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4X Old World - historical 4X strategy by Civ 4 designer (formerly 10 Crowns)

pakoito

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 7, 2012
Messages
3,086
I don't think unity HAS to be garbage collected in a bad way (Outer wilds is made in unity and I never noticed hitches while playing it) though.
Put your ship on a planet, TP yourself to another, leave your scouter in a third one, and just for fun the alien ship on a fourth. It was meant to be a secret achievement "FPS killer".
 

Jaedar

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 5, 2009
Messages
9,838
Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
I don't think unity HAS to be garbage collected in a bad way (Outer wilds is made in unity and I never noticed hitches while playing it) though.
Put your ship on a planet, TP yourself to another, leave your scouter in a third one, and just for fun the alien ship on a fourth. It was meant to be a secret achievement "FPS killer".
Sure, but what does this have to do with garbage collection?
 

pakoito

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 7, 2012
Messages
3,086
I don't think unity HAS to be garbage collected in a bad way (Outer wilds is made in unity and I never noticed hitches while playing it) though.
Put your ship on a planet, TP yourself to another, leave your scouter in a third one, and just for fun the alien ship on a fourth. It was meant to be a secret achievement "FPS killer".
Sure, but what does this have to do with garbage collection?
Not much, it was about FPS stutter. In the Making Of doc they said the game runs basic simulation per planet unless one of those actors is on it. With 2+ you'll start finding stutters.
 

Mr. Pink

Travelling Gourmand, Crab Specialist
Joined
Jan 9, 2015
Messages
3,042
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Unity is garbage collected. That is why the UI is a shitshow. The turn times could be because of stupid animations or some other issue, hard to say without a ton of playtime which I'm not interested in.

What's wrong with Garbage Collection? AFAIK it just automatizes getting rid of useless shit in your memory allocation, instead of having to put things in and out of memory like they had to.

Garbage Collection has to do a lot more work to clean up memory during runtime compared to manual memory management.

But why? Can't it be made more efficient?

GC is like a scripting language for memory management. You just can't be as fast as the more difficult to handle compiled version.

You can write your performance critical modules in c++ in Unity. I'm sure they're probably already doing this.

I'm not even sure how I would optimize the AI because I don't know how it works but the game's base design probably makes it difficult to tackle compared to a more deterministic and limited (in number of permutations to search through) system. Every unit having the potential to move to literally hundreds of possible tiles in one turn and having to cycle through a hundred workers on the map probably doesn't help.

Good lord these turn times though. I'm 210 turns in with a modern 12 core Ryzen 7 and it takes 20-30 seconds per turn.

They could. On a larger maps + during mid-end game + on a mid tier PC with SSD this could easily surpass a minute or more.

I don't understand how a game that is so simple mechanically with an AI that is barely better than Civ AIs could spend a whole minute. I guess every single part of the AI is singlthreaded and they do lots of string comparisons or something. Wish it was open source like Civ code eventually becomes so we could figure out what the hell they are doing with all that time.

From what I understand without seeing the CiV source myself they use Lua and not in a particularly performant way.

Nu-civ units move two to five tiles a turn. Old world units zip across the map, with the ability to do actions between movement. For what it's worth, the AI is much better than Civ at putting up a challenge during a equally matched war and the speed of units makes positioning mistakes far less impactful. Difficulty setting doesn't seem to stop the AI from making the most optimal move during combat most of the time (sniping your units down with ranged focus fire and going for kills). I've been playing with fog of war off lately.

The AI is multithreaded to some extent, but how much you benefit from parallelization has to do with the inherent design of the game and what algorithms are appropriate.

You know how it is.
 
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3 others

Scholar
Joined
Aug 11, 2015
Messages
147
Any way to mod women not to be generals? This is crucial.
If not, I'm giving this a pass.
There is a helpful Mohawk dev active in the Steam discussion forums who described the required change for this:

You would have to make it as a dll mod as you wouldn't be able to do what you want in xml.

In your mod you'll want to override Character.canBeGeneral() and include a check for isFemale() and then return false if the character is female. This will block females from ever being offered general.

public virtual bool canBeGeneral()
{
if (!hasPlayer())
{
return false;
}

if (isDead())
{
return false;
}

return infos().Helpers.canBeGeneral(this, CharacterType.NONE);
}

You can do this for other roles as well if you want.

Looks like the canBeGeneral() function is defined in Character.cs file, as are canBeGovernor, canBeAgent, canBeCouncil, etc.. DLL modding instuctions can be found from this site, presumably written by an early-access modder.

I might attempt this, if only just to get familiar with the mod tools in Old World. Due to the underlying game design, blocking women from military leadership is only a partial fix because the game world won't spawn any additional male nobles to compensate for the change, so you're effectively cutting your pool for generals in half. Not sure if this affects generated Court Soldiers.
 

HeroMarine

Irenaeus
Vatnik
Joined
Feb 3, 2019
Messages
16,306
Location
Rio de Janeiro, 1936
Any way to mod women not to be generals? This is crucial.
If not, I'm giving this a pass.
There is a helpful Mohawk dev active in the Steam discussion forums who described the required change for this:

You would have to make it as a dll mod as you wouldn't be able to do what you want in xml.

In your mod you'll want to override Character.canBeGeneral() and include a check for isFemale() and then return false if the character is female. This will block females from ever being offered general.

public virtual bool canBeGeneral()
{
if (!hasPlayer())
{
return false;
}

if (isDead())
{
return false;
}

return infos().Helpers.canBeGeneral(this, CharacterType.NONE);
}

You can do this for other roles as well if you want.

Looks like the canBeGeneral() function is defined in Character.cs file, as are canBeGovernor, canBeAgent, canBeCouncil, etc.. DLL modding instuctions can be found from this site, presumably written by an early-access modder.

I might attempt this, if only just to get familiar with the mod tools in Old World. Due to the underlying game design, blocking women from military leadership is only a partial fix because the game world won't spawn any additional male nobles to compensate for the change, so you're effectively cutting your pool for generals in half. Not sure if this affects generated Court Soldiers.

Damn, you're a life-saver. Thank you very much!
 

Axioms

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
1,485
Unity is garbage collected. That is why the UI is a shitshow. The turn times could be because of stupid animations or some other issue, hard to say without a ton of playtime which I'm not interested in.

What's wrong with Garbage Collection? AFAIK it just automatizes getting rid of useless shit in your memory allocation, instead of having to put things in and out of memory like they had to.

Garbage Collection has to do a lot more work to clean up memory during runtime compared to manual memory management.

But why? Can't it be made more efficient?

GC is like a scripting language for memory management. You just can't be as fast as the more difficult to handle compiled version.

You can write your performance critical modules in c++ in Unity. I'm sure they're probably already doing this.

I'm not even sure how I would optimize the AI because I don't know how it works but the game's base design probably makes it difficult to tackle compared to a more deterministic and limited (in number of permutations to search through) system. Every unit having the potential to move to literally hundreds of possible tiles in one turn and having to cycle through a hundred workers on the map probably doesn't help.

Good lord these turn times though. I'm 210 turns in with a modern 12 core Ryzen 7 and it takes 20-30 seconds per turn.

They could. On a larger maps + during mid-end game + on a mid tier PC with SSD this could easily surpass a minute or more.

I don't understand how a game that is so simple mechanically with an AI that is barely better than Civ AIs could spend a whole minute. I guess every single part of the AI is singlthreaded and they do lots of string comparisons or something. Wish it was open source like Civ code eventually becomes so we could figure out what the hell they are doing with all that time.

From what I understand without seeing the CiV source myself they use Lua and not in a particularly performant way.

Nu-civ units move two to five tiles a turn. Old world units zip across the map, with the ability to do actions between movement. For what it's worth, the AI is much better than Civ at putting up a challenge during a equally matched war and the speed of units makes positioning mistakes far less impactful. Difficulty setting doesn't seem to stop the AI from making the most optimal move during combat most of the time (sniping your units down with ranged focus fire and going for kills). I've been playing with fog of war off lately.

The AI is multithreaded to some extent, but how much you benefit from parallelization has to do with the inherent design of the game and what algorithms are appropriate.

You know how it is.

The source code that comes with the game doesn't look like C++ to me. Maybe pathfinding is C++ or something but not the AI. I suppose the problem is both the animations and the units. You can't really multithread the unit decisions because of orders and other stuff. So perhaps that is the primary CPU hog in the AI that creates long turn times.
 

Axioms

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
1,485
HoodedHorse follows me on Twitter so I tweeted them and Soren with some turn time/AI related questions. We'll see what they say.
 

Eyestabber

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 15, 2015
Messages
4,733
Location
HUEland
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
I might attempt this, if only just to get familiar with the mod tools in Old World. Due to the underlying game design, blocking women from military leadership is only a partial fix because the game world won't spawn any additional male nobles to compensate for the change, so you're effectively cutting your pool for generals in half. Not sure if this affects generated Court Soldiers.

It's gonna be a daunting task, but if you're up for it I can help with playtesting. This game isn't like CK3, the entire game system of OW relies on wahmen being men. Character shortage is a real problem even in the vanilla game, so simply disabling roles for wahmen will result in most cities not having governors. You would have to double the spawn rate of characters at the very least. I think Schemer and MAYBE Diplomat could still use wahmen. It's also important to disable wahmen as vagina pope/master Kike. That shit is just retarded.
 

3 others

Scholar
Joined
Aug 11, 2015
Messages
147
It's gonna be a daunting task, but if you're up for it I can help with playtesting. This game isn't like CK3, the entire game system of OW relies on wahmen being men. Character shortage is a real problem even in the vanilla game, so simply disabling roles for wahmen will result in most cities not having governors. You would have to double the spawn rate of characters at the very least. I think Schemer and MAYBE Diplomat could still use wahmen. It's also important to disable wahmen as vagina pope/master Kike. That shit is just retarded.
Thanks for the offer but I don't have much enthusiasm for making in-depth changes to a game that won't run reasonably well on my PC. Unless a 'No grils in my army!" mod comes out this weekend, I'll make one myself, but that's probably the extent of it. As you mentioned, making a sensible ecosystem for nobles requires a significant redesign of the whole character system.

Such a shame the way they botched the characters by making men & women interchangeable gray goo. I can't recall seeing an own goal like this in an otherwise solid game elsewhere recently. Never marry a Lebanese feminist, gentlemen.
 
Joined
Sep 25, 2013
Messages
651
I've dropped the game roughly a week ago but I'm just chiming in to drop the Civ 4 pill. I wanted to scratch that itch that can't be scratched, downloaded Realism Invictus for some novelty and I'm having the time of my life.
Fuck this game, all in all.
 

Mr. Pink

Travelling Gourmand, Crab Specialist
Joined
Jan 9, 2015
Messages
3,042
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I completed my second playthrough as Rome on 'the good' difficulty (the one with no bonuses to AI). The lategame tedium is pretty bad, especially when you're unable to automate city management.

Here's the settings I like to use

Semesters
Neutral difficulty
Small map (4-5 players)
7 bots
Coastal map
Score victory off
Razing enabled

I think this game needs to work on reducing the amount of mechanics that do not scale in importance over time as the scope of the game shifts from city micro to wargame macro. I don't give a shit about what trivial upgrades some governor from another family gets. I don't give a shit about trading for 100 food when it's turn 140 and I have 11000 food stockpiled. I don't give a shit about some event that lowers family opinion by -40 when all my relations are over 200. There has to be a better way to handle these things without bogging down lategame with trivial decisions I have to click through. Maybe advisors and courtiers could be overhauled to handle these decisions for me.

Military suggestions:

  • Enemies should not be able to attack from neutral civ territory. It is fucking infuriating to have onagers siege your shit down from neutral civs land.
  • Onagers and mangonels are way too strong. 5 tile range on mangonels with no range falloff is game breaking. Trees and hills should occlude tiles the same way mountains do to force siege units into archer range. They are unreasonably tanky for siege weaponry. It should not take more than 2 cataphracts to kill a mangonel. Unlimbering should take a turn too.
  • The whole promotion system for military units is extra micro I don't care about because of how disposable they are lategame. I end up always picking the most generally applicable bonus like Strike+, Herbalist or Heckler. Promotions from battlefield XP should be chosen for you based on the units combat history. Fight a lot of mounted units to get Horsebane. Kill siege units to get Engineer. You should be able to choose whatever upgrade you want from units being trained in a barracks or led by a general.
  • Military units should be unlocked in earlier techs. It's boring to be stuck with warriors and slingers for the first 50 turns, especially if your luck is bad and you can't get the resources or techs to unlock the good shit. Give every civ Assyria's battering rams in a early tech. Sieges take too long early game.
  • Make boats more useful. Give them a large ZOC to stop land units from zipping past them on the coast.

Technology suggestions:

  • Make redraw random tech an advisor unlock instead of a leader Scholar thing. I shouldn't need RNG to not have to deal with RNG. Change the algorithm to always add one of the cheaper unresearched techs as an option in your first draw.
  • Tech tree in general need an overhaul. I dislike the ones that are purely military focused because there's no reason to research them until you need them as a prerequisite.

Economy suggestions:

  • Food is too abundant. I have never once had an issue with food production and always have tens of thousands surplus with nothing to spend it on. All military units should consume food as a resource. Cities should consume more food per citizen and food surplus should be a big factor in unhappiness.
  • Stone is the most expensive resource on earth apparently. Maybe because I keep buying wonders (what else am I going to spend all that gold on?)
  • Military units should consume gold too. Give the player a reason to use militia as garrisons at least. Anything to make military units cost more lategame is probably good because too many units is bad for the pacing of the game anyways.
  • Religion is basically completely invalidated by the Tolerance law. +2 happiness per religion is extremely powerful and there's no downside to having four world religions in every city. Make religious unrest actually dangerous. It shouldn't be something that can be easily negated by giving gifts to the head honcho. Religions should have opinions on other religions.
  • Worker automation should be changed so it no longer costs orders, but makes improvements take twice as long to build. This should give you a reason to automate workers late game other than just because it's tedious to plop quarries/lumber/mines/hamlets in every unoccupied tile.
Diplomacy suggestions:
  • National Alliances should be reset on leader death.
  • You should be able to vassalize other AI civs after fully conquering them. Vassals are forced to fight wars with you and you have diplomatic options to demand tribute but they hate you and will rebel if they think they can win.
  • Add war goals. Make it transparent how much you're winning and how close to a peace deal you are. Limit the amount of shit you can annex in a war. I dislike seeing half of the factions in my game get wiped out before turn 100. AI should seek to vassalize or subjugate other AI instead of just gobbling them up. Total war should be a lategame thing.
Court suggestions:

  • There ought to be a hard mode for family management that makes them do actually threatening rebellions against you when they have more cities/units than your main house in lategame. After a certain point, character management became pointless micro because of all the stacking relation buffs from just doing well in the game. It would be even cooler if they could succeed as their own faction or be granted independence but who knows if the game is capable of that. As of now there's really no reason to care about what family your military units are from other than garrison bonus and a mild combat boost.
 
Last edited:

Mr. Pink

Travelling Gourmand, Crab Specialist
Joined
Jan 9, 2015
Messages
3,042
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.


Christopher Tin (of Baba Yetu fame) is so good. Lots of great original tracks in Old World + some stuff I'm surprised they got the license for, like Glassworks by Philip Glass
 

Gaslov

Novice
Joined
May 23, 2022
Messages
8
Alright, so I've played quite a bit now and I am loving this game. The mechanics, once understood, all work so well together. This was a very well thought-out game in most aspects. And thankfully, the AI actually works.
 

Eyestabber

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 15, 2015
Messages
4,733
Location
HUEland
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
I completed my second playthrough as Rome on 'the good' difficulty (the one with no bonuses to AI). The lategame tedium is pretty bad, especially when you're unable to automate city management.

I've been playing on "The Great" for a while now. The management puzzle of OW is quite engaging. The main issue with lategame is the horrible lag, but there's plenty interesting things to do. I agree with popups about "Duke whats-his-face stumbled his toe (-1 courage)" being super annoying but:

Here's the settings I like to use

Semesters
Neutral difficulty
Small map (4-5 players)
7 bots
Coastal map
Score victory off
Razing enabled

You REALLY oughta turn Event Frequency to either Low or Minimal. Btw, what's the reasoning on Semesters? What's the difference?

Onagers and mangonels are way too strong. 5 tile range on mangonels with no range falloff is game breaking. Trees and hills should occlude tiles the same way mountains do to force siege units into archer range. They are unreasonably tanky for siege weaponry. It should not take more than 2 cataphracts to kill a mangonel. Unlimbering should take a turn too.

Agreed, except for the unlimbering part. It already takes a turn, so what do you want exactly? A full turn with no moves? That would make sieges even more of an asspain.

The whole promotion system for military units is extra micro I don't care about because of how disposable they are lategame. I end up always picking the most generally applicable bonus like Strike+, Herbalist or Heckler. Promotions from battlefield XP should be chosen for you based on the units combat history. Fight a lot of mounted units to get Horsebane. Kill siege units to get Engineer. You should be able to choose whatever upgrade you want from units being trained in a barracks or led by a general.

Disagree. I picked promotions based on what I'm facing in the near future, not what I'm facing right now. And besides, OW lets you promote units without fighting anyone, how would those work out?

Military units should be unlocked in earlier techs. It's boring to be stuck with warriors and slingers for the first 50 turns, especially if your luck is bad and you can't get the resources or techs to unlock the good shit. Give every civ Assyria's battering rams in a early tech. Sieges take too long early game.

The main issue with the tech tree is spears having no upgrade until the game is over. As for sieges taking too long early, this is not true at all. Before Porticulis cities simply MELT to archers and UU. What I really wish is that the game had better clarity in determining what tier of walls a given city has. Remember how I said this game suffers immensely from bad readability?

Tech tree in general need an overhaul. I dislike the ones that are purely military focused because there's no reason to research them until you need them as a prerequisite.
Have you tried the alt-tech tree mod by the devs themselves? IMO it makes things even worse.

Food is too abundant. I have never once had an issue with food production and always have tens of thousands surplus with nothing to spend it on. All military units should consume food as a resource. Cities should consume more food per citizen and food surplus should be a big factor in unhappiness.

Agreed. Also think the Grain Dole shouldn't be an event, but a slider/button in the city interface. Increasing/decreasing rations should be an integral part of dealing with unrest, similar to Stronghold.

Stone is the most expensive resource on earth apparently. Maybe because I keep buying wonders (what else am I going to spend all that gold on?)

Same, there's only so many mountains and volcanos, but your need for stone is endless.

Military units should consume gold too. Give the player a reason to use militia as garrisons at least. Anything to make military units cost more lategame is probably good because too many units is bad for the pacing of the game anyways.

As it stands right now Militia are completely worthless as they take orders just like a "real" unit. The main criticism is that expanding (in all senses) has ZERO downside in OW.

Religion is basically completely invalidated by the Tolerance law. +2 happiness per religion is extremely powerful and there's no downside to having four world religions in every city. Make religious unrest actually dangerous. It shouldn't be something that can be easily negated by giving gifts to the head honcho. Religions should have opinions on other religions.
The first part is simply wrong, Orthodoxy is very powerful if you invest in a particular WR OR if you go Poly/Divine Rule. As for the unrest, yes, unrest in general has been handled in a pretty limp dicked and unsatisfying way. In the end, it all boils down to penalties to your empire's overall effectiveness. Things don't stop working due to unrest, they merely work less effectively. Even families at -300 don't really do anything against you, merely spawn "rebels" aka free XP. What I would change: religions should lose their perks when relations go negative.

National Alliances should be reset on leader death.

That's already the case...? The AI reevaluates its alliances on every ruler's death by default.

There ought to be a hard mode for family management that makes them do actually threatening rebellions against you when they have more cities/units than your main house in lategame. After a certain point, character management became pointless micro because of all the stacking relation buffs from just doing well in the game. It would be even cooler if they could succeed as their own faction or be granted independence but who knows if the game is capable of that. As of now there's really no reason to care about what family your military units are from other than garrison bonus and a mild combat boost.

Sorry, but this one is absolutely terrible. OW was not designed around a "Main House", what does that even mean? The family that holds your capital? That would force players to found their capital with the military family every single time, rendering 80% of strats not viable. TBH, I have never seen a mechanic for internal turmoil being implemented properly, in a non-infuriating way. Paradox rebel whack-a-mole is garbage, Civ 4 RevDCM is a TERRIBLE mod (despite its popularity) and events that split your empire are the cream of the shitcake. Losing half your shit because RNG says fuck you makes me uninstall immediately. And having a bunch of relationship bonuses from doing well in the game is good design, great emperors like Augustus did please everyone they didn't kill a decade earlier.
 

Axioms

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
1,485
Sorry, but this one is absolutely terrible. OW was not designed around a "Main House", what does that even mean? The family that holds your capital? That would force players to found their capital with the military family every single time, rendering 80% of strats not viable. TBH, I have never seen a mechanic for internal turmoil being implemented properly, in a non-infuriating way. Paradox rebel whack-a-mole is garbage, Civ 4 RevDCM is a TERRIBLE mod (despite its popularity) and events that split your empire are the cream of the shitcake. Losing half your shit because RNG says fuck you makes me uninstall immediately. And having a bunch of relationship bonuses from doing well in the game is good design, great emperors like Augustus did please everyone they didn't kill a decade earlier.

How would you implement a good internal turmoil system? RNG is bad, agreed. Defined events like "realm divide" or w/e are lame cop outs. So what should be done? If you make real trade offs between growth/expansion and stability or other stuff like that and then you get in a bad spot and it all goes tits up, no rng, very deterministic in fact? Or is the "rng" that caused the hickup in your plan to deal with your problems later still the bad rng?
 

Eyestabber

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 15, 2015
Messages
4,733
Location
HUEland
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
How would you implement a good internal turmoil system?

I wouldn't try to fix what isn't broken. To me a game like Civ/OW/Alpha Centauri is supposed to be a fun game first and foremost and a simulation of history, sci-fi or whatever as a distant second, maybe third. In that sense I only care about "realistic" features if they improve the overall experience. "Internal turmoil" boils down to the AI taking away some of your cities and troops because reasons. It simply doesn't make for a fun game, I don't know a single stance of revolution/independence/"turmoil" system that isn't infuriating and completely unfair. This is the equivalent of taking half your gear and levels in an RPG. Would you keep playing it after that? I would uninstall and review bomb it immediately.

The issue lies on the fact that in a 4x your goal is to get more stuff, more troops, more cities, more resources, better technology etc, much like the "goal" of an RPG is to get more XP, better gear, optimal party composition, amongst other things. And sure, in some RPGs you can have a party member leave you or your gear can be lost in combat, BUT those losses feel earned and aren't really a problem. But in 4x games "internal turmoil" is always a punishment for simply playing the game. Rarely does the player actually get the tools to deal with whatever the problem is OR he is usually put in a situation where it's impossible to deal with the "chance to revolt" without sacrificing everything else.

I will admit that in EU IV the internal unrest feels somewhat realistic and "earned", but that doesn't make it any less fucking annoying. And CK3 is a fucking joke, every new ruler has to deal with half the Kingdom revolting while old rulers enjoy eternal peace, very little player agency in between. Essentially, having to redo your work is never fun and I don't accept "RNG says fuck you" mechanics OR being punished for simply daring to play the fucking game.

Anyway, won on The Great as Persia today. World religions are stronger than I initially thought, monasteries are pretty good. T3 theologies still suck, tho.
 
Joined
Jul 8, 2006
Messages
2,930
semesters is 2 turns a year instead of 1 turn a year, I assume it gives you more granularity and choices and turns in a game but I have not tried both ways yet, so not sure how it really plays out..only played w/ semester so far..only played about 1/8th of 1 game so far
 

Axioms

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
1,485
How would you implement a good internal turmoil system?

I wouldn't try to fix what isn't broken. To me a game like Civ/OW/Alpha Centauri is supposed to be a fun game first and foremost and a simulation of history, sci-fi or whatever as a distant second, maybe third. In that sense I only care about "realistic" features if they improve the overall experience. "Internal turmoil" boils down to the AI taking away some of your cities and troops because reasons. It simply doesn't make for a fun game, I don't know a single stance of revolution/independence/"turmoil" system that isn't infuriating and completely unfair. This is the equivalent of taking half your gear and levels in an RPG. Would you keep playing it after that? I would uninstall and review bomb it immediately.

The issue lies on the fact that in a 4x your goal is to get more stuff, more troops, more cities, more resources, better technology etc, much like the "goal" of an RPG is to get more XP, better gear, optimal party composition, amongst other things. And sure, in some RPGs you can have a party member leave you or your gear can be lost in combat, BUT those losses feel earned and aren't really a problem. But in 4x games "internal turmoil" is always a punishment for simply playing the game. Rarely does the player actually get the tools to deal with whatever the problem is OR he is usually put in a situation where it's impossible to deal with the "chance to revolt" without sacrificing everything else.

I will admit that in EU IV the internal unrest feels somewhat realistic and "earned", but that doesn't make it any less fucking annoying. And CK3 is a fucking joke, every new ruler has to deal with half the Kingdom revolting while old rulers enjoy eternal peace, very little player agency in between. Essentially, having to redo your work is never fun and I don't accept "RNG says fuck you" mechanics OR being punished for simply daring to play the fucking game.

Anyway, won on The Great as Persia today. World religions are stronger than I initially thought, monasteries are pretty good. T3 theologies still suck, tho.

EU4 is a very simplistic "idle game" type situation to some degree. Basically you need to stack the right bonus, [ - unrest] in this case. True that unrest comes from choices but not very granular ones and the unrest system itself is childishly simple. And of course it is very impersonal, although many people prefer high level abstractions like what EU4 has.
 

covr

Prophet
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New patch is in beta, you're going to like some of the changes:
Add Food to most unit consumption
Added Bisexual trait
 

Eyestabber

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Sadly there's no talk of improving the GODDAMN HORRIBLE PERFORMANCE.
It ain't happening.You can't fix unity performance issues after you released the game.Would take too much time.

Have you played Xcom 2 War of the Chosen? In that expac FIRAXIS pretty much redid the game engine and drastically improved performance compared to the base game. Couldnt we hope for something similar?
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,945
Sadly there's no talk of improving the GODDAMN HORRIBLE PERFORMANCE.
It ain't happening.You can't fix unity performance issues after you released the game.Would take too much time.

Have you played Xcom 2 War of the Chosen? In that expac FIRAXIS pretty much redid the game engine and drastically improved performance compared to the base game. Couldnt we hope for something similar?
That is the strength of having a in house engine.You can't do the same for unity,you are stuck with the flaws from the get go.
Unreal is better performance wise and the major issue of stuttering is not really present in tbs strategy games.Unity on the other hand is a mess when it comes to any genre.

So if you want to get something from unity in terms of performance you either:
-Have a very experienced engineer team that can actually do something(most of those people work for unity though)
-Invest a significant amount of time during development to get the engine to a respectable performance.Post launch most studios run a skeleton crew unless you are developing a big expansion or something.And the time wasted trying to make Unity run decently is time that could have been used for actual development,so most studios won't do that.

Old world devs are lazy on the other hand thanks the epic deal.They had the money upfront so they had no real worries,they could have tried to iron out performance,they just didn't care.
 

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