221–230 of 246 posts
In Sweden the gradual reforms towards today's uniform, or at least closely situated fields. Took as long as until the 18th century to really become a thing. I suspect similar reforms elsewhere were just as late.
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Ck2 was released roughly 10 years ago amd had tons of extensions. I played recently ck3 and, even if the vanilla gamw is better than ck2, i got the same dull - boredom after 20 hours than i had when i played vanilla ck2 for thr first time. Give it some time :~)
Crusader Kings 2 and 3 are the only games that have ever recaptured the accidental all-night gaming session for me like Civ I and II did back in the day. Since discovering CK, I can't tell you how many times I innocently started a game on a Saturday night, have my partner come in and say good night... just to have my partner walk in the office and ask when I was going to sleep only to realize it's morning (my office…
> And finally, something that would, in my opinion, really add to the realism and historical flavor of a medieval-themed city builder would be the introduction of mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord. Tithes, taxes and rents! Instead of merely abstracting the taxes into an income modifier or letting the player be the extractor himself, we could be shown the tax coll…
I always figured that game makers didn't do this because it wouldn't actually be fun to play with. Reminds me of when I played Medieval: Total War and spent most of my time dealing with uprisings. Like, do we want to deal with regulation bloat that causes greater infrastructure costs, so you have to pay billions to build a big road or whatever? Can you account for a Whiskey Rebellion sort of scenario in a SimCity sor…
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Yes, that’s why, as I said, no peasants owned draft horses before modern times, and very few land-cultivating ones owned any large animals at all.
I have the vague idea that in medieval Europe there would usually be one draft team which farmers would rent from whoever owned it. That supports the idea that owning draft animals was rare. But it doesn't so much support the idea that you wouldn't feed human-edible food to them.
Now, I’m happy that your knowledge already allows you to infer that regular peasants did not, in fact, own draft animals, and I’m sad that it does not allow you to infer that the draft animals were not fed human edible food. Alas, that was the case: draft animals, which were universally oxen, would eat pasture grass, cut hay, and waste biomass like straw left over after growing grains. Human edible food was much too valuable to feed it to animals on a regular basis, and vegetables even more so, considering how little vegetables a typical peasant consumed himself (his diet was overwhelmingly grain based).
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We don’t tax household consumption today, either. If you grow veggies, cook, mend/sew your own clothes, wash your own clothes, change your own oil, mow your own lawn, 3D print your own stuff, or produce your own solar power, you’re not taxed on it (although that doesn’t stop some folk, whether utilities or whatever, from trying to effectively tax you on it). Of course, household production is massively less efficient…
Fun fact: At least in Germany you often end up paying taxes on self-consumed solar. They calculate the tax based on what you would have payed your regular supplier (or 20c/kWh). But otoh you get to declare your "solar plant" a business, with some nice perks: If you buy the solar equipment for net 20k€ you'll pay 19% or 3.8k€ taxes. You get that money back. In addition, the 20k€ are a business expense and reduce your…
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Personally, I prefer Aurora and Distant Worlds: Universe. Paradox games are fantastic but these are Dwarf Fortress-level detail (if you’re into that sort of thing).
Ooh, interesting. I see Distant Worlds 2 is slated for release this year. I'll try it when it's out! Thanks.
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17th century Europe was quite modern with for example long distance power transmission. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/01/mechanical-transmi... The spinning wheel similarly had already transformed transformed the making of cloth and rope. By the 1700’s cottage industries where setup to leverage the free time of village workers on an industrial scale. Communities would specialize based on local resources inclu…
According to AcoUP, transport cost over land is five times that over rivers, and twenty times that over sea. https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...
Rome and the Middle Ages both had a systems of canals which are neutral to navigate. They always require something to pull, but there isn’t any current.
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You should adjust the "mid-game start year" and "late-game start year" sliders at game setup. Note that those are just the earliest possible start times, and the chance starts rolling yearly. Definitely frustrating that you have to try to predict the game trajectory in advance. A game going well is almost a bad thing - you end up ahead of the curve and sit around doing nothing.
I personally find there's no depth to it: the winning strategy is to focus on growing your economic base and pump all spare capacity into research - by mid-game, you'll out-earn and out-tech every opponent other than the fallen empires. In my last long playthrough, the second half of the game was literally me just racing against the victory condition clock to see how much megastructures I can cram in, so I can see wh…
On launch they made a big deal about how they had the "cards" instead of a tech tree... turns out that's pretty much just a tech tree.
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I personally find there's no depth to it: the winning strategy is to focus on growing your economic base and pump all spare capacity into research - by mid-game, you'll out-earn and out-tech every opponent other than the fallen empires. In my last long playthrough, the second half of the game was literally me just racing against the victory condition clock to see how much megastructures I can cram in, so I can see wh…
Absolutely, it's been a long while since I booted up Stellaris. Something like Starnet and absurdly hard cling-to-life difficulties brings a little spice, but it's pretty much a solved game of tuning resource flows. On launch they made a big deal about how they had the "cards" instead of a tech tree... turns out that's pretty much just a tech tree.
Stellaris tries to enable variety by using "cards" to prevent you from seeing the entire tech tree - but you still know there is a tree. You'll still walk through most of it roughly in the same order. So will everyone else.
In this sense, my dream 4x is to Stellaris what StarCraft was to Dark Colony. Where StarCraft gave you 3 completely unique tech trees, each with its own mechanics, playstyle and lore, Dark Colony gave you 2 species that were really just clones with different sprites for the same units (and in few cases, slightly different stats).
(I could rant on and on. One day maybe I'll just write the damn game myself. I already have a sketch of a design doc assembled over the years.)