RPS Article: The 4X Genre Has Grown Stagnant, Here’s How To Fix It

[Mezmorki]

RPS Article: The 4X Genre Has Grown Stagnant, Here’s How To Fix It

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/07/how-to-fix-the-4x/

Written by Rob Zacny (Three Moves Ahead)

Interesting article .... I'll follow up with some thoughts in a moment ....

[Mezmorki]

Going back to the RPS article and Zacny's criticism for a moment . . .

This discussion about combat is just one aspect where I feel 4X games miss opportunities for deeper gameplay, while still remaining true to their 4X self (as opposed to wishing them to be more like grand strategy or whatever). So, on further reflection I don't think Zacny is saying he wants straight 4X games to be more like grand strategy ... I think he's saying he just wants more interesting and evolving 4X games in the ways that we've been talking. The failing of his article lies in not providing enough examples of where 4X games have demonstrated this evolving gameplay dynamic ... and there certainly are plenty of examples (as we've been discussing relative to combat to draw on). But I don't think his lack of examples invalidate the desire to see more.

Others did this earlier in the thread, so here's my laundry list of "innovations" I'd like to see within the context of a 4X game to make the gameplay more interesting (at least to me).

(1) More emphasis (or a return to emphasis?) on spatial positioning (e.g. geography) that matters more to gameplay and with advancement changing your relationship to the geography in strategically advantageous ways.

"Dust" in Armada 2526 provides heavy / light terrain, and technologies allow you to avoid movement penalties, allowing you to get the drop on other empires at the strategic scale. Likewise, there are THREE levels of wormhole networks in the game, again unlocked through technologies, that create new avenues of movement as you progress.

I think space 4X games really could use more fantastical ideas / creative license to create interesting and changing topographies over which to strategize.

(2) Other avenues for meaningful interaction with competing empires beyond military conflict.

I've yet to see a 4X game where a player can use some other form of leverage (political, economic, cultural) to genuinely protect themselves or even ATTACK another empire that is stronger than them militarily. If I'm going for a research or economic win, I had better turtle up (down?) big time to protect myself from physical threats while I click end turn till I win.

I'd love to see a game where I could use economic leverage to affect global/galactic markets such that I could sanction + bankrupt an opposing empire, forcing them to decommission their fleet before it could attack me. Or to use to political / cultural influence to win the hearts and minds of their population (sending them tons of space cookies or whatever), causing mass revolt should the opposing empire try to invade me. Or even having a deeper and more interesting espionage/intelligence system that allows for all sorts of covert machinations that could genuinely position you to win and keep you protected.

I don't think these things are only in the domain of Grand Strategy, they are frequently core mechanics within 4X games ... they just aren't designed in a way thet they have a serious impact on the gameplay outcomes in most cases.

(3) Escalating / evolving capacity as the ruler.

Something boardgames do well, out of necessity in most cases, is to limit the number of actions you can take in your turn. This forces you to prioritize your strategic decisions because you can't do it all. I'd love to see a 4X game where your position as the ruler is similarly restricted, forcing you to change and grow your capacities and make decisions about where and how you exert control. For example, as the game scales, when you have a bunch of colonies it begins to consume too many of a limited pool of actions to manage the build queues on each one ... so you have to make a choice about where/how you instate vassals to manage them for you.

(4) Growing / evolving information war

I think a lot of 4X games are too free with what information about other players/empires they make available, and in turn undermine the ability to have the gameplay evolve later on by opening up more access to this (and more) information. Information is power after all - but this rarely has a bearing in 4X gameplay.

I think more interesting stealth + detection systems can play into this, along with spies (and counter-intelligence) giving vision on your opponents assets, trade networks, etc. Having an evolving information war would radically shape the nature of interaction and conflict with your opponents. Just like how scouting in an RTS game is key to victory, too few 4X games embrace this opportunity.

Anyway ... those are a few of the ideas ...

[Biz]

引用自 hr.oskar：

Revolutionary changes in warfare as exemplified by history are a far cry from the unnecessary details of a simulation. I could just as well have used examples from games, where a rule change or new feature or just plain innovation by players could also bring a major paradigm change.

i'm arguing against criticism of 4X games with no actual basis to the argument other than "history had X. therefore, this game should have X". i'm not saying that you specifically said certain games were broken, but it's the general tone of the article this thread is about

it's fine to enjoy games with revolutionary changes in warfare. a lot of 4X games have those
but to call a game flawed because it does not include this is not a real criticism of anything relevant to strategy games - it's only valid criticism when applied to the simulation genre

引用自 rogue_LOVE：

For the sake of clarity, who are you responding to? I think the combat conversation is on the merit of 4X games like Alpha Centauri that do a good job of making combat feel meaningfully different between game eras vs. those that don't.

Actually, to add to the combat conversation, a few of my favorite fantasy-themed games do a great job of just that.

...

Both games have great combat at any era, but they're also 4X games that do a good job of incentivizing you to shift the way you play the game in a way that's organic, compelling, and a shit-load of fun.

i'm responding to one of the objections in the RPS article and some of the posts which imply that a game is inherently inferior if it uses a similar combat system (or technology system, or improvement system) from start to finish

the examples you brought up are fine, but they have a cost

for a lot of players, a strategy game is a battle of wits that only begins after everyone has learned the rules. if a game has so many units and different rulesets for different eras, then almost nobody actually has time to even get to the level of understanding where they can start playing it like a real strategy game instead of a casual empire simulator

i'm not saying everyone has to play games that way, but there is always a cost & benefit to adding complexity.
you can't just add a bunch of variety and genuinely interesting stuff without losing something else.

strategy is ultimately about planning, and the more rules there are in a game the harder it is to make plans and optimize things and visualize strategies.

civilization & clones are more accessible strategy game specifically because a tank and a horseman are the same thing and specifically because "lasers level 2" and "lasers level 5" provide similar benefits. design decisions like that let us start playing the strategy game for real after a few days instead of after a few weeks.

i can make a fully-informed decision on turn 5 because I can predict what will happen at turn 150. that simply isn't possible in games with more rules and more complexity.

and can I even call something a strategy game if I'm not making fully-informed decisions?

if I examine the biggest problems with 4X games, they just don't get solved by making games more complex. the developers out there simply aren't capable of turning those types of ambitious designs into good strategy games. their AI programming is not good enough. their balancing of different strategies & factions is not good enough. their ability to keep the game close & interesting instead of tedious in the last half of a game is not good enough. their ability to ramp players up to the level where they are making fully-informed decisions is not good enough.

[Mezmorki]

@Biz

I totally agree with you, especially this part:

for a lot of players, a strategy game is a battle of wits that only begins after everyone has learned the rules. if a game has so many units and different rulesets for different eras, then almost nobody actually has time to even get to the level of understanding where they can start playing it like a real strategy game instead of a casual empire simulator

And so I agree completely that for players (AI and/or human) to really engage in competitive play they need to be able to move past the mechanics and get to the out-witting.

There are different sorts of things that feed into complexity however, and different combination of things might yield similar overall levels of complexity but with different implications for strategic depth.

My complaint is that an awful lot of the gameplay in 4X games is spent optimizing for your chosen strategic decisions. And it's here where the the gameplay gets overly focused on the math (IMHO) and maximizing outputs, making the whole thing feel like a big giant math and logistics puzzle to solve rather than a battle of wits.

So I'd rather see a 4X game where all the various systems are simplified (less math and time spent optimizing), but that all the various systems have more interesting interactions and trade-off decisions that need to be made as you balance your emphasis across them. Hence, the focus of the game isn't about how to maximize production speeds of Battlecruisers level 3, but instead deciding whether I use my fleets in a more abstracted sense to pressure my opponent or engage in industrial espionage to undermine their fleet maintenance capacity. Or something like that. Few 4X games prompt those sorts of decisions.

[Crunchy]

This is where RTS 4x makes a difference. or can. Because in an rts the game has to have mechanics where things can operate autonomously. Then its just a matter of tapping into that automation to allow some player control over it.
Its not that TBS cant do this its just that its far easier to not code that and just let the player do it.

look at the close combat series. amazing detail. simply amazing. easy to control.

I think that RTS just naturally lends itself to incredible complexity made simple to use.

[w@ke_]

Also @Biz,

Actually, I pretty much completely agree with that whole post. Like I've said before, I've put in countless hours in games like Civ II-V and MoO II, which are poster children of the beauty-in-simplicity model. There's definitely a tension and tradeoff between strategic/tactical depth, which is lived out every time a prospective player turns away from Dominions 4 because it's too damn complicated and buys Civ V instead. Not only that, but the simpler systems have their own slew of inherent advantages even for someone like me who loves high depth and complexity (again, hence the playtimes). Fortunately, the continued success of Dom 4 and other Illwinter titles is testament to the fact that there's room for their model to coexist peacefully (and, IMO, even symbiotically) alongside the simplicity and broader appeal of your MoO IIs and Civilizations.

[hr.oskar]

@Biz:

I'm no simulationist so I can understand your aversion to "in reality it's like this so in the game it should be too" arguments. It's a very poor way to design a game. My historical examples weren't intended to be a simulationist argument, they were simply the first that came to my mind when thinking of this sort of "strategic evolution".

And yes that sort of design has a cost in terms of complexity. It's a design that would always appeal more to me however. Analyzing and learning the rules and the meta-game is half the fun of strategy for me, the other half being the actual gameplay (the "outwitting"). I used to love playing Magic: the Gathering for example (the collectible card game), precisely because constant evolution and re-analysis of the playing field was inherent in it; designing and fine-tuning a deck was a game in itself and half the fun for me, even though playing out matches was very entertaining too.

So I guess I can agree with your point that not having any evolution isn't necessarily bad design. It's just different design. Not my kind of design, while some players may prefer it.

[w@ke_]

Maybe I was wrong before: it's really Magic: The Gathering that's the Godwin's Law of 4X discussions. ;)

[Troy]

引用自 hr.oskar：

@Biz:

I'm no simulationist so I can understand your aversion to "in reality it's like this so in the game it should be too" arguments. It's a very poor way to design a game. My historical examples weren't intended to be a simulationist argument, they were simply the first that came to my mind when thinking of this sort of "strategic evolution".

And yes that sort of design has a cost in terms of complexity. It's a design that would always appeal more to me however. Analyzing and learning the rules and the meta-game is half the fun of strategy for me, the other half being the actual gameplay (the "outwitting"). I used to love playing Magic: the Gathering for example (the collectible card game), precisely because constant evolution and re-analysis of the playing field was inherent in it; designing and fine-tuning a deck was a game in itself and half the fun for me, even though playing out matches was very entertaining too.

I wonder if that's why so many newer games are experimenting with card-based mechanics.

[Crunchy]

引用自 Troy_Costisick：

I wonder if that's why so many newer games are experimenting with card-based mechanics.

Could be but the original magic the gathering game was a hell of a lot of fun. There is a mechanic there that certainly can work. There is something to the way that cards work that makes it good for a lot aspects of gameplay. Its visually wrong or its hard to grasp conceptually but i think it could work very well in many areas of 4x.

[Gregorovitch]

引用自 hr.oskar：

So, some incremental development (better stats) is fine in my opinion. But ambitious 4X games would do well to design combat that goes through occasional revolutions due to groundbreaking new unit abilities that shake things up. I guess it may be hard to have the AI stay on top of those things... but then the AI tends to be stupid as a cow in combat anyway, no matter what.

Surely one problem with that might be that whoever gets the revolutionary new units first simply blows away any opposition. Take the machine gun vs. cavalry example. Realistically the machine guns will destroy the cavalry (and indeed rifle infantry) almost totally with no losses to speak of. Pretty much game over and it puts tech even more in the accendancy than it typically already is now in 4X games.

[Marfig]

引用自 Mezmorki：

@Biz

I totally agree with you, especially this part:

for a lot of players, a strategy game is a battle of wits that only begins after everyone has learned the rules. if a game has so many units and different rulesets for different eras, then almost nobody actually has time to even get to the level of understanding where they can start playing it like a real strategy game instead of a casual empire simulator

And so I agree completely that for players (AI and/or human) to really engage in competitive play they need to be able to move past the mechanics and get to the out-witting.

There are different sorts of things that feed into complexity however, and different combination of things might yield similar overall levels of complexity but with different implications for strategic depth.

My complaint is that an awful lot of the gameplay in 4X games is spent optimizing for your chosen strategic decisions. And it's here where the the gameplay gets overly focused on the math (IMHO) and maximizing outputs, making the whole thing feel like a big giant math and logistics puzzle to solve rather than a battle of wits.

So I'd rather see a 4X game where all the various systems are simplified (less math and time spent optimizing), but that all the various systems have more interesting interactions and trade-off decisions that need to be made as you balance your emphasis across them. Hence, the focus of the game isn't about how to maximize production speeds of Battlecruisers level 3, but instead deciding whether I use my fleets in a more abstracted sense to pressure my opponent or engage in industrial espionage to undermine their fleet maintenance capacity. Or something like that. Few 4X games prompt those sorts of decisions.

Out-witting an oponent plays a central role during the combat phase. But without true turn-based tactical combat we lose all the opportunities that unit placement and maneuvering offer. Realtime combat (pausable or not) or semi-automatic combat (ala Paradox) rob you of any possibility to bring in this aspect of gaming to combat. It is one of the reasons I feel so frustrated by 4x games offering RT combat. Combat becomes no longer a game of chess.

However, I agree there is a problem in making turn based combat a viable tactical game in 4x. Players usually want to enter conflict from a position of superiority. Both the Research and Production mechanics in 4x ensure that the game will become unballanced during the middle and late games, which is when most combat takes place.

This is a hard problem to solve. But there are some ways to mitigate the problem that can be used all together or just a few:

1. Player knowledge of his adversaries before entering combat cannot be quantitative, just qualitative. Instead of seeing a 10 unit stack he sees a "moderately sized stack". And this same terminology should be adapted to many other non-combat aspects of the game.

2. Players don't need to see the full game map. Information about a faction true power is hidden away, although game charts can show relative values, or line graps with considerable margins of error.

3. Information about alliances can be made public or private.

4. Information about a player advancement in terms of structures in his cities/planets must be subject to certain mechanics that allow players to hide certain structures. Spying should play a more central role to gather knowledge. In particular, once I become an enemy to player A, we cease to be able to see any city development on each other territories.

4. A 4x game can exist without any type of Research implemented. But army composition should be made richer, with several different types of equipment and ablities, that can then be designed as we design ships in space games. Also fundamental becomes the need to apply other mechanics to combat, like troop experience, etc...

5. Can't think of anything else for the moment. Just making this up as I go...

[screamingpalm]

引用自 Marfig：

Out-witting an oponent plays a central role during the combat phase. But without true turn-based tactical combat we lose all the opportunities that unit placement and maneuvering offer. Realtime combat (pausable or not) or semi-automatic combat (ala Paradox) rob you of any possibility to bring in this aspect of gaming to combat. It is one of the reasons I feel so frustrated by 4x games offering RT combat. Combat becomes no longer a game of chess.

Could not disagree more. I'm not averse to TBC per se, but there is no 4X game that I am aware of that has deeper combat then Dominions 4. It is simulated RTC where you do not directly control your units. Rather you script orders to your commanders and units and need to constatly pay attention to battles and change tactics or fine tune orders depending on what is going on. Positioning and maneuvering are extremely important in timing certain scripted attacks and orders. The way the mechanics all work together in that game is a thing of beauty.

[Marfig]

引用自 screamingpalm：

Could not disagree more. I'm not averse to TBC per se, but there is no 4X game that I am aware of that has deeper combat then Dominions 4.

Unfortunately, games like the Dominions series are a drop in the ocean and do not reflect the general state of RTC.

[hr.oskar]

引用自 Gregorovitch：

Surely one problem with that might be that whoever gets the revolutionary new units first simply blows away any opposition. Take the machine gun vs. cavalry example. Realistically the machine guns will destroy the cavalry (and indeed rifle infantry) almost totally with no losses to speak of. Pretty much game over and it puts tech even more in the accendancy than it typically already is now in 4X games.

Good point. I already dislike it when tech progression is too dominant (like in Endless Legend which I'm playing right now).

The risk is that revolutions in military tech can make runaway AI empires even more unbeatable (playing at high difficulty). And then on the other hand the human player could too easily abuse them by beelining the tech and then cheesing the whole battlefield. That is the risk.

The reward is that it gives the tech progression a lot more meaning. Devising a strategy to beeline a key technology is fun in itself, and successfully executing it feels rewarding to the player. Also, in a wider sense technological evolution helps refresh the game by making different stages of a campaign actually different, which can help counter the persistent problem of being bored with late game stages of a 4X game.

You can minimize the risk, or downside, of that design with proper balancing. I'll draw inspiration from history again (uh-oh...) to make an example: revolutions in military technology could have very dramatic results on the battlefield and help decide the outcome of a war; however, in reality cultures were generally quick to adopt successful innovations by their enemies, so the superiority would only last for half a war or one war at most. Then the innovation would become the new standard all over. If a game makes it easy for new tech to spread, the downsides of tech dominance are greatly reduced and only result in a temporary advantage. I think that also presents an interesting challenge to the player following a beeline strategy: timing becomes crucial and he has to be ready to push his advantage immediately and make the most of it while it lasts.

Other balancing acts would also involve having significant cost to technological development. You should have to make hard choices between not only what tech to get but also how much to invest in getting it at the expense of other pressing matters (economy, politics, etc). It's not hard to see how balancing can push a beeline strategy from being a cheesy "I win" to a situational gambit that requires an effort to pull off properly.

[Drexciyian]

引用自 Nasarog：

引用自 koalabrownie：

From reading the article and listening to 3ma podcasts this is the core of his complaints.

The guy is a 4X-Hater at his core.

Don't think he's a 4X hater as such as he seem's to have a problem with space 4x which most do seem to stick to a very narrow style ie space lines & ship building which seem to be his biggest gripes