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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

As an avid player of both video games and board games, I'll say one thing: video games have really fallen afoul of the diminishing marginal utility of interesting decisions. A 2-hour game of Agricola, to me, has far more interesting decisions packed into it than 20 hours of Civilization V, despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.

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I can explain some of the reasons behind this in video games. Design is hard and in some cases impossible because you want the game to be everything to everyone regardless of their play style or level of competence. This is why you get so much optional content and every decision you make has trivial or superficial consequences. Imagine mario kart rubberband mechanic outside of racing games. If done well it gives you the feeling of agency and achievement whatever you do, if done poorly you feel like the game plays itself. I remember when my innocence was shattered when I was given the task to write code that would subtly "fix" user inputs to do the "correct" thing. Makes my laugh today but back then it felt wrong for that reason.

> I remember when my innocence was shattered when I was given the task to write code that would subtly "fix" user inputs to do the "correct" thing.

I had the same feeling when playing one of the newfangled Prince of Persia games a few years ago: the 3d environment gives you the impression that you'd be much freer. But there are not-so subtle rails that you move along when doing acrobatics.

The original 2d game had simple understandable mechanics, so you knew exactly what rails you were moving on. After a while you just ignored them and though `inside the box'.

The latter style helps much more with suspension of disbelieve.

>despite having orders of magnitude fewer options per turn and turns per game.

You say despite, but I think that's half the reason why the decisions are more interesting.

My wording was a bit ambiguous. You interpreted it to mean the decisions themselves are more interesting in Agricola. That is definitely true, but I also meant that there are more of them despite a much shorter play time and far fewer opportunities for them. One is a question of overall yield while the other is a question of efficiency; I believe Agricola wins on both counts.

I agree, but only because Civilization V is a train-wreck. Civilization IV is by far the superior video game. Even then, I would much rather play a game of Agricola with some friends than Civ.

Out of curiosity are you referring to vanilla Civ 5 or with Brave New World?

I only played with BNW expansion and from what I have heard it improve the game immensely.

I've played both and while the expansions do make the game better it's still nowhere close to as good as Agricola in the interesting decisions department. There's still way too many trivial things for you to manage and way too few situations where you have to stop and think for several minutes before proceeding.

That's why I still like the original Master of Orion: they really paired down the micro-management there.

The boardgame Eclipse compares somewhat. (Though Eclipse really wants to be a computer game.)

MOO2 is amazing BUT that game will never be remade. I loved the unbalanced Civs. We see this in Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis where the challenge level is based on who you start with. Most people HATE that and demand balanced games with equal opportunity to win with any civ. This is why all the other masters of orion games and clones have failed. The games are just not that interesting with a more complicated but still equally easy victories.

Can someone please port Masters of Orion 2 with a tweaked interface for tablets?!?!?!?

Free Orion (http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Main_Page) is a remake of (mostly) MoO2.

> This is why all the other masters of orion games and clones have failed.

You are aware that I was praising MoO for simplicity and railing against MoO2 as being too complicated already?

MoO2 was too complicated with everything but the kitchen sink. Moo kept it simpler. (The civilizations are just as unbalanced in MoO as in MoO 2.)

> The games are just not that interesting with a more complicated but still equally easy victories.

Up the difficulty lever they give you at the beginning of most games.

I don't think it's about number of choices, but how impactful and interesting those choices are.

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