at the same time. And picking one will have harsh consequences for the other.
Both in stellaris and HOI4 there are too many obvious choices, and often taking a radically different course won't have such dire consequence, it's all easily manageable and predictable.
Turning France or any country to a communist paradise in HOI has absolutely no consequence, you might incur a small loss of national unity but it only matters if your losing a war (and if you're losing, some % of national unity don't make a world of difference)
And it's not just a matter of choice but what you have to do to earn whatever you are aiming for. If achieving a seemingly hard feat is just a matter of clicking 2 buttons and waiting on speed 5, where's the fun ? where's the glory ?
That's again where micro management is involved, let me micromanage my cabinet, my generals my scientists or whatever, turn this management into a hard game where you have to strike a difficult balance as to avoid catastrophic failure (aka civil war). This is what i'd expect from a grand strategy game.
To conclude,
Don't take away the actions, the hard choices, and the necessity to think about what you do in game from the player.
Don't take control away from him.
The only robots i should have to fight against are from the evil robot theocracy, not the ones embedded in the game mechanics.
Let me crack my head and min max obscure modifier and let me chose several way of advancing my empire.
Present me hard choices and let me face dire consequences like a man.
Let me play Grand Strategy Again
The main culprits are Stellaris and HOI4 here, who appear as weaker titles, after the golden age of CK2 and EU4 who are enshrinement of the paradox mastery.
This is not just my opinion, within my gaming community there is a group of ardent fans of paradox games who all preordered these 2 games based on paradox accumulated goodwill and expertise and were left severely disapointed. I remember that as soon EU4 was released we organized a Grand multiplayer game that lasted months with more than 15 people and we continued with a strong rythm of MP games, sometimes with several sessions a week. We all accumulated hundreds of hour of playtime in the first months and couldn't put the game down. And that's from people who already palyed a lot of EU3.
That's just how good it was.
On to Stellaris and HOI4. I played a few games of both, put them down, and concluded, let's come back next year when they're good.
I don't think it has to do with the games being dumb, or having bad game mechanics, but there simply not enough for the player to actually do in the game. The early game usually work well as you put things in motion, but soon enough you go through the same loops, go speed 5 and the rest of the game is mostly predictable, you can even mostly ignore whole aspects of the game without much consequences, like air warfare in HOI4. Tell Hitler he could have ignored building an airforce, he would have had a good laugh.
So what went wrong with these games ? Why me and my friends got bored of them in weeks in single player and cancelled all our MP plans ?
That's where i come back to this thread's premise : please end the war on Micro-management. You streamlined so much of the grand strategy "gameplay" that the player is not required to do anything meaningful. You give him toys then have a dumb AI play with them instead. You reduce the choices and options the player has in the game by simplifying core game mechanics. And when the player do face choices, they're often unconsequential.
1. I, Robot
or how the player got replaced by The Machine
I remember johan said once "if you have to automate it then it means the feature is not fun", but here it seems it turned into "Even when a feature is fun we'll automate it"
In Stellaris i'm not even starting to have an infant galactic empire that you takes my planet away from me and give them to a stupendously stupid AI. Why ? To reduce micro-management ? What else is there to do in Stellaris but managing fleets and planets ? Especially when the rest of the features like diplomacy is so lackluster compared to other PDS games.
The Sector AI will no doubt become better but it won't solve the issue that you're automating a core aspect of the game.
In HOI4, i build this grand army, 200 divisions, all ready for war and get rid of the nazi menace, I finally order them to attack and then watch the spearhead of my panzer corps strategically redeploy to the other side of the front without ever having givent that order.
Bad AI and bugs aside, those will be fixed eventually, i have to question the battleplan system. I was all for it when it was explained to us in videos and dev diaries, but now i have the game i ask myself : what am I supposed to do if i can't manage my army and ongoing campaigns ? Yes you can micro, but the battleplan system is made mandatory by the game mechanics
Production ? Don't worry that's automated too, just set your production lines and wait for them to pump out equipment and units. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the game playing itself.
The issue here, is that paradox not only handle the control of the game to a necessarily dumb AI (AIs are, at least for now, necessarily inferior to a player), but integrate that into the game mechanics by making them mandatory, and have other features depend on them. In HOI4 i can't lauch a naval invasion without fighting against the battleplan interface. Any one who conquered Oceania and the Pacific (or tried) as Japan will know how painful it is.
Now imagine EU5 having the same design as Stellaris and HOI4 : provinces manage themselves, your army auto train itself you just have to set a target amount of inf/cav/art and when the time for war has come, you don't even have to click anywhere the army will automatically seek and destroy the opposing army then divide itself to siege the province. If you think that would be a terrible game, you're right !
2. I don't think, therefore i'm not.
Grand Strategy Games are supposed to be games that make you think more, not think less.
Recently in the last Stellaris DD, @Wiz explained how they simplified the planet habitability so that the player don't have to think too much about which types are habitable and which are not.
This illustrate another issue with design in Stellaris and HOI4. The player is made to think less. by streamlining some features, making them perhaps more logical, but often more simple, you also often reduce choices.
Currently in Stellaris there is 7 planet types, and 5 habitability levels : 100% (home and gaia) - 80% (starting choice) - 60% (close) - 40% (far) - 0% (farthest)
In Heinlein there will be 9 planet types and 4 habitability ievels, and a threshold set at 30% : 100% (home and gaia) - 80% (starting choice) - 60% (same group) - 20% (different group).
Conclusion : the system is indeed more simple, but there is also one less choice for the player to make. We're going from a nuanced system with shades of grey to an almost binary choice which boils down to habitable or not.
You won't even be able to colonize an unhospitable planet for strategic reasons (extend border, claim resources), and bear with the consequences of it being a shitty planet, because the threshold will kill off your pops.
As for how the habilitability, or indeed pretty much any modifiers in game, is calculated, this is honestly not even remotely an issue. All you need to do is display the final habitability result for your species and the tooltip breaking the math down. That's precisely how everything is handled in CK2 and EU4 no matter how obscure the modifiers are. My vassal has 99 reasons to hate me in CK2 and i can explain every single one of them. But somehow in stellaris we become incapable of managing mutliple factors ? Malarkey !
Please don't confuse streamlining the interface, and simplifying the core game mechanics. You don't need to do the latter for the sake of it.
3. A Victory without Danger is a Triumph without Glory
The player should feel he earned his victory, not that it was already decided.
Sure you can give a hard settings, with buff to the AIs, or have advanced empires that steamrolls the players before he has any means to do anything. But that's not what i'm talking about. In effect those artificial difficulty settings just tip the scales in favor of one or the other but don't make it more difficult to master.
The gameplay of the GSG game (which revolves around clicking on buttons in the UI) should be hard enough to master over long period of time. There is no place for instant gratification.
Civilization 5 and EU4 were released ages ago and i'm still not mastering those games. It again boils down to the quantity and quality of choices you can make. It's not enough to provide choices to the player, they must be 1. Not obvious (like picking Industrial techs first in HOI4) 2. They must have high impact (chosing to invest in a good airforce to support your troops should pay off huge dividends if the enemy can only fly biplanes)
Corneille, a french playwright, was known for the harsh dilemmas facing his protagonists. Cornelian dilemmas. There is no obvious choice, Rodrigo can focus on Honour or on Love but not on both at the same time. And picking one will have harsh consequences for the other.
Both in stellaris and HOI4 there are too many obvious choices, and often taking a radically different course won't have such dire consequence, it's all easily manageable and predictable.
Turning France or any country to a communist paradise in HOI has absolutely no consequence, you might incur a small loss of national unity but it only matters if your losing a war (and if you're losing, some % of national unity don't make a world of difference)
And it's not just a matter of choice but what you have to do to earn whatever you are aiming for. If achieving a seemingly hard feat is just a matter of clicking 2 buttons and waiting on speed 5, where's the fun ? where's the glory ?
That's again where micro management is involved, let me micromanage my cabinet, my generals my scientists or whatever, turn this management into a hard game where you have to strike a difficult balance as to avoid catastrophic failure (aka civil war). This is what i'd expect from a grand strategy game.
To conclude,
Don't take away the actions, the hard choices, and the necessity to think about what you do in game from the player.
Don't take control away from him.
The only robots i should have to fight against are from the evil robot theocracy, not the ones embedded in the game mechanics.
Let me crack my head and min max obscure modifier and let me chose several way of advancing my empire.
Present me hard choices and let me face dire consequences like a man.
Let me play Grand Strategy Again
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