The reality of losing.

[Monty is staring at me]

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.


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.

I also think players should be incentivized to play for soft power more. Measuring success through diplomatic, economic, cultural and trade influence rather than simple map painting.

The reason why putting realistic, hard limits on long term expansion in EU4 wouldn't work is because the entire game is designed around expansion. There just isn't much more stuff to do than colonize and conquer territory.

EU5 offers more gameplay loops during peacetime, meaning that it's okay that you are prevented from expanding 90% of the time.

In EU4, I spend most of my time thinking of who I'll attack next. In EU5, I hope that I'll spend most of my time planning on how to protect myself from whoever is going to attack me.

 

[GenericType]

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

And I agree with that!

Looking forward to France losing half of its population to the plague in the middle of -at the time- losing struggle in the Hundred Years' War. It's going to be fcking epic.

- 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.

And that is what I hated most out of EU4, the coddling. Every time the players whine about something triial because it inconveniences them or god forbid ruins their WC run, the devs readily hands them some sort of magic mumbo jumbo to help them cheese the already cheesy system.

Ran out of manpower? Slacken recruitment! Or choose one of these free manpower buttons!
Heir is bad? Lol, just disinherit them you dummy!
Lack money? How about infinite loans with no repercussions to bankruptcy other than a 5 year turtling? Or how about this debase currency then?

I hope Ceasar stops coddling the players. Let them skin their knees falling down for chrissake.

 

[perceval350]

One other instance where losing would be very fun would be if PC made it possible for you to expand very rapidly, but then certain mechanics would make your large empire crumble in the short to medium run.
That way, you could trick players into thinking they can expand rapidly only for them to irreversibly crumble. After that the player would be able to play one of the breakaway states or a successor state
Basically it would be very cool if PC could dynamically reproduce what happened with the mongols or the timurids. That way, to balance the frustration of seeing its empire crumble, the player would have the satisfaction of continuing its campaign in a world vastly shaped by its passed conquests.
The absolute best for me would be if crumbling empires could even turn into dynamic IOs like the hre or the ilkhanate

 

[Ispil]

My ideal...

I want the game to play like you're juggling a thousand spinning plates. Constantly having to balance the needs of your estates (both the generic "estate" and specific entities within those estates, such as specific noble houses, specific guilds, specific bishoprics), states (vassals, neighbors, your religious head), people (access to goods and the like to meet demands while also fostering growth), economy (managing salt monopolies). Having to compromise between the short term (self-defense after being declared war on, avoiding an immediate civil war), medium term (pleasing the nobles now so you can diminish their rights a little bit without issue in 10 years), long term (ensuring stable succession, gaining a port for better trade and naval access), long long term (putting yourself in an advantageous position so that you can establish overseas colonies), and long long long term (balancing your economy in just the right way that industrialization is prime to take root in your country when the time comes). Dealing with the fact that your goals are not the same as the goals of your estates or your people and that they're acting as much in their own self-interest as you are in yours.

Every single action you take is at the expense of something, whether through opportunity cost or otherwise. The consequences might not be felt for over 100 years, but they will be felt eventually. As your country grows, the number of voices in the chorus of people pulling you in every direction grows. Something will inevitably give, and the plates will come crashing down at your feet. Angered members of your nobility will instigate a civil war. Your economy will languish at the expense of your neighbors, driving you into backwards irrelevancy. Your people, condemned to squalor, will ultimately rise against the state in a bloody revolution.

Losing is inevitable. For you and everyone.

But to me that's the most fun part of all. To lose (the more spectacularly, the better), and to rise from the ashes and make something new and repeat the cycle all over again.

 

[Bisonmask]

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

you'd spend EU4 money on a cookie clicker clone?

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

this doesn't happen? when you do see people complaining about bad game design (a different group of people) there are always players explaining how the issue could have been resolved in the replies

 

[pheonicia]

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?

Again, the ck series manages it by making it easier when you're small, and harder when you're big. You're not much of a target when you only have a single county, but an opm/olm is basically free real estate in an EU game. I don't know what would change the mindset of "if you're not growing you're falling behind your rivals" because that was how people thought at the time, and the exact kind of mindset the game is trying to evolve in player.

you'd spend EU4 money on a cookie clicker clone?

I've spent eu4 hours on idle games. Plus if you really want proof that EU players love seeing the number go up, how many people on the forums use the number of hours they've spent in game as bragging rights?

 

[D.Knight]

The actual answer is that people are arguing past each other about losing as defined as game ending or equivalent vs. losing as defined as (harsh) setbacks. Little progress will be made until the terms are resolved.

you'd spend EU4 money on a cookie clicker clone?

With the way microtransactions are in mobile games someone does.

 

[Oglesby]

One other instance where losing would be very fun would be if PC made it possible for you to expand very rapidly, but then certain mechanics would make your large empire crumble in the short to medium run.
That way, you could trick players into thinking they can expand rapidly only for them to irreversibly crumble. After that the player would be able to play one of the breakaway states or a successor state
Basically it would be very cool if PC could dynamically reproduce what happened with the mongols or the timurids. That way, to balance the frustration of seeing its empire crumble, the player would have the satisfaction of continuing his campaign in a world vastly shaped by its passed conquests.
The absolute best for me would be if crumbling empires could even turn into dynamic IOs like the hre or the ilkhanate

I don't think having the game trick new player or the addition of newb trap decisions are something that should be in good games.

 

[A Pink Duck]

The actual answer is that people are arguing past each other about losing as defined as game ending or equivalent vs. losing as defined as (harsh) setbacks. Little progress will be made until the terms are resolved.

I mean both. In games as long as PDX games tend to be, I don't want either of those things.

I view the harsh setbacks in much the same way I view Oblivion's arcane leveling system. Where it was possible (and probable) for new players to create a build that made it incredibly difficult to actually play successfully. Becoming both over leveled and underpowered at the same time. Players who know take steps to avoid it and players who don't get frustrated and quit. But neither get to play the way they really want to. There's a reason it hasn't been copied by either Bethesda or other studios.

 

[Bisonmask]

Again, the ck series manages it by making it easier when you're small, and harder when you're big. You're not much of a target when you only have a single county, but an opm/olm is basically free real estate in an EU game. I don't know what would change the mindset of "if you're not growing you're falling behind your rivals" because that was how people thought at the time, and the exact kind of mindset the game is trying to evolve in player.

Imo one of the bigger problems with CK3's design is how it doesn't do this. Sure you aren't likely to be conquered as an OPM but that's because the AI is unlikely to conquer anything and the game gets easier from there

 

[Linbot#6018]

One other instance where losing would be very fun would be if PC made it possible for you to expand very rapidly, but then certain mechanics would make your large empire crumble in the short to medium run.
That way, you could trick players into thinking they can expand rapidly only for them to irreversibly crumble. After that the player would be able to play one of the breakaway states or a successor state
Basically it would be very cool if PC could dynamically reproduce what happened with the mongols or the timurids. That way, to balance the frustration of seeing its empire crumble, the player would have the satisfaction of continuing his campaign in a world vastly shaped by its passed conquests.
The absolute best for me would be if crumbling empires could even turn into dynamic IOs like the hre or the ilkhanate

Yeah, I think this is a vastly healthier gameplay loop to have.

 

[Septimus the Merciful]

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.

As a CK3 player, I can assure that players will complain about random events that negatively hurt them, even if they know they are coming (see CK3 pushback on harm events, plagues, and conquerors). Furthermore, the more information the player has about a bad event or situation that will occur, the more the game tilts in the favor of player (unless the AI also has this knowledge and plans accordingly), which defeats the purpose of providing a challenge.

Game studios strive to make good games that sell. Due to this, they will usually take the trade-off of creating an "easier" game to capture more of the addressable market rather than alienating potential customers.

With that said, I think the underlined is the most important aspect of a good game loop. It has to be reinforced early and often that a) losing and winning are not absolutes, and b) many mechanisms can turn losing in your favor and winning against you. If they achieve these two things, I think the gameplay loop will be attractive to a wide range of players.

 

[Ispil]

I mean, random punishment against the player is just ass. Never do that; no one likes that.

If you want losing to be fun, you have to start out with that ethos at the outset. You need complexity, and you need that complexity to both be the cause, and in many ways be insurmountable. Kicking the player in the shins because "it's their time to be kicked in the shins" is not in any way engaging or interesting. Similarly, "noob trap" conditions that are easily avoided also do nothing for the experience; you shouldn't need to go out of your way to have a setback.

Rather, the game should put you between rocks and hard places that are a product of your own decisions as well as your circumstances. You should always feel in some way responsible for things going the way they're going. That's really what drives this: player agency. People don't like losing when it feels like they did nothing wrong.

That's part of the trick to it, really. You don't want to just make events that force players to pick between two bad decisions; that's still depriving them of their agency when they're acutely aware of the fact that they're picking between two bad choices. You want to present a system that's complex and dynamic enough that being able to actually know, in advance, the long-term consequences of a decision is impossible but at the same time be able to identify the original causes of a negative downturn and how they ultimately stemmed from earlier decisions the player made.


In other words, you need the sort of things that are apparently your fault but you don't see coming, that seem obvious in hindsight.

That is, that they "seem" obvious in hindsight, and are "apparently" your fault. That is to say, that there needs to be enough layers of complexity that it becomes easy to attach responsibility to past actions as an "obvious cause" of later problems as they come up, without those past actions being the sole cause in themselves.

The complexity is what makes it engaging, and that it is easy to attribute decline to yourself makes it hard to blame the game for putting you in artificial situations that "force you" to lose.

 

[Septimus the Merciful]

I mean, random punishment against the player is just ass. Never do that; no one likes that.

If you mean only the player, I agree, but when does this ever happen? Usually, at least in CK, in can happen to the player or the AI

If you want losing to be fun, you have to start out with that ethos at the outset. You need complexity, and you need that complexity to both be the cause, and in many ways be insurmountable. Kicking the player in the shins because "it's their time to be kicked in the shins" is not in any way engaging or interesting. Similarly, "noob trap" conditions that are easily avoided also do nothing for the experience; you shouldn't need to go out of your way to have a setback.

Rather, the game should put you between rocks and hard places that are a product of your own decisions as well as your circumstances. You should always feel in some way responsible for things going the way they're going. That's really what drives this: player agency. People don't like losing when it feels like they did nothing wrong.

That's part of the trick to it, really. You don't want to just make events that force players to pick between two bad decisions; that's still depriving them of their agency when they're acutely aware of the fact that they're picking between two bad choices. You want to present a system that's complex and dynamic enough that being able to actually know, in advance, the long-term consequences of a decision is impossible but at the same time be able to identify the original causes of a negative downturn and how they ultimately stemmed from earlier decisions the player made.


In other words, you need the sort of things that are apparently your fault but you don't see coming, that seem obvious in hindsight.

That is, that they "seem" obvious in hindsight, and are "apparently" your fault. That is to say, that there needs to be enough layers of complexity that it becomes easy to attach responsibility to past actions as an "obvious cause" of later problems as they come up, without those past actions being the sole cause in themselves.

The complexity is what makes it engaging, and that it is easy to attribute decline to yourself makes it hard to blame the game for putting you in artificial situations that "force you" to lose.

There must be instances where a player (or AI) can only pick between a terrible choice and a not-as-bad choice (plagues or a succession crisis due to the untimely death of your only heir, for instance), or the gameplay loop becomes too predictable.

In general, I agree with your premise. There has to be blowback, layers to decision making, and unforeseen circumstances to disturb the linear growth of countries.

 

[Kovax]

That's part of the trick to it, really. You don't want to just make events that force players to pick between two bad decisions; that's still depriving them of their agency when they're acutely aware of the fact that they're picking between two bad choices. You want to present a system that's complex and dynamic enough that being able to actually know, in advance, the long-term consequences of a decision is impossible but at the same time be able to identify the original causes of a negative downturn and how they ultimately stemmed from earlier decisions the player made.

The problem with that approach is that the player will learn in their first game or two NOT to take the decisions which bite them down the road. After that, the choices become just another "click here to avoid catastrophe in 50 years". What's needed is an element of risk, where you don't KNOW that it will bite you, but that it has the potential to do so if other factors come into play. In one game, it may work out, in the next, it might lead to disaster if anything else contributes to the problem, so it's up to the player to evaluate the relative merits and risks of the choices, taking into account the current circumstances and probable course of future events.

For example, you might consider supporting a particular estate for short-term support, but realize that it will likely oppose your efforts to make a future reform. It may be possible to undercut that estate after you've gotten their short-term support, making their future opposition mostly irrelevant, but that could lead to increased unrest or even rebellion if not handled carefully. You don't KNOW how that will turn out, but you have some clues as to what COULD happen if things do or don't go as planned or hoped. If it does go sour, you can blame it at least partly on your earlier decision, but also on how you failed to deal with or protect against the possible consequences of that choice, if circumstances beyond your control did push it one way or the other.

Basically, there should be few "do A and B happens every time" decisions. Instead, choice A should increase the risk of B happening, becoming one of several factors pushing toward that outcome, but opposed by other factors which may or may not be sufficient to prevent it. Your decisions should upset the equilibrium, possibly leading to an event, rather than directly triggering that event.

 

[alexgmcm]

Yeah, there needs to be more internal problems that prevent just unstoppable snowballing. Imperator did this a bit with the Civil Wars so hopefully we'll have something similar in Project Caesar.

CK3 and CK2 do this really well too as like if Genghis Khan shows up and you have no chance of beating him you can just become a vassal for a generation or two and get freedom later.

It looks like accepting vassalage won't be effectively game over in Project Caesar and you'll be able to get people to support your independence and scheme from within etc. which is move in the right direction.

Some people will always savescum and despise any setbacks but I find them some of the funnest parts of the Paradox games. They say "We make the games, you make the stories" and some of the best stories are when you come back from the brink of failure.

 

[Ekyman]

I mean, random punishment against the player is just ass. Never do that; no one likes that.

Nah, random setbacks are great in CK2. But that’s because it makes logical sense in CK (you’re playing a person, and sometimes people die) and because in CK it either causes problems that you can resolve with skill and some luck to avoid the setback, or causes an immediate setback that you knew was a risk. And progression and setbacks can happen in chunks and not just linear gains and losses (this specifically is a big part of why I often save scum war losses in EU4).

If you want losing to be fun, you have to start out with that ethos at the outset. You need complexity, and you need that complexity to both be the cause, and in many ways be insurmountable. Kicking the player in the shins because "it's their time to be kicked in the shins" is not in any way engaging or interesting. Similarly, "noob trap" conditions that are easily avoided also do nothing for the experience; you shouldn't need to go out of your way to have a setback.

I agree you have to design the game with that mindset from the start, but disagree with the complexity comment. Again CK2 is a game that does it really well without being driven by complexity, and in some ways it’s opposite of what you say, in that the setbacks are often very easy to see coming, or at least see the potential risk for, but difficult to rapidly respond to. But CK2 still does a good job of feeling like it’s being driven by the rules of the game world and not arbitrarily punching the player because they’re the player.

IMO the key thing with setbacks is that they feel like a natural part of the world and that they create interesting recovery gameplay. The latter is where CK 2 and 3 both succeed and a lot of Paradox (and other) games fail, because:

• If you lost land to succession there is typically interesting gameplay that allows to regain all of it in one swoop
• If you lost land to vassal rebellions there might be ways to get it back in one swoop, or at least without war, and if not then the vassal system means you’re at least probably not recapturing the same provinces over and over
• You often have a chance to avoid the worst of the setback by engaging closely with the character mechanics and doing a good job of managing relations or manipulating oaths

By contrast a lot of possible setbacks in other Paradox games simply erase your progress and make you repeat yourself. If you spent 30 years conquering some provinces then lost them to rebellions the recovery gameplay is just doing the same conquests again and then managing the same unrest again but hopefully managing the unrest better this time. No new interesting gameplay experience has been created.