IncendiaryDevice
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2014
- Messages
- 7,407
I bought Caesar 3 on the recent gog sale for a pound and thought I'd try it out.
After doing the two tutorial levels and then being wiped out in the first real mission I thought I'd make a thread where I can chart my n00bly hilarious major cock-ups for you schadenfreude pleasures (while also providing and noting critiques that I'll likely have forgotten about by the time I finish it for my own record).
Haha, the tutorial doesn't tell you what you need to know, it just gives you a couple of basics then drops you in the deep end. Is this the good ol' days or the bad ol' days of computer gaming? Well there's a question for the ages indeed. It's good that you have to figure things out for yourself, but then its bad that you waste 4 hours of gameplay for no other reason than the tutorial didn't mention something fairly basic, making you reload an older save and simply adding the building it forgot to tell you about.
Disaster 1:
Everything was rolling along quite nicely, everything seemed stable. AFAICT it was just a matter of letting the game run for a bit while my economy got itself into more funds so that I could get on with buying the next batch of buildings (such as a Colosseum). I decided to leave the game at 10% and go for a 10 minute walk and see if I'd reached 100% employment and a greater money pool by the time I'd got back - instead of sitting by the screen being tempted to build stuff I couldn't afford.
I got back 10 minutes later to find the game had self-paused anyway to inform me the plague was ravaging my town.
It told me that my firemen were now busy fumigating the town and that I had no Hospital to care for injured residents. Erm... ok. some buildings were on fire and others had skulls above them. I watched my firemen put out a fire then watched as they didn't put out any more fires. I was confused. Anyway, I then built a Hospital. But that didn't make the skulls go away.
Suddenly another batch of houses succumb to the plague. This time, seeing it in action, I realise that the skulls are over houses that are on fire. Apparently your house catches fire when people get the plague. And also, apparently your firemen can't put out the fire as there is plague there, so you just have to wait for the house to burn out before replacing it.
Disaster 2:
Unbeknown to me, the other fires I arrived back at had nothing to do with the plague but were, instead, because my Engineers and firemen simply weren't walking the paths to those properties. I had an Engineer and fireman near by, but they just weren't ever going down those roads. So there was another load of houses and farms that were perpetually burning down all of a sudden.
Disaster 3:
Even though I had built a temple to all the five Gods, it seems I had crossed the threshold where one temple to each God simply wasn't enough any more and all of them were barraging me with anger messages, causing even more buildings to go the way of the fire and causing goods to vanish left right and centre.
Disaster 4, Armageddon:
While all this was going on Caesar had been nagging me for goods. 10 Olive Oil one year, 15 Fruit the next. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to make a warehouse stockpile an item and prevent my marketeers and traders from lifting the goods as soon as I could make them (I've since figured all this out, there is indeed a stockpile button and the Fruit needs to be prevented from going into the granary, somewhere I didn't even realise it was going).
Each request came and went until, out of the blue, caesar is so angry with me that he fires me and sends in his troops to wipre me out. Suddenly the screen is full of roman soldiers who kick the shit out of my town like anarchists on speed. Smash, crunch, burn, destroy until there's nothing left of my town. All because I couldn't figure out how to make 15 fruit stay in a warehouse.
Facepalm moment:
Needless to say I went back to the save I'd made before I'd gone for a walk and:
Built a Barbers and doctors by each clump of housing then added a hospital somewhere central. Built a second batch of temples so each god now had 2 temples. Built another engineer and fireman in the lacking area and basically bankrupted myself.
Then all that happens is that Caesar says "Oh, you've run out of money, here have 6k more, you're welcome". And I'm like, doh, if I'd known that would happen...
And everything ran smooth as pie, not a single mishap until I got the first Caesar request message. Please can you send me 10 units of Olive Oil. And then I'm like, how the fuck do I do that!!! Waaaaah, clicking around the help'o'pedia, the warehouse info, the market info, desperately looking for something that suggests I can simply hoard Olive Oil somehow, to no avail. Luckily, it was at this moment my gaming time for the day ran out, so I just looked it up on the internet a few hours later.
So, yeah, is this good ol' design or just bad design that happens to sound good from a git gud perspective?
I mean, I don't expect a game to tell me everything I need to know. I don't expect to have every detail spelled out in the tutorials. You are supposed to learn things as you go...
But then, when you do need some information, and the game purports to have an in-game o'pedia plus highly descriptive micro-management buttons and mouse-over pop-ups, it's a bit crappy when it simply doesn't say what it is you have to do mechanically in certain situations. Ie: when you know what you have to do but can't find the right button to perform that action.
And before jumping on the obligatory "git gud" auto-response, there is something inherently annoying about the way this game is designed, from the ground up. Such as:
1) Workers need to be near their place of work... or do they? No they don't. Who works where? It doesn't say. It gives you a total population, but the total population doesn't match total employment, because the total employment is an abstract of the more simulationist total population number. Total population is entirely meaningless as a game mechanic beyond being a goal used to complete a mission by. It has no use as a number. The noly population number that matters while playing is how many people are working.
2) How far does one building reach? It reaches as far as one character can walk. And then it depends how often that character walks past that location. And then it depends if that character ever walks past that location. So you can end up in the bizzare situation of a building supplying it's value to a house on the other side of your town but completely ignoring houses a few yards away. And sometimes you can sit and watch a character walk miles out of your city before walking back. Even if you dig up the road before they get there, they'll just walk on as if you hadn't changed anything. So, for example, a row of houses got to Large Casa size, from copious food deliveries, and then suddenly reverted back to large shacks because, for whatever reason, the trader stopped going down their street for a while. That's not as much management as random luck (unless you spam traders, of course, but that has its own counter-productive aspects).
3) Some building allow you to control your stats whereas other simply don't. For example, instead of mucking around in the warehouse and granary screens, something that is not overly intuitive (fruit isn't normally stored in a granary, grain is normally the only thing stored in a granary etc etc), then how about letting the player set a maximum limit on the amount of items a trader can stockpile and a limit on the number of goods a house can stockpile. This would automatically allow the granary to get full and automatically allow your warehouse to get full. It's like the automation for this aspect of the game is in the wrong place. Here I am with a measly demand for 10 fruit from Caesar, which I'm panicking about how to fulfil while my traders just wander around stockpiling 4 fruit that I don't even need distributed because my houses aren't posh enough for that yet. All I want is for the market trader to stop collecting that item, so why can't I do that in the market trader window. And, most importantly, when looking in the o'pedia why isn't there a section 'dedicated' to "fulfilling caesar's requests since that's a pretty crucial aspect of gameplay.
It's like its either being: a) deliberately obtuse in order to use this kind of thing as a replacement for genuine difficulty or b) it was an unintentional case of overthinking some aspects while underthiking others in a mad frenzy of muddled game production.
So far I'm loving the game, but its also causing me a lot of question marks as I gradually figure bits and pieces out. On the one hand it's micromanagement heaven, but, on the other, there seems to be way too much random where, even in real life, it would be easy to assign someone a specific paper round, for example. Am I managing a game or am I managing random, etc etc.
After doing the two tutorial levels and then being wiped out in the first real mission I thought I'd make a thread where I can chart my n00bly hilarious major cock-ups for you schadenfreude pleasures (while also providing and noting critiques that I'll likely have forgotten about by the time I finish it for my own record).
Haha, the tutorial doesn't tell you what you need to know, it just gives you a couple of basics then drops you in the deep end. Is this the good ol' days or the bad ol' days of computer gaming? Well there's a question for the ages indeed. It's good that you have to figure things out for yourself, but then its bad that you waste 4 hours of gameplay for no other reason than the tutorial didn't mention something fairly basic, making you reload an older save and simply adding the building it forgot to tell you about.
Disaster 1:
Everything was rolling along quite nicely, everything seemed stable. AFAICT it was just a matter of letting the game run for a bit while my economy got itself into more funds so that I could get on with buying the next batch of buildings (such as a Colosseum). I decided to leave the game at 10% and go for a 10 minute walk and see if I'd reached 100% employment and a greater money pool by the time I'd got back - instead of sitting by the screen being tempted to build stuff I couldn't afford.
I got back 10 minutes later to find the game had self-paused anyway to inform me the plague was ravaging my town.
It told me that my firemen were now busy fumigating the town and that I had no Hospital to care for injured residents. Erm... ok. some buildings were on fire and others had skulls above them. I watched my firemen put out a fire then watched as they didn't put out any more fires. I was confused. Anyway, I then built a Hospital. But that didn't make the skulls go away.
Suddenly another batch of houses succumb to the plague. This time, seeing it in action, I realise that the skulls are over houses that are on fire. Apparently your house catches fire when people get the plague. And also, apparently your firemen can't put out the fire as there is plague there, so you just have to wait for the house to burn out before replacing it.
Disaster 2:
Unbeknown to me, the other fires I arrived back at had nothing to do with the plague but were, instead, because my Engineers and firemen simply weren't walking the paths to those properties. I had an Engineer and fireman near by, but they just weren't ever going down those roads. So there was another load of houses and farms that were perpetually burning down all of a sudden.
Disaster 3:
Even though I had built a temple to all the five Gods, it seems I had crossed the threshold where one temple to each God simply wasn't enough any more and all of them were barraging me with anger messages, causing even more buildings to go the way of the fire and causing goods to vanish left right and centre.
Disaster 4, Armageddon:
While all this was going on Caesar had been nagging me for goods. 10 Olive Oil one year, 15 Fruit the next. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to make a warehouse stockpile an item and prevent my marketeers and traders from lifting the goods as soon as I could make them (I've since figured all this out, there is indeed a stockpile button and the Fruit needs to be prevented from going into the granary, somewhere I didn't even realise it was going).
Each request came and went until, out of the blue, caesar is so angry with me that he fires me and sends in his troops to wipre me out. Suddenly the screen is full of roman soldiers who kick the shit out of my town like anarchists on speed. Smash, crunch, burn, destroy until there's nothing left of my town. All because I couldn't figure out how to make 15 fruit stay in a warehouse.
Facepalm moment:
Needless to say I went back to the save I'd made before I'd gone for a walk and:
Built a Barbers and doctors by each clump of housing then added a hospital somewhere central. Built a second batch of temples so each god now had 2 temples. Built another engineer and fireman in the lacking area and basically bankrupted myself.
Then all that happens is that Caesar says "Oh, you've run out of money, here have 6k more, you're welcome". And I'm like, doh, if I'd known that would happen...
And everything ran smooth as pie, not a single mishap until I got the first Caesar request message. Please can you send me 10 units of Olive Oil. And then I'm like, how the fuck do I do that!!! Waaaaah, clicking around the help'o'pedia, the warehouse info, the market info, desperately looking for something that suggests I can simply hoard Olive Oil somehow, to no avail. Luckily, it was at this moment my gaming time for the day ran out, so I just looked it up on the internet a few hours later.
So, yeah, is this good ol' design or just bad design that happens to sound good from a git gud perspective?
I mean, I don't expect a game to tell me everything I need to know. I don't expect to have every detail spelled out in the tutorials. You are supposed to learn things as you go...
But then, when you do need some information, and the game purports to have an in-game o'pedia plus highly descriptive micro-management buttons and mouse-over pop-ups, it's a bit crappy when it simply doesn't say what it is you have to do mechanically in certain situations. Ie: when you know what you have to do but can't find the right button to perform that action.
And before jumping on the obligatory "git gud" auto-response, there is something inherently annoying about the way this game is designed, from the ground up. Such as:
1) Workers need to be near their place of work... or do they? No they don't. Who works where? It doesn't say. It gives you a total population, but the total population doesn't match total employment, because the total employment is an abstract of the more simulationist total population number. Total population is entirely meaningless as a game mechanic beyond being a goal used to complete a mission by. It has no use as a number. The noly population number that matters while playing is how many people are working.
2) How far does one building reach? It reaches as far as one character can walk. And then it depends how often that character walks past that location. And then it depends if that character ever walks past that location. So you can end up in the bizzare situation of a building supplying it's value to a house on the other side of your town but completely ignoring houses a few yards away. And sometimes you can sit and watch a character walk miles out of your city before walking back. Even if you dig up the road before they get there, they'll just walk on as if you hadn't changed anything. So, for example, a row of houses got to Large Casa size, from copious food deliveries, and then suddenly reverted back to large shacks because, for whatever reason, the trader stopped going down their street for a while. That's not as much management as random luck (unless you spam traders, of course, but that has its own counter-productive aspects).
3) Some building allow you to control your stats whereas other simply don't. For example, instead of mucking around in the warehouse and granary screens, something that is not overly intuitive (fruit isn't normally stored in a granary, grain is normally the only thing stored in a granary etc etc), then how about letting the player set a maximum limit on the amount of items a trader can stockpile and a limit on the number of goods a house can stockpile. This would automatically allow the granary to get full and automatically allow your warehouse to get full. It's like the automation for this aspect of the game is in the wrong place. Here I am with a measly demand for 10 fruit from Caesar, which I'm panicking about how to fulfil while my traders just wander around stockpiling 4 fruit that I don't even need distributed because my houses aren't posh enough for that yet. All I want is for the market trader to stop collecting that item, so why can't I do that in the market trader window. And, most importantly, when looking in the o'pedia why isn't there a section 'dedicated' to "fulfilling caesar's requests since that's a pretty crucial aspect of gameplay.
It's like its either being: a) deliberately obtuse in order to use this kind of thing as a replacement for genuine difficulty or b) it was an unintentional case of overthinking some aspects while underthiking others in a mad frenzy of muddled game production.
So far I'm loving the game, but its also causing me a lot of question marks as I gradually figure bits and pieces out. On the one hand it's micromanagement heaven, but, on the other, there seems to be way too much random where, even in real life, it would be easy to assign someone a specific paper round, for example. Am I managing a game or am I managing random, etc etc.