Tag Archives: review

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.

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*.

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.