Gameplay VS Realism

[lwarmonger]

Gameplay everytime. Who wants a game that isn't fun? The market is filled with niche games that have about 50 players utterly devoted to its "realism". Any kind of profitable audience (and profitable audiences fund expansions) wants a fun game that is internally consistent.

 

[Sernista]

If it can model good sci-fi fiction without too much tweaking, that'll be good enough for me. So much of 4x gaming is so heavily tied up in "it's a game, roll with it" that the world you're building just doesn't make much sense narratively.

 

[Nirmara]

Gameplay should always come first. For example, I'm totally fine not having to wait many years until my commands are executed across the galaxy.

Otherwise, consistency and plausibility should always guide the development of mechanics.

That being said, I'm wondering, will it be necessary to get a certain tech in order to speak with other species and if so can we declare war/make peace without said tech?

 

[Ezumiyr]

Soft SF is just fine with me, as long as there's consistency.

What do you mean by "soft SF" ? As far as I know, soft science fiction means science fiction that doesn't talk too much about science, but it can be either realistic, and even very realistic (like 1984) or not realistic. Dune is also not scientific science fiction, therefore it's probably also soft science fiction. Is that what you mean ? Then I strongly agree with you. We don't need a hard science fiction game with many (pseudo-)scientific explanations.

The few SF books that pretended to be scientifically plausible infuriated me and I even threw some directly in the bin after chapter 3. They were either horribly arrogant or completely wrong, many times both. (I also had the same reaction with Asimov but it's more a problem of taste I guess. Though I still think that he has a very arrogant style. But that's an other matter.)

 

[Krajzen]

The few SF books that pretended to be scientifically plausible infuriated me and I even threw some directly in the bin after chapter 3. They were either horribly arrogant or completely wrong, many times both. (I also had the same reaction with Asimov but it's more a problem of taste I guess. Though I still think that he has a very arrogant style. But that's an other matter.)

Have you tried Peter Watts' Blindsight?

 

[Sinister2202]

Realism would completely destroy immersion for this type of game for me.

 

[Ezumiyr]

Have you tried Peter Watts' Blindsight?

I've read Starfish by the same author. While he's clearly obsessed with mental diseases and not as good as Frank Herbert for depicting how people live in the abyss, I liked the book so I may try Blindsight.

 

[Buladelu]

But yeah, not much immersion in GalCivIII and I think it is by design.

For me it felt immersive enough. Beautiful event pictures. Every event sounds like Star Trek story. Opponents are interesting and memorable enough. That is untill they've made DLC with evil squirrels. I wish I was joking.

 

[Slayen]

When gameplay and realism come into conflict in a game like this, I feel that realism should be loaded into a mass driver and fired into the nearest stellar body at a significant fraction of c.

Just always remember to be consistent about it. I value internal consistency far more than realism.