Category Archives: Video Games

Civilization (the game) thoughts

I don’t know if I’ve blogged about Civilization 6 before.  The game has received its final DLCs and the devs have all but left to work on Civ 7, so I guess being 5 years late is the perfect time to talk about it.  Warning, this is a long post.  Also warning, I do enjoy Civ 6 and pretty much every Civ game I’ve ever played, but I will be very critical in this post.

To step back a moment, I’ve played every Civilization game since 3.  Most Civ games have a difficulty scale with funny little names, but basically there are 8ish levels of difficulty, and the AI gets progressively more bonuses as difficulty increases.  In 3, I could barely win on difficulty 3 of 8.  In Civ 4, I could reliably win on difficulty 5 of 8, and sometimes 6 of 8 (Emperor) with the right setups.  In Civ 5, I could win on 6 of 8 reliably, and once managed 7 or 8 using a broken setup and a lot of savescumming.  

Difficulty level 8 of 8 is always called Deity, and it is always an exceptional challenge with the AI receiving ludicrous bonuses to every single statistic.  I have never beaten any Civ game on Deity.  Until Civ 6.

Civilization 6 was the first game I beat on Deity and the crazy thing is I don’t actually think I’m better at Civ 6 than I was at Civ 4 or 5.  I know I’m bad at Civ 3, but that’s because I hate the trading mechanics.  But with Civ 6, I genuinely think it’s just an easier game than its predecessors in an interesting and perhaps bad way.

To start off, let’s discuss how the Civ games make higher level AIs difficult.  They don’t particularly add any new mechanics or strategies, they just give the AIs big multiples to everything they do.  At high levels, an AI city will grow 50% faster, train units 50% faster, build buildings 50% faster, and they start with free technologies.  At the highest difficulty of Deity, the AI also gets to start with 2 settlers to the player’s 1.  That means that on Deity, the AI will start with twice as many cities as the player does, and each city will be 50% more productive.  

That’s a big hole to dig yourself out of, but the player has much better knowledge of the game mechanics and so a very good player can still win, even on Deity.  

The thing is that the AIs understood the game mechanics in 4 and 5 a hell of a lot better than they do in 6.  Some would say 6 is more complex, but I don’t buy that, I think in many ways it has (thankfully) been made simpler and more streamlined for easier access.  But I do think the Civ 6 AI understands its own game a lot worse than 4 and 5.  

It comes down to “one unit per tile” or 1upt as it’s known in Civ circles.  In Civ 4, you could stack as many buildings and as many units on a tile as you wanted.  Want your city to have a forge, a market, a theatre, and be garrisoned by 10 archer units?  Go ahead.  Civ 5 changed this in that only 1 archer unit can ever fit on any tile, but they didn’t update the AIs to make them good at this new system.  There’s a complex juggling act that is needed to make all your units be effective when you can’t stack them all on a tile.  And the AI is not good at this juggling act.

In Civ 4 the AI wasn’t great but it was at least smart enough to gather a dozen units and march towards the nearest city.  If you only had a single archer in that city, well even Alexander the Great can’t win against those odds.  But in Civ 5, the AIs will gather a dozen units, and they will all get in each other’s way as they fail to march against an enemy city.  A single archer in Civ 5 can indeed pick off their enemies one by one, defeating a dozen units without taking a scratch.

So with 1upt, wars in Civilization became heavily player-favored, as no amount of enemy numerical advantage could make up for their incompetence.  However the Civ 5 AIs still had ungodly bonuses that could let them tech up and win the game through other means.

Civ 6 then decided to “unstack the cities,” doing to cities what 1upt had done to military units.  Now you could no longer have a forge, a market, and a theatre all in one place.  They had to be spread across the map of your city.  To make this mechanic fun, they added “adjacency bonuses” so that buildings work a lot better when they’re near things that help them.  If a market is near a river, then it can trade with far away places easier and it makes more gold.  If a theatre is near a world wonder, then it’s in a more beautiful part of town and produces more culture.  The player is encouraged to use these adjacency bonuses to get the most out of their buildings.  The AI… cannot do this to save its life.

Just like 1upt led to the AI being terrible at war, districts led to the AI being terrible at peace.  They have no ability to manage districts or even look for the best spots to place them.  You’ll often conquer an AI city and see districts placed in just such a way that they have zero adjacency bonus, which is hard to do if you know even just look at the tooltips.  They also seem to hyperfocus on research to the expense of all else, which doesn’t really help them.

But on deity the AI is still hard.  In fact, Deity AIs in Civ 6 are the hardest they’ve ever been, getting to start the game with three free settlers and a good sized army while the player starts with a single settler and a warrior.

But this gives a game against Deity AIs a sort of strange difficulty curve.  On turn 1 every single AI is more than three times as strong as you because they start with 3 settlers and their cities get free bonuses.  But as the turns go on the player makes more and more good choices while the AIs make poor ones.  Eventually the player pulls ahead of the AIs, and then starts to “snowball” from there.  Snowballing in strategy games is when the strongest ones in the game get even stronger over time relative to their peers.  Players always snowball better than the AI and so once a player is stronger than the AI, they’ll never ever be weaker again.  

So in a game against Civ 6 deity AIs, the first few turns are the hardest by far, and you can die within the first 10 turns easily.  But if you just make it to turn 50, you’re golden, untouchable even.  The AI isn’t skilled at getting any kind of victory, so even with their huge bonuses you can snowball out ahead of them and get whatever victory you want at your leisure.  This difficulty curve existed in every Civ game, but it is at its harshest in Civ 6 because the AIs have never been worse at playing their own game.

So while I have gotten my first Deity-level victory in Civ 6, I don’t actually feel like I’m all that good at it.  I feel like I’m playing chess against a 5-year-old only they’ve replaced all their pawns with queens.  I feel like this is definitely something that needs to be improved upon in Civ 7.  “Better AI!” isn’t exactly a hype-worthy back-of-the-box quote, but these are primarily single player games and I feel the single player experience is paramount.  I think I’d enjoy my time much more if I felt that my victories were from being out-maneuvered and outplanned, rather than because my opponents got free stuff at the start.  And I think it would be more fun if I could be ahead all game and then a smart AI could sneak up and overtake me in the lategame.  As it stands, once we’re out of the classical age, I’m golden.

I know no one at Firaxis games reads my blog, but if someone could tell John Civilization to fix his AI, that’d be great.

Final thoughts on Crusader Kings 3: A distinct lack of place

Some final, disjointed thoughts on CK3.

Crusader Kings, more than any other game in Paradox’s library, is primarily event-driven. The game lets you set up as the king of England, and then set up schemes to go to war with your neighbors or build up your finances, or whatever else. But the primary way you’ll interact with the game is actually random events. This is where the problems start, and they don’t stop.

Some of the events are quite fine, there are a lot related to the “lifestyle” you choose for your king that are honestly quite good. If you’ve focused on a war education, you’ll get events where your king trains in mock battles, or debates strategy with his marshal. If you’ve focused on learning, you’ll get events to translate old books.

But many of the events have no sense of time, place, or consequences. And those annoy the hell out of me. There is an event where a cult believes that the head of a saint has rolled down into your castle. Nevermind that most castles would be built on high ground, the cult wants to be allowed to search your castle and find the head. If you tell them no, then a few months later the cult leader will break out, hold your king at knifepoint, and if you still refuse to let him search the castle he’ll decapitate you.

Let’s break this down:

No sense of time. This game is set in the middle ages, your character is a king. Kings don’t just walk around on their own like it’s a Hollywood movie. They have guards, servants, and hangers-on at every point in time. Why can a cult just barge into a castle and confront the king? Why can the leader then sneak into the king’s bedroom? If security is this lax, then why are peasant revolts in the game so unsuccessful? This event makes it seem easy to barge in and kill the king whenever you want. This sort of thing breaks the illusion that the game is a living, breathing world because the event runs contrary to the actual logic of its setting and to the logic of the rest of the game!

No sense of place. Again, this is an event that happens in the castle of a king. Those things tend to be located on high ground and are heavily fortified against invasion. This is because both foreign kings and disgruntled peasants would love a chance to kill the king and either take his land or get reprieve from his taxes. Yet these facts are ignored to create and event where a head rolled into your castle and a bunch of cultists have barged in.

No sense of consequences. If the cultist does succeed in killing your king, there isn’t any reaction from the rest of your family or friends. You just start playing as your heir and the cultist wanders off. And if you weren’t happy at the cultists barging into your throne room earlier, you aren’t allowed to just have them all arrested and thrown in the dungeons, even though that’s the logical action to them breaking into your castle and demanding to break into it further. The actions of this event have no consequences outside the event itself. Either they search the castle and you get some small bonus, or they kill you and you play as your heir. In a game that gives mechanical benefits to you hiring bodyguards and hangers on, none of those things matter as the cultist will just waltz in and cut your head off because the event demands it.

This is just one event out of many, but it is very indicative of all of them. If you’re studying a foreign language, far off kings will teleport across half the map to knock over all your notes, even though again you’d be presumably studying in your own damn castle. All this because the game wants you to develop rivalries but can’t do so based on the actual conquering that happens in the game. If you have a cat, a foreign king may sneak into your catapult armory to launch the cat out of a catapult, again despite that making no sense in the time and place and this presumably happening on your army grounds where you should have soldiers capable of subduing him. The game desperately wants to spice things up with a small handful of events, but none of those are written well enough to be in any way meaningful or interesting. So instead they try to go over-the-top and just completely break the spell that this is an actual game about medieval kings and such.

More on Crusader Kings 3 and inheritance

I wrote recently about how it feels CK3 was made for the Devs to have fun and not the players. I’ll add a few more final thoughts on the specifics of my Gavelkind/partition gripe.

So to reiterate, Gavelkind aka Partition was an inheritance law in Crusader Kings 2 in which your children each inherited a title on your character’s death. Since you then played as one of those children, each generation you would end up weaker than what you started with. Players didn’t like this and so the first thing anyone did in a game was change their succession laws to “not Gavelkind.” Primogeniture, Seniority and Elective were all different choices with interesting drawbacks but they solved the problem of getting weaker every death quite nicely.

In Crusader King’s 3, the dev team decided that rather than improve Gavelkind so it was more fun, they would just lock people into Gavelkind as the only possible option. Now it’s impossible to switch out without either being a Bohemian or having some very late game tech (games often end early when they player gets bored however). Even elective monarchy doesn’t stop Gavelkind anymore.

I feel this was entirely the wrong move. Gavelkind isn’t fun, they should have made it more fun instead of locking you into it. CK2 had a very weak way of trying to make Gavelkind be viable, by increasing how many holdings you could have without penalty. But it was rare that a character could actually conquer or inherit enough holdings to made that useful, so it didn’t actually matter.

I’d much prefer it if CK3 made this succession law useful in a way that would be interesting to the players, then went back to allowing us to pick succession laws early.

Here’s an idea: since in Gavelkind every child inherits equally, maybe make it that under this succession law the player can pick who they will play as next. Not pick their heir, just who they will play as. You often get into a situation where your eldest child is a moron whereas your second oldest is smart, strong, handsome, and highly skilled. Without doing game-y shit like killing off your own child, their is now no way to play as that second son instead. I’d make it so that Gavelkind lets you play as them.

The eldest child would still inherit the highest title. Your older brother would still be the king or emperor while you’d be stuck as a count. But since you’d now be playing as a character with tons of good traits, you’d have to resources to climb your way back up. Even better is this would create a dynamic way for the player’s power to scale down during the game. The game becomes very boring very quickly once you created an empire, created your own faith, and are now too strong for anyone to challenge you. Players also don’t like losing wars, so they tend to just rage-quit instead of continuing play if something bad happens to them. This creates a dynamic where the player’s power goes exponentially up forever, and nothing can challenge them besides very boring and arbitrary RNG.

This Gavelkind change would change that. All the player’s heirs are equal under this succession law, so having the player choose who they will play as would be perfectly fine. And yet it would let the player lose a lot of power without rage quitting. This would be especially fun for players who play the genetics game, as choosing to continue on as a minor noble with all the good traits would be more rewarding for them than continuing as a powerful emperor or king.

In CK2 as a republic you could even choose your heir this way. Normally your heir was the oldest member of your Dynasty as a republic, but there was a special minor title called “designated heir” that let you get around this. You could do something similar in CK3 (although minor titles have been removed). Just call it “father’s/mother’s blessing” and draw parallels to the story of Jacob and Esau (it is a game all about catholic royalty, remember).

Mechanically I’d like to stress that my idea wouldn’t change how the inheritance works. If you choose to play as your youngest son instead of your oldest, you’ll still be choosing to play as the weakest successor. But it gives Gavelkind an actual reason to exist and be fun. If you want to stay powerful every generation, you pick Primogeniture. If you want to play the election game, you pick Elective. If you want to reunite your family lands after handing out vast tracks to your uncles, you pick Seniority (and for god’s sake don’t limit Seniority to only Bohemians!). But if you want to choose your future, you can stick with Gavelkind, the “historically accurate” inheritance law.

Crusader Kings 3: Should the players have fun, or the devs?

I can’t find the quote right now (and I have a headache so I don’t want to), but a quote attributed to Sid Meier is that in a video game, the goal should be for the player to be having fun, not the devs. I think of that a lot because one of the reasons I hate modern Paradox is because they think it’s the other way around. The player should dance to the dev’s tune, and if they’re not playing “right” then the devs need to “fix” that.

I say this because I recently posted about playing Imperator: Rome, and one of my friends thought it would be funny to gift me Crusader Kings 3, since I said in that review that I didn’t plan on ever buying another Paradox game. And when I started playing my gift, the first thing I realized is that CK3 is definitely a game that looked at CK2 and decided “the players weren’t playing right, we need to fix that.”

There’s a ton of things I could say about CK3. I’ll briefly mention that the lack of a ledger, most UI elements, and a MINIMAP make this by far the most tedious Paradox game to play. There’s some good ideas but it’s way to hard to get to any of them, pointlessly so. The whole thing needs a UI redesign from the ground up, but that’s not what I’m here for.

In CK2 and CK3, you play as a feudal family through the generations. From lord to lord you get to take the reigns of some feudal noble and expand your kingdom, fight off rebels, go Crusading, and what have you. As it’s a dynastic game, decisions about succession and titles are paramount. To cut to the chase, the primary inheritance law is called “Gavelkind” or “Partition,” in which the realm is divided among the ruler’s children. So if you hold 3 counties and have 3 sons (assuming male-preference), then each son inherits 1 county. This makes it difficult when your character dies and you start playing as the eldest son, since you’ve become 1/3 as strong as you were before.

This means that Gavelkind succession in CK2 was an endless loop of getting strong, realm partitioning, and working your way back to square 1. Most players hated it, and so the first piece of advice given to new players was always “get rid of Gavelkind.” It was fun to choose different succession laws for different occasions. Seniority let you reunite family lands as elderly, title-holding members of your dynasty were the primary inheritors. Primogeniture meant only your eldest son inherited. And elective meant you could choose your heir as long as you could game the election. It was pretty fun.

Then the devs saw this and decided that the players were playing “wrong.” They needed to be spending more time in Gavelkind as it was “historically accurate.” So now Gavelkind is renamed “partition” and it’s almost impossible to get out of it. Elective succession laws only apply to kingdom level titles, so your counties and duchies still get split on death even if you’re elective. Primogeniture has been relegated to being only available at the tail end of the game. To add, they’ve removed the ability to actually start at the tail end of the game, so you can’t even get any use out of Primogeniture since most people’s games will end much sooner when they get bored. And finally seniority succession is now locked behind a cultural tradition available only to the Bohemians. Because I guess no one else is able to just study the idea and decide “hey, we’d like to do that too.”

The game still isn’t historically accurate by any means. Succession was never this cut and dry. But the devs are having more fun now and the players less, so that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

I’ve bought my friend Kenshi in return for CK3, and I feel I’ll quickly fall off of this one much like Imperator. It’s definitely not bad, but it’s moving in a direction I don’t appreciate.

Kenshi: A better game than Rimworld

Like I said in a previous post, I like Kenshi a lot more than Rimworld. The two aren’t actually that comparable, the title is just a dig at a friend of mine who called Rimworld “a better Kenshi.”

Kenshi is a brilliant mix of fantasy RPG, post-apocalyptic survival, and real time strategy. The game is also dipped in a more fantastical flavor that makes it a lot more novel than the scores of Fallout-lite clones where we fight through ruined 1st world cities. Instead, this is a world where wandering ronin have sword battles with skeletal robots, where 20-foot-tall “beak things” fight giant gorillas, and where a death-cult race of Foglanders capture and eat anyone who wanders into their domain. There’s a lot to love here and I’m glad the setting isn’t generic like so many others.

As an aside, I love the implication that this world has had multiple apocolypses. Nobody knows who built the skeletons or where they came from, as well as a number of other giant mechanical monstrosities that litter the world (like an orbital death-laser). In turn there are a number of libraries scattered throughout the world. They apparently come from the “second empire” and post-date the skeletons, but by game start they have all been abandoned and mostly destroyed. What few that remain are poured over by wandering tech hunters to regain their lost knowledge. This wasn’t a simple apocolypse that destroyed this world, it was a long-multistage affair, and it gives you a lot to think about as you wander across the wastelands.

And wander you shall because that’s the primary gameplay loop of Kenshi: running around and trying to not die. But the game lets you keep and train up a party of a few dozen dudes to do that with, and it can all get really fun. Putting your guys on different jobs, sneaking around if necessary, building up a team, this is where the fun of Kenshi is. And the part where it gets a bit Rimworldy is that you can eventually create a base of operations and have all your murder-hobos do manual labor like they were Rimworlders. Unlike Rimworld, the game doesn’t give you progressively harder challenges but gives you the hardest possible challenges pretty much all at once. If you want to settle down anywhere you’d best be ready for a war.

But having a war is also fun because the gameplay isn’t about numbers. You can have 100 guys, and you’ll still get wrecked by a single gate guard. That’s because during combat, the game takes a martial-arts movie approach of having all allies and enemies pair up for one-on-one combat. And if there’s 100 guys and 1 master, the 100 guys will patiently wait for their turn to attack, while the master will have such powerful swings that he can destroy 5 enemies with a single slice.

So the game is still enticing you to build up a squad and survive, but it’s not about tricking the AI into giving you easier challenges, but rather about building up the skills of your group until you can take on any challenge. When you finally train up some random schmuck to the point that they can solo and entire squad of Paladins, you really feel a sense of accomplishment.

Sorry, this post was a bit scatterbrained, but I really just wanted to gush about Kenshi. I hope there’s a sequel some time soon.

Understanding why I don’t like Mana in EU4

So this is a big topic that I’ve thought about a lot but I’m going to break it down into little pieces to try to get something written on paper.

I don’t like the introduction of Mana in EU4. If you’ve played EU4, you know this is a well-worn topic, but for the others, here goes.

In EU4, most every action in the game will cost one of 3 resources. These resources are called “monarch points” but the community calls them “mana.” Your admin mana mostly deals with stability and integrating conquered provinces into your realm. Diplo mana mostly deals with peace treaties, trade, and the navy. Military mana mostly deals with the military and rebels. The problems with this system start right off the bat with how one imaginary resource is performing multiple completely unrelated tasks. Why will signing a big peace treaty prevent me from hiring a new admiral? And furthermore, why do most actions happen instantly once I save up enough mana, shouldn’t technology be something you research over time? Instead here you just save up your mana and at the click of a button all your soldiers are better.

The unrealistic game-y-ness is the origin of the (originally derogatory) term “mana,” as the system makes your king seem like a wizard casting spells rather than a monarch ruling the country. “I was casting a spell to summon a general, but now I can’t cast cannon spells!” <- I spent my military mana on generals and now can’t afford technology. Diplo mana is the worst by far with how game-y and spell-like it is. Peace treaties, trade powers, naval leaders, espionage ideas, diplo is just the dumping ground for anything and everything that doesn’t neatly fit into either admin or military.

Another big downside with the mana is how it is earned. Every country gets 3 points of each, but the lion’s share of your mana will come from your ruler, who can add up to 6 points in each category. You can also get up to 3 points of each type from advisors, but in the base EU4 game half or more of your country’s total mana comes solely from their king. This brings EU4 back into the “Great Man” theory of history, in that the country of your ruler doesn’t matter a bit. It is your ruler himself who is solely responsible for researching tech, maintaining stability, summoning generals, reducing war exhaustion, and everything else. There are a lot of questions about why some countries succeed and others fail. EU4’s answer is that successful countries just had a powerful wizard as ruler who generated enough mana to research all the tech.

And in a way it’s downright racist to present history this way. Countries don’t just succeed because of their ruler, European rulers weren’t smarter than their counterparts in the rest of the world, making every single action a country takes or can take come down to how much mana their ruler generates just makes it seem like you read Edward Gibbon once and then slept through all your history classes.

This isn’t just ahistorical but it’s bad gameplay too. You don’t have any control over who you get as ruler, so your game will largely be determined by how lucky you get with this. Making pretty much every action a player can take come down to the luck of how much mana they can afford (because of how good of a ruler they got) is just bad gameplay design. Oddly enough it’s pretty clear Paradox even agrees with me, because while they haven’t abandoned mana in EU4, they did mostly abandon it in Imperator:Rome, and in EU4 they have added a number of systems to address the luck-based irregularity of mana.

Pretty much every DLC Paradox puts out mostly revolves around new ways to let the player generate mana. Getting advisors up to level 5, estates, razing enemy territory as a horde, disinheriting bad rulers or heirs, it’s clear that Paradox knows that the mana system is unfun and too luck based. So every DLC lets players pay for the privilege of ignoring it more and more. But it’s too much work to change EU4 now, and Johan is too stubborn to admit that he’s wrong, so mana is going to see out the remainder of Paradox’s EU4. Fans should hope they see the light and remove it for EU5.

Imperator: Rome, a laundry list of grievances

I said in my last post that I could give a laundry list of grievances for why I didn’t like most of the game. So here they are in no particular order.

The Republic mechanics are terrible, offering no real long term strategy and consequences. You either set up your Republic well in the first few years, in which case you spend the entire game with zero problems, or you stumble early and can never recover, and you might as well just restart. If you get the factions on your side, they’ll stay happy forever. But if they hate you, then every new election sinks your country lower and lower into anarchy and you can’t do anything about it. We can make jokes about how this is accurate for a democracy, but the problem is that it isn’t fun. There’s no actual haggling or politics in a republic, no real interesting choices. You can easily ensure that your favored factions retain all their power and influence and ignore the other faction, and from then on the republic just doesn’t matter, you’re basically an elected king.

The mechanics for levying soldiers are too gamey in many respects. The game does a good job of realizing that for ancient Rome, military service was the job of citizens, not just everybody. Because of that the game only lets you levy a full compliment of troops out of pops that are your correct culture. In all other territories without your pops, you simply get 4 cohorts of light chaff. However you get those 4 cohorts no matter how many (or FEW) pops reside in your new territory. So conquering a new territory with just 1 pop in it expands your army more than conquering the remainder of your home territory containing 100 pops.

Why does founding cities require mana to begin with? And why is there a limit on the number of mercenaries you can raise? These two things together just mean that by mid game, there’s nothing to spend your money on. I quit my games with 1000s of denarii in the bank because I just couldn’t spend them, having already build all the buildings I wanted, being unable to found more cities due to the mana restriction, and being unable to raise new mercenaries because you have a hard-cap to the number of companies you can raise regardless of your size. This is a game that has made money absolutely useless outside of the first 10 years of the game.

Speaking of useless money, the AI plays the same way. Every single tiny tribe in Europe is sitting on a Consul’s ransom of gold and the moment you go to war with them they’ll raise their maximum allowance of mercenaries against you. This means that expanding into 5 Gaulic tribes ends up being more painful than fighting large empires such as Egypt or Carthage because those 5 Gaulic tribes actually end up with more armies to use. It’s nonsense and it just shows that this game is balanced horribly, since both the player and the AIs can’t find anything to spend their money on.

You set up trade routes by importing goods from a foreign province. Then when that province gets conquered, you have to restart the trade route manually even though the new owners will still accept the trade. Just let the route have continuity unless the new owners would forbid it, stop giving me pointless busy work.

Trade in general is underwhelming. There are a tiny number of nice capital bonuses (stone, for the early game) and then a whole lot of boni so minor you won’t even notice.

Every civ feels exactly the same. Defenders of this game will wrongly claim that the Roman classical period just isn’t popular (ignoring Rome: Total War), and will likewise claim that there isn’t enough history to put in any real flavor. That’s just nonsense, the game is just bad at flavor. Playing as the King of Armenia shouldn’t feel identical to playing as the Consul of Rome.

Let’s go further with the above point: base-game EU4 actually felt very different depending on where you started. You could play inside the HRE with Austria or Brandenburg, which gave you lots of bonuses but also limited your expansion and forced you to comply with HRE laws. You could play as an HRE neighbor like Poland or France, in which case your expansion into the HRE was limited but the small states within it were unlikely to hurt you. Or you could play somewhere far away from the HRE like the Ottoman Empire or Muscovy. Your expansion was unconstrained, but being next to high-tech neighbors does help you boost your tech, and so you might find yourself falling behind on tech due to lack of HRE-neighboring bonus. Finally you could ignore Europe and go colonizing with Portugal or Spain. In this case you played the colonial game instead. All those types of games did feel very different from one another, and they were all played in the same game-map covered by Imperator: Rome. And that was base-game EU4, no expansions or patches which brought Japanese Shogunates, Chinese Tian-zi’s, or native American confederations. Just straight out of the box EU4 in Europe.

NOTHING in Imperator:Rome feels different or unique in this way. Nothing has its own unique flavor or game-play benefits. There’s just no reason to ever play a second game after you’ve played your first. And I think that’s why this game failed.

Boy, Imperator Rome isn’t that good

I had no desire to play the new Paradox game Imperator:Rome, but when I received it for free from a friend last Christmas, I thought I might as well respect the gift and give it a go. Besides, they say the game was changed significantly since its mana-infested launch and I thought I might as well give it a go.

It’s not great.

To start with the good, Imperator: Rome does try to have unique concepts. You can play as unsettled tribes, for instance. This allows you to move your people around the map and claim vast tracks of territory, as well as assimilate large numbers of people into your migratory horde.

You can also play as a settled tribe and reform into a Roman-style republic or a kingdom. This is done OK but it does feel mostly like a less-fleshed out version of Vicky 2 or base-game EU4’s Westernization mechanic. It’s just kind of there.

And there’s republics with their own factions and influence. Whatever.

I could give a laundry list of grievances as to why none of these mechanics really entertain me. But the biggest problems with Imperator are much much bigger: there’s nothing to do outside war, and war is boring.

Let’s start with the first, Paradox plays motte-and-bailey with what exactly they are. They proudly coined “Grand Strategy” as the term to market themselves, and push their games as a way to play historical simulators or alternative history. Yet when pressed about the bad history or lack of strategy their games include, Johan, a high ranking Paradox dev who loves to fight and troll on social media, will exclaim that these are wargames, that war is the point and it’s what they focus on. So the fact that Imperator isn’t fun when you aren’t at war is both a damning indictment of Paradox’s claim yet also gets deflected by people like Johan.

With that said, peace is boring in Imperator. You’re supposed to use this time to manage your empire, convert conquered peoples to your religion and culture so they stop being so mad that their parents were killed, and building up your forces and treasure through buildings. This is all done terribly. Converting people is a waiting game that is supposed to be influenced by governor actions, yet those governor actions run on mana, the same currency you need to start wars, change laws, or doing any of the other things in the game. When a governor dies or gets replaced, their replacement undoes all the settings you put in, forcing you to spend yet more mana to fix them. By locking the converting and enforcing (with things like harsh treatment or local autonomy) behind mana, you encourage the player to just not interact with this function at all, lest they waste their precious mana and have none left over for war, the closest thing this game has to fun.

What’s worst is that this system doesn’t have to be here, previous Paradox game Victoria 2 had a genuinely better system with national foci (plural for focus). You only had a few national foci at any time, so for a large empire you had to move them around to get the best effect. And there were always things you wanted to do with your foci, encourage clergy to get more research and literacy, encourage craftsmen and capitalists to get more industry, encourage soldiers to prepare for or sustain a war. You had to make interesting trade-offs between your long-term and short term national interests, and weather what you needed in the near future was a more literate populace or a wealthier one or what have you. And if the national focus system (which DIDN’T use mana!) was just ported straight to Imperator, it would be much better.

But it isn’t. So being in peace costs mana, a scarce resource. And in turn this means peace is boring.

So war, that’s fine right? Well recent design decisions at Paradox have turned war into a boring slog. I wonder if they got taken over by secret pacifists who want to teach us all about the banality of war by making a wargame boring during war.

At some point a few key decisions were reached at Paradox interactive. Now I want to preface by saying that Johan and his social-media trolling ilk will fervently deny this, they denied for years the most obvious Paradox designs such as AIs not taking attrition in many circumstance. It’s very dumb that Paradox lies about their own design decisions, and lying to your customers is just one reason I have zero sympathy for them or desire to give them money ever again. But anyway these design decisions make war a boring slog that isn’t really worth it.

First up is the changes to shattered retreat (SR). I first encountered SR in CK2 and here’s how it is supposed to work. In base-game CK2 and other Paradox games, a defeated army or navy will simply move one province away to rest and heal. But the victorious army is now standing on the province where the battle happened, and there’s no difficulty in them walking to the defeated army and starting an immediate fight. Since the defeated army just lost and is now smaller, it will likely lose again, retreating further and further battle after battle until it’s completely wiped out. This often turned wars into basically 1-battle affairs, where whoever won the first battle would win the entire war as the defeated army had no way to rest, recuperate, and respond.

SR is supposed to fix this as a defeated army marches away and cannot be engaged by anyone until it reaches a point several provinces away. If you chase after it, you’ll find you cannot engage it until it reaches its destination. What’s more, it slowly regains some of its moral as it marches, so when you finally do engage it it will be stronger than what you may expect. This is supposed to allow defeated armies to get back into the fight and mean that the whole war isn’t decided by a single battle. The problem here is that it’s too easy to abuse this mechanics and the AI always does so. If a battle seems like it’s even slightly going the wrong way, the AI will retreat across their territory. You fight it again and it retreats again. Battles have become almost bloodless affairs in Imperator where only a small fraction are lost in any fight. Gone are the days of Darius when a single defeat from Alexander forced him to raise an entirely new army, instead a single army can fight dozens of battles, be defeated in every single one, and the soldiers and generals will never desert, quit, or get cut down as they flee like what usually happened in a Roman-era battle. In fact another small change enforces this: when an army retreated from battle in prior games, the army against it got a few free hits in before it left. This was to mimic the actual circumstances of retreating troops being cut down, but this mechanic is gone.

What the above all does is turn Imperator into whack-a-mole. You have to chase down enemy armies constantly and it just isn’t fun.

A second SR change is the omniscient AI. The AI knows at every moment where all of your troops are. This means there’s no reason to ever be strategic, no reason to ever have forces in multiple places to cover multiple avenues. The AI always knows exactly how many troops you have and where, and isn’t shy about walking half-way across the world to siege down an undefended province. So if you don’t play whack-a-mole with them the AI can walk past any obstacle to annoy your backlines, and will do so even while their capital city is being razed to the ground by your forces. The AI’s armies and soldiers apparently don’t care about the dying of their families back home, but your own empire can get severe penalties from being sieged down from behind. And if you DO send an army towards them, the moment you click the map the AI is instantly alerted that an army is coming their way, even if they have no way of knowing your army is on the move. They will then scuttle back to where they came from. So you either play whack-a-mole or you just ignore them, because you can’t trap them, fight them, or do any of the strategy you’d expect from a strategy game.

Finally, the AI has decided it will never EVER engage unless it thinks it has overwelming odds of victory. This turns them into little McClellans who will retreat from every fight and completely refuse to even engage you if you’re strong enough. I’ve genuinely had wars where I never fought the enemy because they decided I was too powerful and just ran their armies away. Again I guess they don’t care about protecting their homes and families.

All this together turns war into a boring slog. If you are weaker than the AI, you want to get a local concentration of forces and defeat AI armies one by one. But they know your every movement and whether they will win a battle and they always retreat, so this tactic turns into my least favorite game of whack-a-mole ever. And if you are stronger, you want to find their forces, defeat them, and start the siege. You skip steps 1 and 2 because since you are stronger the AI never engages.

It’s just a terrible game overall.

Rimworld: a game of entropy

Rimworld is a very popular colony sim game.  I’ve seen a number of other games paint themselves with it’s brush, aping its style and mechanics, and yet none have come close to offering what Rimworld offers.  Rimworld puts you in the shoes of 3 survivors who crashland on a sparsely populated world at the edge of human habitation.  The survivors must immediately get to work building shelter, growing food, and finding some way to escape their new home.  The planet is also home to hostile pirates, insane robots, and murderous bug creatures, so the deck is stacked against you.  But if you can learn to grow and manage your colony, you can survive, thrive, and escape.

This basic outline of growing a colony and surviving against enemies and nature alike is used in a number of other games I’ve played. But none of them really offer the same experience that Rimworld does. Now, cards on the table, I think Rimworld is good-not-great, and I enjoy some of those other games a lot more. But I wanted to examine why it is I think that Rimworld is offering such a rarified experience when the basic outline is so widely used.

One of the things to understand about Rimworld is that this is a game of entropy.  Your position in the world is always decaying and you need to work just to maintain it.  You’re fighting an uphill battle just to survive, so growing and prospering is going to be pretty hard.  Food is not plentiful, so your first job is to immediately start farming, foraging, and hunting for raw food.  But raw food isn’t healthy or fun to eat, so you also need to set up a cooking station to make meals.  Meals spoil quickly so you need a refrigerator to store them in.  And unsanitary conditions lead to disease so you need to keep your food areas as clean as possible.  

Keeping your colony fed it a hell of a lot of work on its own, and that isn’t even getting into all the other entropy the game has, like how clothes degrade and need replacing, or how electric appliances short circuit, or how your colonist will eventually age and acquire new ailments that need treatment.  Surviving on a barren world is hard, and Rimworld wants you to realize it.

Now, other games I’ve played have included some amount of survival mechanics.  Kenshi and Oxygen Not Included both include the need for food.  But in those games I never really felt like I struggled to survive.  The games were tuned so that keeping everyone fed felt like an occasional annoyance, not a difficult necessity like it is in Rimworld.  

SURVIVAL IS DIFFICULT

In Rimworld, there’s a lot to do and only so much time in the day.  At the start of the game your colonists might spend half of their day on basic needs (eating, sleeping, etc) and a third of their day doing the work needed for the colony (cooking, getting food).  That leaves just ⅙ of their day to work on expanding and improving the colony, doing things like making new weapons or building better living quarters.  

You can try to finagle the numbers a but, but they’re pretty tight.  If you have your colonists work less on the colony’s needs, you might run out of food and starve.  If you don’t let colonists sleep, they’ll have a mental break and stop working for you.  Mental breaks and dead colonists decrease the total amount of work you have available, so it’s best to err on the side of caution and not rush towards colony expansion.

So in Rimworld, playing the game “well” involves making the colony run as efficiently as possible so you can get as much work out of your colonists as possible.  If the beds and food storage are near the dining halls, colonists don’t have to walk as far for breakfast.  And if you make sure the skilled planter does the farming and the skilled builder does the building, basic necessities will get done a lot faster than they would otherwise.  This lets you siphon off more and more of your colonists’ day towards expansion and improvement.

But this is where the “storytellers” of Rimworld come in.  At semi-regular intervals, the game will drop some crisis in your lap that needs solving.  Maybe half your colonists get sick and need healing, maybe space pirates start attacking your colony.  Either way you now have to drop what you’re doing and fight for survival.  

These crises are multifaceted in how they test you: first of all your colony needs to be well enough run that you can drop everything for a day without your colony going to crap.  Secondly, these crises will often bleed you of scarce resources, such as medicine or single-use-items.  Thirdly, you rarely come out of these crises unscathed.  Even if no colonists die, Rimworld battles tend to include long-term and even permanent injuries that not only need to be treated but can also make your colonists less efficient for the rest of their lives.  

These crises are an excellent way to test your colony and see how well you’re managing your supply of “work.”  If space pirates kill your best planter, can you still grow enough food to survive?  If half your colonists get space-flu, can the other half take care of them?  And after you’ve spent your resources and lost your colonists (or your colonists have lost their arms), can you build yourself back up and continue?

So survival is very hard, and the storyteller makes it harder, but even that’s not the end.  I said before that expanding your colony is part of the goal of getting off-planet, well Rimworld makes sure that expansion is even harder than survival.  

COLONY EXPANSION

To expand your colony you’re going to need new colonists, but while Rimworld is a war-torn backwater there aren’t just plenty of people wandering around happy to join your dirt farm.  There’s a few different ways to get new colonists:

First, you can incapacitate enemies who attack you, lock them in a jail cell, and then persuade them to join your colony.  This will require you to spend a lot of work feeding your prisoner and keeping them alive, as well as dealing with the occasional jailbreak.  For a colony just barely scraping by, a single extra mouth to feed can be the breaking point, so this method isn’t easy.  Also the game makes sure that the vast majority of enemies will die rather than surrender, so the Stockholm Syndrome route isn’t very productive.

The second option is to rescue colonists as part of a quest, at which point they will join you in gratitude.  This option is a gamble itself since the quests usually involve a lot of fighting, and as I said above Rimworld’s combat is a huge test to your colony’s survival.  Still, if you can manage it, this is usually the quickest route to growing your colony.  

Finally, you can sometimes pay to have a colonist join you, but this usually costs an exorbitant amount of money, way more than an early game colony can afford and way more than a mid-game colony would usually spend.  These opportunities are also few and far between, so even if you are rolling in cash this option isn’t a given.  

Finally, in all three of these options you don’t have the ability to “pick and choose” what type of colonist you want, you get what you get.  And if you end up with 4 artists who your single planter/chef/doctor struggles to keep alive, then oh well.

Expanding your colony is the easiest way to have more “work” available to do things.  The game knows this, and will fight you to prevent it.  As stated above, the game is finicky about giving you new colonists, but that’s not the only trick up its sleeve.  If you do luck into a big colony, you’ll find you don’t have as much extra work available as you might think.  This is because the game increases the difficulty as your base gets larger, and always keeps you in check to make things challenging.

NEVER SATISFIED

The game measures how much “wealth” your colony has.  Wealth includes the rooms your colonists sleep in, the food in their pantry, and the number and abilities of the colonists themselves.  As your colony expands, it has more wealth.  As it has more wealth, the colonists will get more and more picky.  

Remember what I said about mental breaks, they are one of the ways that the game forces you to look after your colonists’ needs.  If you don’t keep them happy, colonists may hide in their room, start setting fire to things, or start taking drugs in order to cope.  When you’ve just crashlanded on the planet, the colonists are happy just to be alive, and their mood will be high enough that they’re unlikely to break over little things like not having good food or clothing.  As your colony expands, your colonists’ needs expand too.  They’ll want more entertainment, better living quarters, more time to themselves.  As colonists’ needs increase, you need to spend more and more of their labor on meeting those needs, having less and less available to do other things.  

So growing your colony isn’t always going to give you more available “work.”  With 3 colonists, you can perhaps use ⅙ of their daily labor to do your own things, while ⅚ are needed for their survival.  If 3 more colonists are added, everyone may suddenly demand more niceties such that all their daily labor is spent keeping themselves alive and happy.  If another 3 colonists join, maybe people will demand so much stuff that you can’t keep all of them happy.  Again, good play means making your colony efficient enough that each new colonist gives you enough labor to offset the expense of keeping them alive and happy.

And even that’s not the end of it!  Your colony’s wealth will also determine the difficulties of the challenges that your colony faces.  Your crashlanded survivors will only be attacked by small animals or single, melee-armed humans.  A large and wealthy colony will be attacked by wasting diseases, herds of wild megafauna, killer robots and more.  The game is constantly testing you, and the tests get harder as you get better.

So that’s what Rimworld is.  I may not have explained it well but it is a game of entropy.  Every day is a fight for survival, your position in the world is always moving backwards.  You need to struggle to keep what you have and struggle harder to get anything more.  Even as you run forward, the game ups the speed on the treadmill giving you harder and harder challenges so you’re always struggling.

THE UNIQUENESS OF RIMWORLD

This contrasts pretty strongly with the other games that I’ve been told are “colony sims” and “like Rimworld.”  Now to lay my cards on the table, I like these other games a hell of a lot more than I like Rimworld. But I don’t like them for their “Rimworldness,” in fact I’d say I like them because they do a lot of things better than Rimworld, and their “Rimworldness” often holds them back. But these games keep being talked about in the same breath as Rimworld and I’d like to discuss why I think they really aren’t like it at all.

The closest approximation of Rimworld I’ve played is Oxygen Not Included.  Like Rimworld it gives you a few colonists and tells you to keep them alive and grow your colony.  Unlike Rimworld, keeping them alive isn’t the hard part.  I haven’t played more than 20 hours of Oxygen Not Included, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a mental break or been close to starvation.  Dirt and water on their own can be turned into cheap food, and a single skill can turn that food into something the colonists actually enjoy.  You don’t have to put a huge amount of energy into farming, fueling your stoves, or even keeping your food clean.  Food is very cheap and a simple CO2 trap keeps it fresh and unspoiled forever.

Not only that, Oxygen Not Included isn’t shy about giving you more resources.  Every hour or so of game time it gives you a new colonist for free.  You don’t have to take the colonist mind, but unlike Rimworld I was struggling to keep my base small, not struggling to grow it.  Before I knew it I had more labor than I knew what to do with, and half my colonists were wandering around aimlessly.  In Rimworld this is usually a sign of a very efficient colony, in Oxygen Not Included it was a sign that I didn’t really know what else I should be doing. 

Kenshi is a game I like much more than Rimworld, but again I think comparing the two is unfitting.  Kenshi will also let you set up a colony to farm, grow, and survive, but it’s not hard for the reason Rimworld is hard.  In Rimworld it’s hard to stay fed and clothed, and the random events add spice to your entropy sandwich.  In Kenshi it was very easy to stay fed and clothed, I found a single farmer and a single cook could keep 20 people fed no problem.  The difficulty in Kenshi is entirely in the politics and combat.  

Everywhere you can settle in Kenshi is already “owned” by some organization, either a nation or a bandit tribe, and so if you set up a dirt farm the owners will come to collect.  Sometimes they’ll demand tribute, sometimes they’ll ransack your storage, sometimes they’ll try to kill you, but keeping them assuaged or fighting them off is the real test of your colony.  

Unlike Rimworld and its “wealth” system though, Kenshi doesn’t have a way to scale these challenges up or down.  The same horde of bandits will descend upon a dirt farm as will descend upon a thriving metropolis with harpoons guarding the doors.  Once you’re strong enough to fight off the attacks, nothing else can touch you.  

Furthermore, Kenshi isn’t shy about giving you colonists either.  You can pay for people to join, but unlike in Rimworld the costs isn’t that great compared to the amount of money you can expect to have on hand.  It’s not difficult to fill your ranks in Kenshi, and as I said it’s not difficult to keep a large horde of people healthy and happy.  The difficulty is because (in true action movie fashion), untrained mooks are useless in combat while trained swordsmen cleave through them like butter. Kenshi rewards you for your skill, not your numbers.

So Rimworld is a game that’s all about Entropy, and I think that makes it different to every other “colony” sim I’ve ever played, including several I haven’t mentioned here.  It’s difficult to survive in Rimworld, most of your time will be spent on bare necessities with little left time over for expansion.  And even if you do expand, you’ve only increased the challenges you’ll face and the needs of your people, so they game ensures you’ll always struggle.  I’ve stopped playing Rimworld, but I think this is what people need to understand if they want to make a game to challenge it.  It’s not about adding farming and a “mental break” mechanic, it’s about making the mere act of existing a genuine struggle.  That’s what Rimworld is really about.

The circle of Skyrim

This probably won’t be controversial, but The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is a pretty good game. For what it is, I’d say it’s a masterpiece. There’s certainly some parts I don’t enjoy, (the guild quests can be lame, the main plot meanders, the civil war is undercooked), but none of those bring down the enjoyment of what Skyrim actually is. Skyrim is a time waster, expertly designed and developed to have you spend hours upon hours without even realizing you’re doing so, ensuring that at any moment there are 5 different activities you could be doing and a dozen different goals you could be working towards. I remember first thinking about this topic due to a post written by the late Shamus Young, but I can’t remember the exact post so I’m sorry I cannot link directly. Here’s how a few hours of Skyrim may play out:

  • Load up the game and dive into some dungeon. There’s tons of the map and the combat is engaging enough to make this enjoyable. You may even get some nice loot depending on where you dive: rare materials, dragon souls, even a Word Wall to give you new powers
  • With the dungeon now thoroughly dived, make your way back to town. It’s here that the time wasting really begins. You can sell your loot to merchants, use the proceeds to buy better gear or a house in town. You can buy training in a skill, unlocking more perks you can use out in the world. There are 3 different crafting-based skills and your loot may well suit all 3, so you can run around town crafting new weapons and items with the loot you acquired. These and other time sinks give you ways to keep strengthening your character, making you better able to head back into the world and fight.
  • DING! You leveled up! Since Skyrim uses the “learn by doing” system of level-ups, just crafting stuff will advance your skills and earn you new perk points, which can be spent to unlock new abilities
  • New abilities in tow, you may head back out into the world to try them out, plus you have whatever sweet loot you got out of your last dungeon. Maybe you can disarm opponents now thanks to a Word Wall you found, plus maybe you have a fancy new Dwarven Blade courtesy of the Smithing perk you just bought.
  • Having now dived a few more dungeons you may be getting bored with the combat, new perks or no. Fear not, the game still has ways of entertaining you, in town you may learn of an interesting new quest which could break up the monotony of combat, or decide to join one of the factions for a different flavor of gameplay. The factions themselves will give you a bit of story and their own quests, again breaking up the monotony and keeping you engaged even if all you’re doing is running around doing more fighting and gathering more loot.
  • And since you’re doing more fighting and gathering more loot, you need to keep heading back into town, spending more time running about the shops and skill trainers, leveling up further and further and buying more and more new cool abilities to try out in the world
  • And the world itself may have fun quests. Go into a random dungeon? Hey there’s a guy here wanting to kill the people looting his family’s crypt. Well that’s what I was just about to do, but I’ll fight on the side of justice this time. These quests out in the world do even more to frame the repetitive fighting and make it still feel “fresh” even as you hack your 1000th bandit to pieces. You may be doing the same thing over and over again, but it never really feels like it
  • And the maximum carry weight even feeds into this. We all know how much it sucks to be overencoumbered with all your loot, but that’s a GREAT incentive to head back into town to sell or use it all, again letting you spend time there, power up, and again want to go back out into the world.

Skyrim does an amazing job at making a super simple combat and leveling system keep you engaged for hours. The fact that every moment feels fresh and new, and the fact that every activity pushes you towards doing other activities, is a testament to how fun the game is. Running around town makes me want to use my new gear and go dungeon diving, gathering a bunch of loot in dungeons makes me want to go back to town and cash it in. The quests and questlines are all enjoyable enough to make the umpteenth Draugr crypt still feel engaging, and there are enough memorable characters sprinkled around the make the world feel real and alive. I only write this post because I just lost an entire weekend to Skyrim, and I hope I can get this game out of me so I can get back to work later, but this decade old game is still really really good.