How could Paradox make a Cold War game?

[FOARP]

If you do not prepare for the nuclear game, you have nothing you can do against the other powers. If you act aggressively against another power without nuclear matters, you loose (while the others survive as you have nothing to answer with). But you could also choose to not do it and deal with the situation that arises. Disarmament should not be prevented.

I'm not sure you got my point here: the USA and the USSR spent large amounts of resources building large numbers of nuclear missiles. In your proposal there's simply no reason to do this: you'd either build none, or only the minimum that the game actually requires you to build (and you'd only build them because the game requires it - this isn't fun).

Ultimately your asking the player to develop and build weapons that they can't use.

Well, guerilla is a bit about micro-management and whack-a-mole but the player could have access to HoI4-style tools to deal with it militarily.

In which case the war largely plays itself. Again, where's the fun in this?

If you compete for it, it can be.

Only because it allows you to do something new - typically field new weapons-systems in Paradox games. However, if war-fighting is something that doesn't occur much, or consists of CO-IN fighting that the player doesn't actually control, then the gratification simply isn't there.

That is more a design issue. The player shouldn't be forced to micromanage.

But if this is an economic-management game then this is what the player has to control.

I'm not saying that a CW game is impossible to make. I am saying that the EvW devs massively under-estimated how difficult it would be and that resulted in an utter failure, and I hope that Paradox don't repeat that mistake.

 

[Zavaleta]

'm not sure you got my point here: the USA and the USSR spent large amounts of resources building large numbers of nuclear missiles. In your proposal there's simply no reason to do this: you'd either build none, or only the minimum that the game actually requires you to build (and you'd only build them because the game requires it - this isn't fun).

Ultimately your asking the player to develop and build weapons that they can't use.

That is why you implement the actual game theory used by planners during the Cold War into the game. If you don't build enough your opponent may launch a first strike and beat you. If you out produce your opponent or out research them you gain the ability to launch a first strike with minimal loss. Or you can choose to just build what is necessary for MAD and focus on encircling your opponent in the political game. Throw in an espionage element of trying to figure out what your opponents military capacity actually consists of and it becomes a fun game with replayability.

 

[loup99]

I'm not sure you got my point here: the USA and the USSR spent large amounts of resources building large numbers of nuclear missiles. In your proposal there's simply no reason to do this: you'd either build none, or only the minimum that the game actually requires you to build (and you'd only build them because the game requires it - this isn't fun).

Ultimately your asking the player to develop and build weapons that they can't use.

I'm only applying what happened in real life. The two great powers competed, and other nations that joined the race tried to have significant defence. However, pushing for disarmament was also a possible path. In my proposal you have to do it if you want to remain a superpower, unless you go down the path of disarmament. You would build them to be able to defend against your enemy, which is similar to how it works in EU4 for armies.

In which case the war largely plays itself. Again, where's the fun in this?

You as the player wants to avoid fighting a guerilla by acting politically. The war plays itself, but you will fight harsh resistance and be the one drawing the plans.

Only because it allows you to do something new - typically field new weapons-systems in Paradox games. However, if war-fighting is something that doesn't occur much, or consists of CO-IN fighting that the player doesn't actually control, then the gratification simply isn't there.

I didn't get "CO-IN". But as for the player not controlling, that is just how the Cold War was. The game should try to be somewhat realistic.

But if this is an economic-management game then this is what the player has to control.

The player controls the model to follow and deal with the consequences.

I'm not saying that a CW game is impossible to make. I am saying that the EvW devs massively under-estimated how difficult it would be and that resulted in an utter failure, and I hope that Paradox don't repeat that mistake.

I mostly agree with you on this.

 

[Zavaleta]

On that thought, I would propose that score (winning) be determined by holding victory points around the world (Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, etc.). Nuking has the capacity to eliminate the victory points in that province (along with their inhabitants). So going for a nuclear victory only works (in terms of gaining a high score) if you can ensure the destruction of your opponents victory points and not your own (MAD). Otherwise it is more effective to try and play the political game and undermine your opponent from within or secure more victory points in the Third World.

 

[Zavaleta]

I'm only applying what happened in real life. The two great powers competed, and other nations that joined the race tried to have significant defence. However, pushing for disarmament was also a possible path. In my proposal you have to do it if you want to remain a superpower, unless you go down the path of disarmament. You would build them to be able to defend against your enemy, which is similar to how it works in EU4 for armies.

The player should have no real incentive to disarm as it just leaves you open to attack by the AI or other players. However, it could be fun to give players incentives to begin detente midgame (1970s) due to rising domestic political pressure and the cost of maintaining fulling armed and mobilized versus domestic spending- that will lead to political crisis.

 

[loup99]

The player should have no real incentive to disarm as it just leaves you open to attack by the AI or other players. However, it could be fun to give players incentives to begin detente midgame (1970s) due to rising domestic political pressure and the cost of maintaining fulling armed and mobilized versus domestic spending- that will lead to political crisis.

Disarming was something many major political parties were in favour. I don't see why it would be excluded or not be a possibility, even if it would not be a good option for the aggressive strongman.

 

[Zavaleta]

Disarming was something many major political parties were in favour. I don't see why it would be excluded or not be a possibility, even if it would not be a good option for the aggressive strongman.

It should be a possibility. But in terms of winning the game (eliminating your opponent), it only makes sense if you get them to agree to disarm as well. That is why I would give the player rising incentives to seek disarmament as the game goes on. Just as happened historically.

Edit: Would be fun to have a "Peacenik" mechanic (like war weariness in EU4) that steadily rises throughout the game and gives negative modifiers. You can lower it through political suppression or disarming and it will rise with prolonged military engagements, i.e. quagmires like Vietnam.

 

[loup99]

It should be a possibility. But in terms of winning the game (eliminating your opponent), it only makes sense if you get them to agree to disarm as well. That is why I would give the player rising incentives to seek disarmament as the game goes on. Just as happened historically.

Of course. But if one of the great powers (or superpowers even) was to start disarming earlier than in our reality, it could have put pressure on the other to do so as well, even though it would not eliminate the opponent.

 

[Zavaleta]

Of course. But if one of the great powers (or superpowers even) was to start disarming earlier than in our reality, it could have put pressure on the other to do so as well, even though it would not eliminate the opponent.

Maybe that could relate to a United Nations mechanic that would also give players further incentives to secure political control in neutral/Third World countries which would in turn give them more votes to play with in the UN.

What do you think @FOARP? I think we just outlined the basics for a fun Cold War Paradox game.

 

[EmperorBatman999]

Should Paradox focus on making the game enjoyable for most factions, even the weakest ones? Or should they simply focus on ones like the US, USSR, China, France, and the UK?

 

[loup99]

Should Paradox focus on making the game enjoyable for most factions, even the weakest ones? Or should they simply focus on ones like the US, USSR, China, France, and the UK?

The thing is that while it is important to have minors playable, that playability should not be at the expense of the majors or the realism or general game balance. I'm not sure the setup in HoI4 solved that.

 

[LiberiusX]

Do you think it is at all possible to make a Cold War game fun?

Or are Paradox games and Grand Strategy Games by their very nature fun ultimately due to conventional warfare, the build up and planning to said conventional warfare, the implications of said warfare, and in reality painting the map your color.

This is why Vicky 2 succeeds where so many other grand strategy games fail. Peacetime is fun. In almost every Vicky campaign(save Germany, and maybe Austria), you are avoiding war with other great powers for the first 75% of the game. Sometimes it can't be helped, but you really have very little to gain and much to lose. You can go a whole campaign without fighting in a Great War and it still be fun, because warfare isn't the main focus. Guiding your country through the Industrial Revolution, and its effects(may they be war or peace) is the main focus.

Besides, painting the map(in Europe) in Vicky(especially in PDM) is quite difficult and monotonous, especially after Nationalism and Imperialism is researched.

 

[EU3NOOB]

I do think a conventional WWIII should be possible.

Nuclear weapons are more likely to end up as the chemical weapons of WWII. Basically, we have copious amounts of the stuff, but we refuse to use them unless the other side uses them first.

 

[pheonicia]

I would hope they take inspiration from Twilight Struggle, considering it's basically the perfect cold-war (board) game.

 

[jmpveg22]

I think they should look to Supreme Ruler Cold War, HOI, and a new engine before making said game.

As in for a cold war game to work... you need a spherical globe to properly account for ICBMs and SLBMs.

I also think they should fine-tune and focus the cold war timeframe. Making a game 1950-2000 would cover it... but would require amples of work to adequately cover each playable nation's history, politics, society, stats, and military capability/capacity.

So perhaps having DLC of different start dates would be ideal. My vote is starting a game with one Era for each of the major Soviet leaders:
1950 Stalin (Korean War and when the ideological battle lines were starting to set, also a point where both sides had nuclear capacity),
1960 Khrushchev (Berlin Crisis, sino soviet split, Cuban missile crisis, De-stalinization, space race heating up, Start of American Vietnam Conflict, etc etc etc)
1968 Brezhnev (Tet offensive and Vietnam heats up, Sino Soviet Split worsens as China becomes a major player, middle east conflicts, Prague Spring and invasion, American Unrest, etc etc etc

 

[Surimi]

First things first. Look up a little game called Defcon.

It's a deliberately simplified and abstract game, but it captures perfectly the horrible reality of how you actually "win" a nuclear war, as well as the sheer speed at which you do so. The problem with a cold war game is that when the doomsday clock hits midnight the game will end within a matter of days. You aren't moving troops around or executing complex battleplans, it's just the cold hard maths of massive nuclear launches and then just awarding the burned and irradiated victory medal to whoever is the most intact at the end. Heck, Defcon vastly overstates the degree of strategy involved by allowing ICBMs to be intercepted, something which wasn't possible for much of the cold war.

So yeah, the problem with a cold war game is that it's not a wargame at all. The entire game is the "buildup" phase. There might be little proxy wars here and there and maybe you'll move a few troops around, but actual war between the global powers would be basically asking for your game to end. The only way to handle it would be to make the possibility of war extremely undesirable. Once the ICBMs start flying, everyone has lost the game and the only hope is to perhaps lose a little less than your enemies.

So what would the gameplay in our cold war game be? It couldn't be a wargame, at least not in any kind of conventional sense. So what would the primary mechanic be? I imagine you'd have distinct phases of the game with different objectives which then build up "score" for an overall objective.. minor objectives would be things like building up defence alliances, spreading your ideology, technological achievements which could either be practical (like advanced weapons) or symbolic (like space exploration).

This raises the huge problem that you basically have to build an entire game out of secondary mechanics from other strategy games (diplomacy, espionage, budget management). You'd have to invent whole new ways to do these things which made them interesting and engaging enough to carry a full game. Furthermore, I think it is by no means certain whether what you end up with would be enjoyable for most people. Much as we love to romanticise the typical paradox gamer, the typical paradox gamer likes blobbing in a sandbox. A hypohetical cold war game would be a game in which expanding your borders at all would be extremely rare and where much of the conflict would be an internal matter of trying to sway public opinion or build alliances among political figures. It would be more like Victoria than anything else, and Victoria is already niche.

 

[FOARP]

That is why you implement the actual game theory used by planners during the Cold War into the game. If you don't build enough your opponent may launch a first strike and beat you. If you out produce your opponent or out research them you gain the ability to launch a first strike with minimal loss. Or you can choose to just build what is necessary for MAD and focus on encircling your opponent in the political game. Throw in an espionage element of trying to figure out what your opponents military capacity actually consists of and it becomes a fun game with replayability.

Thought about this, and, no I think you're wrong here. Ultimately all you're proposing is a race to build weapons that you can't use, or at least the use of which would be an unsatisfactory "press button to win" victory. Whilst the superpowers maintained the ability to launch a guaranteed second strike through SSBNs and airborne alert bombers, the idea of a first strike to which there would be no response was, anyway, something of a fantasy.

Nuclear war would last 24-48 hours. Making that fun in the context of a game 40-50 years long is a problem to which I have seen no real solution. This leaves you with the problem of either including it (but it being unsatisfactory) or leaving it out (but then having to simulate the build up of a nuclear arsenal that you won't use).

Espionage is, as has been pointed out above, a secondary mechanism thus far in Paradox games. Centring the entire game around it seems unwise: to what end are you spying on the enemy if you cannot go to war with them?

 

[Zavaleta]

Thought about this, and, no I think you're wrong here. Ultimately all you're proposing is a race to build weapons that you can't use, or at least the use of which would be an unsatisfactory "press button to win" victory. Whilst the superpowers maintained the ability to launch a guaranteed second strike through SSBNs and airborne alert bombers, the idea of a first strike to which there would be no response was, anyway, something of a fantasy.

Nuclear war would last 24-48 hours. Making that fun in the context of a game 40-50 years long is a problem to which I have seen no real solution. This leaves you with the problem of either including it (but it being unsatisfactory) or leaving it out (but then having to simulate the build up of a nuclear arsenal that you won't use).

Espionage is, as has been pointed out above, a secondary mechanism thus far in Paradox games. Centring the entire game around it seems unwise: to what end are you spying on the enemy if you cannot go to war with them?

I get where you are coming from but I think you are wrong for a few reasons.

1. Lots of people will load up the game for the sole purpose of starting Armageddon and replaying it to see if they can "win" slightly better than the last time.

2. The actual gameplay purpose of nuclear weapons is not their use but the feeling of tension they create in the game for the player or players. Just read the reviews of Twilight Struggle on Steam, in which nuclear war is an lose condition. The possible use of nuclear weapons would hold the player in suspense the entire game, in which one or two wrong moves could lead to the game end. It would be like having an endgame crisis that lasts the entire game.

3. So unlike CK2 or EU4, the player will never arrive at the point of knowing they have won until they actually win. There will always be the possibility of losing, mid and late game, even as they blob out. Winning without the use of nuclear weapons will feel like an actual accomplishment rather than a foregone conclusion once they reach a certain stage of the game.

 

[jmpveg22]

An easy way to do the time/turn compression in a coldwar game.., would be to make the elapsing of time dependent on DEFCON level. That way things such as wars can be more precisely controlled and interacted with. And nuclear war is not just a flash or outta scale.

Example:

DEFCON 4 & 5:
-Slow speed=Half a day/second
-Medium Speed= Full day/second
-High speed= two days/second

DEFCON 3:
-Slow Speed= quarter day/second
-Medium Speed= half day/second
-High Speed=day per second

DEFCON 2
-Slow Speed= 1 hour/Second
-Medium Speed= quarter day/second
-High Speed= half day/ second

DEFCON 1:
-Slow Speed= Realtime
-Medium Speed= 1 hour/Second
-High Speed= quarter day/second

 

[Rip Off Productions]

well here's my ideas:


1) Have a system similar to a mix of HoI4's factions and Vicy 3's Great Powers' sphere of influences; there would be 3 types of counties within each faction; the Superpower(USA and USSR) who can influence all nations within the faction, world powers(UK, France, China, maybe Japan or India later in the game) who can have their own smaller spheres of influence within he faction, and minors who make up everyone else. then there's the "neutral" 'third world' nations, they can be influenced by members of both factions until they eventually get pulled into one or the other(or split into both by a civil war).

2) have Stellaris type "Ethos" that reflect a nation's attitude/culture/policy/ect. and nations will interact with each other based on how these line up, POPs within a nation would also have Ethos and if there is enough disunity/conflict between the types of ethos present then civil wars or coups can occur(or maybe just different leadership being elected in democratic nations will make the government drift to match the people)

3) have something similar to HoI4's world tension in the form of the Doomsday Clock; if it ticks up to midnight then a all out nuclear war is probably inevitable, however nuclear war can still happen if someone thinks they have first strike capability or a significant enough advantage that the war would be "winnable"/survivable. the clock will tick up or down due to a variety of things, mostly revolving around the maintaining of nuclear deterrence/M.A.D., but this will only happen if both sides are aware of the disparity in power; for example if you're playing as Russia and manage to set up those missile bases in Cuba without the USA(or any other western/capitalist faction member)'s spies or intelligence agencies noticing then the clock will stay put, but if they do then your going to need to find a way to fix the balance by pulling them out.

4) technology will be put into three categories; secret(new stuff that only you know, can be shared will allies or discovered by enemy spies but otherwise will not spread to other nations who don't develop it from scratch), military(stuff only in use by the army/navy/air force/government/etc., becomes easier to research as more and more nations acquire and use it), civilian(will slowly spread thought the world). most tech will slowly "degrade" through each category over time, though some things will obviously never reach the civilian level, and if you play your cards right all your best toys will stay a secret for a very long time.

5) spies and espionage should be a big part of how the game is played if you're a superpower/world power, putting eyes and ears in enemy territory while rooting out their attempts to do the same in yours, double agents, spreading propaganda and counter-propaganda both in and out of your borders, and so on will be key to "winning" in the long run.

as for the nuclear war itself, I think it having it's own map mode where you'd set up the strategies using a HoI4 style planer to place your missiles, planes, subs and so on and set their targets in the case of war would be the best way to handle it, after all that's how a real nuclear war would be handled isn't it? the plans are already set in the case of needing to use it in retaliation, and if you want to be the one who starts it then you just need to hit the nice big "launch" button...