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I think this should be done in an indirect way. For example in DWU the private sector is not directly controllable by the player but I found many ways to indirectly influence and direct it and I liked that a lot. In other words present the player with problems they cannot directly control simply by fiat... making a payment or pushing a button... but provide the player with ways & means to indirectly affect those issues. In other words a challenge that requires thinking & strategy rather than merely some direct action.
Phoenix seems to be implying, is a bloated economy (among other things) going to make it not the solution it needs to be? To which he says a giant economy is not inherently a problem. It appears we're already solidly slated for the Shakturi, so discussing what of the above answers (or potentially new ones) to Rock Paper Shotgun's dilemma seems moot.
I somewhat disagree about the economy not necessarily being a problem. Abundant cashflow is desirable, yes, but excessive cashflow is not. More importantly, as the game currently is, it will almost certainly be a problem to make the Shakturi a threat without blatantly throwing endless ships into the galaxy. A trio of rich colonies provides plenty of income to field a few large fleets and numerous smaller ones. Just 10 rich colonies are enough to fuel a mighty, galaxy-conquering one.
That's too much. My first empire, in a 700-star galaxy, had 203 colonies- 65% of the galaxy total at 2937, two of which earned more than 1,000,000 in income, had 1541 warships, including 9 planet destroyers, and could afford to bolster that armada to 7569 similar ships. None of the colonies were fully terraformed, and the empire (being my first and turned over to full automation for some time) was not at all optimized otherwise. Tons of excessive buildings, overpriced planetary defense batteries (much earlier version), overpriced inefficient designs, etc.
And that empire's economy was rapidly growing, under full automation. By 2939, it had 231 colonies. I'm sure a better empire could be fielding over 30,000 (not a typo, thirty thousand) warships superior to the ones used in this empire by 2900. Do we need to discuss why that might be too much? The automation is mopping up the other empires with less than 2,000 ships.
If you want to look at that empire yourself, this save started in the non-beta in April '22, so it might be buggy (though I had no trouble loading and running it):
https://file.io/2FPh6ebzA3qA
In other games with an exponentially growing economy- namely, an industry-focused one like Factorio or Satisfactory, these spikes in capability are handled by requiring a new tier of machinery, materials, and manufactured components to be developed and grown to progress and ultimately win. The idea is, all the iron and all the cash in the world doesn't help much in producing fission reactors- only a bit more than enough does. This might be something that might be incorporated into 4x game's endgame.
Hexodorium, Kaasian, Osalia and Dyrillum aren't even close to what I'm talking about. They're just rare materials.
In the case of handling an extra-galactic threat like the Shakturi, a weapon system capable of damaging hyper-advanced shields and/or armor, something of such scarcity that only a joint operation between empires or a vastly dominating one could hope to amass enough to develop sufficient ships to threaten the hostiles. All other ships are offensively nearly useless but can serve as cannon fodder, perhaps able to take on 1 Shakturi ship (presumably a Type-2 Kardashev ship) to 100+ DW2 galaxy ships (Kardashev scale Type-1, except the Planet Destroyer and possibly the Black Hole Projectors, both super-techs not normally achievable without artifacts). This would make those potentially tens of thousands of ships useful for slowing down the invaders- not just useful, but essential- but they couldn't overcome them even if the entire economic might of the galaxy pumped out as many ships as possible.
Conventional ships don't become merely cannon fodder, as hostile 'conventional' ships appear too, either in the form of traitors (the Boskara, Gizureans, etc), or Shakturi-produced facilities building them.
This extraordinarily difficult-to-produce system could be acquired in a variety of ways; a limited amount provided by a research project, produced by a special facility that is similarly researched that can provide a trickle, or there might only be one source in the galaxy that can be revealed via an event triggered research. The empire might only need 30 or so of these ships to win if they're carefully used and given plenty of cannon fodder. Or they might need 300 if they're reckless, which might see much or most of the galaxy brought under the heel of the invaders, which can then wage large-scale battle in a galactic war of attrition.
These special weapons otherwise don't provide extraordinary firepower against conventional ships.
Why go through the trouble? This makes a massively wealthy empire still more likely to succeed against this truly terrifying extra-galactic threat, but it also makes a tall-building Quameno capable of overcoming the threat, letting the rest of the galaxy serve as cannon fodder. And, theoretically, an absurdly powerful militant empire might be able to overcome the threat with a gratuitous casualty count... somewhat effectively with squadrons of planet destroyers shielded by hundreds of lesser ships.
In any case, the economic issue does need to be touched on to make a Shakturi invasion well-balanced, and I think simply triggering the Shakturi before an empire hits a huge economic status isn't the right idea.
I'd like to note that I dislike how other 4x games handle endgame events. Endless Legend was satisfying once per race because of the stories (that's better than all the others IMO), Stellaris was just throw more ships with the correct weapons and defenses at it (conventional weapons/defenses), Gladius just spawned in big blobs of enemies randomly on the map (more annoying than challenging, given the quality of the AI), the Realm Divide was near-insurmountable for a first time casual player and a roadbump for those who planned for it, and saving the world via wonders a-la Civilization felt like a bypass to playing the game in full to win.
Oh... I liked the legendary pirates in DW:U a lot. An ever-present overwhelming force that wrecks, but never defeats you, a sort of nemesis or rival that you can eventually have the satisfaction of defeating. In a way, they kind of count as an endgame objective.
How do you even keep the empire together without especially well off planets getting uppity and declaring independence because they are tired of paying all those federal taxes. Real politics is always a game of balancing the interests of your domestic factions, even the bloodiest "dictator" won't stay for long if he doesn't have a majority of the domestic interest groups behind him.
Or, how do you prevent mass stupidity like racial strife where all the race X people band together against race Y. And it not getting worse over time, every additional race currently being a straight net positive.
One internal power dynamic I always liked a lot was the situation in CK2 (Pdx did a lot of work on the genre over the years) where the empire often turns into a bag of fleas situation. You have a quite limited personal domain of directly ruled baronies to work with, everything else has to be signed off into the care of dukes. However these dukes often have nothing better to do than taking aim at the job as king, or declaring war among themselves or with external powers.
Then there are external politics. As a bare minimum, there has to be an idea of balance of power in the galaxy where empires actively band together when the player gets too big for their liking. There is the "we are envious of your power" diplomatic modifier but I feel like that's less than the bare minimum needed. When this kicks in you are already towering above your neighbours.
My solution to this would be enforcing a galactic world war situation building up steadily the more powerful you get. So you get a decisive midgame crisis automatically well timed and adjusted to the real power levels in the galaxy. Shakturi as the all-conquering super villains would eventually use this situation to join the fray against the weakened powers, and the player now really needs to be a galactic emperor if civilisation is to prevail...
I agree, this is one of the biggest flaw of most strategy games and 4x games in general, they simply do not offer a proper way of displaying cultural and ideological division within groups of individual thinking beings, these things will always persist in some form. Planets in DW2 simply are too obedient and have no self interest, in a "real" scenario they would, even worlds themselves would not be completely unified in culture or ideologies.
The only way to make a game consistently interesting throughout hundreds of years is to break the robotic behaviour of societies and the exponential snowballing of economies. Even research should not be linear in effect, but the more labs you have the less overall RP they should produce.
There need to be a constant threat of both external and internal strife as well as constant struggle of resources. Unless these things exists the overall challenges is always removed and the decision making become more of a routine and not interesting.
This is why I NEVER are able to finish these types of games to the finish line and usually stop playing sometimes about mid to late mid game. The first third of the game is always the most interesting part, the second third is sometimes interesting and the last part is boring. Even an end game crisis usually don't fix end game boredom in my opinion, that is "fixing" the problem in the wrong way. I don't say the crisis mechanic in and if itself can't be fun, but it does not fundamentally fix the actual issue.
Actually... yes. Is this reasonably achievable for DW2, though?
To be honest... the political part of the game would not have to be very complicated so it could be possible for DW2 at some point. It would need an expanded diplomacy system and a system with regional powers or system where there are more the one level of integration of planets and smaller empires into a larger one. Such as Monarchies are made up of many small more or less independent empires, dictatorship might have very varied loyalties of planets, fleets and income flows. Democracies/Republics have a problem of maintaining really large empires but easy to forge large federal entities of smaller empires. Change in governments should be more common as well are revolts and overall stability issues.
More issues with integrating multi species empires in addition to governments and ideologies.
The game victory system would likely have to be overhauled as well if large empires tended to break apparat or become impotent at some point.
- Political groups would form in your empire. (based on government and race). Each political groups would have different effects.
- On each planet; support could be gained toward these groups. (based on race and happiness, scaled by population).
- You could send diplomat to deal with these groups.
Crusader King type mechanics would not work well in this type of game. This game is not centred around political conflicts between individual characters.
A system that emulate political strife and ideological differences would have to be allot more abstracted in a game of this scope.
It would seem watching small decisions pile and compile over time creating different results is a puzzle of its own. The best part of a great solution to that puzzle is the expected result that comes ~sooner~!
At least for me. I mean fundamentally I reduce terms where I can. Its just nature and it feels good!
I think there is a lot of merit in the basic argument that the game is more fun at early stages when you are poor. But I think what really matters is the impactfulness of decisions. Early on it really matters where you move your ships, but later on you can lose an entire fleet and not care. Early game what you choose to build really matters but later you just spam build everything you possibly can because why not.
Distant Worlds is cool though because it's the only 4x/strategy game that really tries to solve this problem by going all the way with automation. With good automation then you can still be making a small number of extremely impactful decisions at a high galactic empire level just as much as a single planet despot level. DW2 still has a way to go to match the feel of DW:U's automation i think although it has also surpassed it in some ways already. They need to fix some things like the AI spamming you with noob trap requests to build useless stuff. Although that is not a new problem.
So anyway DW2 is the one 4x game I'll keep watching because it actually has the key to solving this problem of late-game entropy. Letting you feel like a boss when you control 100 star systems instead of still making you go fix the plumbing on each one of your sewage plants like other games.
They need to fix the in-game UI though because not being able to drag the map with the middle mouse button is annoying as hell. Literally every other grand strategy game lets you drag map with the middle mouse button but for some reason that is the only key which isn't configurable.
Re. economy and scaling, instead of the current habitability setting of a blanket -% to all planet quality, I would want it skewed 95%/5% to extremes. An extremely low number of colonizable planets at all. But also a few extremely high quality ones, rare paradise worlds that the Shakturi missed the first time, scattered through the galaxy.
The AI mods and several other mods for DW-U made the Pirates all the more challenging to deal with. Which did allow many of my games in DW-U to reach the mid-late to late stages.
I feel the problem of the 'lack of challenge' in Distant Worlds 2 should be partially dealt with once the Pirates expansion gets released.
As for internal power dynamics which people have mentioned, I feel one of the easier ways to do this would be to assign some sort of an ideology to species based on the government they were part of. Which species themselves are very slow and resistant to change. A concept that can be separate from 'Assimilation' .
Which also means inter species conflicts. A race of Dhayuts should find it nearly impossible to stay on the same planets with humans. Which forces the player has to assign worlds to certain species, especially if the empire is a multi species empire. Now when you have a species opposite to what you initially chose solely inhabiting a planet or a group of planets, You can then add random events, happiness modifier and other effects to either force a rebellion or an entire secession with a group of planets of the same species.
The mid-late to late game requires threats and systems that are comparatively less focused on War and more on maintaining the Empire in one piece. The beginning of the game is a challenge, the mid-late to late game requires an entirely new challenge. Which means new population, and racial mechanics which needs to be added.
- I don't think it is either mine nor Erik's thesis that the best part is exploration and the game should become boring and be restarted.
- Infinite cash is not the reason for this other issue you bring up: which is that 4X tend to be boring after a certain stage of game play.
Maybe I can tease these out a little...
The reason that 4X genre in general has stagnated is because the game itself would have to evolve to a higher level of abstraction as you progressed in it - from first deciding what individual units should do -- investigate this unknown region - mine this resource - that sort of small-scale individual unit decision making -- to become something... larger.
I have yet to see a 4X manage to even try to present a higher abstraction - setting a group of cities / worlds / whatever into a new grouping entity that works a single unit in a higher level of abstraction and play.
Being able to assign sub-AIs to manage the individual day-to-day decisions at the old level of play - the early game level of play - instructing ships or fleets or mining units or whatever to do the right thing to achieve the goals you give that new amalgamation of cities / worlds / whatever as a higher-level command abstraction.
Because the gameplay never evolves beyond the original UI / original level of abstraction - by definition - if you grow your empire / civilization - you hit a point where managing all of that using the same UI / same level of abstraction - BECOMES A CHORE. It IS DRUDGERY. It sucks, and that is what leads to boredom, frustration, and starting a new game.
Excessive money has nothing to do with this.
It's a failure of the game itself to evolve as a game over time. No game does this. Arguably, we need real Ai at the level of games to implement anything remotely this cool in a functional way.