The reality of losing.

[Creamu]

Im sure we probably don't have too many dwarf fortress players here. Even a set back is unforgivable to many players.

I'm sure we will get mods that try to inject a more harsh dose of realism though. Eventually. But in a game where its player nation vs AI nation. It might be hard to create a system that doesnt rely on giving the AI "help". Though personally I don't mind cheating AI, I care about results.

 

[Monty is staring at me]

People do not treat losing land in EU games and losing titles in CK games the same. Because, frankly, they're not at all the same.

Losing land in an EU game is the start of what is usually a very negative spiral, where now that you're weaker, more nations want to take chunks out of you, and you don't recover fast enough to defend yourself (even with the insane revanchism bonuses in eu4). In CK, losing your titles means being safer, and *less* of a target without the threat of whomever just beat you up coming back as soon as the truce ends to finish the job.

That's what my original comment was about, we need mechanics to make losing a war a ludonarratively coherent and enjoyable experience. If you lost a war, you should be, with good plays, be able to at least hold your own by playing more defensively and diplomatically. It can be fun to play a game where you are trying to survive, but you need mechanics that enable that - including AI that doesn't dogpile you, but tries to address the largest threat to themselves (and probably to you).

I have been an immense critic of the "inverse difficulty curve" of EU4, where it is significantly easier to play larger countries than smaller ones. I think that diplomatic systems should allow smaller countries to survive by not posing a significant threat, while larger countries should have a harder time managing their diplomacy and internal stability, with constant setbacks to be expected due to conspiring and covetous rivals as well as domestic fractures.

 

[Gurtannon]

Most who people pay games like seeing the number go up.

PC is designed for a simulation unlike Eu4 which was more about numbers going up

There are people who likes numbers going up doesnt mean there arent who enjoys history simulation

 

[Fikou_]

my first thought on how id tackle it is make external losses provide internal opportunities
if you have a humiliating military defeat it should help you reform your military, get some more crown power, etc
the tricky part there is to have it not be super cheeseable with losing meaningless things on purpose

 

[Briloner]

As we all wildly speculate about about the mythical other players and not us:
- Most other players (mop) will quit, because they cannot handle defeat.
- mop are perfectionists
- mop want to get their missing achievements, which demands optimal play or cutting a lot of cheese or trying specific strategies. A single ill-timed heir-death can mean a lot here.
- mop just claim to want have games with "realism" and setbacks, but save-scam when they get it. Why? Don't know. Perhaps we feel better when we manage a challange with perceived risk - even if we do not want the consequences of said risks.

‐-------------------------

More seriously:
We (at least I) want
- large gains to be hard or at least high risk high gain. With later tech and time, the larger gains should be manageble.
- from time to time challenges, because new threads arise or the rules of the game change.
- not desired is an auto-effect guaranteeing a tag with 1.5 manpower of me

And lo and behold EUV has all that.
- large gains in the beginning will likely lead to rebillion, civil war, etc. In fact I think several starting nation will struggle to keep it together. Several nations will have mechanics for bad succession.
- scenarios, illnesses, and events will shake things up. (E.g. Western Schism, reformation, italien wars all will shake up rules, manpower-pools allience-webs and more - just on the first game-half in Europe)
- finally (and in partial contrast to my wishes) there seems to be a willingness to give nations a leg-up to form at least middling powers, e.g. in Bavarian Flavour and others events are shown for randomized grateness.
I believe in most runs the will be at least 1 stable, Iberian colonizer, 1 single domineering tag in Britain, a unified French tag, 1 domineering Turkish power in Anatolia, 1 in the Balkans, ..
This will not happen in all games and not necessarily fast. But with enough regularity, that players, who accept losses in the form of set-backs, can enjoy them and plot their come-back.

Admittedly I am rather a roleplayrr, than a map-painter

 

[Nnorm]

There is one thing that this game would really need AND every grand strategy Paradox game lacks until now: a disgregation mechanics. Or, at the veary least, the viable option for the player to concede something in the short term.
Every single Paradox game is developed in a linear progression, in which the player consistently becomes stronger. EU IV had the golden age system that curbed the huge human power by boosting all nations in different times, creating situations in which one was at the very least challenged in his actions. But I think it should go further. I think that the general gameplay should embrace the idea that the player, representing a nation acquiring its state identity and/or imperial ambition may have easier and harder times, that not all gains are eternal and yet it may still be funny. Maybe having easier cooldowns to try to get back lost territories or to being able to give lighter concessions to avoid heavier demands by a more furious AI. In addition, the possibility to benefit from vast and quickly conquered territories (maybe by stealing development like in EUIV) before losing them thanks to a reduced cost for them by nearby powers in peace demands.

But that depends on what does losing mean - in medieval and early modern period when country lost the war it didn't mean it fall apart, or got steamrolled entirely - often just had to pay contribution, lost some land, but wasn't stomped totally. Later on, when wars became more and more industrialized, and globalized losing country could either reform itself, and dug out of crisis or sink even deeper. In Eu IV nothing of that is simulated - if you lose, especially early on, it is hard to rebuild and you are wasting time. You can of course take more military ideas and policies, build more forces but thats it.

 

[pheonicia]

- Most other players (mop) will quit, because they cannot handle defeat.
- mop are perfectionists
- mop want to get their missing achievements, which demands optimal play or cutting a lot of cheese or trying specific strategies. A single ill-timed heir-death can mean a lot here.
- mop just claim to want have games with "realism" and setbacks, but save-scam when they get it. Why? Don't know. Perhaps we feel better when we manage a challange with perceived risk - even if we do not want the consequences of said risks.

No need for a call out post I'm already in the thread, damn.

 

[Briloner]

No need for a call out post I'm already in the thread, damn.

No offense ment - I did not have you in mind.

When I first started to write the first draft, I realized: I myself speculated, how others, who thought clearly differently than me, would obviously think. And what the (silent) msjority would think.
--> Therefore my ironic comment.

 

[pheonicia]

No offense ment - I did not have you in mind.

When I first started to write the first draft, I realized: I myself speculated, how others, who thought clearly differently than me, would obviously think. And what the (silent) msjority would think.
--> Therefore my ironic comment.

You're taking the comment too seriously.

 

[ItsBenter]

Johan said that with the early challenges like the Plague, one goal is to adress that, to teach the player that losing is ok and part of the run

Hopefully it works but I guess players are gonna want their "optimal" run and reload anyway after something they think they could have done way better

Plague and other non tag challenges could be good for that. I think people is little bit more okay to not losing to ai or outright fail to maintain the wholeness of their country. There must be some agency in facing those though...

 

[Bisonmask]

Most who people pay games like seeing the number go up.

If this were true everyone would just play cookie clicker

 

[Bawhoppen]

The only way to make losing fun in my opinion is to make the game hard and brutal. Here's what I mean: in EU4, for example, there was so much cushioning to strengthen nations, both militarily, economically, and so on, that if you somehow lost a war and provinces, you REALLY lost.
Like, for instance, you have shattered retreat, near endless loans, mercenaries, so on, which really glue your nation to be indestructible. If something manages to dissolve that glue, you've lost badly.
And this is not what reality is like. In reality, committing a single siege or raising a single army of 1k people are difficult affairs. Let alone marching 500km away from your borders and sieging things. Things generally favor the status quo,

Basically, on the other hand to EU4's guard-rails, if everything is fast and fickle, and dangerous, then things balance out more in both directions and make losing more fun, since you have more chance of recovering later.

 

[pheonicia]

If this were true everyone would just play cookie clicker

Most people have. That's why it was massively popular and codified a genre with a million copycats.

 

[Álvaro Núñez de Lara]

The eternal debate.

No easy solution. I think this game should have something like Rimworld or Ck2 used to have, chaos and unpredictability.

Dimishing returns from the get go and clear mechanics. Bad things should happen but they should be:

1. Random.
2. The player should know theu are going to happen.
3. Realistic.


People usually want arbitrary brutal maluses to punish you to force you into a declaine or crisis age despite everything going well for you. And nobody likes that. It feels horrible.

You fix that with increased difficulty across the board, with, as mentioned,.more random events that can throw you off,; and lastly, bad things should have harsher consequences. They are usually too easy to overcome in the game. We have established you cant arbitrarily punish the player when hes doing things well. That is why the punishment must be harsher when the player does something wrong or things go NATURALLY wrong. Because these scenarios dont present themselves much.

Other than that any mechanics to hinder or debuf the player should be something underlying and present since the beginning regardless of whether the player is doing well or badly, and it should be something the player should know from the beginning its there. He should know its a mechanic that its there and going to happen regardless and its not an arbitrary god sent punishment on the player out of nowhere because playing optimally. Examples of these are the black plague, the protestant reformation, the 30 years wars...These are all events that are, genarally, devastating, or at least they should be if implemented properly. But the player is fine with this. Becaus they know its a built in mechanic and they know its going to happen since the beginning.

This makes it so rather than hate it the player kind of looks forward to it. He prepares, and he deploys his skill to navigate It as well as possible, as a challenge and tries to see it as an opportunity as well to achieve certain goals out of a bad event. Does this kill lots of my pops or devastates my lands or breaks my public finances? Yes but I knew it was coming, I prepared for it, had fun preparing for it, had navigating it, and had fun getting something out of it (weaking a rival, converting to my religion a bunch of enemies who can now become my allies, etc etc).

So yeah i think they just need to reinforce these elements. Thats the success of Rimworld. Not because its a good farming simulator. But because random stuff happens that you KNOW may happen and prepare for it, but you dont know when. It is fun preparong for it and if it happens its fun going through it. The outcome is NEVER exsctly the same and all sorts of things happen. Did I lose several colorists to these raiders or to these xenophobic fanatics that i took in? Yes but look the one hell of a story i have to tell about how the whole thing developed. And now out of it I have got this stuff: (...), or maybe just the memory of having a blast trying to overcome that crisis and overcoming it even if its left me in rags. I can rebuild, no matter.

 

[Superdark33]

Everyone says "make losing fun" up until they lose and go to post on the forums about how the game is actually so easy and for babies and its actually bad game design that made them lose

 

[lukesilveira]

The reality of losing is that most players would rather just reload or restart than take any loss. People want to struggle in order to win, but still want to win. Winning without a struggle is boring and losing under any circumstance feels like a waste of time.

While I completely agree with your assessment, this situation exists because average players are accustomed to familiar mechanics that tend to be very linear. If you're winning, you snowball, while if you're losing, you enter a death spiral.

Ideally, we'd have a gaming environment where setbacks aren't viewed as catastrophic but as occasional, expected challenges. For some countries, something as straightforward as a country's survival from the 1300s to the 1800s could be considered a form of victory in itself.

This is much easier said than done, though, and I can't think of a simple way to implement this mindset. Perhaps a 50-year tutorial where the player initially loses territories in early conflicts only to reclaim some of them later might help illustrate it?

 

[Vohen]

I see a pretty good potential for coalitions here, even when compared to EU4.
The way it is, coalitions are a fail state, if you don't manage your expansion rate well, they will fire and cut you down to size.
But I don't think that should be the case, coalitions should be a natural part of gameplay for anyone aiming for hegemony.
So once you eclipse everyone around you, coalitions should become a constant in your game, and the way you navigate this should determine your overall success.
Basically, eveyone should have their Napoleon moment naturally.

Now, how to make "fun to lose"? Well, I'm of the opinion that if coalitions are an inevitability, players might have a mentality more accepting of situations where they'll just have to cut their losses and bite the bullet, fighting defensively to peace out for the least amount of territory possible, and then building back stronger.

And now that coalitions are an IO, there are even a few things that could be done, like creating phases (similar to CK3 struggles), levels of beligerance per member, special modifiers and events, and many more things I'd like to play with in the future.

Other than that any mechanics to hinder or debuf the player should be something underlying and present since the beginning regardless of whether the player is doing well or badly, and it should be something the player should know from the beginning its there. He should know its a mechanic that its there and going to happen regardless and its not an arbitrary god sent punishment on the player out of nowhere because playing optimally. Examples of these are the black plague, the protestant reformation, the 30 years wars...These are all events that are, genarally, devastating, or at least they should be if implemented properly. But the player is fine with this. Becaus they know its a built in mechanic and they know its going to happen since the beginning.

Thing about these examples is that they pretty much affect everyone equally, so in the end the player isn't necessarily on a more or less advantageous situation because of them.

 

[IAmATurky]

The eternal debate.

No easy solution. I think this game should have something like Rimworld or Ck2 used to have, chaos and unpredictability.

Dimishing returns from the get go and clear mechanics. Bad things should happen but they should be:

1. Random.
2. The player should know theu are going to happen.
3. Realistic.


People usually want arbitrary brutal maluses to punish you to force you into a declaine or crisis age despite everything going well for you. And nobody likes that. It feels horrible.

You fix that with increased difficulty across the board, with, as mentioned,.more random events that can throw you off,; and lastly, bad things should have harsher consequences. They are usually too easy to overcome in the game. We have established you cant arbitrarily punish the player when hes doing things well. That is why the punishment must be harsher when the player does something wrong or things go NATURALLY wrong. Because these scenarios dont present themselves much.

Other than that any mechanics to hinder or debuf the player should be something underlying and present since the beginning regardless of whether the player is doing well or badly, and it should be something the player should know from the beginning its there. He should know its a mechanic that its there and going to happen regardless and its not an arbitrary god sent punishment on the player out of nowhere because playing optimally. Examples of these are the black plague, the protestant reformation, the 30 years wars...These are all events that are, genarally, devastating, or at least they should be if implemented properly. But the player is fine with this. Becaus they know its a built in mechanic and they know its going to happen since the beginning.

This makes it so rather than hate it the player kind of looks forward to it. He prepares, and he deploys his skill to navigate It as well as possible, as a challenge and tries to see it as an opportunity as well to achieve certain goals out of a bad event. Does this kill lots of my pops or devastates my lands or breaks my public finances? Yes but I knew it was coming, I prepared for it, had fun preparing for it, had navigating it, and had fun getting something out of it (weaking a rival, converting to my religion a bunch of enemies who can now become my allies, etc etc).

So yeah i think they just need to reinforce these elements. Thats the success of Rimworld. Not because its a good farming simulator. But because random stuff happens that you KNOW may happen and prepare for it, but you dont know when. It is fun preparong for it and if it happens its fun going through it. The outcome is NEVER exsctly the same and all sorts of things happen. Did I lose several colorists to these raiders or to these xenophobic fanatics that i took in? Yes but look the one hell of a story i have to tell about how the whole thing developed. And now out of it I have got this stuff: (...), or maybe just the memory of having a blast trying to overcome that crisis and overcoming it even if its left me in rags. I can rebuild, no matter.

I agree with this, game mechanics that challenge you are better than arbitrary malus.

I think the overarching threat that players should be concerned about is rebellions.

I hope that PC mechanics make rebellions an unpredictable threat that may be suppressed easily or spiral out of control into a civil war and cause massive pain. For example, pops in rebellion shouldn’t work, pay taxes, dont answer call to arms, may become bandits (lower control), or at worst join militant groups (peasants riots or separatists etc) that actively fight your garrisons.

This should be one of the pathways of losing the game, maybe you overextended, ignored your pop satisfaction, and purely focused on military adventures or expensive colonial ventures. Therefore, your pops are one bad event away (ie bad harvest) from rebelling and now the country may break apart in a civil war unless this is addressed quickly.

i think that such narrative would be engaging and fun (and double as a role playing experience)

 

[wowlock]

I think one of the few changes I've seen to rectificy this is the 'Alliances are not permanent' thing they are going with. Because in history, there are SO many cases where alliances shifted and changed like every few years depending on the situation.
So, say you were on the losing side against an alliance. But now that the said alliance got some land from you, they have a conflict of their own now and their alliance ends and now YOU can form the alliance and get your stuff back.

It is the next best thing with the lack of a bilateral peace treaties that are very hard to implement properly.

Also the idea of costing the enemy so much manpower and money in a loss, should be able to harm them and giving them the feeling of Phyrric Victory where, yea they might've won some land but they lost a lot of men and money that will harm them and it won't be easy to recover. That would make the 'defensive' playstyle viable compared to the previous games ( other than HOI 4 where you can practically win with every nation by just sitting defensively and let the AI attack you none-stop and destroy themselves, which is not fun either honestly )

 

[Linbot#6018]

My ideal paradox game would be one where instead of it just being linear endless powerscaling, gameplay is designed around you encountering domestic situations that challenge or weaken your power or control of some region, which you have to devise solutions to. But these solutions shouldn't ever be permanent, and the solutions you choose + the unpredictable things that happen in the future will lead to future challenges.

For example, let's imagine as Russia you might decide to disempower the old Boyar families (because they are an obstacle to you raising crown power) and raise up a new class of officials. But you have to support those officials with land because your state is not advanced enough to have a paid bureaucracy. They eventually become a new class of landowners whose needs you need to worry about, perhaps you have to institute serfdom now to ensure they continue to support your regime. That leads eventually to living standards of the peasantry declining, leading to rebellions.

Or perhaps you play as Vietnam, and you decide to import traditions of government from China. That allows you to create a stable, loyal, and meritocratic bureaucracy. You experience a population boom, but that upsets stability because of the rapidly changing demographic situation, creating a crisis where annual revenues become unreliable and corruption increases. You might fix that by freezing the tax rolls, but this leads to proliferation of tax farming and the regime falling out of touch with local conditions, leading to social disruption, leading to banditry, leading to an uprising.

Those are both fairly loose examples I came up with on the spot, but this genre of story is what I think a grand strategy game should really be about.

Conquering land should only be the focus when special opportunities to do so arise, or you play a country that needs to keep raiding and conquering to distribute rewards to its elites to ensure their loyalty, but a country like that should also be very unstable, playing it should be managing a house of cards that no amount of player skill can keep standing forever. Examples of crises that could do in a horde include a bad succession crisis, or cultural/political estrangement of different wings of your horde, or a string of military defeats that cause your elites to lose faith in your dynasty.

EU5 seems to kind of depart from EU4's flaws here, but I feel like the problem it has instead now is that it is fundamentally just a "Building Simulator" (like victoria 3), which doesn't really solve the issue. You are just snowballing inexhorably until there is nothing in the game that can threaten you because of how much money manpower tech etc. you have. A game where difficulty tapers off as you play on is both bad history and bad gameplay.