Category Archives: Video Games

Addendum: Factorio is getting worse as a game

I posted a while ago about how I loved Factorio but didn’t like Factorio: Space Age. The crux of my argument was that Factorio rewarded players creativity and expression, letting and encouraging the players to find their own solutions to problems and play “their way.” Space Age undid all that, the devs have decided that there is only 1 right way to solve each problem, find their way and do what they want you to do. There is no more player freedom and expression, no more playing “you way,” it’s the devs’ way or the high way.

I decided that Space Age was a bad expansion pack, but at least the base Factorio game was still untouched, right? Well no, Space Age’s “my way or the high way” ideology has also infected the base game. The game has certain achievements for completing it within certain constraints, and now the devs have decided that if you play “your way,” you are no longer eligible for their achievements.

Nefrums, a Factorio youtuber, used to have an amazing series of videos where he completed 100% of Factorio’s acheivements in a single base in a single session, a speedrunning achievement in which he held the world record many times. The only realistic way to complete this gargantuan task was to change the way the game was played to make them possible. The task was still monsterous of course, it wasn’t at all easy by any means, but it was possible since Nefrums was allowed to play “his” way.

Now an update has made playing the game Nefrum’s way no longer possible. When you start a new game, you can see all the little tweaks you can make to how the game is played. There is a warning next to *every single tweak* saying that if you change this setting, you disable some achievements. Obviously it’s no longer possible to play Nefrum’s way since he would change these setting but still get 100% of the achievements in a single base. But again, the devs don’t want you playing “your way,” it’s the devs’ way or the high way.

So now even the base game has decided that if you aren’t playing “correctly,” you need to be punished for your arrogance. The devs have become so insular that they are seemingly enraged by anyone playing “wrong,” so they need to change the game to “fix” them.

Achievements don’t harm the devs in any way, they are purely a motivational factor for the players. If Nefrums wants to get 100% of the achievements by changing the settings, that doesn’t hurt the devs and it doesn’t hurt any of the other Factorio players at all. So there is no reason to change things and disable those achievements except pure spite, pure spite that someone, somewhere might be playing the game “wrong” and getting achievements in the “wrong” way.

Such a shame that the devs I once thought were pinnacles of the video game world have become so spiteful and insular. I don’t think I’ll even play another game of theirs, I’ve been burned badly with how bad Space Age was relative to the Factorio base game, and now they’ve even gone back and changed the base game to make it worse.

Such is life.

Addendum, I’m sure fans and devs might be angry at my post, and attack me by saying Space Age is making hella bank and so I’m just a hater. But I think the evidence shows the wider community agrees with me. Factorio’s base game is rated “Overwelmingly Positive” by the Steam reviewers, a mark of excellence only a very few games achieve. Factorio: Space Age is rated at a mere “Very Positive,” and the recent reviews give it a “Mostly Positive,” meaning barely a majority of the reviewers gave it a thumbs up.

“Mostly Positive” is a very low bar to clear in Steam reviews, only the worse of the worst video games will ever score below “Mostly Positive”. So in grade scales we could say that the base game got an “A,” its expansion got a “B,” and the recent players of the expansion give it a “C,” a barely passing mark.

It’s pretty clear that many many players, not just me, think Space Age is a worse game than Factorio was. If you like it, I am glad, but I don’t like it, please don’t get angry at me for not liking a game you like.

Opportunity Costs in Civilization 6

One of the most important concepts I learned in economics is the idea of opportunity costs.  Every action we take has a cost, not just the cost of the action itself, but the cost of *now not being able to do something else* with either the time or money or both that we just spent.  

A simple example: a company only has 100$ to invest in a machine.  If they buy the machine that makes blue widgets, they can’t also buy the machine that makes red widgets.  Thus, buying the blue widget machine doesn’t *just* cost 100$, it also has the *opportunity cost* of not buying the red widget machine.

There are also opportunity costs with time, if you decide to go to Europe for your holiday vacation, you can’t also go to South America at the same time.  So the cost of going to Europe isn’t just the cost of the time and the tickets, it’s also the opportunity cost of not going to South America (or anywhere else) as well.

As an aside, this is why for some people it can make sense to NOT go to college EVEN IF college were totally free.  The cost of going to college includes the *opportunity cost* of not having a full-time job (if you’re a full-time student).  

A comedian once made a joke that, after graduating college he couldn’t find any work “because the dropouts already had the jobs.”  A funny joke, but it demonstrates a point:  You spend 4 years getting a degree, but if that degree doesn’t measurably increase your employment prospects, you could have been better off spending those 4 years getting work experience at a full-time job.  You could not only get the money that a full time job gives you, but the experience itself would increase your employability and ability to get better jobs.

So the education and degree you’re seeking needs to increase your employability *more* than just doing 4 years of work.  If not, then it’s a net loss *even if your education was free* because you had the *opportunity cost* of not getting those 4 years of work experience.

But I didn’t want to blog about college, I wanted to blog about Civilization again.

The non-gamers in my audience may be tired of my gaming blogging, but I’ve spent a lot of this holiday season playing Civ IV and Civ VI with friends, so I’ve been thinking about this.

I complain that in Civ VI, some of the leaders seem to have traits that are utterly worthless, they don’t feel like they improve your Civ’s abilities any more than having a vanilla Civ with *no* traits.  Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of these, her ability to culture-flip cities feels very underpowered and completely useless, and doesn’t make her any more powerful than a Civ that doesn’t have any abilities at all.

My friend shoots back at this by saying that if you put a lot of resources into it, you can set up a situation in which you culture-flip whole continents in an instant.  And yes, this is theoretically possible.  Does that mean Eleanor is “very powerful in the right circumstances?”  No.  Because of *opportunity costs*.  

See, the cost of putting all your resources into Eleanor’s culture-flipping ability is that *you can’t put those resources into other things*.  You can’t research technologies or build military units if you are instead spending your entire GDP on culture buildings.  Culture isn’t free, and it doesn’t just cost what it costs to produce it, it has the *opportunity cost* of not doing anything else with that money and production.

So in any situation where Eleanor can “culture flip a continent” by spending an absurd amount of resources on culture, any other Civ could just use those resources to win the game with military, or science, or even diplomacy.  

Eleanor’s ability is useless not because you *can’t* use it to do things, but because the amount you have to spend to make her ability not-useless could instead be better used to win the game in *any other way at all*.  Her ability has an *opportunity cost* in that if you try to use it to its fullest, you are by definition not using those resources on better strategies that will win you the game more easily.

And that’s what I feel about a lot of the Civ VI leaders.   Some  leaders have abilities so minor they don’t feel impactful.  Some have abilities that completely change the nature of the game.  And some like Eleanor have these abilities that are actually traps, because the opportunity cost of trying to use their ability to its fullest makes you worse off than if you’d ignored their ability and played the game normally.

People didn’t like Civ IV’s leader system because every leader drew from a limited pot of abilities.  Gilgamesh is Creative/Protective, while Catherine the Great is Creative/Imperialistic.  From my perspective, that’s unique, *no one but Gilgamesh has that specific combination of traits*.  From other people’s perspective though “they’re both creative so they’re too similar to be cool.”  

These people who say this seem to really be drawn to Civ VI because every leader has *completely unique abilities* not seen anywhere else.  But from my perspective “many of those abilities are worse to use than just ignoring the ability and playing the game normally.”  Leaning into your “special ability” can have an opportunity cost, and no one but me seems to recognize this.

So in the future, please think about opportunity costs, both for college and for your video games.  Making a nation have a super special ability isn’t actually cool if leaning into that ability makes you worse off than if you’d ignored it and played the game normally.   Opportunity costs are real, even if not everyone understands them.

Why does the Civ VI AI feel so incompetent?  Part 2: Examining how it was made. 

When I was last writing about the Civilization series, I was complaining about how the AIs in Civ VI feel much stupider than the AIs in Civ IV.  I encourage you to read that post, because this one is a direct follow-on. 

In brief, there were a lot of ways AIs could threaten you in Civ IV.  They could send their military to attack you, they could use their production to build wonders before you could, they could use their culture to steal the hearts and minds of your people, making your own cities flip to their side in the process. 

In theory, all these methods still exist in Civ VI, but the AIs are very incompetent at executing them.  None of the Civ VI AIs can threaten you with their military, wonder-building, or culture the way AIs could in Civ IV.  And I think the reason is one of Civ VI’s biggest selling points: unstacking the map. 

See, Civ IV militaries came in “stacks,” where 20 to 100 different units could all sit on one tile together and attack wherever they wanted.  Defeating these stacks meant you had to have a stack of units all your own, and some people complained that this made warfare just a numbers game without any tactics.   

I think those complainers were dead wrong, but regardless Civ V was the first game to “unstack” the military, forcing 20 units to all sit on 20 different tiles instead of stacking together to attack you.  Civ VI continues this trend, and coincidentally Civ V and Civ VI have the same problem in which warlike AIs are incredibly bad at war.   

But while Civ V was the first to unstack the units, Civ VI went further in “unstacking the map.”  In Civ IV and Civ V, your city could have any number of buildings in it that you wanted, built at any time.  So you could build a Forge for +25% production, a Library for +25% Research, a Market for +25% gold.  The question then becomes, which buildings should you build, and in what order? 

If you already know you’re going to build all 3, then you should build the Forge first.  It’s bonus of +25% production will speed up how fast you build the Library and the Market after its finished.  But maybe you are in a severe economic crunch, and you just NEED GOLD NOW.  In that case, maybe build the Market first, and then maybe skip on the library and forge so you city can focus on producing wealth and not spend its scarce resources building infrastructure. 

Or maybe your city produces a lot of science, but almost no production or gold.  Is it worth building the Market and Forge in that case?  Maybe you should *just* build the library and be done with it. 

These are all simple ideas, and you can easily see the AI thinking of the game like an excel spreadsheet and just trying to maximize its values at the end.  The AI sees its running out of gold, it builds markets in response.  It sees a city with high science, it builds a library there.  It sees a city with good everything, it builds Forge first, then Library and Market after.   

The AI in Civ IV is really just deciding what order to build things in, and when.  Its goals can be thought of as simple profit-maximizer functions, and it can be coded in the same way.  The programmers who actually built this AI then had a straightforward job in front of them: adjust how the AI weights each one of its goals until you find a system that makes the AI play reasonably well.   

You can downweight Libraries if your playtesting reveals that the AI is going bankrupt by building those instead of Markets.  You can upweight Forges if the AI is foregoing them to focus only on science and gold.   

Up- and downweighting just chances where the AI puts its build orders in the city queue, and while there’s a lot more to build in Civ IV than just Forges, Markets, and Libraries, the build queue itself is quite simple to grasp. It’s easy to visualize the build queue by just writing it out, and it makes sense that you could try to use it to improve the AI’s intelligence while sitting in front of your computer trying to program the game. 

But with unstacking the cities, there’s no longer just a build queue.  It isn’t just about *when* you build things, but also *where*.  Even explaining this system through text or a spreadsheet is difficult, and you’ll see what I mean.  And I believe that this difficulty made it harder to program a “good” AI.  Because instead of a simple build-queue that can be thought of as a profit-maximizing function, you’re suddenly solving a *graphical* problem instead. 

So here’s an example of unstacking the cities.  In Civ VI you’ll still build the equivalents of Forges, Libraries, and Markets.  Only now Forges give bonus production for being near mines and quarries, Libraries give bonus science for being next to mountains, and Markets give bonus gold for being on a river.  Each building can’t stack on top of another building, so you can’t place a Library where you already put your Forge. 

Let’s say we have a city that’s just south of a river, near a mountain range immediately to its west, and has some mines on the opposite side of the river near the mountains (so northwest from the city).   

Well if you put down the Forge near the mines (so across the river), you invalidate using that spot for your Market.  If you then put your Market down on this side of the river, you no longer have any room to place your Library near those mountains.   

Is this easy to visualize in your head?  Do you think it’d be easy to try to program an AI to maximize its bonuses in this system?  I don’t think so, and I think this might be a fundamental problem with the Civ VI AI: it can’t think in terms about graphical problems, it only seems to think about functional problems.  And I think that’s because the programmers programming it also had trouble solving the graphical problems because translating a graphic problem into code isn’t something most people are used to. 

And I think this is the case because Civ IV’s AI *also* had a fundamental difficulty of solving graphical problems.  Most of Civ IV’s gameplay was like those profit-maximizing functions I talked about above: what do you build or research and in what order.  But *where* to place your cities is a more graphical problem, and it was one problem the AI was unusually bad at. 

Here’s an example of Civ IV’s graphical problem: where to settle your city?  You’re playing as Egypt, and Egypt’s special unit is the War Chariot, which requires Horses.  You see there is a Horse resource a ways east of some Wheat, and to the northeast of the Horse resource is Fish.  Wheat and Fish both provide a lot of food, and food is the most important resource of all in Civ IV (as it is in real history).   

So you want to maximize your food AND get the Horses, but how can you get all 3 of these together in a single city?  Settling closer to the Wheat gives you a city that’s off the coast and can’t get to the Fish.  Settling closer to the Horses means you have to wait until borders expand to get either the Fish OR the Wheat.  Settling closer to the Fish means you have to wait until borders expand to get the Horses. 

Again, this problem of where to settle cities is probably very hard to visualize.  And while a skilled player will quickly learn to solve this problem, it seems the Civ IV programmers couldn’t get the AI to solve it.  The AIs will regularly settle cities in terrible spots where they can’t get any resources or can’t get as many resources as they *should* get. 

Again, I think the graphical problems of Civ IV were harder for programmers to visualize and program for than the profit-maximizing problems, and that’s why Civ IV is worse at the game’s graphical problems, like settling cities, than it is at the profit-maximizing problems, like when to build its Forge, Library, and Market. 

I think as the games’ problems have become more and more graphical, the programmers who are used to coding functions haven’t been able to keep up.  And that leads to a severe disconnect between how the programmers want the AI to behave an how it actually does. 

I think my final piece of evidence for this is the 2021 patch for Civ VI/ 

In the Civ VI 2021 patch, the Devs tried their damndest to finally make the AI smarter.  They did this by making the AI overemphasize science to a ridiculous degree, hoping that if the AI could have a tech lead against the player than all its other problems would fall into place. 

This didn’t work because the AI was still building Libraries in terrible places, it was just now building more of them and invalidating good locations for Markets, Forges, and everything else.  The huge overemphasis on libraries created AIs that would blow through the early-game research before stalling out due to a lack of money and production to build buildings in the later eras.  The AIs still couldn’t win technology victories, or even beat the player in technology, but when you captured their cities you’d find tons of libraries built in spots that should have had a Market or Forge. 

It sounds like the Devs faced exactly the type of graphic problem I’ve described, but tried to solve it with a profit-maximizing solution.  The AI can’t research well?  It’s very hard to teach them *where* to place libraries, so just tell them to build *more* of them.   

I don’t know what can be done to fix this, maybe force the devs to have a copy of the game running on a second monitor as they program, or introduce some training about how to translate a graphical problem into a code-able solution.  But I think this difficulty of solving graphical problems is why the Civ VI AI is so much dumber than the Civ IV AI, all the biggest problems in Civ VI are graphical. 

Why does Civ VI AI feel so incompetent? Part 1: Examining the AI in its natural habitat.

I’ve talked before about Civ IV and Civ VI, two great entries in the much-beloved Civilization series of video games.  I’ve talked before about how the Civ IV AIs feel like they’re a lot “better” at playing Civ IV than the Civ VI AIs are at playing Civ VI.   

Civ IV AIs aren’t smart, they make dumb mistakes, but they are competent and threatening both to the player and each other.  Civ VI AIs are incompetent and unthreatening, they simply don’t know *how to win* even if they are OK at surviving and acting as a speed bump.   

Let me get deeper into how the AIs could “threaten” you in Civ IV.  I don’t know if “threaten” is the right word, but we’ll go with that.

The most obvious way an AI can threaten your empire is they could go to war with you.  A warlike leader like Alexander the Great could just build military units nonstop and attack you.   

But that’s not the only thing AI leaders could do, they could also build wonders that you wanted to build.  In Civilization, there are these unique buildings called “Wonders” which can only be built once in the entire world.  Think of the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or the Statue of Liberty.  Every Civ in the game gets a chance to build these wonders, but whoever built it *first* gets the wonder and all the benefits of that wonder, while everyone else gets a crummy consolation prize.   

These wonders gave powerful benefits, The Great Wall for instance would completely stop barbarians from entering your territory.  You might really want that wonder to protect yourself.  So let’s say you start building the Great Wall, but another Civ across the map finishes their own Great Wall mere moments before you were about to finish yours. They get the Great Wall with all its benefits, you get no Great Wall and a crummy consolation prize, AND you invested a lot of production into that wonder that you could have spent on something else.   

An industrious leader like Rameses had the perfect traits to outbuild you in wonders.  So if he was on your map, you had to really plan and strategize how you were going to beat him to get those wonders for yourself. 

AI leaders could also threaten you culturally.  Civ IV had an elegant way of using culture, in that culture decided what parts of the map your empire controlled, and thus what parts you could extract resources from. 

Consider two AI leaders, Julius Caesar of Rome and Louis XIV of France.  They settled their cities right next to each other, and between the Roman and French cities lies a gold resource.  Gold is incredibly valuable, not only does it give you money in Civ IV, but it also counts as a luxury resource that makes every city in your empire happier.  Controlling that gold is key to building a wealthy and powerful nation. 

Caesar is a warlike leader though, he’ll be building non-stop military units in his city.  Louis is a more cultural leader, he’ll build libraries, theatres, that kind of stuff.  These cultural buildings put cultural pressure on the people living between the two Empires, those people will start to adopt more and more French fashion, language, taste, and more and more of them will call themselves French and not Roman.  Because they call themselves French, they’ll work for the French Civ and not the Roman Civ, thereby giving France control over the gold.   

So through the power of culture, France will control the gold and Caesar won’t.  And since Caesar never builds anything but military, he won’t put out the cultural pressure needed to counteract the French culture pressure.  Eventually, French culture might be so strong that the people Rome might get converted into being French, they’ll want to join the French Civ rather than remain Roman because French culture is so dominant.  It will take a lot of military police for Caesar to keep the his people in line, and even then they may revolt out from under him. 

Which is why Caesar usually declares war on cultural Civs that settle next to him. 

But anyway, this cultural pressure is *yet another way* for Civ IV AIs to threaten you.  It’s not enough that you settled powerful cities in good spots, you also have to keep your citizens happy and build then some cultural buildings.  If you don’t, an AI like Louis can settle on your border and convert them all out from under you. 

All these three things: wonders, culture, military, are ways that the AI in Civ IV could affect and threaten you.  You weren’t just playing a game all on your own, Civ IV had AIs on the board who would mess up your every plan at the slightest opportunity, with their military, their wonder-building, and their culture.

Military, wonder-building, and culture all still exist in Civ VI, but the AI can’t really use them to affect a human player. 

Let’s go back to our war example with Alexander.  In Civ IV, Alexander’s main mode was to declare war by marching a force across his enemy’s border that was twice as large as their entire army.  All of these military units could move and attack together, so 20 units could move right next to an enemy city and attack the single archer that was guarding it.  With such a large force, Alexander was basically guaranteed to conquer several cities in his path before his enemies could mount a counter-attack. 

In Civ VI, Alexander is still a warlike AI who likes building units.  But Civ VI has 1-unit-per-tile (abbreviated 1UPT), so all those 20 units are spread out across a very wide area, and they get in each other’s way when they try to move.  If the unit at the front is attacking a city, every unit behind it is blocked from moving forward, and they have to all awkwardly shuffle around to find their own vectors of attack.   

Rather than overwhelming his enemies 20-to-1 like Civ IV Alexander, Civ VI Alexander has his units attacking piecemeal, one-at-a-time, because he can’t get them all into the same place at the same time.  You’d think his 20-to-1 advantage would still ensure he eventually wins, but Civ VI has so many defender advantages, and so many ways to heal units, that his attacks end up petering out in most cases. 

Civ IV Alexander would conquer Civ after Civ until he faced someone with enough of a technology edge to counter his numerical edge.  Civ VI Alexander rarely even takes border cities, and almost never conquers entire Civs.  

How about that wonder example from earlier?  In Civ IV, wonders require a certain technology in order to unlock them, and can be built faster if you have a special resource like Marble or Stone.   

Rameses’s MO was therefore to bee-line for technologies that let him build wonders, try to grab any Marble or Stone he could find, and build his wonders in whatever city he had the most production in.  That was usually enough to net him most of the wonders, and you’d have to bee-line those technologies yourself and outpace him in raw production if you wanted to get any. 

In Civ VI, Rameses is still in the game, still obsessed with building wonders, but he is now MUCH worse at it.  The thing is that wonders now have a lot of specific requirements in order to build them.  You can’t just build the Colosseum in whatever city you choose, you can ONLY build it on FLAT land NEXT TO an entertainment district that ALSO has an Arena in it.   

AIs are really bad at building districts, they always seem to have way fewer than they should and often those districts are placed nonsensically.  The AI also doesn’t plan ahead with their districts, they will happily place their entertainment district in a spot surrounded by hills and mountains so that they have no flat land to build the Colosseum.   And even if the AI builds an entertainment district next to flat land, there’s no guarantee they’ll eventually build the Arena in that district that is required to build the Colosseum.

Many of the wonders in the game have strict requirements like this, so aside from the few wonders with very loose requirements, Civ VI Rameses is just structurally incapable of building wonders.  The Colosseum unlocks in the classical age, and it is a very powerful building, you’d think Rameses would want to build it.  But I can still lazily pick it up in the industrial age *centuries later* because AIs like Rameses will simply *never satisfy the requirements to build it*.   

In Civ VI I don’t need to bee-line technologies, or have super high production.  I just need to be mindful of the wonder’s requirements, and I can build almost any of them at my leisure. 

Finally let’s talk about Culture.  Louis XIV isn’t in Civ VI, but Eleanor of Aquitaine is.  When Eleanor leads France, they should be a cultural powerhouse just like under Louis, right?  Not really. 

See, there’s no cultural struggle in Civ VI like there was in Civ IV.  France can’t settle next to you and steal your gold tile away with culture.  Instead Civ VI works on a first-come-first-served basis, if you get the gold tile first, it’s yours forever barring some unbelievably rare circumstances.   

And in fact, the map is so open in Civ VI that you’ll rarely see a Civ next to you at all.  Civ IV was a mad dash to settle the map before anyone else.  If you were slow, all the good resources (like the gold) would already be taken before you could get to them, leaving you with no resources of your own.  At that point, the only way to get your resources in Civ IV would be either war (like Alexander) or culture (like Louis). 

But Civ VI has more resources than it knows what to do with, I often stop settling cities not because there’s no more room but because I no longer want to have another city to manage.  If someone does take a gold resource, well that sucks, but I can probably find another gold resource somewhere close by.

So my cities very rarely are right on the border with another Civ’s, meaning that even if she wanted to, Eleanor couldn’t steal my tiles like Louis could.   

And besides, the AI can’t build culture any more than it can build wonders.  As I said, the AI doesn’t build enough districts, and they certainly don’t produce enough culture from those districts to matter.  You can’t culture flip tiles, but you can still culture-flip cities, and Eleanor’s special ability in Civ VI is supposed to let her better at this than anyone else.  She’s so good, Civs can’t even use their military to keep cities in check the way Caesar could in the Civ IV example.   

But when I’ve played against AI Eleanor, she never has any success with culture-flipping.  She doesn’t produce enough culture districts, she doesn’t produce enough culture, and her cities are usually so far away from mine that her culture-flipping couldn’t happen even if I ignored culture entirely and went for a pure military victory. 

I wanted to make this point about how the AIs in Civ VI don’t seem to play their game as well as in Civ IV.  I’ve harped on this point a lot over the years, but I wanted to bring in some specifics because in my next post, I’d like to tackle the *why*.  I don’t know for sure, but I think that a very important change in the Civ series made coding AIs for it a MUCH bigger headache, and that has led to stupider AIs overall. 

Stay tuned… 

Templar Battleforce: X-Com meets Dawn of War in a very disappointing way

I don’t have time to edit again today, but I wanted to post that Templar Battleforce is a game that’s really less than the sum of its parts. It’s currently available for 10$ and that’s probably an appropriate price point, because it’s not a hidden gem or an indie classic but rather a muddled homage to X-Com and Dawn of War.

But some of you might not know what I’m comparing it to, so let me explain.

X-Com was one of the earliest and most highly regarded squad-based tactics games on the PC. I’ve seen both the original game (made in 1993) and the modern remake (made in 2012) top lists of the 100 best games of all time. X-Com puts you in command of a squad of soldiers trying to defeat and alien invasion, and despite your rookies have the life expectancy of a WW1 soldier at higher difficulties, players became instantly attached to their digital avatars thanks to the fun mechanics, varied enemies, and interesting scenarios they could be thrown into. Naming all your soldiers after pop stars, then telling your friends how Taylor Swift hit an amazing shot to blow up a cyberdisk and save Freddie Mercury was exactly the kind of fun that X-Com was made of.

Dawn of War meanwhile was a series of tactical RTS games based on the Warhammer 40k franchise. The Dawn of War series put you in the shoes of a bunch of Space Marines fighting enemies from without and within, with a lot of the enjoyment coming from the over-the-top, dare I say “cool” scenarios you could be faced with.

See, Warhammer 40k (and the Space Marines in particular) are extremely over-the-top in every way. So having your guys drop from orbit onto a burning planet to fight an awakening God with their chainsaw-swords is exactly the kind of “cool” you want to lean in on, and the Dawn of War games delivered. Whether it was endless legions of Tyranids, nigh-unkillable Necrons, or Orks who just love to fight and talk like football hooligans, Dawn of War tried to make each battle feel like an extravagant power fantasy against impossible odds.

So Templar Battleforce is an indie game that tries to make exactly the game I wanted as a kid: an X-Com style game with Warhammer 40k lore. And it just doesn’t work.

The first problem is that the lore is kinda boring. I find myself skipping most of the dialogue and story because it just isn’t interesting. This game gets around the Warhammer 40k trademark by having these “Templars” be slightly different than the Space Marines of Dawn of War, but the game is definitely leaning towards these guys being zany impossible badasses in their own right. And it just doesn’t land, in part I think because the game doesn’t have enough fidelity to *show* cool stuff and relies on *telling* us instead.

We very rarely get a nice comparison point between our Templars and the normal humans who they’re so superior to. And we don’t really get any instances of crazy scenarios that make our Templars seem cool, like the God-chainsaw fight above. You can tell me all you want about how these enemies are so strong they’d tear through any normal human, but with no comparative or stand-out moments of their own, the Templars *feel* like normal humans. They aren’t cool, and to be honest I don’t know how to fix it.

The second problem is that the gameplay isn’t as fun as X-Com, or even as some of the Dawn of Wars like Dawn of War 2. These other squad-based games were fun because of the cool tactics you could do, the cool abilities that you could use, and how the fights encouraged experimentation and rewarded you for your ingenuity. I had moments in the original X-Com of blowing up the side of a building to flank aliens who were covering the doors, and I loved it. And later games gave your soldiers special powers that were integral to victory but also really cool to use, like snipers parkouring up an impossible ledge to get a better vantage point, or heavies using a special shredding rocket that made enemies take double damage from everyone else once they were hit by it.

Templar Battleforce doesn’t really have that. I shoot and I stab my enemies, but I don’t feel like many of my tactics are cool or interesting. I feel like I’m learning the loadouts and correctly reading the maps to find the optimal way to victory.

Part of this may be the design choice that unlike X-Com, Templar Battleforce makes it very hard to dodge shots and stabs. In X-Com a 50% chance to hit was expected, and the game was all about optimizing and improving that chance through your numerous powers and abilities. In Templar Battleforce, missing an enemy is very rare, and there isn’t much you can do to optimize and improve your damage numbers. So instead, it’s mostly a game of calculating how to use your limited movement points to fire as many shots as possible, with the assumption that each shot will do an expected range of damage.

It’s not that there’s *no* special abilities, just that they’re rare and not encouraged by the game mechanics. I like how the Hydra (flamethrower guy) can set down a wall of flame that persists for the rest of the battle. I like that the Engineer can set up turrets. But most of the abilities are just giving you small bonuses and buffs that you don’t usually need because as I said misses are rare. The game doesn’t do enough to make these bonuses and buffs feel impactful at all.

Finally the online community helpfully *discourages* you from investing into the other soldier that might be cooler like the Berzerker or the Neptune, because the game doesn’t give you enough points to spread your investments wide. Instead, the recommended playstyle is to invest heavily into the bog-standard soldier and scout classes, the least interesting classes by far.

The thing is, the soldier and scout *don’t even need to be uninteresting*. To bring it back to Dawn of War 2, that game did a lot to make every class interesting in its own unique way. Now it was real-time instead of turn based, but regardless the units in that game had heavy differentiation in their jobs and abilities. There was huge variety in the range of your weapons, the effects of your weapons, and each unit had a very unique upgrade tree that made you really think about your choices while upgrading.

My Dawn of War scout could go invisible and spam explosive mines at anyone he wanted, my Dawn of War heavy could lock down huge amounts of the map by himself, making enemies duck and move slowly, my Dawn of War soldier could ignore this ability when enemies tried to do it to us, and he could taunt enemies so they’d target him instead of my squishy scout.

These kinds of abilities made me really think about what I was doing with these units and where I was positioning them, and the maps did a lot to encourage this thinking whereas the Templar Battleforce maps just don’t do these things well.

Even better was how Dawn of War rewarded you for experimenting and playing against type. The soldier is by default a ranged-weapon guy, but you could give him his own chainsaw-sword and have him join the melee fight instead. He had a whole upgrade path that made this really effective even, taking less damage from both melee and ranged while locking down his enemies.

The Dawn of War commander could also play this game, he was by default a close-combat specialist, but you could hand him a heavy weapon if you wanted him to stay back instead. By the end of the game he could get an upgrade where he was guaranteed to 1-shot most low level enemies when he did so.

I tried playing against type in Templar Battleforce and it was severely underwelming. A melee-focused soldier is lame and ineffective, and they’ll always carry their ranged weapon just to taunt you for picking the wrong upgrades. A ranged-focused commander also feels underwelming, I can only equip pistols with paltry range and damage, no rifles or heavy weapons for the commander, not even dual-wielding pistols for rule-of-cool.

Finally, Templar Battleforce includes Relics, special items like in Dawn of War that are supposed to be of immense power and cost a lot to use. But unlike Dawn of War there’s no blurb on them to make them interesting, no tales of impossible odds or epic last stands to go along with your hand-me-down, just a name and a bonus that’s 25% bigger than the bonuses on all your other equipment.

Nor do these relic ever change your tactics like they could in Dawn of War. There’s no sword that damages you when you use it but deals massive damage to the enemies. No pistol with the range of a sniper rifle. No armor that is worse than your default armor but doubles your movement in exchange. There’s nothing here that would make you sit up and say “hey that might be cool to use.” Relics just have the same bog-standard bonuses as every other item only now the numbers are bigger.

Let me finish up with this: I don’t hate Templar Battleforce. I think 10$ is a great price and I encourage you to try it. But I’ve now tried 3 times to finish this game and I’ve always stopped short. The engaging build-a-soldier menus aren’t interesting if there’s no interesting choices like in Dawn of War, the maps aren’t fun if there’s no cool tactics and abilities like in X-Com. “X-Com meets Dawn of War” is exactly the type of game I would have made if I knew how to make games, but as Templar Battleforce proves, making great games is a lot harder than making games, and an interesting premise just isn’t enough.

Civilization VI and the No City Challenge

Let me tell you a hilarious story, then later get technical about why it happens.  

The Civilization series of games gives you control of a civilization and asks you to “win” history.  You can win by conquering the world, or by having your civilization elected supreme leader, or my researching enough technology to escape the cradle of earth and go out to colonize the galaxy.

But fundamentally civilization is about cities.  Cities are where everything happens, you build your military in cities, you get money from cities, you get research from them, your civilization is nothing without its cities, and when your last city is lost, you are defeated.  

It makes sense then that you want to always have *more* cities so you can have *more* stuff.  Two cities give you twice as much of everything as just one, a third city upgrades you 50% from two and so forth.  The Civ games have tried to put limits on “infinite city spam,” but generally *more* cities is always better than *less*.

That’s why the One City Challenge is such a challenge.  The One City Challenge is a longstanding challenge for Civilization veterans, demanding you win the game using *only one city*.  This means staying unconquered long enough to either diplomacy yourself into the World King, or research your way into galactic colonization.  

But the One City Challenge is nearly impossible when you’re up against AIs building as many cities as they can.  I’ve never beaten the One City Challenge, and most who do beat it do so on the lowest difficulties.  Beating the One City Challenge on Deity (the hardest difficulty in the game) is only for Civ Masters with a *lot* of luck on their side.

But Civ VI introduced something new, wonderful, and stupid.  Civ VI introduced the No City Challenge, and it’s doable on Deity.

See in Civ VI, the Maori civilization starts with the ability to sail the oceans, and their starting settler and warrior both begin in the ocean.  It’s easy enough to send the settler and warrior way down to the artic ice caps and hide in the ocean forever, never meeting or even interacting with any other Civs (because who would explore the desolate ice caps in this game?).  Now you’re playing the “No City Challenge,” an attempt to win the game while hiding in the ice caps and never even settling a city.

But how on earth would you *win* this challenge?  No city means no research, no money, no production.  You could never settle the galaxy OR be elected world leader this way, could you?

Well galaxy no, world leader yes, because Civ VI also has a hilariously broken victory condition.  

In previous Civilization games, Diplomatic Victory required a majority of the world’s population to vote for you as leader.  This meant you needed to make very good friends with a good number of the other Civs, becoming allies and trade partners, and being such good friends with them that they’d be willing to elect you leader, even though it meant giving up their sovereignty to you.

Civ VI doesn’t do this though, instead Diplomatic Victory means collecting “diplomatic points” until you have 20 of them, and 20 points means you win.

But how do you get diplomatic points?  Some ways still rely on production and money, for example you can help out after natural disasters and build wonders of the world to gain diplomatic points.  

Clearly those ways are unavailable if we’re hiding out in the ice caps, so the No City Challenge instead relies on the World Congress, which is hilariously broken in its own right.

The Civ VI World Congress starts up once enough time has passed for the game to reach the medieval era.  At that point, every Civ will gain the opportunity to vote for random “world congress resolutions.”  These resolutions are chosen at random, you have no control over them.  And they’re binding on you, even if you’ve never met half (or all!) of the other nations in the World Congress.

And these resolutions make no sense when you think about that.  For example, our real world has done a lot of work banning Ivory hunting, even though Ivory was considered a luxury centuries ago.  The Civ VI world congress can also ban Ivory, but it does so even if the people voting on the resolution have never met each other.  So you can have a situation where people you’ve never met, on the other side of the world, are now enforcing an ivory ban on you even though your own ruthless Civ sees nothing wrong with Ivory hunting.

Anyway, any time you vote for the winning “side” of a resolution, you earn a diplomatic point.  Even if the vote wasn’t close, *even if you only casted a single vote*.  If the world votes to ban Ivory and you also voted Yes, you get a diplomatic point.  

You get votes according to how many cities you have *but you also always get 1 vote no matter what*, and here’s where we come back to the No City Challenge.  Our Maori Civ hiding in the arctic still gets to vote in the World Congress, even though they don’t have any cities.  It’s also *very* easy to predict how the AIs will vote, and very easy to know which World Congress resolutions will pass or not.  So if our Maori Civ can just cast their 1 vote for the winning resolution each time, they can rack up Diplomatic Points until they have 20 and they win.

Think about this, a Civ sitting in the arctic, never founding even a *single* city, has “won” because they voted for the winners in every election of the World Congress.  The other Civs of the world have determined that the Maori (who they never knew existed until now, wait how did their votes even get cast?), the Maori who have zero cities mind, are truly the skilled diplomats the world needs to lead it to peace and prosperity.  And these Civs (who again, *have never met the Maori*) will give up their spaceships and their weapons of war to let these Diplomats rule the world.  

And this isn’t even a theoretical victory condition, it’s actually happened.  Several times.

This insane “victory condition” comes about because the AIs in Civ VI are very bad at *winning* even if they’re pretty good at *not losing*.  See, the World Congress is Weird and Broken, but even then, previous Civ games would never have seen this type of victory because an AI would have won some other victory before then.  Previous AIs were pretty good about conquering each other, culturally dominating each other, or reaching Alpha Centauri alone, especially if the player wasn’t there to stop the strongest Civ from running away with the game.  And that’s what the rest of this post is about, Civ VI AIs can’t easily *lose*, but they can never *win*

I recently got the Civ VI bug again and wanted to write about it.  I made some posts long ago discussing how Civ VI is the only Civ game I’ve ever beaten on Deity (the hardest difficulty level).  This isn’t really because I’m good at the game, it’s because the AI is bad at it. 

See, there are really two sides to “winning” a game.  One side has to lose, the other side has to win.  This seems obvious, but let me be clear: the AI in Civ VI is *really really bad at winning*, so much so that if the player can even become *moderately good at not losing* then they are guaranteed to win eventually, even if they themselves are bad at winning.  

Let me compare Civ VI to its predecessor, Civ V.  I once played a very high-level game of Civ V with Polynesia.  I settled islands, I built my navy, and since this was an “archipelago” map where there was lots of water everywhere, this made me undefeatable in war.  

See Civ V made it so that land units traverse the water by just walking into it and conjuring up a boat for themselves (maybe they built their boat on the land).  But these land units are completely powerless in water, they are instantly destroyed by any true naval unit.  A roman trireme can attack a division of marines, and as long as the marines are on the water the trireme will win and take zero damage.

So in this Polynesia game, my main war strategy was to bait enemy land units into the water and slaughter them with my ancient, obsolete ships.  I would repeatedly send triremes against marines and modern armies, and win with no casualties because the AI never build naval units to defend their sea-borne land units.  

It was impossible for me to lose.  But I was never going to win.

See although I had an impregnable military, my economy was in dire shape.  High level AIs get obscene bonuses to production, research, and the economy.  My enemies were in the Industrial Age while I languished in the Renaissance, and even if this didn’t matter militarily it would soon matter technologically.  

Civ has always provided a number of ways to win, both through war *and* peace.  You could conquer all your enemies, or you could build a spaceship to Alpha Centauri and say neener-neener as you colonize the galaxy, that also counts as winning.  Well my enemies were clearly going to get to Alpha Centauri while I was still figuring out coal and oil.  They were going to *win* even if it it didn’t feel like I would *lose*.  

Militarily, I was unstoppable.  Culturally, I was fine.  Economically, I punched above my weight.  But in the end, my enemies could always win through Technology, and win they did.

This story is meandering, but it proves an important point: winning isn’t just about *not losing*, it isn’t just about staying in the game and staying active.  There are victory conditions that the AI can still meet, and they can use those to win even if they don’t knock you out of the game, even if it feels like you never “lose.”

Civ VI though, Civ VI AI’s don’t have this.  Civ VI AIs are like me in that Polynesia game, they’re good at *not losing*, they’re terrible at *winning*.  And in fact they’re so bad, that they are almost incapable of winning at all.  

The Civ VI AIs are terrible at building a spaceship to go to Alpha Centauri.  They are incapable of achieving cultural or religious domination.   They will never conquer most of their neighbors.  And with those being the main ways you can win, a player playing competently will *eventually* luck into one of those.  So long as a player just *doesn’t lose* they can slowly crawl their way into *winning*, even though the AIs are strong enough that they *should have won long ago*.

I don’t like Factorio: Space Age

I started, stopped, and started this post several times. I just want to get it out the door so I’m posting it now regardless of that it’s not the greatest. I’ll have more to post on Factorio after this, but my thesis remains: I loved Factorio on it’s own, I don’t like Factorio: Space Age. I don’t think it’s a good expansion pack and I don’t think you should buy it.

Let me ramble about science in the base version of Factorio.

Red science was so simple you could craft it in your inventory. But the long time it took encouraged you to figure out automation to make that unnecessary. Green science was a step up, but it not only tested your automation skills, but also encouraged *and* rewarded you for successfully doing it. To explain: green science needs inserters and belts, which are two things you’ll make a *lot* of in Factorio. If you want to succeed, you’ll need to automate them so might as well do so since they’re also needed for green science. Conversely once you do get over the difficulty hill of automating them, you can split off the inserters and belts you’ll need for your factory, because you probably are building more than what your green science needs. So green science encourages you to automate the things you’ll need to automate anyway, but also rewards you since automating those things is a necessary step in growing the factory.

From there, blue science tests a whole new subject: fluid mechanics. Blue science needs plastics, which needs petroleum gas, which needs oil. If you’ve never dealt with factorio fluids before, blue science demands you learn how. But you’re also rewarded with bots, because blue science unlocks the construction and logistics robots that make the second half of the game so much easier.

Purple science doesn’t feel much different than blue science, but I think the name “production science” is fitting because it’s a real step up in total materials if not complexity. For the most part purple science uses all the same inputs as blue science, but no matter how much I feel I overbuild, I *always* seems to run out of steel for it! Purple science tests your ability to scale, and scale big, because you always need more steel than you think you need.

Finally, yellow science really feels like a final exam. Like purple science you’ll need to have an overwelming volume of inputs, this time copper instead of iron/steel. Blue Circuits and Batteries both require you to have completely mastered the game’s liquid input systems, with multiple steps where chemical plants feed into assemblers and vice versa.

When you finally master yellow, white science is strangely underwelming. It’s mostly “the same but more,” if requires blue circuits and low density structures just like yellow science (plus extra green and red circuits before Space Age came out), but then adds rocket fuel on top of that and a huge space launcher that needs to be built. Not exact a great leap in difficulty, but by then you’re probably just ready for it to end, so it’s in a good place overall.

The thing is, Space Age doesn’t feel like it follows this kind of progression, or any progression. Each planet feels mostly like redoing red and green science. The science pack only demands that you master the basics of automation on this new planet with these new resources. And once you do that, you can leave and never need to return.

It feels… not great. I don’t feel any sense of adventure and progression landing on planet after planet and doing the equivalent of “super simple red/green science, only now with 1 new ingredient no other planet has.”

The space mechanics are like Dyson Sphere Program, in that they aren’t realistic at all and I wish they were. I know making Kerbal Space Program *in* Factorio would have been hard, but at the very least I don’t see why a rocket that runs out of fuel starts slowly sinking back to the planet it launched from, but also doesn’t ever fall into the atmosphere and hit the ground. A rocket that loses fuel just continues to drift on its current trajectory. If you want it to fall back to the planet it launched from, then that trajectory should eventually make it hit the ground. But instead Factorio: Space Age has this worst-of-every-single-world middle ground where things are unituitive *and* unphysical *and* waste your time. My first every space ship didn’t have enough fuel to reach its destination planet, so I had no choice but to wait for it to *sloooooooooooooooowly* drift backwards back to the first planet before I could give it more fuel to try the journey again. I had no way to speed this up, and I had no reason to think it *would even work that way* since that’s not how space travel actually works.

Another thing I dislike, I feel like this game had room for having the planets interact with each other more. The space ships are build off the old system for railroads, but the spaceships aren’t useful as railroads. The game is clear that you should simply be producing your science on each planet and then shipping it all to Nauvis for research. But why does that have to be the *only* option? Why not make it so that we can juggle items and send them all over to each planet? Because the devs decided every challenge in this expansion pack must have *a single specific solution*, rather than letting the player come up with their own solution. That’s bad game design and makes this game less fun.

When I played with rails, yes I would make a starter base for red/green/black science. Then another for blue, another for purple, another for yellow+white. And I’d run a single train line to each of these bases to ship all the science to a single location. But you don’t have to be that lame. You can have train likes running in all directions to ship all raw resources to a centralized location. This can simplify say your green chip production if it all happens in one place and you just siphon those chips to each research that needs them.

Or you can have satellite bases that build intermediate products, say putting all chips in one place and shipping them around. Or a mishmash of both where sometimes you produce everything onsite and only ship the science back and sometimes you’re importing everything just to make science. You can do a lot of things.

You can’t do that in space age because of the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on how much stuff can fit in a rocket. 2,000 green chips can fit in a single rocket, but only 300 blue chips. Blue chips stack a lot more efficiently than that, the only reason for this is the feeling that it would be “too easy” if you could ship blue chips around from Fulgora. But would it be easy, or would it be interesting? They clearly wanted you to engage with space shipping, the entire planet Aquilo punishes you if you don’t, but they didn’t want you to do *enough* space shipping to actually make planet-to-planet production lines like you could with trains in the base game.

And I think that’s a huge missed opportunity, because I’d *love* it if I could be rewarded for interplanetary shipping like this. I’d love to heavily focus Vulcanus on the “low tier” items and Fulgora on the “high tier.” Gleba could specialize in the various oil derivatives with all its bioproducts. Then I could ship whatever I need whereever I need and have an engaging reason to produce a lot of different space ships with different needs.

It feels like the game quite clearly has exactly one way you have to play and doesn’t want you to experiment, rather it wants you to find and accept the “right” way. The most clear version of this is in the asteroids that will hit your space ships. Fighting the biters in the base game gave a huge latitude for experimentation, did you turret creep them? Mass produce grenades and use grenade spam? Drive all around them in a car with autocannons? Go for the defender capsules? There’s a lot of different ways to do things and none of them are wrong. You can use a tank or ignore it completely. You can focus on personal laser defense to kill biters up close, or rush artillery to kill them from afar. Do you even care to try uranium ammo? Or nuclear bombs? Or do you just want to plop down a long line of laser turrets and call it a day? The game lets you play how you want, rewards you for experimenting, and never punishes you for trying something “wrong.”

Space Age punishes you for not playing its way. You need to use turrets in space to protect from asteroids. And you need to build ammo in space to feed the turrets. You can’t use lasers like you could on the ground, because then you’d only need to focus on power, so asteroids have 99% damage reduction against the same lasers that can kill a behemoth biter twice their size. And you can’t ship ammo up to the space ship either, that would be too easy. Instead ammo has been heavily curtailed with how much of it can be shipped to and fro. 25 uranium-coated bullets weigh as much as 1,000 solid iron plates. Check the periodic table and do the math, I assure you it doesn’t add up. Even more crazy is that 25 uranium bullets weigh as much as 50 uranium fuel cells, U-238 really isn’t *that* much heavier than U-235 guys.

And then once you get ammo working, they introduce new asteroids that are 99% resistant to physical damage. All so that you are forced to build rocket turrets instead, which are the new asteroids one weakness. Then finally rocket turrets need to be upgraded to tesla turrets.

There’s no variety here, there’s no experimentation, there’s no reward for trying things your way. You don’t get to try other options like shipping all your ammo up and trying to make it that way. Or focusing on laser turrets instead of gun turrets. Or using walls to ram the asteroids instead of using guns at all. There’s a lot of alternative routes that are just fine to experiment with against biters, but are shot down when you go against asteroids because the devs had a very specific vision in mind for how they wanted space ships to work, and stepping outside of their vision is not allowed.

The game just isn’t fun. The newest planets are hit and miss. Fulgora is nice because it’s a backwards planet, all the most expensive materials are easy to get and all the cheapest materials are harder to get. Vulcanus is my favorite because it actually does something cool: your normal solid products are turned into liquids instead. Gleba is terrible game design and should be deleted entirely. Aquila is unfinished and boring.

And overall even the new planets aren’t fun when I’m just landing, doing 3 things, and then leaving that planet never to return. I don’t feel like these bases are part of “my” base the way I felt when I made an area for purple science and an area for yellow science. I don’t feel like they connect to each other in any way because they don’t.

And I don’t feel like any of the challenges the game presents are worthwhile in their own right, because they’ve all been made with the mindset of “there is only 1 way to properly complete this challenge, find the way the game devs wanted or else.” They’ve specifically put down guard-rails to prevent you from ever having an original thought that wasn’t the solution they themselves wanted, and it just feels lame. Space ship design should be the greatest avenue for player freedom and creativity, but instead everyone’s space ship is *identical* because the devs needed to make the challenges solvable in only 1 precise way. So no one ships ammo to space, no one tries to smash into the asteroids with walls and build up faster than they take damage. No one tries to do anything except the exact solution the devs wanted, and that it such a shame for a game that until now was so focused on player freedom and expression.

Factorio: Space Age is not a good expansion pack. I thought it would rekindle my love for Factorio, but now I never want to play Factorio again. I had been playing for absolute ages, and had recommended the game to friends. But I can’t recommend this expansion pack to anyone I know, it just isn’t what made Factorio so fun to begin with.

Victoria 3: I hope you like GDPmaxxing

You may have thought this blog was abandoned.  Nope, I’m just lazy.  So I didn’t want to write about Factorio (which I have a lot of thoughts about), instead I asked my friend from the Victoria post if he’d talk to me about Victoria and I could type it and clean it up to use as a blog post.  As this was from a conversation, it’s very much in stream of consciousness.  But then isn’t that what this is all about?

I asked him to describe what drew him to playing Victoria 3, and he answered:

The Victoria series is a peculiar one.  A mix of economics, politics, and war that this time is much heavier on the economics than anything else.  The real strategy of Victoria is Soviet Planning meets Laisse-Faire capitalism: the state invests heavily into construction and heavy industry, while letting the capitalists build the consumer goods factories for the masses.

I start every game, no matter the country, by building a bunch of construction sectors. Then I build lumbar yards for wood and iron mines for iron.  Construction sectors are what actually build things, they’re kind of like building companies, and the capitalists can contract them out the same as you.  You get a couple to start but you want a lot more to get off the ground quickly.  Wood and iron are the base construction materials at the start of the game.  If you’re an industrialized nation, you can also add tool factories into the mix, as you’ll be building with tools too.  

I want as much wood, iron, tools, as possible, because the larger surplus you have the cheaper it is to construct things.  Building a port costs the same amount of materials no matter what, but if I can buy those for 30,000 dollars instead of 100,000, that’s a better deal.  Oh yeah Victoria has a sort of supply and demand to model prices, if there’s more of a good available than what is being used, it’s price is cheaper.  So when you have a surplus it’s cheap, when you have a shortage it’s expensive.  A surplus of construction materials makes construction cheap.

I also want a lot of construction sectors so building goes faster.  Construction can only happen at a certain rate, so even if I have infinite money and materials, I’d be waiting for years to build all the factories I wanted if I don’t have enough construction sectors.  

So while I’m building out the construction economy, I’m hoping the capitalists and aristocrats of my country privatize the mines and lumbar yards I’m building.  When they privatize, they give me cash and get themselves an asset in return.  That asset will make money (since I’m building so much stuff), and they can reinvest that money into building more buildings later.  Remember that.

But I’m spending money like water trying to build out my construction economy.  I can jack up taxes but that hurts government legitimacy and makes everyone rebellious (insert American Revolution joke).  And even with sky high taxes, I’ll still run a deficit while building up.  So eventually my national debt will become a problem and I have to stop building before I go bankrupt.  This is when I hope the rich people of my country are ready to reinvest, and give back for the good of the nation.

When rich people in Victoria own a farm or factory, they get dividends based on how profitable it is.  They then use those profits to reinvest back into the economy by building more farms and more factories.  Once I’ve built out the construction industry, it should be very cheap for them to start building things themselves, things like wheat farms and clothing factories.  These soft goods are what my people actually want, you can’t eat iron or wear wood.  So if the peasants actually want to their lives to improve, more wheat farms and clothing factories need to be built by the capitalists, which creates a food and clothing surplus letting the peasants buy things cheaper, meaning the peasants can afford to buy *more things* as well.  

This is industrialization in action.  The rich people who built the factories and farms reinvest their profits into building more things, like wine farms and furniture factories and eventually telephone lines. This makes all those things cheaper and now everyone can afford to live much more comfortably than when we were all living as dirt farmers.  Also the rich Job Creators™ will gracious pay a wage to the factory workers and farmhands, and this wage pays better than what you can get as a subsistence farmer.  So this puts extra money in my peoples’ pockets and is another way that their standard of living can increase.  And since people have more money, they can demand even more stuff, which is why my capitalists have to always be building.  No one is ever satisfied, we always want more, so we need to make more factories to make more goods to bring prices down, hire more people into higher and higher paying jobs so they can buy things, and reinvest all that profit we make so we can keep the cycle going.  Forever.

This is economics, and it’s why I like Victoria.  It takes a real stab at simulating an economy.  And like a real economy, industrializing creates a virtuous cycle that spurs on more industrialization and economic expansion.

EDITOR’S NOTE: this is also why I, the editor not the talker, enjoyed Victoria 2.  Vicky 2 and Vicky 3 both have their strengths, *severe* drawbacks, and plenty of edge-cases where things go crazy.  But they both try in earnest to develop a real, working economics simulator that models both why industrialization was so beneficial, and why it was so hard.

Anyway, as the economy expands, it is hopefully my capitalists doing most of the building, spending their hard-earned dividends on new clothing factories and lowering the price of clothes for my people.  Because as my people can afford more stuff, their Standard of Living (SOL) increases.  The Vicky 3 typeface infuriatingly makes SOL look like SOI, but forget that.  When the people’s SOL increases, they become more loyal to my magnanimous government that made it all happen.  Should their SOL decrease, they become more rebellious (imagine that!).

So we want capitalists to build more factories so people can afford more goods so their SOL increases so my regime becomes stronger and more resilient to all the violent revolutionaries/liberals who would overthrow my absolute monarchy.

See Chapel Comics to understand the joke about liberals https://www.chapelcomic.com/64/

Now I made it sound complicated-yet-manageable up there, but trust me like any good economic simulation there are a ton of moving parts.  In addition to micromanaging what your country builds, you can micromanage its trade, setting up each and every trade route with foreign nations.  It’s *kind* of OK.  Trade routes cost convoys (which you build at ports) and bureaucracy (which you build at government institutions).  So there is still the Victoria 2 problem of there being no travel cost for goods, (a sheaf of wheat costs the same whether you bought it from the next town over or from China).  But by having trade require limited resources the player is at least fenced as to how much trade they can easily do.

And while the game does sort of try to model different economic systems, you’re still playing God even in the Laisse-Faire capitalistic system, you’re still an all-knowing god building the construction sectors and various heavy industry.  

So that’s the stuff I like about Victoria 3, so why couldn’t I convince my friend to play it?

EDITOR’S NOTE: really I didn’t want to buy another paradox game and sign up to a lifetime of DLC

Well I love Victoria 3 as an industrialization simulator, but it doesn’t do much besides that.  

So let’s say you’ve built all the heavy industry and now construction is cheap in your country.  Let’s say you keep on top of things as your economy grows, expanding the construction sector to meet new demands, upgrading your factories with newer technology, and so on.  What else can you do once you have a strong, powerful empire?

Not much really.

In fact, upgrading your factories is sort of a frustrating minigame in and of itself.  In older games, researching a new technology would just apply a flat boost to all your factories that used it, researching a better plow made your farms better.  Now however, you have to actually tell all your farms to use that newer and better tech, and that tech will have some cost (of iron, or tools say) that your farms will have to pay in order to use it.  If you upgrade your farms without having enough iron or tools for them to use, you can actually cause them to lose money as the grain they sell doesn’t cover the cost of the tools they use.

But why am I an omniscient god telling everyone how to run their farms?  Who cares.

OK not sidetracked now: what can you do besides economy?

Well war sucks, so don’t do that.  I mean in the game by the way, it is never fun in real life but games should be fun and in this game war isn’t.  They decided moving every individual army was boring an unrealistic, so instead you vaguely tell all your units to go fight along a “front” and they’re supposed to do all the action for you.  A few problems with this:

First, a “front,” is very very vague and yet each army can only and exactly cover one front.  The whole border between Russia and China could be a front.  Or two neighboring towns in Germany could be two different fronts.  It all depends on how the AI decides to split up the map and sometimes it chooses poorly.  But regardless of how the fronts are split up, a single 60 division army can cover exactly one front, and it will always be able to reach every battle along a ridiculously long front, but will never be able to fight a battle happening on a different front even if it’s within spitting distance.

But then, how exactly do the armies even fight on these fronts?  It’s pure diceroll and I don’t know if any skill is involved.  I click to tell my armies to go to a frontline and fight the enemy, then war vaguely happens offscreen, and I can neither influence it nor does it influence me.

See, wars in Vicky 3 are strangely bloodless affairs.  Soldiers are supposedly dying, territory is blasted with artillery, but it doesn’t seem to affect anything besides a vague “war weariness” number that ticks up until you’re forced to surrender or you win.  If your territory is conquered, you still get all the money from it, your people are still working their jobs, and all the factories are still sending ammo and artillery to your frontline (even though the factories themselves are behind enemy lines).  If your army is annihilated, they flee back to your territory to rest and recuperate, but you never see units wiped out that you have to replace, or see the effects of all the dead soldiers on your populace.  It’s weird, bloodless is the only way I can really describe it.  It’s like they *had* to have wars, because you can’t simulate the 19th century without them, but they didn’t want war to interrupt the economics lesson so they just put it to the side.

EDITOR’S note (long one this time): This is a complete change to how war was in Victoria 2.  Not only on a higher level, in that Vicky2 let you move around every individual division, but on a lower level in how war effected the rest of the game.

Occupied provinces in Vicky2 didn’t send you taxes or resources.  Their factories were blasted to rubble, their farms were torn to pieces.  The people living there would slowly run out of supplies, which not only lowered their life expectancy but made them militant and angry, angry enough to start a revolution.  More than once I would be fighting a war only to see enemy rebels pop up in the lands I had occupied, the occupied people deciding now was the time for a revolution to overthrow both invaders and oppressors.  Wars could turn into an interesting 3-way dance in this way, or even a 4-way dance if multiple different groups rebelled simultaneously.  

And beyond the front lines, the soldier pops themselves were important.  Soldiers staffed their regiments, and as they died in battle new soldiers needed to replace them.  That meant that during war you’d have to use your national focus points to encourage other people to become soldiers and fill the ranks, essentially you put on a huge recruiting drive, and that took away from your abilities to raise literacy or factory output or anything else.  The soldiers themselves all had an identity too, and a home they were from.  

There might be a regiment of say Hungarian soldiers in Vienna.  They might have come from Hungarian people migrating to the Big City for work, and then being encouraged to become soldiers and join the army by your recruitment drive.  You can form them into a division, and as they take loses those Hungarian soldiers in Vienna will shrink more and more and more.  Eventually their division will take so many loses that it will completely disappear, along with the soldiers it was connected to.  

There may be other Hungarians, other Viennese divisions, but the *Hungarian Soldiers From Vienna* could come to an end, all because of a single bloody war where their division took the brunt of the fighting.

You could see these effects happening in real time.  If you recruited soldiers mostly from your nations ethnic minorities, then they’d be the ones to take most of the loses in your wars.  And if your nation discriminated against ethnic minorities, you could find that your own soldiers would rise up and join the rebels when the time came.

None of this seems to happen in Victoria 3 wars.  Farms, factories, and soldiers aren’t all that troubled by the killing, dying, and destruction.  It’s one of the biggest misses in a game full of misses, war doesn’t seem like war.

But unfortunately war is the major way you can interact with an affect the game world.  The AI knows it too, and can be a lot more trigger happy in this game than previous one.  Victoria 2 had a habit of AIs being fairly passive unless you screwed with them.  The “crisis” system was supposed to satisfy a player’s warlust by forcing all the great powers to have a showdown every decade or so, but if you weren’t in Europe you could ignore the crises and everyone else would ignore you (mostly).

Now though a strong AI is happy to march their army to war anywhere, anytime, for any reason.  Russia will send everything it has to Spain in order to support the independence of the Phillipines.  Britain will march on America because they want to change the rulership of Liberia (America’s protectorate).  Italy will send everything it has to Guatemala just because they didn’t want to join Italy’s alliance.  These are all wars that are possible, but somewhat fantastical because in the real world nations didn’t send large armies halfway across the world just for kicks.  Wars happen either with large armies close to home or with very small armies very far away, you don’t send out everything you have because what if your neighbors want to try something while your whole army is away?  You could be conquered in a day by someone far smaller than you.

EDITOR’S NOTE: fun fact, this was kind of the case in WW1.  I was watching a show that pointed out that Germany delayed the implementation of unrestricted warfare submarine warfare until it could bring units back from the Eastern front to station on the border with Denmark.  Submarine warfare didn’t just piss off the Americans and bring them into the war, it pissed off all Germany’s neighbors and could have brought any one of them into war.  There was a real fear that with literally the entire army in France and Russia, a nation as small as Denmark could pull a surprise invasion and be in Berlin before anyone could react, and they would definitely have a reason to if German subs started sinking a lot of Danish ships

So war feels very very gamey, AIs are way too willing to throw down for the slightest cause, but then again war is so painless that they might as well do so yeah?

On and politics?  It’s ok I guess.  Very confusing, very deep, very much something that you dream about and think “oh I wonder what cool things I can do!”  Then you actually play the politics and it’s not much.  

It’s not the worst when it interacts with economics I’ll say that much.  See the powerful people in your country are split up into interest groups (IGs) that have their own ideals and their own desires.  And in a non-industrialized nation, most of the power is held by the large landowning families.  And surprise surprise they don’t like changing the laws in any way that would negatively affect them.  So maybe you want to rationalize the economy to allow for private investment, open up trade to allow for importing of valuable goods, or ending serfdom to allow peasants to take factory jobs.  Any one of those is a threat to their power, so the landowners will forbid it.  And if you try to force the issue, they’ll rise in rebellion and overthrow you, reverting all your hard-fought laws to back to how they were before your reforms.

Reforming an economy in the politic sense is thus an uneasy balance of placating the powerful landowners, undermining their influence where possible, and desperately trying to enact laws before they can rise up against you.

But once you’re past that, the politics is just timers and dicerolls.  There really isn’t much you can do to direct the fate or your nation.  You can sometimes invite foreign agitators to try to start a movement for some cause or another.  You can suppress or support some interest groups to get them to be powerful enough to pass laws.  But it is really all down to chance and factors outside your control.  And there isn’t any real novelty to the politics either, there is pretty much always a “best” law that you want to be aiming for at any one time.  So no matter your nation no matter your starting position, you’ll be trying to pass the same laws the same way everywhere using the same dicerolls and timers.

Not exactly fun.

I’ll end on a final note about Power Blocs, or rather what they should be called which is the EU-lite.  Power Blocs aren’t what they seemed to be named after, where multiple countries join together for a common cause.  Instead they’re modelled almost exclusively after the British and Russian empires, where one nation (Britain, Russia) is *really* in charge but let’s other nations (Canada, Finland) have a tiny bit of sovereignty as a treat.  Those nations can set some of their own policies, but their ultimate fate is to either be swallowed up and annexed by their overlord, or fight a war and escape.  Or I guess wait for their overlord to fight a big war and then ask to leave, that works too.  

Anyway why would anyone join a power bloc, when it all leads to annexation?  Well the key is the EU part of it.  Nations in a power bloc all share a single market.  You should read an economist for a good deep dive as to how common markets are more efficient, but the game does do a damn good job at modeling that too.  You the player don’t have to make sure your own nation produces one of everything, instead other nations can produce some stuff and sell to you in exchange for your stuff.  This lets everyone specialize in their comparative advantage, and unlike the normal trade system this doesn’t cost bureaucracy or convoys, the trade is automatic.  

What this means is that as soon as Britain start building factories to make tools, the rest of its Empire benefits from lower priced tools.  Britain also benefits from having a captive market for its finished goods, sure it’s a lot harder to overproduce tools and cause a surplus that makes your construction cheaper, but you can also let your factories go wild on producing the most high value finished products, because you’ve always got a captive market to sell to.  In turn you can buy up their low value products to keep your population satisfied and keep their standard of living (SOL) rising.

It all makes a certain kind of sense.  I formed a power bloc as America that was a kind of Trade League, which seems to be the only type of Power Bloc that doesn’t end in Annexation.  I invited all of Central and South America into my EU-style trade league, and my population’s SOL shot through the roof.  Overproduction of a good isn’t always useful, because if the cost goes down too much then the people working in the factory don’t get paid (because there is no profit).  This can end with a depression cycle, where their income goes down so their SOL goes down so they buy less meaning the factories sell less meaning their income goes down more, etc.  But all of the Americas was my captive market, any time I build a factory there was someone somewhere to buy the surplus.

And since I had all the best tech, it was always better for the factories to be built in America rather than anywhere else, so it was always my people who got the high paying factory jobs.  The rest of the Americas usually only worked the jobs that were cut off by geography instead of economics.  Large scale coffee and rubber farming for instance.  My capitalists opened rubber farms anywhere they could in South America, and since my factories needed the rubber those rubber farms paid a lot better than any of the less efficient factories opening in those South American countries.

This created a sort of anti-capitalist’s nightmare, capitalism was working by way of a permanent underclass.  The workers in America were getting ever richer because they were producing finished goods to export to South America.  The workers in South America couldn’t compete with the American factories because their nations didn’t have the tech that America did.  They were instead relegated to rubber, coffee, and any other jobs that just couldn’t be done in America or couldn’t be done efficiently.  But they were still benefiting from a rising standard of living (SOL) because the cost of rubber/coffee/etc was rising thanks to American factories and American demand for goods.  This lead to South America also having a rising SOL, just one that was never as high as America, and was capped well below America’s.

The one problem is that that isn’t how it really works in real economics.

The technology of a factory isn’t determine by what country it’s built in, but by the technology available to the investor.  When Apple started building factories in China, they didn’t use Chinese technology (which at the time was well behind America’s).  They brought over all the innovations and insights from Silicon Valley and set up all the tech there.  The factories of China used all the same high tech you’d find anywhere else, just with a lower cost of labor.  

That should be the case in Victoria 3 as well.  It doesn’t make sense that South American factories can never keep up with American ones, if an American capitalist built both then the assembly lines, automatic sewing machines and so on can be brought and shipped to a factory whether it’s in Columbus or Colombia.  You’d expect outsourcing to happen in this scenario, same as happened with China in the 90s and 2000s, but since the technology of a factory is determined by where it’s built and not who builds it, we instead get the anti-capitalist’s nightmare described above.

One final fun fact to end this one: Hawaii was also in my Power Bloc.  I checked the rankings at one point and it was the damnest thing: Hawaii’s standard of living (SOL) was head and shoulders above anywhere else on earth, even my own SOL in America.  

Most nations start the game at SOL of 9 or so.  Industrialized may start at 10, lower tech nations may start at 8.  It’s long and hard to improve your SOL but I’d done a respectable job of bringing America’s SOL up to a baseline of about 20, double what it was at the start and bringing my nation from its starting point of “impoverished,” up through “middling” and into the giddy heights of “secure.”

Hawaii by contrast had an SOL of *35*, way past “secure” and “prosperous,” all the way to “affluent.”  I was shocked, how had this happened?

Well the EU is how, and in a funny way.  See since all the best paying jobs were in America, the people migrated to where the jobs were.  America starts the game with roughly open borders, and if you keep it that way the tired, poor, and huddled masses will be very happy to leave their rubber/coffee jobs and come live in America to work in car factories and get paid 3x as much.

Hawaii starts the game with a miniscule population, and it seemed almost every dang one of them had left and gone to America.  So who was even left to live it large in Hawaii with the SOL of 35?  The capitalists, of course.  

Capitalists can invest in factories remember, and at some point the Hawaiian capitalists had taken advantage of my EU power block to invest in an American factory.  Naturally it was doing gangbusters, and they in turn were swimming in dividends.  So of course they could live the high life, buying lots of stuff since my factories had made everything so cheap.  They could have lots of clothes, porcelain, furniture, even a car or two.  And since all the working classes had gone off to be Americans, the wealthy capitalists were the only ones left on the islands.  This defaulted Hawaii’s SOL to the SOL of the poorest capitalists, an affluent 35 or so.

But wait, if all the working classes left, who sold the capitalists their food?  Who brought over the cars from America, who built their homes and fixed them after the storm?  

No one, like a lot of things Victoria 3 abstracts that all away.  If goods aren’t moved by rail they move by magic, so everything can come off the factory floor in America and teleport magically to the rich capitalist in Hawaii, who never needs to hire a poor handyman to fix his windows or garage either.  

EDITOR’S NOTE: Anyway that’s Vicky 3 in a very long nutshell.  As my friend describes it, you’re here for the economy and *nothing else*.  If economics doesn’t interest you, I hope you don’t mind my blogging.  But if it does, I hope war doesn’t interest you because Vicky 3 doesn’t do it well.  I’d like to say this will be the last time I make a post this scattered and unusual, I wanted to write but didn’t want to so I had someone else write for me essentially.  Hopefully next week we’ll be back to Factorio, I swear I still have much to say about it.

Quick update on games that play themselves

A while ago I wrote about games that play themselves and why they’re a genre I really enjoy. The gist of that post is that there’s a type of game (Victoria 2 and Factorio were my examples) where the start of the game is an impossible grind against endless problems, but by the end you’ve automated most of your problems away and have created a self-sustaining system. The game eventually plays itself, without much needed for input.

Of course you can still have input, old challenges being automated away just means you can create new challenges for yourself. In Victoria, educating and industrializing your populace eventually meant they’d build factories and run the economy for your, but that meant you were now free to go map painting or play border police. Factorio’s late game gives you an army of bots who will upkeep and rebuilt the factory for you, but that means you can now focus on building the biggest base possible and researching the infinite techs.

I watched a video from youtuber tehsnakerer about Evil Genius and one of his complaints about the game seemed to be something I’d like, that by the end it plays itself. You start out trying to finagle minions and ensure your base is running smoothly, and once it is you can be a lot more hands off with the thing. He didn’t seem to like that and treated it as a negative, but I wonder if I’d enjoy it. I never played Evil Genius, but maybe I should give it a go.

Stardew Valley: Nitpicks and Wishes for more

To round out my series on Stardew Valley, I’d like to talk about where I *wished* the story had gone. I already spoiled the whole story in a prior post: the spoiler is that there isn’t really a story to spoil. Now I’ll talk more about the story I *wish* I could have spoiled.

I want to start by acknowledging that Stardew Valley was made by just 1 guy. All by himself. I know that he didn’t have the time or the resources to write a national epic. So I only want to talk about story beats which I feel could have been added in easily using the simple dialogue and cutscenes the game already uses.

To start: I wish the Jumino, Jojo Mart (aka Evil Walmart), and Mine plotlines were more interconnected. I wish Jojo Mart was more overtly corrupting the town, and the Juminos were fighting back. And I wish the monsters in the mine were set loose by the Jojo Mart mining operation.

To start, I think that Jojo Mart corrupting the town could have been gotten across in the few few dialogues with the townsfolk. On the first day you get a quest to introduce yourself around town, but while this is a great way to meet the neighbors they all have very generic greeting dialogue. Some might say “oh you’re that new farmer!” to let you know they’re friendly, and I think one says “why are you talking to me” to let you know he’s unfriendly, but more could be done with this.

Pam is the town bus driver, but her bus is broken down. I wish she’d complain about that when you first meet her: “I drive the bus to Pelican town, or I used to”. Shane works at Jojo Mart and seems to hate his job, I wish he said something about that: “do I like my job? Of course not, but what other choices do I have around here?” And a few people could complain about how you’re the first new face they’ve seen in ages, mostly people just move *away*. They could even connect that by saying that when Jojo Mart came they thought it would breathe life into the town, but instead the decline accelerated.

Not every character needs to say something like that, I’d say no more than 5 pieces of dialogue need to be written. But when you’re introducing yourself, this would at least give more of a hint that the town isn’t entirely happy-go-lucky, and that the conflict with the Evil Walmart is something the townsfolk take seriously. As it stands, only Pierre seems to care, and that’s only because he runs the General Store, which is the single solitary store that actually competes with Jojo Mart.

The conflict can still be generic and maybe not even outright stated. I’ve love if Jojo Mart were some secretive evil corp that knew about and was working against the Juminos. But it could be the simple hippy complaint of “ever since Walmart came to town, the jobs and happiness left,” which is a fine premise for conflict even if I disagree with its economics.

So once it’s better established that the Evil Walmart *is* Evil, then I think a lot of the game does a fine job with background storytelling about how the town is decaying and the Juminos want to fix it. The bus is broken, the Juminos fix it. The mine carts are broken, the Juminos fix it. The community center was once the life of the town, the Juminos can bring it back. And it would mean so much more to be able to kick out the Evil Walmart if they were actually established as a degrading influence in the first place.

From there, I wish the game actually did something with the mines. You get a quest early on to reach the bottom of the mines, and I assumed there’d be mystery and revalations down there. Instead all there is is some combat items and a key which unlocks a post-game infinite dungeon where you can fight in the mines forever. It’s fine as a gameplay reward, but really underwhelming overall.

I’d like it if every 30 floors of the mine, instead of just getting a combat item you got a diary page from the Jojo Mart expedition which caved in the mines in the first place (as seen at the start of the game). Chasing diary pages is hardly groundbreaking storytelling, but I would have appreciated it and it would have given a chance to let us Know Our Enemy, if indeed the game’s only plotline is working against Jojo Mart.

The diary could be generically evil, talking about strip mining for minerals and Digging Too Deep/Too Greedily. But it could also give some weight to the Juminos. Does Jojo Know about them? Are they working against them? Do the Juminos specifically hate Jojo Mart as a commercialization entity that’s destroying good old fashioned farming values? Or are they just sad that the town has lost touch with nature?

Finally, the diary could explain that it was Jojo that awakened the monsters in the mine, and that’s why its suddenly so dangerous. Now maybe this isn’t what the creator had in mind, I mean there’s an adventurer’s guild, maybe in his mind the mine has always been dangerous. But personally I thought it was a little weird that there’s these deadly creatures right outside town and no one seems to care. I’d be more willing to accept it if they only started being there recently.

Finally, I like that the Juminos don’t really say much, and mostly just emote happily at you. But I’d like to know just a bit more about *why* they were there, and I think the wizard from the beginning can be a good character for this.

I said earlier how I thought it was strange that in this otherwise modernish farming sim, you have to speak to a wizard who helps you translate the Jumino’s message. He becomes a character you can befriend after this, but otherwise I don’t think he has any story relevance, he’s just some guy. A nice guy, but just a guy.

I wish his friendship arc had him taking on more of a mentor role, telling you about the Juminos, about forest spirits, about how they protect the town and how the town lost its way. Again nothing groundbreaking, but it would at least satisfy my curiosity that there *is* an answer, because in the actual game I spent the whole game hoping to find an answer and getting nothing.

In fact, with regards to the wizard, the adventurers guild, and the Juminos, it feels overall weird that this game is set in present day. The Mayor has a car, you arrive to town on a bus, there’s TVs and electricity all over. And yet there’s a wizard, an adventurer’s guild, friendly forest spirits, and evil monsters in the mine. This could have been an attempt at modern fantasy, or magical realism, but a straight-up robes and wizard hat wizard still felt jarring to me when I first played. I wish the wizard had more to do with the story, because that jarring feeling could have meant something, I could have recalled that feeling as I reflected on how much I’d learned from the wizard over the course of the game. But instead it’s just a moment of “ok, this game is weird” before he starts acting like any other character.

Anyway that’s what I wish the story of the game was like. I wish there was more of a conflict with Jojo Mart, I wish the mines gave you nuggets of story, and I wish someone, preferably the wizard, told you more about the Juminos. The game is still incredibly, I’ve played through it multiple times, but I still wish the story was a little more than nothing at all.