Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcmoor | Hacker News Reader

It also sucks that all the Paradox competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.

Yep and paradox 4x games honestly take a brute force approach by adding too many limits of various kinds to ensure you don’t break the game.

Eg. fleet cap, star base cap, empire size, new systems requires spending influence that ticks over slowly, leader caps, etc.

Yes there’s ways you can increase things like influence 25% faster but that means you’re only 25% larger in size (and you’ll then be hit by the empire cap). In general I just don’t think paradox makes great 4x games compared to what I’ve played in the past. There must be a smarter way to have a fun 4x without resorting to a ton of different types of caps to stop you getting too far ahead. I will definitely +1 that the genre needs a shakeup.

Crusader Kings and Stellaris always felt more like… story-generation games than strategy games, to me. Sorta like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld at a different scale.

Yep, which makes them so amazing after Civ decided to abandon that approach and heavily push into trying to be a static boardgame.

How could Civ abandon that? Civ never was a story-generation game (arguably, VII is a very slight move toward that, but Civ I was pretty much Empire with a tech tree, more varied terrain, a more detailed (terrain-based) production system, and founding/growing cities replacing conquering independents.

I’m not sure I disagree. Civ certainly doesn’t have a lot of “flavor” events or characters. The standards of the era were pretty low for this kind of stuff though, so there was a little bit of a feeling of building a story, for me at least.

As a sidenote, somehow the setting, leaders, and tech blurbs in Alpha Centauri managed to construct a much better facade of a story generation game, IMO. Despite being very similar mechanically. The system allowed a lot more customization… even if it was just a bunch of little +1 bonuses here and there, it made it feel like “your” faction.

Anyway, it’s all a facade. Other than dwarf fortress. I’m sure those dwarfs will achieve sentience soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com