Strategy Players / Designers - Beware the "False Artifice"

[yin26]

LOTM:

I was, of course, being a bit flippant. Certainly realism *can* be fun and rewarding, but it should never be at the expense of fun (gee, I think just ripped off a Sid Meier quote there)...

[lord of the mark]

i understand, i didnt mean my post as a "counter attack" on you, i just thought that since realism vs gameplay was a major point in the thread, these might be useful thoughts - and your post gave me good point to riff on.

[yin26]

Hey, a good counter attack in the morning would be fine, too! Shake up the House of Poly a bit, you know?

[Boris Godunov]

Re: realism.

Realism is good, but it depends on what kind of realism. The minutae involved in maintenance costs may be more realistic, but that's not the kind of realism that makes a game fun--on the contrary, its what makes it tedious.

Striving for realism in a historical strategy game should be about having realistic outcomes for situations, realistic progressions for a civilization, realistic results for a war, etc. Making the player become a bean counter may be "realistic" to some, but to me it's just tedium. I'd rather the effort be invested in making the interesting aspects of a game more realistic.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Re: realism.

Realism is good, but it depends on what kind of realism. The minutae involved in maintenance costs may be more realistic, but that's not the kind of realism that makes a game fun--on the contrary, its what makes it tedious.

Striving for realism in a historical strategy game should be about having realistic outcomes for situations, realistic progressions for a civilization, realistic results for a war, etc. Making the player become a bean counter may be "realistic" to some, but to me it's just tedium. I'd rather the effort be invested in making the interesting aspects of a game more realistic.

boris - logistics is part of what makes all those things.

i remember starting a civ2 ww2 scenario - i think it was 2194 days of war - i was playing as brits - the germans in north africa, instead of attacking toward my positions in egypt, flanked me by heading across the desert towards Khartoum!!!! Good move, I suppose. Ever wonder why Rommel didnt try it? Cause he coudnt move supplies across the desert. And since civ2, which does have unit maintenance, doesnt require supply lines, this stuff happens. It happens in regular random map games too, - you just see it more clearly in a scenario. Yet most non-grognards hate logistics micromanagement. You leave that out, youre not gonna have a realistic war. Period.

But thats ok. This is an RTS, and need not be that completely realistic - giving up realism for gameplay is a valid choice. And attrition may work as a partial, abstract substitute. But if you want realistic battles, you will need boring logistics stuff. Too much of military strategy is based around cutting the other guys supply line and protecting your own (Jomini, etc) But i suspect most non-grognard gamers are not particularly interested in realistic battles.

[lord of the mark]

"Making the player become a bean counter may be "realistic" to some, but to me it's just tedium. I'd rather the effort be invested in making the interesting aspects of a game more realistic."


I once read a bio of JEB Stuart. The very image of the dashing chivalric warrior - and you know what - he was obsessive about the tedius details of war, including .

Problem - real war is very much based on tedius tasks - abstracting too much from them tends to result in unrealistic games. (one would think automating them might work, but i know too little of AI to understand why this hasnt happened yet)

[lord of the mark]

and let me just say - dont think youre ever going to have realism in a playable 6000 year game anyway, cause of the time scale problem. This is mathematically provable in the case of TBS. Not sure about RTS.


So how does RON fare as far as realism for timescale - how long does it take in game time (IE years) to move ship around the world? Has RTS with variable speed solved the problems of unrealistic movement, or did they not bother?

[Boris Godunov]

Re Supply lines: This was automated rather successfully in Heats of Iron, but that is a far different kind of RTS than RoN and its ilk. Without the province structure, it doesn't work. Civ3 abstracted it some by making it so units couldn't heal inside enemy borders (which is a step removed from RoN's attrition model). I have no problem abstracting that.

GalCiv has a somewhat more artificial system, in that your ships simply can't travel outside a certain distance from the worlds you control. You can expand this distance with advanced technologies, however. I think something like that would be great in a Civ game, as it would also help impede ICS.

RoN doesn't have a timescale--no "years" go by. But in terms of timescale, it's rather hectic. I have had an entire age go by without using any of the units allowed by it. Progress is very fast--that's what comes with a game designed to be played in an hour. Distance is also totally abstracted, so gauging that is impossible.

That being said, I think it would be possible to create a game which had a more realistic historical arch, it would just be an incredibly daunting task. Accounting for the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and rall etc. of civilizations would require a lot of code.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov

RoN doesn't have a timescale--no "years" go by. But in terms of timescale, it's rather hectic. I have had an entire age go by without using any of the units allowed by it. Progress is very fast--that's what comes with a game designed to be played in an hour. Distance is also totally abstracted, so gauging that is impossible.

.

interesting - no years - sounds again like an acknowledgement this is a classical RTS (however much improved, and despite the variable speeds and pausing) rather than an EU style history game.

[Boris Godunov]

Oh, this game is sooooo unrelated to EU. It's got more features from Civ than it does EU.