Tag Archives: gaming

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 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*.

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.

I don’t like what you like

I still want to finish my Stardew Valley miniseries, but I also want to get something off my chest: it’s ok to not like things other people like, and I wish more people felt this way.

I’ve written before about games I like, but I’ve also been honest about how some of them are the kinds of games I wouldn’t recommend to others, just because I know some folks won’t like them. I really enjoyed Pillars of Eternity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t.

What turned you off of it? Was it the 30+ different status ailments to keep track of? The overabundances of resistances and damage types? The stats each doing 5 different things? The rest-heal system? I loved all that shit, but you don’t have to. Or maybe you just don’t like real-time-with-pause, I’ve been open that I’m probably the only one who prefers it to turn-based-tactics in RPGs, so while I’d be disappointed at your criticism I wouldn’t be surprised.

Or maybe you played Cult of the Lamb, but hated how the base building got in the way of your dungeon crawler. Or you tried Ace Attorney, but couldn’t get over how it was a visual novel with pixel hunting for puzzles.

If you told me you didn’t like any of these games, I’d understand. If you said they were *bad* games, I’d disagree but I could probably at least understand your viewpoint. Even if a game is loved by 99/100 people who play it, that still means a game with a million buys is disappointing *at least* 10,000 people.

Our culture has even had a resurgence of memes pointing this out. Standing up and telling the whole world that they are wrong has become a point of pride for some people. So if you don’t like a game I like, I try not to hold it against you.

But I feel some people just can’t accept this. If you don’t like something, you must be *bad* at it, or impatient, or stupid, or you didn’t read the tutorials, or you mashed through the story. The reason you didn’t enjoy it is a *moral failing* on your part because *I* liked it and *I’m* a good person so anyone who thinks differently than me must be a *bad* person.

If this feels like a petty call-out of “gamer” culture, that’s because it is. Too often I’ve seen people disliking things be attacked for being bad, or salty, or unmanly because they can’t handle the “difficulty” of a game that can never just be criticized. I’m tired of this shit, I see it all the time, and it’s why I almost never talk to people about video games.

Because no one is ever allowed to just think something is good or bad, no one can accept that different people have different opinions. You must be too stupid to understand Pillars of Eternity, or too illiterate to appreciate Ace Attorney, or too impatient to enjoy Cult of the Lamb.

And yes this post is a subtweet, because when talking to a friend recently, I had exactly this kind of conversation. I didn’t like part of a game, and this was thrown back at me as a *moral failing* on my part. That because I didn’t play *the right way*, my complaints about not having fun were invalid, and were instead a reflection of my impatience and ignorance for not reading the correct menus or using the correct strategies.

And I hate that shit. Sometimes people just hate your favorite game, or favorite movie, or favorite book. And part of being an adult and not a child should be accepting these opinions, allowing people to complain if they want, and if you feel obligated to defend the honor of your favorite media, to at least couch your defense as how “you” feel, and how “you” played, rather that attacking the other person for their failure to enjoy it.

I just feel like too many people treat and attack on their preferred media as an attack on them. If you thought Ace Attorney was bad, I disagree. And it could be fore any reason, you can think that the murders are too contrived, or the world is unrealistic, you can think the characters like Mia and Pearls are creepy, or that Phoenix is an empty suit, you can think investigations are boring, and trials drone on and on, you can think it’s too simple or too convoluted or anything else. And I’d disagree, but I would hope I’d be willing to see that an attack on my favorite media is just you venting, and not an attack on me.

Nothing you say is an attack on me. “How was I supposed to know to press on that statement!” Fair criticism, I get people can get bored when most presses yield no new information. “I think Mia’s power is creepy,” is something I disagree with, but I can accept others think this way. “The murders are unrealistic and convoluted,” I like it because every case feels engaging and nothing is ever simple or straightforward, but you don’t have to like it yourself. Unless you go out of your way to say “only idiots/perverts/misanthropes enjoy this game,” I’m not going to hold your critiques against me.

So please give me the same treatment. If I dislike a game or movie or book, I’m not attacking you or the people who like it. I’m talking about my dislike because all people like talking about themselves. You just told me about your day, can’t I tell you about mine? So just let me say I don’t like it, say you liked it and that’s fine. But don’t attack me, because I’m not attacking you.

Stardew Valley: Story Spoilers

Last time I was writing about the gameplay of Stardew Valley. I consider it very much like a farming version of Factorio, but the gameplay isn’t the only thing that keeps me interested.

Stardew Valley is a very “cozy” game for lack of a better word. The art style is all cutesy, with animals making little hearts whenever you pet them. The characters are also written to be very sweet (or saccharine, depending on your taste). They each have their own life problems, but most of them will be unwaveringly kind and loyal if you give them even a modicum of respect. So most of your time will be spent walking through this colorful world with cute animals and plants, talking to people who will be your friends almost from the word go, and engaging in a story where you are single-handedly revitalizing a small town with your rustic farmstead.

So yeah, “cozy.”

Minor point, I also like some of the asymmetry in the spritework. Abigail here has her bow on the left side regardless of whether she’s facing towards or away from you. Might be a sprite error? But it feels intentional and cute.

But for all the fact that I like the town, the world, and the story, I feel like the game routinely fails to stick the landing. The game is full of plot points and story elements that seem like they should be important and meaningful, but then don’t go anywhere and no one cares about them. Warning: total spoilers ahead.

The overarching story of Stardew Valley is about rebuilding the town’s community center with the help of some forest spirits named “Juminos.” The community center was once the heart of town life, but has become run down and disused ever since Jojo Mart (aka Evil Walmart) moved in next door. You’d think these stories might be connected: was the moral decay from going to Evil Walmart instead of a general store causing the townsfolk to lose their passion? Was the Evil Walmart the cause of the town’s becoming run down? Did the Evil Walmart’s strip mining operation cause the Juminos to appear and try to fight back?

No not really. The Evil Walmart is just there. The Juminos are just there. The strip mining blocks off the local mines for purely gameplay-based reasons (not overwelming the player in their first week). But none of these plot points have any relation to each other. Don’t expect any sort of final boss fight or plot twist, everyone’s too nice for that.

Before you can even talk to the Juminos, you have to find the magical wizard who teaches you their language. Wait, a magical wizard in this rural farming game, is he going to be a mentor figure? An Obi-Wan who teaches you the ways of inner strength? No he just lives there. Zoning guidelines meant he couldn’t build his magic tower inside city limits so he lives out in the forest, don’t question it.

And the town really is run-down, for example the bus driver is unemployed because her bus is broken. Did the Evil Walmart cause the town’s decay, and are they lobbying the state to prevent repair so they can swoop in and buy land on the cheap? No, things are run down so the Juminos can have stuff to fix for you. And when the state’s Governor comes to visit the town no one talks about the decay and everyone has a good time with him. Even though you can fix things, and people are grateful, it feels so disconnected from everything (and people aren’t all that broken up that the town is broken) that it’s hard to feel proud for what you’ve done.

And again, what about that strip mining operation? The mines you can visit are infested with evil monsters, but are closed off at game start because of a rockslide caused by the Evil Walmart. Did the Walmart cause the mine to become evil? Are the Juminos nice spirits to fight back against these evil spirits? Does the town mind that there’s killer monsters lurking just outside town? No, there’s an adventurer’s guild that takes care of them, no one minds.

And what about clearing the mine itself? You get a quest to reach the bottom of the mind and find what’s down there, do you find anything meaningful that might add to your understanding of the world? Maybe the secret of the Juminos power? Or evidence of the Evil Walmart’s misdeeds? No, you find a key that unlocks a new mine you can explore. This new one’s infinite, so you’ll never reach the end.

These may all sound like disjointed, meaningless complaints, but I truly feel like this game has a “journey/destination” problem. In the moment I love every minute of it, but completion just feels like checking off boxes, I never feel a sense of relief or amazement for what I’ve done, and the story is part of that.

I feel the game could be so much deeper and more meaningful if these stories were connected and expounded upon. The town is pretty run-down with some folks either unemployed or working bad jobs because of it. People should comment on this, and there should be a sense of elation from the townsfolk when you fix things. Instead they mostly just do and say what they always did, and at most they have a new daily schedule based on what got fixed.

I feel like the Evil Walmart and the Juminos should be connected in some way too. Either the Walmart caused the decay of the town or the Juminos are fighting back against the Walmart or something. But aside from a single cutscene in the beginning and one at the end, the Walmart doesn’t even figure into the story at all. It occupies a large chunk of the narrative’s setup, but with almost no intrigue or payoff.

And I feel like the Wizard and the haunted mine are too unusual to not get some story justification. You could have skipped the Wizard and just let the main character learn the Jumino’s language on their own. Of if you must have him, then give him a purpose, even just the visual gag of the local Wizard walking to town to buy groceries would be nice. But instead he spends all day in his tower not doing or saying anything of note. And the mine is just a monster dungeon that people comment on without thinking about the implication of holy shit, man-eating monsters are living not 5 minutes outside our town! Good thing the game doesn’t let them leave the mine!

During my first run of the game, I kept thinking that there would be some mystery, some deeper connection that I’d find as I played the game further. But no, the entire story is basically revealed to you within the first 10 minutes of gameplay, and there’s nothing to say or build upon after that.

So I said there’s spoiler in this post, but really the spoiler is that there are no spoilers. You can get the entire story by just playing for 2 hours before refunding it on steam. And that’s a shame.

Stardew Valley: Farming for Factorio players

I’ve recently been playing (or rather replaying) Stardew Valley. It’s a game about starting a farm in a rural community, and even though it seems like the furthest thing in the world from Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program, for me it scratches that same itch for “systems” based games that I’ve written about before.

The crux of Stardew Valley is that your avatar is working a menial job at “Jojo Mart” (think evil Walmart), until they’re sent a note by their grandfather inviting them to take over the farm at Stardew Valley. The farm itself is pretty run down, but the townsfolk are eager to teach the young newcomer about turning it into a profitable endeavor.

Jojo Mart is muscling into this town as well, competing with the town’s only General Store, but that’s mostly a background element. The real story progression comes when your character happens upon the “Juminos,” little forest spirits who inhabit the abandoned community center. They ask for gifts of “the forest’s bounty” and in exchange they’ll help the town and your farm however they can.

The gifts for the Juminos come from all the products you can farm in the game: seasonal veggies, animal products, fish of the sea. And they give you small rewards for completing a “bundle” of related gifts (like giving them all the Fall Veggies, or all the Summer Fish), and then a big reward when you complete all the “bundles” of a certain theme (like completing all the Veggies bundles, or all the Fish bundles). This system rewards you for learning how to run your farm well to produce all the needed items, and gives you both near and long-term goals to work towards.

Completing these goals also requires improving the farm by constructing barns, coops, and the like using stone/wood/etc. So you have to balance not only farming, but also gathering the materials and money necessary to make long-term investments.

It’s really fun, but also quite hectic. And I didn’t even mention that there’s a cave full of monsters you need to go into to mine stone, copper, and iron, plus every character in the game can be given gifts to become friends with them, and they’ll give you not only special bonuses but also cute cutscenes in return.

In Stardew Valley, a typical day for me starts the night before as I sit in my in-game room planning what I need to do next. I want to complete the “Animal Products” bundle for the Juminos, but that requires getting sheep (for their wool), which requires constructing a barn, which requires getting stone, which requires going to the mine. So I resolve to go to the mine tomorrow to get stone.

When I wake up though, I first have to water/harvest my crops and tend to my chickens, a somewhat tedious bit of micromanagement which becomes easier as you improve your farm. I try to do this as quickly as possible, but although my character wakes at 6am, it’s already 10am before I’ve finished this work. I harvested 8 pumpkins so I resolve to first buy 8 more packets of pumpkin seeds to plant in the furrows, no use leaving those empty when they could be growing things!

Stardew Valley doesn’t believe in crop rotation any more than Amy here

While heading to the General Store I make sure to pick any flowers or wild produce on my way. These help my “foraging” skill and can sell for a pretty penny as well. I take note of the calendar outside the store and notice that it’s a character’s birthday, maybe they’ll like the flowers I picked? I find them in town and give them my gift because gifts give extra friendship points on a character’s birthday. Then I hustle back to the store to sell my pumpkins and buy more seeds.

It’s already afternoon by the time I’ve planted and watered the new seeds, and I’m finally ready to hike to the mines. I can only carry 24 items at a time, and since I want to bring back as much stuff as possible I put away everything in my inventory except a pickaxe and a sword (for protection).

Finally by 2pm I can start battling monsters and mining for stone, copper and iron. But I need to get back home by midnight if I want to have a good night’s sleep and have enough energy for the next day. Energy is an important resource in the game, and just about every action you take will cost some amount of it. So being mindful of the time, I leave the mine at 10pm with stone in tow.

I get back home around 11:30, put my well-gotten gains into storage bins and start planning my next day before bed. I finally have the stone I need for that barn (so I can get sheep, so I can get wool, so I can finish the Juminos bundle) but I still need wood, so tomorrow I’ll have to go into the woods and chop trees. Regardless, I’m that much closer to my in-game goals.

It should be easy to see that this kind of gameplay loop can be *really* addictive. At any one time there’s a dozen things you could be working on (getting resources, expanding your farm, buying and selling, socializing with characters) and a number of goals you’re working towards simultaneously. It can be somewhat hectic and stressful if you don’t know where to look for guidance, and unfortunately I think the online wiki is mandatory to have a good time, because there’s too much information that’s just kinda hidden away.

I only wish there were a better in-game way to find things out. I wish that if the Juminos asked you for a certain type of fish for example, they’d also tell you specifically when and under what conditions that fish can be caught. Because sometimes there’s a fish that can only be caught in Spring/Summer when it’s raining, but you spent your rainy days doing other things. Sure you might have fished really often, but if you weren’t fishing at the right time on the right days, you had no chance to catch this specific fish.

And once Fall rolls around and you finally look up how to catch the fish, you realize that you’ll have to play another half-year in-game before you can even get a chance to try.

I also wish that characters could tell you where other characters are. Sometimes you want to give someone a birthday present, or they send you a quest asking for some item. But I can’t memorize every townie’s schedule, so unless I want to waste a day running all over town (and the woods! lots of folks hang out in their!), I need to go to the wiki again. I think I should be able to ask their parent for some general information, “Oh, we told Sebastian he can’t smoke in the house so he goes to the lake instead.” Some general ideas about their schedule would be nice to have in-game.

Anyway that’s Stardew Valley. I actually have a LOT more to talk about it, maybe 2 or 3 more posts. But for now I’ll say: it’s probably in my top 10 games of all time, so if you were into Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program, give it a chance. I know building a community farm seems like the complete opposite of Factorio’s “coal mines and industry” vibe, but they really are quite similar in my opinion.