Tobold's Blog: December 2023

Tobold's Blog

Thursday, December 28, 2023

The mediocre games of 2023

2023 was a fantastic year for video gaming, with a record number of games scoring over 90 on Metacritic. Nevertheless, various gaming and social media are full of lists of "the worst games of 2023". To which I must say, I didn't play any of them. Most were in genres I don't really play all that often; others were so quickly covered as being "bad games", that I never wanted to try them. While I did buy more games than usual on release in 2023, instead of waiting a year for a lower price, that had a lot to do with these games having been marketed via Twitch streamers; which means I only bought games on release that I already knew a lot of, which makes falling for a really bad game less likely. But of course, not all games that I played in 2023 were great. I would, however, call the less good ones mediocre, or disappointing, rather than bad.

Of course the term "disappointing" is highly subjective, because it depends a lot on how much hope you had put into that game in the first place. I call Starfield "disappointing" compared to the high expectations many people had, including the people who made the game. I wasn't disappointed myself by Starfield, because my expectations were low. To be honest, I didn't like Skyrim or the Fallout games all that much. Starfield met my expectations for an okay-ish role-playing game. Plus, I got to play it "for free" on Game Pass. I played for some hours, was happy that I was able to see what everybody was talking about, nodded, and moved on. With all that subjectiveness, I would still say that Starfield isn't a good game, more a mediocre one. And while that was in part an accident of bad timing, one just has to play through 5 minutes each of dialogue interaction with a companion in Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield to see that these games aren't bowling in the same league.

Another mediocre game I played, I was very much more disappointed in: The Lamplighters League. This is my genre, I liked the art style, I loved the setting, and I really, really wanted to love the game. And then in the long run, I couldn't, because something is off with the flow of the game on the strategic level, which ends up making it feel somewhat tedious to me, even if I liked the individual missions and tactical combat. I had a very different experience with Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. That also is a mediocre game, but somehow I liked it enough to play 55 hours of it, even if I had to cheat at the end to get through the last chapters faster and see the end. Even while I was playing it, I had enough experience in game design to see that this wasn't a very good game, but I enjoyed it nevertheless, and that is probably what matters most.

A mediocre game that managed to perfectly match my expectations *and* where the game length perfectly matched the amount of fun time for me was Fae Farm, which I played on the Switch. I knew what it was, a prettified but simplified version of Stardew Valley. And that was exactly what I was looking for at that point in time, and it delivered exactly the experience I expected it would. That doesn't make it a great game, and I was very well aware of its flaws at all times, but it is another good example on how one can have a perfectly pleasant experience with a mediocre game.

While it didn't make my list of the top 3 games on Steam this year, I think that Jagged Alliance 3 is a notch above this list of mediocre games. I'm not saying that the game is perfect or doesn't have problems. But even if I wouldn't called JA3 "great", I would call it a good game. Also in the category of "better than mediocre but not great" games was Hogwarts Legacy, a game that ultimately bored me after 65 hours, but was competent and pleasant enough.

My last two mediocre games of 2023 have one significant difference: The outlook for them to get better. I played about 100 hours of Phantom Brigade in March of this year, had some fun, but found other aspects of the game not appealing at all. Especially the repetitive strategic level with an extreme enemy scaling based on the average level of your mechs, where I ended up in a situation where I was just under the limit, and so any tiny upgrade of my mechs would have made all enemies a full level harder, which pretty much takes the fun out of finding better gear. While I played it, nothing much happened in the way of patches, except for a hotfix. Since then, in August, Phantom Brigade got a single real update, patch 1.1.0, and a few more hotfixes. But it is very clear that there is little hope of the game still improving a lot. The other extreme on that scale is Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. Which already got two bigger patches and several hotfixes since it released three weeks ago. And based on my experience with the two Pathfinder games of the same company, there will be many more patches. So I am a bit unhappy with myself that I knew that and still bought the game on release. Because it isn't a very good game to start with, and I would have gotten *both* a better price and a better game if I had waited.

Overall, I am happy with my gaming year 2023. Not all the games I played were good or great, but some were. And on the other side I didn't really fall for any really bad games. The game I played and liked the least was Diablo IV, but I don't think this is really a "bad" game, and I got to try it for free, so no harm, no foul.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:44 PM Permanent Link (1) comments

Monday, December 25, 2023

Merry Christmas!

To all of my readers, a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! May all the games you buy in 2024 be polished, bug-free, and feature complete!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (5) comments

Friday, December 22, 2023

My year on Steam

Steam sent me a recap of what I have been up to on that platform in 2023:

The summary isn't bad. Three games together took up more than half of my time on Steam. While Steam doesn't tell you the overall number of hours played this year, the fact that AoW4 only came out this year allowed me to calculate the overall number from my played time for that game. I spent around 1,000 hours on Steam. Add the hours I spent on the PC playing games on other services like Epic Games Store or XBox Game Pass for PC, plus the hours on the Nintendo Switch, and I played around 4 hours of games per day. That is the obvious advantage of being retired, one has a lot of time for one's hobbies.

So where am I with those big three games? Age of Wonders 4 I have continued playing since I got the recap, but I think I will take a pause until the next DLC comes out in Q1 2024. Baldur's Gate 3 I have been stuck in the middle of Act 3 for months, totally planning to finish the game "one day", but never getting around to it. And Against the Storm I now restarted a new game since the game left early access. I don't know yet which will be my three most played games of 2024, but it is likely that the games of 2023 will still see some time played next year.

Steam says that I played 15 games on Steam this year, and I would estimate another 15 games on other platforms. 30 games a year for an average of 50 hours per game sounds like my playstyle, rather than playing a lot more games for a lot shorter time. Of course the kind of games that I like to play, from strategy to role-playing, are not the kind of game that you could possibly finish in an hour or two. But given the flood of new game releases in 2023, I can't help but think that it has become impossible to "keep up". Not that playing everything is actually a good goal to pursue. However, I think 2023 was somewhat special in the number of releases, and that there are a lot of economic factors that will result in the coming years seeing fewer releases than 2023. Still, it is unlikely that I will run out of games to play.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:50 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Modding Age of Wonders 4 for a single game

If you compare Age of Wonders 4 with other 4X games, like Civilization, one definitive selling point of AoW4 is how you can set up your games to be very different from each other. Already the choice of culture changes the game more than the choice of civilization in Civ6, as every culture has different basic units in AoW4. Then you can choose 3 different archetypes of hero, and 12 different races. During the game you choose between 60 different tomes, which give you different spells or new units. And you can play all that on randomly generated maps, where you can make a number of selections to get different types of geography or modify other situations, like rules of diplomacy.

Having said that, and having played AoW4 for 277 hours this year, the choices the game lets you make when creating a realm are not very detailed. There are 9 basic geographies, modified by 7 clime traits, like "desert realm" or "endless fields". But there aren't any sliders anywhere that let you for example modify the percentage of mountains on those endless fields, or how much space underground is unusable due to lava.

I don't know if a mod that adds such sliders would even be possible, as adding new menu elements seems difficult to me. But I do know that a lot of the parameters that I would like to change can be changed by a mod. I just need to write the mod myself. For example I wanted to try the Reavers new culture again, but on a map with more free cities around. And while there are realm traits to get fewer or no free cities, there isn't one available that gives you more of them. But if you look in the mod-writing resource editor, there is a setting for "dwellings" that can be set to "none", "few", "normal", or "many". The setting exists for various map types and clime traits, so I could simply modify the clime trait that I wanted to take anyway to add the "more free cities" feature to it. For somebody more talented than me, there is probably a way to create a brand new realm trait "More Free Cities" as a mod; me, I can only modify existing stuff, not add new things with a mod.

Anyway, by simply writing a mod for myself for just the next game I want to play, I now have even more possibilities to modify the random map generator to produce realms to my liking. At the end of the game I simply delete the mod again, or rewrite it for the next game.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Monday, December 18, 2023

Paying somebody for playing nice

Either I am getting old, or the world of internet gaming is getting weirder every year. I just read a story about a streamer getting perma-banned from Dota 2 for something I didn't even know was a thing: Paying somebody else for playing nice. Dota 2 this August introduced a new system to score player behavior. It seems to be working reasonably well, and uses reports of other players as well as real-time processing of toxic chat to create scores of player behavior. And a dropping behavior score has actual bad consequences, disabling certain game functions. In response, new internet services sprung up: People you pay for playing your account in the nicest possible way, so as to increase your behavior score. Of course such "behavior boosters" are illegal, and with Valve now handing out bans disguised as Christmas gifts, one streamer ended up streaming him being banned.

Paying somebody else to play on your account is something that is as old as multiplayer online gaming, but up to now it was usually done to increase game scores or levels or to farm stuff. Paying somebody for playing nice is new to me. And I find it even weirder than the other forms. I can see a player arguing that he needs to pay somebody to play his account because he doesn't have the time or the skill to achieve the wanted result himself. But here the player is arguing that he can't possibly play in a non-toxic way, and needs somebody else to do it for him. Don't some people even know how to not be toxic anymore?

- posted by Tobold @ 9:45 AM Permanent Link (5) comments

Thursday, December 14, 2023

I have a cold

I have a cold. It isn't a very interesting cold. It doesn't have some fancy acronym or other name. It is just a bit of a cough, a bit of a running nose, and me not feeling very well. The only thing remarkable about it is that it is the first cold I got since the pandemic. Because not only did I never catch COVID, it turned out that social distancing, wearing face masks, washing your hands, and working from home work equally well against a lot of other viral infectious diseases. The cough sirup I still had in stock is past its "best before" date by two years.

It seems that everyone was so eager to get "back to normal" after the pandemic, that we collectively chose to forget the lessons we learned during the COVID times. I think we really should have kept some of the better habits from that time: Working from home when you feel ill, instead of spreading the virus in the office, for example. Or wearing a face mask when ill. The latter probably suffers from the authorities having sold us the necessity to wear face masks "to protect ourselves" during the pandemic; in reality the regular masks were always at best mediocre at protecting the wearer from airborne viruses, but were very useful in protecting the rest of the world from the wearer's viruses.

If people who get a cold would practice some social distancing, work from home, and wear face masks when they have to leave the house, we could reduce the prevalence of the common cold to something a bit less common. And while the common cold has comparatively fewer severe cases and deaths than COVID, I think we can all agree that it isn't pleasant to catch one.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:00 AM Permanent Link (7) comments

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Some Rogue Trader remarks

Today I saw a typical clickbait headline asking whether Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader was a better game than Baldur's Gate 3. Of course it isn't. The production value clearly isn't even in the same league. And according to Metacritic, Rogue Trader is significantly less popular with both critics and users. Having said that, whenever you compare two games, there are things that are the same, and there are things where one game is better or worse than the other.

Rogue Trader is clearly in the same genre as Baldur's Gate 3. Gameplay is split between tactical combat, character development, and lots of dialogue. Thus it isn't a bad answer to the question what to play next, for those who got into the CRPG/TRPG genre with BG3. And where Rogue Trader is strong is in the world it presents; it might not be to everyone's liking, but the Warhammer 40K world is more original and interesting than the somewhat generic fantasy of the Forgotten Realms. Where Rogue Trader is weaker is that much of the exposition and dialogue is in the form of the written word, not even always with voiceover, and with the characters as still portraits or tiny on the isometric map, with zero motion-captured animation.

Baldur's Gate 3 uses the Dungeons & Dragons 5E pen & paper rules, with some minor modifications. Rogue Trader uses the Rogue Trader RPG rules, and I can't say with how many modifications, because this isn't exactly a very wide-spread RPG rules system. What I can say, is that it resembles a lot more Pathfinder than D&D, with the rules system being significantly more complex, involving more math, and being more suitable for people who like to min-max optimal builds. It is the sort of rules system that I don't like to play in the pen & paper form, because it is just too much work, and the administrative works easily gets in the way of playing the game. As a computer game that is less of an issue, because you don't have to manually track yourself for example the warrior's Sworn Enemy talent, which gives "+(10 + 2 x TGH bonus)% armour and +(2 + STR bonus) damage on melee attacks". You can do some fun combos and things in the computer game, without having to use a totally optimized build.

Baldur's Gate 3 has a relatively linear main story, with some freedom for side quests. Rogue Trader seems to have less freedom, at least for the first 20 hours that I played. Suspiciously in both my playthrough and the one playthrough I watched in parts on YouTube, you end chapter I of Rogue Trader exactly at the moment where you hit level 16 and can choose your second class. At least in BG3 there was more choice and variety how long you wanted to play act I before starting acting II.

In Rogue Trader in chapter 2, new game elements are introduced, like ship combat, colony management, or resource extraction. Unfortunately this doesn't make for a great game. It also adds more weight to the question of why you, as somebody powerful enough to rule over a star system, have to constantly go out with a small squad of not more than 6 people and engage in combat. At least the fact that your star ship is 2 km long and built like a cathedral results in there not being a silly weight limit to the loot you pick up, like in Starfield. I still don't know why for example the number of medkits I can buy is limited in view of this near unlimited wealth.

If you can live with the cruel world and the logical inconsistencies, and just take the game as good fun, there are many hours of enjoyment in Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader. It definitely fits my "more than 1 hour of fun per $1 spent" criterion. And by playing on a more medium difficulty, I avoid having to work too hard to optimize my builds, just taking what looks like fun and getting away with it. Rogue Trader isn't a particularly hard game, but can get a bit annoying with the injuries and trauma system sometimes. I don't regret having picked this up, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend Rogue Trader to an audience as wide as Baldur's Gate 3.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:46 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Friday, December 08, 2023

Against the Storm

This is just a short shoutout for the game Against the Storm, which is leaving early access today. I very much recommend this game, especially if you are looking for a new angle on city building games. The combination of city building and rogue-like elements works really very well for this game, which limits the cities you build to a reasonable size and complexity. The different biomes and conditions make every new game different and interesting again, and the "between games" system of progression is also very well done.

I have been very much impressed by Eremite Games, who have for over a year now produced a good sized patch for Against the Storm every two weeks. Their support for this game is exemplary. And by taking into account player feedback, they have fine-tuned the different elements of the user interface to near perfection. I have already played it for 160 hours, and that won't be all.

Note that while I consider the $30 price tag on Steam very reasonable for what you get, Against the Storm will also be available from today on via Game Pass.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:20 PM Permanent Link (1) comments

A first look at Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader

Being a fan of tactical, turn-based CRPG, I decided to buy Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. It supposedly is the least buggy of Owlcat Games' releases, so I hope I don't regret not having waited for the inevitable patches. While I wouldn't call myself a fan of Warhammer, I always found the world building very good, and was interested to learn more about the specifics of the Rogue Trader role-playing game. Having said that, I do wonder how this game is going to be received by the more "progressive" parts of the gaming press. Warhammer 40K is fundamentally a satire about how evil humanity can get, and requires a certain type of humor to be enjoyed. Some people might consider that it needs a huge trigger warning, and the game deals with a lot of really dark stuff, and human lives are considered to be cheap in this universe.

The game launch wasn't perfect. The game was supposed to be released at 5 pm in my time zone, but for 40 minutes on Steam the base game wasn't available, you could *only* buy the DLCs. Or, with a workaround, buy the $100 deluxe edition, but not the $50 base game. Needless to say that struck some people as possibly intentional, but I tend to apply Hanlon's Razor to such situations: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence.". 40 minutes later the situation was resolved, and thanks to my new fibre optics internet connection I had the game downloaded and installed within minutes.

I only played through the prologue up to now, which expectedly was rather linear. But by sheer luck I seem to have made a reasonable choice for a character, a sniper operative. The problem I tend to have with Owlcat Games is that sometimes I choose a character and then I meet the premade companions, and discover that given the other people in my party I'd rather have played something else. For example, if I had chosen a warrior / tank build, I would have ended up with the same build as my first companion, and that would have been rather annoying. In the prologue you get a tank warrior, a psykker operative, and a soldier. So if you want something different, you need to take either an officer, or one of the other three classes with a very different build than the companions. As the psykker is somewhat special, I don't mind that my main is another operative; as a sniper he plays very different, and the special abilities of two operatives work well together.

Character creation and combat is pretty deep, but fortunately slightly less deep than the previous Owlcat Games, which were based on the Pathfinder RPG. I decided *not* to overly optimize, but just take the choices at each level for each character that seem reasonable or fun. But I am playing only on a medium difficulty level, as I believe that playing on "unfair" requires too much optimization and doesn't leave you with many options to try out some fun stuff. Personally I do like the design decision to have have a lot of low level enemy minions in each combat, as it allows for characters to feel powerful against those, even if the boss mobs are tough.

Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader was the last game I had on my radar for this year. I might have missed something, of course. But between the long hours this game will require, and some games I still want to play "for free" on the Game Pass, I think I got the rest of the year covered.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:02 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Thursday, December 07, 2023

AI-ification of art and the lesson of Impressionism

While great and original art certainly still exists, these days we are often confronted with the more commercial, mass market targeted works of art. When big companies make art for profit, they frequently try to find the "secret formula", and then mass produce following that formula. Which leads to Disney movies like The Marvels or Wish, which feel very generic and formulaic. In video games we get open world games that follow the Ubisoft formula, or games like Diablo IV, which feel like a "best of" previous games, with a bunch of modern monetization added. Passion project, like Baldur's Gate 3, are few and far between. Online writing is often search engine optimized, rather than original. I call all of this the AI-ification of art, because if this stuff isn't already made by AI, it soon will be. Finding the formula of already existing stuff, and generating new artworks based on that is exactly what AI does well. But this isn't the first time that technology threatens art.

During centuries, if you wanted a portrait of yourself or your family, you had to hire a painter. Many famous painting, like the Mona Lisa, are originally commissioned works of art. It was the daily bread and butter of painters. Then in 1839 Frenchman Louis Daguerre invented the Daguerreotype, the first form of photography. Other, even cheaper and faster methods of photography were invented in the following decades. Now, if you wanted a portrait of yourself, you could get your photo taken, at a fraction of the cost and time a painted portrait would have taken. Painters were out of their day jobs. When in the 1870s in France the first impressionist paintings appeared, that was not a coincidence, but basically a reaction to the threat of technology. Impressionism tries to depict the human perception and experience of a scene, rather than just the most realistic image. By adding more subjectivity and "soul" to their paintings, the impressionists tried to create works of art that technology couldn't. And that was a critical and commercial success.

Audiences this year have proven that they can distinct between formulaic products and original art, and generally prefer the latter. It is to be hoped that the companies that produce artwork for our entertainment will learn the lesson. We might see more AI-generated products for some years, which hopefully will be rejected by the public in favor of artwork with more "soul" in it, leading to the emergence of new styles based on human creativity rather than technology and formulas.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:40 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Sunday, December 03, 2023

Rich world demographics and macroeconomics

My generation, the boomers, is named after our numbers. The "baby boom" after World War II until the mid-60s, when the contraceptive pill was invented, created an unusually large generation in most rich countries. And most of my generation, me included, have now retired, with relatively few of us being left in the workforce. Now, if you read articles or watch videos about macroeconomics, you will have heard that this is causing a lot of concern among economists. They talk about "old age dependency ratios", with fewer and fewer working people supporting more and more retirees. And thus they project an economic decline of the first world countries, among gloom and doom. To me that proves two things: Classical economic indicators like GDP are horribly bad at describing the economic situation, and textbook economics are frequently very much detached from the real world. My prediction would be that actually things are looking up.

Just compare the anecdotal evidence you have yourself: Among the people you know or have heard of, are there are lot of cases of elderly people moving in with their kids, because they can't afford housing anymore? I don't know a lot of those cases, but I see and hear many cases of the opposite: People in their 30s still living with their parents, or people in their 30s only able to buy a house with finance from "the bank of mum and dad". The economic error is to consider only production, which is going down when fewer workers are available, instead of wealth. Yes, of course, there will be some flow of wealth from the younger generation paying pensions to the elderly. But a much larger flow of wealth with be in the other direction, with the younger generation receiving huge amounts of money either as gifts from their parents or inheriting it. We know that, because we know who is currently holding most of the wealth, very often in the form of houses, and it is the boomer generation. Of course wealth is even less well distributed than income, and if you are a member of the younger generation and your parents don't own a house you are out of luck; but in aggregate we are looking at the upcoming biggest wealth transfer in history from old to young.

But inheritances aren't the only good news for younger people. It is macroeconomically obvious that our economies will pivot: Up to recently, economic growth was mostly demand-limited. There was plenty of supply of everything, and it was people's spending that limited GDP. In the future, more and more, economic growth will be supply-limited: Fewer people working will produce fewer goods and services than there is demand for. The good news part of that is that in an economy which is supply-limited, the value of an hour of work is going up relatively to the value of capital. We are already seeing the first examples of companies having to pay employees more money, because of a shortage of talent. Note that even in an economy with falling GDP, if a larger part of the money is going to the working classes, the economy will feel better for the average person.

The macroeconomic situation after World War II also was supply-limited, with many countries still having food rationing for years after the war ended. A limited supply of goods and a shortage of labor led to one of the biggest economic booms in history, which was especially exceptional in that the newly created wealth was much better distributed. Life was good for the average person, which then led to people having all those babies. While of course the process won't be painless, I do think that it is very possible that another such boom is ahead. Economies do operate in large cycles. A shortage of labor might just be what is necessary to right things.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:59 AM Permanent Link (4) comments

Saturday, December 02, 2023

Age of Wonders 4: General Advice

I spent more hours this year playing Age of Wonders 4 than I did playing Baldur's Gate 3, although that is in part due to me having already played a lot of BG3 during early access. But you could say that Age of Wonders 4 is my "game of the year", in a year with a lot of really strong other contenders. It is definitely one of those "one more turn" games that make hours fly by. And I really appreciate the good level of support from Paradox, who not only produced already 2 DLCs, but also accompanied each of those DLCs with a major patch that improved the game a lot.

The caveat here is that Age of Wonders 4 is a Paradox game, and as such is on the complex side of things. This is a game that you will have to play a few times before actually understanding it. I would say that it is less complex than Paradox's grand strategy titles, and that it is completely possible to just start playing casually without feeling too lost. But it is really advisable to play your first games on easy difficulty, and play on normal difficulty for trying out casual fun builds, before mastering the game and going to hard or brutal difficulty. At its core, Age of Wonders 4 combines the 4X strategy of games like Civilization with the tactical gameplay of games like Battle Brothers. That is complex, but extremely fun if you like both strategy and tactics. And the strong side of Age of Wonders is that it provides a huge amount of variation you can try out. Goblin pirates raiding an island map? High elf paladin-druids? Mole necromancers living underground? All of these are not only possible, but also perfectly viable to play. So I would like to provide some general advice for people who want to try Age of Wonders 4 and maybe feel a bit lost:

୦ Tactical combat is fun. While you can use auto combat, and the AI doing it isn't terrible, you might have more fun if you play battles manually, especially at the start of the game. Not only can you usually do better than the AI with a bit of practice (and possibly a retry if things went wrong), but you also learn a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of your army while doing battles manually. Getting the mix between frontline melee troops and backline support and ranged units right takes a bit of practice in manual battles. If your manual battle results are worse than the auto combat results, there is a "watch replay" function to learn how the AI did that. Don't hesitate in the early game to use your hero a lot, he is probably stronger than most other units you have and can take a few hits. Warfare spec is good early game, support spec is good most of the game, while battle magic spec gets very good at higher levels.

୦ The strategic part in most cases is about building a maximum number of cities, not too close together, to cover a maximum of resources, magic materials, and wonders. Units require upkeep in either gold or mana, with high level units needing both plus possibly some imperium. Thus the overall size of all your armies combined is limited by what your cities can support. You usually want to invest gold in your cities, in order to produce more gold and other resources to support your armies. Try to go for a mixed production of everything, food, production, gold, mana, research, draft; you'll see soon enough where you need to concentrate on later when you are constantly short of one thing. Which, depending on the build and the map, might be a different resource in each game.

୦ There are no wrong builds. Some combinations of cultures, traits, and tomes have more synergies than others, but at normal difficulty every build is viable. I literally tried to make the worst possible build with no synergies and one point each in six different affinities, and the game was still fun to play. Having said that, the motivation to start the next game can be that you realized something, for example that you need tons of mana if you want to use a lot of summoned creatures, and that you can optimize a build around that. But just trying out a culture or strategy you haven't tried yet can also be a lot of fun. Most of the time concentrating on one or two affinities gives the best results, but don't be afraid to mix and match.

୦ Free cities are a useful resource. Usually there is one free city close to your starting city that has the same race as you do. Try to find it early, give it your Whispering Stone (unless you chose a culture or trait that doesn't have one), and at least make the city your vassal, or even integrate it if you didn't reach your city cap at that point. For the cultures and traits that are opposed to peaceful diplomacy, e.g. the new Reaver culture, free cities are easier to conquer than AI players.

୦ With AI players, while the empire relations score is of some importance, the really important score is the grievances, resulting in a war justification score. You want that to be positive, so that you can declare justified wars when necessary, which have a lot of advantages over unjustified wars. Note that if you have a positive war justification score, it also means that the AI would need to declare an unjustified war if he wanted to attack you, so the balance of grievances is important even if you don't plan to attack somebody. If you have a surplus of gold, don't hesitate to pay gold to settle grievances.

୦ There are a lot of neutral enemies like monsters on the map. Again, this is a resource. They provide experience for your armies and heroes, while frequently guarding some resources. Monster stacks you leave standing get stronger over time. Especially monster infestations, recognizable by the red borders, are best to tackle as early as possible, before they spawn additional stacks of monsters that come pillaging your empire.

୦ Your empire is limited in size by the city limit. Increasing the city limit is frequently a good investment of you imperium, but it gets rather expensive quickly. You can exert some control beyond your core empire by building outposts with your heroes. An outpost can only control its own and one other province, and costs 10 gold per turn in upkeep. But if you build for example the outpost on a gold mine and control a neighboring wonder with it, the outpost will be a producer of resources rather than a consumer. In the early game, don't forget to build some outposts to grow into cities.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:44 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Newer› ‹Older