131–140 of 172 posts
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Orville is also in that vein, IMO. It tries to be a comedy, a parody, but you can also tell it's a love-letter to old-school Star Trek.
And better Star Trek then Discovery.
Absolutely loved this series, but never acclimated to the 3D maps they switched to after Civ 3. You couldn't see as much of the world at once, and units and terrain became more difficult to discern. I wound up playing in the strategic overlay, with mods that relieved some of the claustrophobia, but it never felt as slick as the earlier 2D / isomorphic view. Other classic strategy games from that era followed the tren…
A lot of the game moved to bonus calculation. Playing a spread sheet so to speak. What happened with units and the map was secondary. The Civilization board game was similarly boring. Most of the time there were no wars, and everybody was just trading and dealing with disasters and barbarians.
>A growing pile of video-game histories [...] suggest that the medium has always had collective effort at its heart, from its academic beginnings to its ascent into everyday life. In Meier’s memoir, we discover that he was a good game-maker when he fought this essential fact, but that he became great when he learned to embrace it. >The strength of the modding community is, instead, the very reason the series survived…
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As is the the Total War series in general, even if I don't like naval battles that much, but hey that's what superior numbers and auto battles are there for.
Total War is a technical miracle. I've yet to see any other games have so many animated units on screen in a battle at once. Other games don't even come close. It creates an amazing atmosphere.
Absolutely loved this series, but never acclimated to the 3D maps they switched to after Civ 3. You couldn't see as much of the world at once, and units and terrain became more difficult to discern. I wound up playing in the strategic overlay, with mods that relieved some of the claustrophobia, but it never felt as slick as the earlier 2D / isomorphic view. Other classic strategy games from that era followed the tren…
A lot of the game moved to bonus calculation. Playing a spread sheet so to speak. What happened with units and the map was secondary. The Civilization board game was similarly boring. Most of the time there were no wars, and everybody was just trading and dealing with disasters and barbarians.
However, if you want, you can play very war like, or avoid war quite well. Snowballing early with a push is a viable strategy.
Rushing tech to get the first cannon and pushing then as well.
It depends on what civilization and what special units and buildings you have.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As is the the Total War series in general, even if I don't like naval battles that much, but hey that's what superior numbers and auto battles are there for.
Total War is a technical miracle. I've yet to see any other games have so many animated units on screen in a battle at once. Other games don't even come close. It creates an amazing atmosphere.
You are still playing with low 1000s of units, and this has been the case for a decade. The AI is also not really much better.
Even on strategy map level it has been simplified.
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Lower Decks is good, it is done by people that really liked the old ST series. Sometimes, I am not sure if it is mocking some of the ST tropes, like the two-hand punch, space anomalies and so on. Still light years better then Discovery (which is totally not cannon in my mind).
Orville is also in that vein, IMO. It tries to be a comedy, a parody, but you can also tell it's a love-letter to old-school Star Trek.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It does seem like games, of all things, would have the potential to be at their greatest under the vision of a single author, but history has shown the opposite I have to disagree with you here. Both Civ II and Alpha Centauri were headed by a strong single author. As were both the original Civ and Civ IV which I and many others would see as the best manifestation of the game. We can also see this outside of the Civ…
At least on the story front, Alpha Centauri seems to owe much more to Brian Reynolds than to Sid Meier, according to [1]. Unless you mean he was the "strong single author" there (instead of Sid Meier), I'd argue there were at least 2 strong authors. [1] https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/introduction/
Absolutely loved this series, but never acclimated to the 3D maps they switched to after Civ 3. You couldn't see as much of the world at once, and units and terrain became more difficult to discern. I wound up playing in the strategic overlay, with mods that relieved some of the claustrophobia, but it never felt as slick as the earlier 2D / isomorphic view. Other classic strategy games from that era followed the tren…
Battle for Wesnoth is my go to 2D turn-based strategy game. It isn’t anywhere near as advanced as Civ but it scratches my itch.
Civilization is on the easier / simpler end of 4X / Strategy... and believe me, this is a good thing!! Things get really complicated. Paradox games (Victoria, Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings, Europa Universialis) are the "complicated" games, technically realtime but the underlying simulations "feel" turnbased. (Hearts of Iron progresses the simulation in 1-hour increments. They're "realtime" only because it'd be too boring to hit "next turn" so often, but you can hit the pause button and really think about a situation at say: September 1st 1939 @ 1pm if something terrible is going on)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is also a strategy game: war, tactics, resources, diplomacy, etc. etc. The elements you'd expect.
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"Tactics" games that focus on a singular battle as the core gameplay loop. Fire Emblem, Wesnoth, Wargroove, Advance Wars, Heroes of Might and Magic, Panzer General, Starcraft, Age of Empires.
"Strategy" games approximate the battles and focus on larger scale elements.
A good rule of thumb is that Strategy Games have an element of siege and supply lines, while Tactics games often just "teleport" the resources where needed. Tactics are about maneuvering your troops to get an advantage, Strategy is about finding / securing resources (ex: placing your defensive Pikeman on the enemy's mine in Civ2, or in their districts in Civ6)
Civ leans towards the simpler/tactics side, but is just barely enough "Strategy" that I'd group it in the strategy side of things.
>A growing pile of video-game histories [...] suggest that the medium has always had collective effort at its heart, from its academic beginnings to its ascent into everyday life. In Meier’s memoir, we discover that he was a good game-maker when he fought this essential fact, but that he became great when he learned to embrace it. >The strength of the modding community is, instead, the very reason the series survived…
I think that's just like the fact that John Lennon did his best work in The Beatles, or that George Lucas's best films are the ones where he was challenged by collaborators. Once art requires a certain amount of diverse techniques in order to be produced, the chances that a single individual will excel in all of them fall dramatically.
Sometimes a singular vision leads to something great. Something it doesn't. Sometimes a single vision contained by bureaucracy leads to something great. Sometimes a vision helped along by others creates great things. Sometimes nobody has any vision and they somehow end up with something amazing. Sometimes you have a bad vision and others turn the core of your idea into something awesome.
There are literally tons of examples for all of these. We have 10k+ years of human history of art.