Tobold's Blog

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

A message of hope

It is possible that with age comes serenity. More likely, having lived through many decades, an older person has already had experiences that serve to put today's news into context and give a point of comparison. The result is that, viewed by me as an older person, life today isn't as bad as some people think it is. So, to give you some hope, I'd like to talk why that is so.

The example that probably has the most data is crime statistics vs. fear of crime. Time and time again, and in different countries on different continents, there have been many recent examples where polls showed that people are increasingly afraid of violent crimes, while various statistics clearly show that the probability of becoming a victim of violent crime is decreasing. Much of the difference between reality and perception can be explained by how media evolved over the past 30 years: We have a lot more news sources today than we had 30 years ago, and in the competition between these news sources, exaggeration brings more revenue. Any given crime that happens today is both far more likely to be reported, and also likely to be reported in the most lurid way possible. That influences everybody's perception, and makes the world look a lot more dangerous than it is.

Increased reporting sometimes goes hand in hand with increased understanding, adding another important factor to our perception: The broadening of definitions. For example, our understanding of mental health has improved, which leads to people getting more easily diagnosed for depression or autism, which leads to statistics that suggest that depression and autism is a lot more prevalent today than it was in the previous century. Another example of better understanding leading to more reporting is when during the me too movement, the reported rape cases in the US shot up to nearly double in the span of 5 years. The sad reality is that rape cases were simply very much under-reported due to shame before, just like depression cases were under-reported before. It is very hard to say whether these things actually went up or down, we are just very much more aware of them. In Germany this year a politician lost his seat in parliament due to accusations of "sexual violence"; while part of that was due to an intrigue and somebody in his party making false statements under a false name, the proven misbehavior of that politician was described as "flirting" and "touching a woman's arm". That sure was inappropriate, especially from a man in a position of power towards younger women, but wouldn't have registered as sexual violence in the previous century. In reality, the situation in the previous century was worse, but the broadened definition and increased reporting is making women feel a lot less safe today.

Sometimes the increased fear is simply due to younger people not having been around when things were actually worse. I remember reading Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising in the mid-80's, when it came out, and Third World War scenario of a Soviet Union launching a conventional attack on Europe was scary as hell, because it very much reflected our fears at that time. I read the same book 20 years later, and it had stopped being scary, due to the fall of the Soviet Union. While Putin is certainly a nasty piece of work, the actual threat he poses ranks a lot lower than that of the Soviet Union in the 80's. Another example is society's treatment of queer people: When I was a kid, homosexuality was still illegal in many western countries. In the USA, the supreme court decision of Lawrence vs. Texas that ended the last anti-sodomy laws was in 2003. Having your sexual identity getting embroiled in today's culture war certainly isn't pleasant, but objectively speaking the situation for queer people in first world countries has much improved over the past 50 years. Feeling that something that happens today is a lot worse than things were before is natural, and the lack of awareness of how much worse things actually were before gets even worse when we go beyond a typical human lifespan. The Covid-19 pandemic was bad, but the Spanish Flu or the Black Plague were objectively much worse, there just aren't many people other than historians that have this point of comparison.

Finally, society's attitude towards victimhood and towards sensitivity have changed a lot. 50 years ago, the last thing you wanted was to be seen as a victim; today some people revel in victimhood. I'm currently watching the TV series Will Trent, in which the two main characters are constantly depicted as traumatized victims of their childhood in foster care, while still solving crime cases. If you are used to detective series or films from the previous century, that seems quite weird, but is simply a reflection of how attitudes have changed.

Of course, many of these societal changes have been powers for good, and have been responsible for today's situation being better than things were half a century ago. You can't improve things if there is no awareness. But my message of hope is that increased awareness of bad things is a good thing, because it leads to improvement, and doesn't mean that these bad things suddenly happen now, when they were unknown before. Catholic priests didn't suddenly become paedophile in the 1990s, it was our awareness of their behavior that suddenly increased, and probably led to lot fewer of them being able to act with impunity today. We might feels poorer today, and beset by dangers, but in reality the world is a lot richer today than it was before, life spans have increased, and a lot of dangers are actually a lot lower than they were before. We are just more sensitive to whatever bad things are left.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:14 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Friday, May 16, 2025

Early thoughts on Europa Universalis 4 and 5

I now played 8 hours of Europa Universalis 4. Which is nothing in a game in which people who played it for 2,000+ hours call people who "only" played for 1,000 hours "noobs", as they probably haven't seen and understood every game mechanic yet. Other Paradox grand strategy games concentrate on one aspect: Hearts of Iron on warfare, Crusader Kings on characters and dynasties, Victoria on economy. Europa Universalis does everything, which makes it a lot more complicated. I have to agree with the commenter on this blog who said that I should use "complicated" instead of "complex", because Europa Universalis simply has a lot of small game mechanics, instead of having a few with complex interactions.

The specializations of the other Paradox games sometimes frustrated me. You know, the situation where your main character in Crusader Kings 3 unexpectedly dies and the duchy you built up is divided among his heirs, leading to a sharp drop in your power. Or the situation where you research advanced technologies in Victoria 3, and then can't use them, because the world doesn't have enough trade in the required raw materials like rubber or oil yet. By being less specialized, Europa Universalis sometimes is actually easier to play than those other games. It is also the game that makes the least effort to remain historically accurate. At its core, Europa Universalis 4 is a simple game of territorial expansion. Even in my game, starting as the one-province city state of Aachen, after 8 hours I control already 4 provinces making up the whole of the Lower Rhineland area. A lot of the game mechanics are simply there to stop the player from expanding too fast. Taking provinces causes "aggressive expansion", and if you collect too much of it too fast, everybody gangs up on you and beats you down. So after every episode of expansion comes an episode of consolidation, in which you deal with new provinces to reduce their unrest, and wait for your aggressive expansion to slowly dissipate.

What is really good in Europa Universalis 4 is the mission trees, which make countries more different from each other than they are for example in Victoria 3. They also provide some guidance about possible goals. Taking the whole Lower Rhineland was a mission for Aachen, and forming Westphalia would be next, with forming Germany as a long-term goal. Play well enough, and you can take a one-province start all the way to controlling a whole continent. As I said, not much effort to remain historically accurate. My least favorite part of Europa Universalis 4 is the combat system, which has the same problem as in Crusader Kings 3, where chasing the enemy army all over the map to actually get into a battle is the hardest part of warfare.

At the very least, I am now better able to understand the discussion around the just announced Europa Universalis 5. The good news about that game is that is Swen Vincke compliant, that is to say an obvious passion project from a senior developer at Paradox who wants to make the best Europa Universalis possible. He does that by adding more of everything. Where EU4 had 3k provinces, the smallest unit of land in the game is now a "location", and EU5 has 27k of them. And it has 60k population groups distributed over those locations, leading to a staggering amount of possible detailed micro-management. With EU4 already being daunting even for experienced strategy players, the obvious question is whether there is even a market for an even more complicated and detailed game. And with a huge amount of detail and so many different game mechanics, we don't know yet whether the developers will manage to turn all this into a reasonably balanced good game with decent flow.

Europa Universalis 4 is one of those rare games which today has more players (average peak in May 2025: 25k) than on release (August 2013: 15k). I actually made a mistake by buying the starter edition which included some DLCs, and then buying a few DLCs I needed to access specific features like army drill or the ability to curry favors. It would have been cheaper for me to buy a subscription for $8 a month or $15 for 3 months that would give me access to all DLCs. The player numbers aren't huge, but by keeping up those player numbers for over a decade and being able to sell DLCs and subscriptions, Europa Universalis 4 is certainly a good and reliable money maker for Paradox. Replacing such a lifestyle game is fundamentally hard, as Firaxis just found out with Civilization VII. While looking at videos on how various features of EU4 work, I found that the "expert knowledge" of EU4 veterans very often involves knowing all sorts of exploits, like selling crown land you don't actually own, or selling the province Maine as France before you lose it in a fixed event. A lot of that expert knowledge will become obsolete when switching to EU5. For me, as a "new" EU4 player, I would certainly welcome some modernization changes, like a better user interface. For EU4 I needed to fiddle with a UI scaling setting labeled "experimental", just so that I could actually read the small text on a 27" screen. All this to say that it isn't obvious in how far EU4 players will all switch to EU5, or whether it is possible to grow that user base. Kudos for trying!

- posted by Tobold @ 10:17 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Tobold - The Podcast

Sorry, I don't really have a podcast. My domain is the written word, which can be edited and reviewed before posting, not the spoken word. But this morning I listened to a podcast of one of my blog posts. How is that possible? With an AI tool from Google, called NotebookLM. I took one of my blog posts, copied and pasted it into NotebookLM, and a few minutes later the post was turned into an 8 minute podcast episode in which two people more or less correctly explain what I was saying on my blog. The voices sounded extremely real, no robotic voice or uncanny valley here.

The only difficulty was that Google doesn't allow to create such a podcast from the link to the post. I got a "unable to import web page due to domain restrictions" error when trying to link the blog post directly. Which is weird, because my blog runs on Blogger, which belongs to Google. Why does one Google website restrict the access of another Google website? Maybe Google is well aware of AI bots scraping the web and has put up defenses against that, which now even affect its own AI bots. Anyway, copying and pasting the text works, so it wasn't a big problem. If you prefer my blog as a podcast, feel free to use NotebookLM to create a podcast of a copied post yourself.

Personally, I am not worried by the capabilities of AI to create internet content "putting me out of business". That is because I don't have a business. I write my opinions on various things on my blog for fun, as a sort of public diary. There is only a single reader who used the "buy Tobold a coffee" button once per year in the last two years. This isn't a commercial enterprise, and as such it isn't threatened by possible cheap AI knockoffs. But obviously this is more of an exception these days than the rule, the majority of internet content is created with the purpose of making money. I would be somewhat upset if somebody actually created a Tobold podcast copying my blog posts into NotebookLM and then managed to monetize that. Fortunately my content is too weird and inconsistent to make that a viable strategy.

You could probably create a realistically sounding and monetizable podcast by just selecting some hot topic every day, asking ChatGPT to write a text about that, and copying that text into NotebookLM. The sad fact is that much of the human-made content on the internet isn't terribly original, and thus an AI can produce something of similar quality that many people won't be able to distinguish from the real thing. We are getting closer and closer to the situation described in the Dead Internet Theory, where AI produced content is consumed by bots, with more and more net traffic not involving humans at all.

If you are interested, you can listen for yourself.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:34 AM Permanent Link (7) comments

Monday, May 12, 2025

Still a fun game or already a too complex simulation?

Some years ago, I kept generally far away from the typical grand strategy games that Paradox makes. That stance has softened, both because Paradox has made an effort to make at least slightly more accessible games, and because I realized something about these games: “Winning” is actually not that important in a grand strategy game as it is in other strategy games. A good part of the fun is the simulation, even if that simulation isn’t leading to world domination. I wouldn’t want to play Civilization VII as a minor power to the end, but in Victoria 3 or Crusader Kings 3 that can actually be fun enough. It helps that since my early retirement I have more time, since grand strategy can be rather slow.

The recent news in the domain of grand strategy is that Paradox finally officially announced Europa Universalis 5. With me warming up towards Paradox grand strategy games, I might want to play that. But, amongst the complete range of Paradox series, Europa Universalis is the most complex one. And I never played any of the previous games of the series. Then I saw that with the EU5 announcement came a big Steam sale, and I decided to risk $12 on the Europa Universalis 4 “Starter Edition”, which includes the base game, and apparently the most essential DLCs. That would give me the opportunity to try out this game, which both makes it easier to decide whether I actually want to try EU5 when it comes out, and if I do gives me at least some basic understanding what Europa Universalis games are about.

Having said that, I am still at the stage of looking at EU4 tutorial videos, because this game is a lot more complex than Victoria 3 or Crusader Kings 3, both of which I already have a decent understanding of. In fact, most tutorial games simply ignore big chunks of the game mechanics, just because that would overload a tutorial. EU4 simulates a great many things, some of which aren’t overly important or necessary to deal with before getting some sort of fun game experience going. I’m not sure I like that, I tend to be afraid that a game mechanic I don’t understand and therefore ignore is ultimately going to break my neck. On the other hand, I don’t see how I could get started at all without willfully ignoring a large chunk of the game, as it is definitely too complex to understand in advance.

The ultimate question I have about Europa Universalis 4 (and by extension 5), is whether in the end there is still enough of a fun game in there somewhere. Or whether it is a great simulation of complex historical systems, which is too complex to derive enjoyment from.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:01 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Thursday, May 08, 2025

Release roulette

In 2023, Bethesda released Starfield, to a mixed reception by the audience. Originally, Baldur's Gate 3 had been planned to have nearly the same release date as Starfield, but Larian Studios advanced the release of BG3 by a month. It is hard to say how much the huge success of Baldur's Gate 3 and the comparison with that game ultimately hurt Starfield, but I guess that Bethesda wasn't happy. This year, Bethesda released Oblivion Remastered in a "shadow drop", that is to say without announcing the release date beforehand. That in turn hurt other games released around the same time, although the publisher of Expedition 33 said that it didn't. In other release news, GTA 6 went from a badly defined "Fall 2025" release date to a more precise May 26, 2026, to the huge relief of everybody wanting to release a game in Fall 2025, and the chagrin of those who planned to release their game in 2026.

There are too many games released every year. The price at release for these games is rising, now moving towards $80 for triple A titles. Meanwhile disposable incomes are falling due inflation, tariffs, and a global cost of living crisis. Which means that increasingly releasing big video games is a zero sum game. In May 2026, a lot of people will think that GTA 6 is a must-have game, and will therefore not buy other games around that time, because they simply can't afford it. More and more game releases will be affected by similar games releasing around the same time, and the relative success or expectation of success of those.

Hard data will be impossible to come by. How many people exactly didn't buy game A this month, because they bought game B around the same time? We can only speculate. But between rising console prices, rising game prices, and an ever increasing number of games released every year, it isn't hard to see that we are approaching a breaking point. And games (unlike their hardware) are a business that isn't even affected by tariffs yet, although the recent move to tariff movies doesn't bode well. I don't think that the wave of layoffs from 2022 to 2025 is over yet.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (7) comments

Tuesday, May 06, 2025

Why we don't have absolute kings anymore

If you look at a large selection of countries over centuries of history, the trend is very clear: 300 years ago, most people were ruled by some sort of king with absolute power, while today most people are ruled by some sort of committee or parliament, which is more or less democratically elected. The kings that remain are mere figureheads mostly without political power. And even autocratic states like China prefer one-party rule to one-person rule. Why?

Now the more idealistic people interpret this evolution as being motivated by "people power". However, that might be overstating the actual power that can be wielded by making a cross on a piece of paper every few years. Even people who voted for the party in power often feel disconnected from later decisions of that party. In some countries there are only very few parties, sometimes even just one or two, that have any realistic chance of coming to power. In other countries with more parties, some people vote deliberately for the least mainstream option, as a form of protest, in some instances not even really caring whether that option is of the extreme right or the extreme left.

The real advantage might actually lie elsewhere: Having political decisions being made by a committee, rather than being based on the decisions of an individual person. The simple fact of a law being discussed by a group of people, even if that group is as little democratic as the communist party of China, already weeds out some of the more extreme aspects of individual whims. It also leads to greater stability, simply by the process being slower, and changes taking longer.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the fact that Trump is trying to rule America by decree. I don't want to discuss all the legal and constitutional aspects of that, because those are often a lot more complicated than people think, and clearly open to bias (which is why the political composition of the Supreme Court is so often discussed). Clearly the US constitution has some wriggle room, and different presidents used that room to different degrees. But the reason why previous presidents used it much less than Trump might have less to do with the constitution, and more to do with efficiency and practicality.

Tariffs are a prime example of why ruling by executive orders can be a bad idea: One of the main purposes of tariffs is to persuade capitalists to invest in manufacturing. But investments take years, and to make an investment decision, capitalists need some certainty that those tariffs would still be around by the time the factory is built. The Trump tariffs this year changed so frequently, that nobody in his right mind would make an investment decision based on them. If you put a tariff on Mexican car parts, only to revoke that tariff in exchange for Mexico doing more against drug smuggling and migration, then the tariff clearly isn't about the car industry at all. Not even the Chinese believe that America wants to have 145% tariffs against China for several years, so the business discussions are all about "how do we store goods until the tariffs go away", rather than about investing in US manufacturing.

Executive orders that come seemingly out of nowhere tend to produce a lot of chaos, which is why so many of them ended up getting "paused" for 90 days. The more traditional way of getting a law through congress takes a lot longer, but that also allows for checks of whether a decision is actually possible, or allows for time for government institutions to adjust to the new law. The closing of the de minimis loophole on small parcels failed on the first attempt simply because US customs couldn't handle it and needed more time before it could be implemented on the second attempt. It is also a lot more difficult to sue against a newly made law that went through all the necessary parliamentary steps than it is to sue against an executive order. The 141 executive orders Trump signed in his first 100 days may look as if he did get of stuff done quickly, but the reality of things is that his administration will spend a lot of energy for the next 4 years fighting the various challenges to these executive orders in court.

Do you remember how much Republicans railed against the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare? Guess what, this 2010 law is still mostly in effect in 2025. If Obama had done this by executive order, Trump would have revoked it in 2017, Biden would have reintroduced it in 2021, and Trump would have revoked it again in 2025. That is no way to rule a country. Executive orders come with an implied expiry date of the presidential term, even if obviously not all of them are revoked by the next guy. Laws enacted by congress tend to last significantly longer, even if the majorities in congress change.

Perversely, Trumps many executive orders make it more likely that the next US president will be a Democrat. To achieve a lasting change for America, ruling by decree is simply too chaotic and inefficient. Implementing political decisions by taking a shortcut just makes those decisions easier to reverse. Not using the parliamentary majority is a mistake that will cost Trump whatever legacy he is trying to leave.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Demographics, culture wars, and advertising

There is an ongoing legal and marketing illusion in which companies are treated like people, “legal persons”. In reality that concept has serious limitations, as for example you can’t jail a company that commits crimes. One frequently touted fake personality trait is pretending that companies have values. They don’t, other than shareholder value. Companies pretend to have values to be more attractive to both customers and employees, but anybody who has worked for a while in any company can point out numerous discrepancies between his real work experience and the proclaimed company values. One highly visible example this year was how many companies changed their “values” when the US administration changed.

Due to the culture wars, there has been heated discussion over the last years on how “woke” companies are, and how that affects their bottom line, e.g. “go woke, go broke”. And I was wondering in how far that is less of a culture war story, and more of a demographic and generational story. Since the beginning of time, young people have often tended to be more progressive than old people. And since the Mad Men days of the growing importance of advertising to our consumer economy, advertising has tended to be targeted mostly on younger consumers. There is a cold, economic logic to that: Tastes are formed at a younger age, and if you can gain a loyal customer at young age, you might be able to keep that customer for a long time.

However, this assumes that advertising only gains customers and isn’t losing you any. With culture wars issues becoming increasingly divisive, that is no longer the case. Whether it is Bud Light, the story of Gilette making an ad against toxic masculinity, or Disney’s remake of Snow White, there are now a growing number of stories where marketing has done more harm than good to a brand. And there are demographic and socio-economic factors that play into that. Who are your customers, and how much money do they spend on your product? While it might be fashionable to complain about Boomers on social media, companies have to consider that there are a lot more of those boomers than there are younger people, and that, on average, those Boomers have a lot more disposable income than Gen Z.

That doesn’t mean that advertising shouldn’t target younger generations or shouldn’t be modern and progressive. But there are a lot of progressive themes that either are also attractive to older customers, or at the very least aren’t insulting to them. Disney’s marketing for Snow White was a disaster not for being progressive, but for being actively insulting to the original and the generations that loved that original. That mixes badly with the very idea of a remake, which is to exploit nostalgia. It also mixes badly with cinema customer demographics: Cinema goers are an aging demographic, both because of younger generations being more likely to stream content, and because a night out to the cinema is an increasingly unaffordable luxury.

To a lesser degree this also applies to the video game business. It is good to modernize genres of gaming, but not to a point where you lose older demographics. The average age of the video gamer is increasing, and the idea that games are for children is totally outdated. Some people argue that for example Civ 7 went too far with modernization, losing a lot of older fans of the series, while having a price point that wasn’t really attractive for a younger and more casual crowd. In that case a split might have been a better idea: A classic Civ game for the fans, who spend hundreds of hours playing that, which justifies a higher price, and a casual version on mobile platforms with more accessible monetization options, like Free2Play.

In the end, companies aren’t people. They don’t have values, because they don’t have convictions. While “fighting the man” might sound attractive to young people (until inevitably they turn into the man later in life), that sort of adversial culture doesn’t really adapt well to marketing strategies. Gaining one younger and poorer customer while scaring off two older and richer ones isn’t economically viable. If you have fake values, at least make sure that the promotion of these values increases your bottom line.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:14 AM Permanent Link (5) comments

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Will the Grinch steal Christmas?

The board game industry had a series of bad news recently. Companies went bankrupt or decided to shut down, others laid off people and stopped developing new games. While several of those announcements mentioned tariffs, it is actually too soon to feel them, due to the time it takes for a ship to go from China to the USA. The more honest press releases talked of tariffs as the straw that broke the camel's back.

While I don't have any insider news, I think I recognize the pattern, as it happens to be the same one we observed with computer game companies: While of course the pandemic overall was a bad thing, and also did a lot of economic harm, it also was an absolute windfall for a few industries, especially those that provided entertainment for people in lockdown. Game companies, both digital and analog, made more money than ever before. And then the pandemic ended. But many of those companies hadn't just put away the extra money away for a rainy day; instead they had invested it to grow their companies, as if those extra earnings were just the beginning of a a new normal. Regression to the mean can be a bitch.

I'm not saying that every game company acted that way, but enough did to create a trend. The pandemic-induced extra demand dissipated, the companies that had counted on it lasting are now in difficult financial position. The tariff announcements and evolving trade war just made it clear to some people that they were already in an untenable position, and had to change things.

Having said that, the announcement of CMON to stop crowdfunding new games makes sense to me. I was reading the risk section of some recent new crowdfunding projects, and many of them said that they believed that the tariffs would go away soon, and people shouldn't worry for a new project that will take a while to produce and deliver. That smelled of both naivety and desperation to me. I am not currently backing any crowdfunding board game projects that don't have a plan to deal with the tariffs if they don't miraculously disappear. Making problems go away by ignoring them rarely works, even if Trump has a history of frequently changing his mind.

Shipping traffic departures from China to the US have already plunged. If tariffs would end tomorrow, there would still be some disruption, because there would be fewer arrivals for a few weeks, followed by a spike of goods sent when the tariffs drop. Right now, China and the US can't even agree on the basic fact of whether they are negotiating or not, China says no negotiations are ongoing. To me that doesn't sound like the trade war ending soon. On May 2 the end of the "de minimis" exception goes into effect, which means that 145% tariffs would be imposed on millions of Temu and Shein parcels every day. Theoretically. Practically the US doesn't have the manpower, so either Temu and Shein stop sending parcels, or those parcels will be stopped at customs for an unknown amount of time. Sometimes in May you will see news reports of empty shelves, as some inventories will run low.

Right now, nobody knows how long the trade war with China will last. But the longer it lasts, the more serious the consequences will be, even if it gets resolved eventually. Detailed data from China are difficult to get, but there is obviously a limited time where you can keep producing and just warehouse the produced goods while waiting for an end of tariffs. Even the end of the trade war is likely to be a big mess, as restarting shipping and trying to catch up on lost time will be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible.

You might think that Christmas toys are produced by elves in workshops at the North Pole. But in reality, 80% of toys sold in the US are made in China. And due to the slowness of shipping and distribution, the Christmas toys are produced in summer. Which means that if by summer the trade war isn't over yet, the Grinch will steal Christmas, and toys will be expensive and in short supply in America. China manufactures and exports over 70% of the world's toys, it isn't as if they could easily be replaced by production from elsewhere.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (5) comments

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Wartales final (?) comment

For the past 3 weeks I have mostly been playing Wartales. I am not 100% sure how many hours, but my total Wartales play time after this third run is now up to 225 hours. In this run I finished the first four zones to 100% completion, and finished the main story and majority of content of the fifth zone. Now my group is parked before the 5th Ancient Tomb, and I don't really feel the desire to play through it.

I have a model of how all computer games work: There is a basic repetitive part, which in games like Wartales is combat, and a non-repetitive part (e.g. story or quests) that leads you from one repetitive unit to the next. Ideally the repetitive part evolves somewhat to stay interesting for longer, but that typically plateaus. My characters in Wartales are now level 11 or close to it, and I don't expect them to be much different at level 12, even it that is the next level where they gain new skills.

On the positive side, combat in Wartales remains fun for many hours. It is very easy to get past my benchmark of 1 hour of fun per $1 spent on the game. Especially if you just buy the base game for $35. In my current playthrough, I never made it to the Pirates of Belerion DLC content, as I was playing on region-locked, and Belerion would be either the 6th or 7th zone, with 6 zones being base game content. I have the Tavern DLC, and that was usable from level 1 on, but other than siphoning off money, I mostly ignore that management side-game now, as I am already at the top with my tavern.

My basic model of computer games shows a typical problem: There are two "lengths" to a game. One is the length of the non-repetitive content, how long you play until you are at the end of the story or have done all the quests. The other is the length of the repetitive content, how long you can play that before it becomes boring. For Wartales, the non-repetitive part is definitively longer, I grew bored before reaching the end of the story. That isn't inherently bad, as I said it took a lot of hours before I reached that point. But frankly, sometimes I had to grind a bit to either catch up with my levels to the region-locked level, or to gather enough resources to get all my mercenaries equipped with the latest smithed armor they could make, but didn't necessarily have all the resources for. Leveling feels slow after reaching about mid-level, it really seems as if xp per fight nearly stay the same, while xp per level go up by a lot, so time per level increases.

I am still somewhat divided on the question whether it is better to play Wartales on region-locked or adaptive difficulty. The clear disadvantage of my region-locked run was that I had to play through the same zones again that I already knew from my very first run 4 years back. But I do kind of enjoy the feeling in any RPG where you encounter an enemy that is too strong for you, only to be able to come back later, when you have a higher level and better gear, and now are able to beat that enemy. Adaptive would be better for being able to skip zones, although I haven't tried it, and am not sure how viable it would be to directly go for zones that are higher level in region-locked with a level 1 group.

The problem with fun of the repetitive part of the game having run out for me is that the fact that there is a new DLC coming out next week doesn't interest me at all. The changes to the core gameplay aren't big enough to revive my interest, and so I really don't need yet another higher level zone.

I had fun, and I certainly don't regret my third time playing Wartales, but I do think it might be time to move on. I'm not directly uninstalling the game, in case I want to come back and play the pirate DLC after all. But my experience with the first five zones was that, while they certainly do have their unique parts, there are also repeating elements in those zones, and the fifth tomb, the fifth bandit camp, and the I don't know how manyth rat lair aren't really fun anymore.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:19 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Thursday, April 24, 2025

Clair Obscur: Guitar Hero Chess

Following the news about RPG releases without spending too much time on that, I was happy to hear that today a turn-based game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 released, with very good reviews. It is said to be a homage to older Final Fantasy titles, with an interesting story, and, to mention it again, turn-based combat. In even better news, the game is available from day one on Game Pass. What's not to like? Well, the game being described as having turn-based combat being a lie kind of ruins it for me.

Technically, while the Steam tag says the game is turn-based, the description says it is "turn-based RPG with real-time mechanics". In practice, it is turn-based with what is known under the name of "Quick Time Events", QTE: You get a prompt on screen, and need to press the corresponding key or button within a short time window. That, in itself, still doesn't tell you much. To measure the impact, we need to know how important it is to get that button press right, and how long the time window is in which the button press counts as being done right. Sadly, in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 those Quick Time Events are used (among other things) to parry and dodge attacks from enemies that can one-shot you, and the time window is short on the easiest difficulty, and very short on normal. In other words, if you have a perfect strategy and tactics for turn-based combat, it is still likely that you will lose that fight because you pressed a button a fraction of a second too late and the monster just killed you with a single hit. Aggravating that situation is that at release the game isn't very optimized yet, so there is lag, and that affects the timing of when you have to press the button. People report getting visuals of having dodged an attack, and then still getting full damage and dying.

While I don't like button-mashing games, I do think that there is a place for them. Some people like Souls-like games, Elden Ring was a huge success. But combining this with a turn-based combat mechanic is extremely weird. Imagine a game of chess in which the game board sometimes with only a very short announcement launches one of your game pieces into the air, and you lose the game if you don't catch it. It is easy to see how a regular chess grandmaster might totally fail at that version of the game, while somebody who is very good at dexterity and reaction-time based games still could find the chess part unpleasant. Chess and Guitar Hero might both be very good games, but they simply don't mix very well, because they demand very different skill sets.

I am extremely bad at Quick Time Event games. I wasn't even good at them when I was young, and there is ample scientific evidence that reaction time gets slower with age. I am usually good a turn-based combat, but my reaction time just lets me down here, and I don't think I will be able to play this. At best, I would be able to play in "story mode", but while that is said to make the Quick Time Events a bit easier, it also makes turn-based combat in general a lot easier, which I don't think I would enjoy when too simple.

In terms of accessibility policy, this is really stupid. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 *also* uses Quick Time Events to enhance attacks, think "press button at the right time to achieve a critical hit". And in the "Accessibility" options, you can turn that off and make it auto-succeed. But, as the game says, "Automatic QTE does not affect QTEs during enemy attacks (Dodge and Parry, for example)." Why would you have an accessibility option that only affects the less important added damage part, but doesn't work on the part where slow players get one-shotted? That is like having a colorblind mode that doesn't work during color-based puzzles.

According to some review aggregator sites, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the best game released in 2025 so far. I am upset that their weird accessibility options exclude slow and old players from enjoying this.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:41 PM Permanent Link (6) comments

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Trade balance

I find that these days I have to work a lot harder to understand what is going on behind US news. Between a deranged administration and an opposition with Trump Derangement Syndrome, you frequently get two biased lies from the extreme ends of the spectrum, and no balanced view from the center. That not only isn’t very helpful in understanding things, it also risks to miss rather essential and fundamental truths from reality while concentrating on fabricated lies from the extremes. That is especially grave with subjects like tariffs and the changes to the global economic order, because unlike some culture war issues, these matters significantly affect everybody, and not just in the USA.

What is the basis for Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs? Once you’ve removed all the lies and looked at the way they were calculated, you understand that the tariffs are based on the trade balance between the US and every other country. The formula calculates the tariff needed to balance trade, assuming a rather simplified and linear response of demand to prices, which is almost certainly incorrect from the get go. But I think that instead of just shouting about how stupid this is, we should have a closer look at the underlying assumption that a balanced trade would be a good thing for America.

I will not discuss the “exorbitant privilege” here, that actually allows the US to run a persistent trade deficit, but instead look at even more fundamental economics to see what this all means. Economic theory certainly doesn’t say that balanced trade is a bad thing. But what does it mean if a country that has a large trade deficit currently is trying to achieve balance of trade? If a country regularly imports more than it exports, to achieve trade balance it needs to either export more, or import less, or both.

Exporting more is not a bad idea for a country. But if we look at the data, we see that the US has a particularly low trade to GDP ratio. Only 11 percent of GDP is exported, and 15 percent imported. Compared to most other countries, imports and exports are relatively small compared to the internal economy. In other words, exports are low, because Americans consume most of what they produce, and there is very little left to send elsewhere. And if you look at the various factors of production, you’ll see that there isn’t much room for improvement here. Unemployment is low, productivity already high, and demographics combined with anti-immigration policies don’t suggest that there will be much labor force available for any theoretical increase in US manufacturing capacity.

The most realistic way to increase exports would be to consume less of the manufactured goods, and consuming less is obviously also the solution to decrease imports. And this is exactly what tariffs do: They decrease consumption by raising prices. Decreasing consumption to match production is certainly not a crazy idea in economics, and everybody visiting a personal financial advisor due to a debt problem is probably getting exactly that advice: Don’t spend more than what you earn. The difficulty isn’t economics, but politics. For Americans to achieve trade balance by consuming less, Americans would have to lower their standard of living. That not only will be unpopular in itself, it will also be highly regressive, as luxury consumption is such a small percentage of GDP. Compared to the rest of the world, Americans own and buy more stuff. But that doesn’t mean that they would be happy to adjust that consumption downwards.

If we assume that through all the chaos and frequent changes the Trump administration will ultimately pursue their goal of a more balanced trade, and will make at least some progress towards it, the most likely outcome will be them failing the famous “are you better off than you were 4 years ago?” test at the next elections. In as far as I am not 100% sure how crazy Trump really is, or in how far he is just successfully playing a crazy guy on TV, I consider it possible that he is aware that many of his policies will have unpopular outcomes. He is more of a crash and burn rather than fade away type of guy.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:22 PM Permanent Link (6) comments

Friday, April 18, 2025

Wartales weird scaling

In my current run of Wartales I got further than ever before. I finished the first three regions to 100%, and am well advanced in the 4th one (region-locked). But compared to other role-playing games, Wartales is handling some things differently in scaling the enemy fights, and some of those features can get annoying.

After having had the problem in a previous run, this time I avoided one major scaling trap that nobody warns you about: The number of enemies scales directly with the number of combatants in your team. That is especially significant if you let "fun" combatants join your team, like a war horse or a mole rat. Most animals in combat are significantly less efficient than human mercenaries of the same level. So hiring them actually makes combat harder, as their presence causes more enemies to appear, and they are less efficient in killing enemies.

The bigger problem in that scaling of enemy numbers was that one is tempted to hire new mercenaries to try out different weapons and related classes. But if you run around with 20 mercenaries, even simple fights end up taking a lot of time. I limited myself to 11 mercenaries this run, because it is the number of different professions in the game. And maybe some professions I could have done without, like brewer, and gone with an even smaller team.

Scaling enemy numbers to character numbers at least I understand: If you can choose your group size freely, the game basically has to do such a scaling. If enemy numbers were fixed, players could just hire enough mercenaries to make fights trivial, and that wouldn't be good game balance. What I don't understand in Wartales is why they decided to scale xp from enemies as they did: In Wartales, the xp you gain from killing a group of enemies does NOT depend on enemy levels. My group is mostly level 8, but whether I kill a group of level 2 back in Tiltren, or a group of level 9 in Ludern, I get about 50 xp for the fight. As levels now need over 2,000 xp, it is quite annoying to do a big main story fight against a high-level group, and be rewarded with so little xp.

Game design wise, I don't understand this design decision at all. Fights against low level groups for me are very quick now, sometimes my first attacker with a two-handed weapon kills several enemies with his first hit, and the rest runs away directly. So if I need a level, I would "farm" those low-level fights, which isn't very interesting. I can only assume that this is because the game was designed to be played in "adaptive" mode, where enemy levels just scale with your level. They added the "region-locked" mode to be more similar to other RPGs, but failed to scale the xp to that.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:33 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

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