Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
 
Microtransactions and mods

Dragon's Dogma 2, an otherwise decent action RPG, caused a lot of negative reactions by having "DLC" in the Steam shop that are essentially microtransactions. You can buy a currency, or items like fast travel stones or resurrection items for cash. While most of the things you could buy for real money were also available in game, these microtransactions for a single-player game weren't popular. So there was much rejoicing on the news that modders had found a way to give out these cash shop items for free. I wasn't feeling the joy. In fact, I am kind of worried.

I like mods. There have been numerous cases where I wasn't happy with a game design decision, e.g. the standard size of the inventory in Starfield, and then used a mod to change it more to my liking. I couldn't have played Elden Ring without a mod that made it easier for a slow person like me to play. I even wrote and published my own mod in Age of Wonders 4, because I wasn't happy with the geography of the "land" type of random map generation. Yes, ideally a game has settings for different difficulties and features, but often it hasn't, and then a mod can be extremely useful.

In many cases, game companies either support mods (I couldn't have written the AoW4 mod if Paradox hadn't provided a mod editor with the game), or simply ignore them. There are only a few cases in which a mod causes bad publicity, e.g. the Hot Coffee mod for GTA. But what is called a mod in a single-player game is called a cheat in a multi-player game, and there are various kinds of "anti-cheat software" and ways to make it more difficult or even impossible to modify a game.

I don't think we have seen the end of microtransactions in single-player games. And if mods give you items for free that the game company had planned to sell you, the game company is going to go after those mods. We might very well end up with single-player games that have some sort of protection against mods and cheat software. And that would most likely not be limited to mods that circumvent microtransactions, but make all modding more difficult. I think that would be bad. Sometimes game designers have really bad game design ideas, like Dragon's Dogma 2 not having a "new game" option. Mods can make a game more fun to play, or make it accessible to people who couldn't otherwise play. If we would lose mods by companies defending their microtransactions, games would change for the worse.

Monday, March 25, 2024
 
An evolution in brands and IP

Imagine you are a huge fan of Baldur's Gate 3. It is 2028, and you see two new games advertised: A game called Baldur's Gate 4, licensed by Hasbro to a new game developing studio you don't know, and a game with a completely new name, made by Larian Studios. Which one do you buy?

This scenario has been getting more likely after Larian announced they wouldn't do DLCs for BG3 or a BG4 game. But one has to do a little bit of reading between the lines here. Big companies in the general business of entertainment, whether that is movies or games or something else, put a lot of emphasis on intellectual property rights, IP. Thus when Hasbro talks to its investors, it will claim that the success of BG3 has a lot to do with the strength of the Dungeons & Dragons brand, and the "Baldur's Gate" IP. That claim is debatable. On the one hand, it is possible that the exactly same game would have sold a lot less if it had been called Divinity Original Sin 3. On the other hand BG3 is clearly a completely different game than Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and not really a linear evolution of these previous games, but rather an evolution of Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2. Larian Studios is betting that they can make a game as good or better that is in some way an evolution of BG3, but won't be called that. The D&D / Baldur's Gate IP, and the owner of that IP, are considered more of an obstacle to make the next game great, rather than a condition for success.

Let's look at a very different example. In November of last year, The Escapist got into a fight with the employees that did their Youtube videos. The Escapist fired an editor-in-chief, and the rest of the employees in his team basically said "If he goes, I'll go". While The Escapist held the IP rights to a lot of the popular video series brands these people made, like Zero Punctuation, they didn't own the people behind those brands. So the same old team simply created a new brand, somewhat sarcastically called Second Wind, and continued to make the same sort of videos under new names. There is now a video series called Fully Ramblomatic, which is basically just a reskinned, rebranded Zero Punctuation. And it turns out that viewers just care more about Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw reviewing games in his peculiar style than they care about the "Escapist" or "Zero Punctuation" brand or IP. The Youtube channel of The Escapist is basically dead, while Second Wind is doing fine.

Third example, and much discussed of course this year, is Palworld. A game studio that didn't hold any IP rights to Pokemon basically made a Pokemon game that people liked a lot more than the Pokemon games of the company that did hold the IP rights. And because IP rights are actually a lot more limited than many people imagine, beyond lots of spilled ink and a "we will look into it" press release from Nintendo, absolutely nothing happened.

And there are a lot of other examples, maybe less prominent. Ubisoft ran "The Settlers" brand into the ground, and people previously working on that series now launched Pioneers of Pagonia in early access, a game that if sold by Ubisoft would be a "The Settlers" game. And some of the "sequels" released recently are from games that are over a decade old; are people buying Outcast because they liked the 1999 prequel, or do they simply not care how the game is called? How important is Dragon's Dogma from 2012 for the success of Dragon's Dogma 2? It didn't shield the game from review bombing when players were disappointed by bad performance, questionable game design decisions, and greedy microtransactions.

Warner Brothers made one of the best-selling games of 2023 with single-player Hogwart's Legacy, and one of the worst flops of 2024 with live-service Suicide Squad. Their conclusion? Harry Potter is simply the better IP than Suicide Squad, and they should make a live-service Harry Potter game. The alternative explanation is simply that players care a bit less about IP than big companies think, and instead care more about the actual quality of games. Between Steam user ratings and refund options, Metacritic, and video streaming sometimes even before release, it has become increasingly easy for players to judge how good a game actually is. We don't have to rely on the name of the game to give us a rough estimate of the quality of the game. We learned that sequels can be a lot better, a lot worse, or totally different than previous games of the same name, and therefore lost trust in these names. I don't think that brands and IP have no importance, or will go away; but there seems to be an evolution that makes them somewhat less important today, and it seems that some managers of big companies haven't gotten the memo yet.

Saturday, March 23, 2024
 
Not a "fan" fan

I have already written a bit about Millennia, and I will certainly write more after the game releases and I can play the full version. I am very much looking forward to playing this, as the complex economic system is something I was missing in other 4X games. So you could say that I am a fan of Millennia. But I hesitate to use the term, as there is a connotation to "fan" that I don't subscribe to.

Buying a computer game usually requires a bit of money, and playing it requires some time. That is an investment. In some "fans" of a game, the money/time investment leads to a sort of emotional investment as well. It is as if they had made a life choice, and they need confirmation that this was the right life choice. Thus they get angry if somebody criticizes the game, or there are bad news about the game, as that would criticize their life choice. I don't tend to get that emotionally attached, and I am certainly not "rooting" for Millennia.

While there are many things that I look forward to in playing Millennia, I am very well aware that this is a deeply flawed game. It is lacking game balance, and the user interface is sometimes so user-unfriendly as to make me cringe. It is also not a very pretty game, with the combat animation (especially naval combat) looking almost ridiculous for a game of this price category released in 2024. And then there is a problem which would still apply if a miracle patch fixed all the balance, UI, and graphics problems: Fundamentally Millennia is a more complex and less accessible game than its competitors, like Civilization 6, Humankind, or Old World.

Civilization 6 was released over 7 years ago, and there are still over 60k players every day at peak that play it. While that is down from an all-time high of 160k, the longevity of Civ6 is extraordinary. Humankind on Steam peaked at 55k and is down to 1k after less than 3 years. Old World has even less players (also because it was only available on Epic for the first year). I would honestly be surprised if Millennia even beats Humankind at Steam peak concurrent users. The people who think that Millennia is a "Civ Killer" are deluded or smoking something. Millennia is a cross of different game genres, none of which is exactly mass market suitable. It lacks the cartoon character appeal of Civ6. The fact that you see the bad graphics and UI flaws immediately, but need many hours before the advantages of Millennia in game depth become apparent won't help either. The bad habit of Paradox Interactive to release not quite finished games and then make them better with patches and DLCs later won't help. I would consider it extremely likely that in a week the Steam concurrent user numbers and user ratings of Millennia can only be described as "disappointing". That doesn't make Millennia a bad game, it only makes it a game that is niche, and needs improvement. I buy it at release because I like the depth, I can live with the current flaws, and I have confidence in Paradox to make the game better over time, based on previous form.

I do somewhat hope that Millennia isn't doing so bad as to be unsalvageable. It does happen that a game releases flawed, but with potential, and then never develops that potential due to lack of financial success. But I am not a "fan" sort of fan of Millennia, who will get extremely angry if other people criticize the game or simply don't buy it. I didn't even say "recommended" about Millennia on any of my posts about it, because it isn't a game that I would recommend to everybody. If you read my very long previous post about Millennia with interest, you are probably an exception, and this might be the game for you. But if you are not a hardcore fan of 4X and/or Paradox grand strategy games, chances are that Millennia won't appeal to you.

Friday, March 22, 2024
 
Pre-launch game tips on Millennia

I find myself in the curious situation to already know a lot of details about a game that hasn't even released yet. Millennia will come out Tuesday, but I have already played the demo repeatedly, and watched many hours of streamers playing on YouTube and Twitch. Some of those content creators were well prepared and rather good at the game, allowing me to learn things. Others just tried to play blind, which then made me realize where the pitfalls for the average player might be. So I thought I write this post with some advice for people who would like to start playing Tuesday, but don't have as much time as I do to watch videos about it.

Starting with the basics, Millennia is a "Civ-like", that is to say a 4X game that takes you from the stone age to modernity. It is less pretty than Civ6 or Humankind or Old World, but makes up for that by being a lot deeper and more complex. Many of the game systems are introduced over time, so the early game is still relatively easy. But at some point Millennia gets as complex as other games from Paradox, which leads to you having to make a choice: You could try to understand every single aspect of the game and minmax the heck out of it; or you could go on a journey of discovery / role-playing and don't worry about optimas. I would recommend the latter approach, as Millennia is particularly suited for that: Millennia is *not* perfectly balanced, and too much optimization can easily "break" the game, by making it trivial. Sometimes it is better to just go with the flow, and choose for example natural spirits or government forms that seem fun or appropriate at the moment, without worrying too much about efficiency. The replay value of the game comes from making different choices and possibly experiencing alternative timeline ages in every new run.

A first advice on game setup is about a minor problem, one that is shared with a bunch of other 4X games: If you take the default "continents" map type and play well, you are likely to reach a point where you have conquered the continent you started on. And somewhere else, unreachable with early game technology, is another continent, that by the time you can get there is fully settled by the remaining AI opponents. The AI isn't clever enough to send big armies to your continent. So you need to send armies there and conquer, which is a slow process, and not much fun if you are already the strongest power. I'll play on a single landmass instead. I think the default AI difficulty is fine for the first couple of games. As usual for 4X games, at higher AI difficulties the AI isn't necessarily getting a lot more clever, but simply cheats more, which isn't necessarily fun.

You start Millennia with a city and the six hexes around that city. As you can't choose your starting location (a feature that is apparently planned for a future DLC), this starting location will have a *huge* impact on the rest of the game. My advice would be to go scouting with your starting units, but if a few turns in you discover that there is not a lot of flat terrain around your city (grassland, bushland), I would consider restarting the game until you get a better starting location. Some water, some hills, and some forest is useful, but if the majority of spaces in the first and second ring of hexes around your starting city is this, or worse, unusable mountains, then I'd just restart. Once you know the game much better, you can go for a starting location in the deepest forest, or go for an early seafaring nation. But for your first few "regular" games, you will need tons of flat space to build improvements.

One easy mistake in the early game is to lose track of the various points you accumulate. Some of the points are localized to the city you produce them in, like food (and all later goods that fulfil city needs), or the influence points that let your city take over adjoining hexes over time. Others, like government points or improvement points can be used in different ways and at different locations. The game doesn't stop you from advancing into the next turn just because you have unused points of that sort. As there is a lot of interesting stuff happening elsewhere, it is easy to forget about the points and then realize that you should have build a settler with government points five turns later, or that you could have build a plantation long ago. My advice is to plan ahead, and use the CTRL-left click function to set a reminder on whatever improvement you plan on doing. If you have one reminder for every sort of point, you'll never forget anything.

Speaking of settlers, building a new city with settlers or conquering a city or taking over a neutral city with an envoy results in that city only becoming a vassal, not a fully controlled city. A vassal will accumulate integration points, and when that meter is full, you can spend government points to integrate that city. Only at that point do you fully control it. But there is a serious downside: Integrating a city decreases culture, and increases unrest, with the penalties becoming bigger, the more cities you integrate. You really need to choose wisely which cities to integrate, with an eye on them having the space to grow. You can't raze your own vassal cities, and curiously you can raze a city on conquest only if that city is neutral. Which means that the only way to get rid of a conquered enemy city is to leave it undefended and hope that barbarians take it, after which you can raze it on reconquest. If you have a vassal city that you want to integrate later, you might already want to use culture to add a town, or to use engineering points to build outposts around it, in order to reserve the space and prevent other nations from building too close.

Land-grabbing is important in Millennia, and the AI often does it aggressively. Very early in the game you will get your first culture power (these always happen when your culture meter runs full). You will probably want to use the culture power to build a first town around your starting city. Note that while you technically can build that town on terrain you already own, it is a lot cleverer to build it adjacent, as it thus grabs more land. The space you build the town on is used for the town, so you will want to build the town *next to* the spaces you actually want, not on them. Later in the game you can grab single spaces by spending exploration points. As a clever trick, you can combine that with the rule that a new town needs to be adjacent to your territory, by first buying that extra space in one direction, and then building the town one space further away from the city center than otherwise possible. Note that the outposts built by pioneers don't have that adjacency rule, and can be built anywhere, but they need to share a border with your city if you want to integrate them into the city region later.

Besides towns, culture powers early in the game can be used to gain research points with the Eureka power, or use the Local Reform power to increase the output of a city by 50% for 5 turns. One good tip is to first check how much research your starting city is currently producing. It is totally possible that even early in the game your starting city produces enough research that 50% more times 5 is actually the same or more research than what Eureka gives you. And as Local Reform also increases all other outputs by 50%, Local Reform can be ultimately the much better choice, with the only drawback being that you don't get all the research points immediately.

Millennia is divided into ages, and each age has a selection of technologies to research. For example the age of stone has farming, tribal elders, defenses, scouting, and workers as the 5 possible technologies to research. You need to research 3 of those 5 to be able to advance into the age of bronze. You *can* research more or even all technologies before advancing. But you can also research just the minimum number, advance to the next age, and then get back to research old technologies later. Technologies get cheaper to research when you have already advanced into a later age, plus you get 10% rebate for every other nation that has already researched the technology. That makes picking up old tech rather cheap and fast. Which techs are the best depends a bit on your situation, e.g. if you have a lot of food from fish, but no farmable resources, farming is less useful. But in general you will want to pick up scouting and farming early. You need to think what you actually want to do with the tech you researched: Scouting is generally useful, but if for example you research tribal elders and get access to the Council building that produces research, this only really makes sense if you then actually build that Council in your city. If your city is busy building other stuff, you might have been better off with another technology, like workers.

Compared to other Civ games, in Millennia in the early game you will meet a *lot* of barbarians. While of course early on you have very few units and will want to move them one by one to explore the maximum, you will rather early want to stack your units. An early game "full stack" with two warbands and an archer not only quickly deals with all roaming barbarians, but will also usually take out a barbarian village in two attacks. Note that scouts aren't completely helpless in Millennia, and stacking several scouts into one scout army is a good way to avoid the scouts dying. Barbarians are highly aggressive, so standing on terrain with a defensive bonus and letting them attack you usually works better than attacking them. In spite of the danger from barbarians, early scouting is extremely valuable; not only for getting the lay of the land, but also for reaching tribal camps and landmarks before the AI players. Also attacking barbarian villages early is very useful. Both tribal camps and conquering barbarian villages gives you a choice between two random rewards, for example 10 government points or 10 improvement points. As in the early game you are probably earning just 1 or 2 of these points each every round, getting 10 points of something is usually a nice boost. Of course some points are more valuable than others, but you'll quickly learn that, and to some extent it depends on your situation.

Somewhere around turn 20 you will reach the age of bronze. This allows you to choose your first national spirit (with other national spirits being unlocked in ages IV, VI, and VIII). If you are the first to reach the age of bronze, you can pick any one you want, and you'll get 5 bonus points of the type of point that this national spirit is using. If you are not the first one, picking the same national spirit than somebody else gives you no bonus points, but picking one that hasn't been chosen yet gives you more bonus points. The later you come, the more bonus points you could get for the few remaining national spirits, but of course they might not be the ones you wanted. Note that national spirits can massively change the way you play: The most powerful choice is probably raiders, but only if you are okay with a very aggressive style of play and constant warfare. Raiders are a good choice if you wanted to try out the first alternative timeline "crisis age" of age of blood, but this will result in a development that will be very, very different from a more peaceful approach. Which is good, because having meaningful choices is good.

Note that many national spirits give some bonus that lets your cities expand into specific terrain faster. Thus which national spirit would be good for you depends on the terrain around you. Most obviously you don't want to take ancient seafarers in a landlocked location. But if you didn't follow my advice on restarting on difficult terrain, for example a location with lots of forests could be made more playable by choosing the naturalists national spirit. Wild hunters like brushland, the god-king dynasty wants hills, and the mound builders grassland. I am looking forward to playing many different games of Millennia with many different choices of national spirits. They are easy to underestimate until you played them, for example I at first considered the olympian national spirit of diplomacy a bit weak, until I discovered that envoys can grab neutral cities as vassals for free, and that holding the olympic games as a culture power event gives you a huge amount of different points. Again, different national spirit results in a different playstyle, but if the situation is right, that different playstyle might actually be stronger than you thought.

The age of bronze is also the age in which chains of goods become more prominent. After doing the corresponding research, improvement points can be used to build building on your hexes that take existing resources and turn them into more valuable things. You might have already built a farm that creates wheat, but wheat can be turned into flour, and flour into bread, each time improving the amount of food you get. You can turn wool into textiles, grapes into wine, olives into oil, wood into lumber, and so on. Sometimes you get different options, like either turning flax into textiles or into oil. Later in the game you can import goods from other nations, or send them from one of your cities to another domestically. This adds a huge "city building" aspect to Millennia that other 4X games don't have. One tip here is that there are buildings that can convert several resources at once, e.g. a saw mill can turn 3 wood into 3 lumber, but you don't *need* 3 wood for this to work. If you have only 2 wood, it will only produce 2 lumber, but that might be a perfectly fine choice. You'll import the third wood later, or grab another forest hex. I personally consider chains of goods that create production points or improvement points as more interesting than those that create for example wealth, but that of course depends on your current finances.

Population growth in Millennia is interesting. You need to fulfil different needs, with every 5 population introducing another need. Totally ignoring a need often leads to a crisis age (which might be what you want), for example ignoring the need for hygiene in the age of iron leads to an age of plague. On the other side the fulfilment of needs is capped at 200%: If your city needs 5 food, providing more than 10 doesn't grow the city any faster. This makes the goods chain system and domestic exports even more interesting, as you could conceivably have a mining city that doesn't produce much food, but create some high food value item elsewhere and then send it over.

Trying to plan for a run with ages you haven't seen yet is difficult. Some crisis ages are easy enough to get the conditions for, but it is the player who first reaches an age who determines the age for every other player. At higher (and thus cheating) AI levels, it will usually be an AI player who is ahead of you in research and thus it becomes very hard to be the one who determines what the next age will be. I also found that some variant ages have conditions that you can't control at all: The first one possible, the age of heroes, requires your scouts to have found 3 landmarks. Even if you manage to push both scouting and research faster than any AI player, you'll not necessarily discover 3 landmarks. Again my advice would be to go with the flow, and sometimes you'll just have the opportunity to reach an age you don't know yet. Between the different national spirit choices and the different ages, I see good replayability, although I can't say yet whether that holds true for the late game. I am very much looking forward to Tuesday, when Millennia is released.

Sunday, March 17, 2024
 
Influenced by Paradox

The typical games of Paradox Interactive are not for everybody. They are typically (grand) strategy games, and usually rather deep, which makes them not easily accessible for the casual gamer. There are probably a lot of people out there who tried one of these games, but ended up scratching their head, not having fun, and ultimately giving up on it. There are some which are a bit more accessible, like Age of Wonders 4, and some which are a bit less so, like Europa Universalis 4 (which therefore I haven't played yet). But I wouldn't be surprised, nor would I judge anyone, if a number of my readers just weren't interested in these games.

Whatever one thinks of their games, one has to admit that Paradox Interactive is good at modern influencer marketing. That probably shouldn't come as a surprise, because niche games are best marketed directly to a niche audience, while mass media advertising would work a lot less well. As I am following on Twitch a number of streamers that play exactly this sort of game, I was inundated this weekend with content about Millennia. This weekend content creators were allowed to play the game until the 6th age, and next weekend they'll be allowed to play until the end, with the game then releasing on the 26th.

Now I played the Millennia demo at the Steam Next Fest in February, and came away with mixed feelings. It took me some time to overcome my dislike of the ugly graphics and user interface, but the game obviously had a lot of depth and potential. On the surface Millennia is "Civ-like", but there is a complex wealth of resource-management and city-building game systems in addition to the usual fare of the genre. The demo wasn't great in as far as it was limited to 60 turns, which didn't get you really far into the deeper game elements. But I played it several times and got quite fascinated by it in the end. The game definitely has flaws, but it also has the potential for many hours of fun.

So after seeing more of the game beyond turn 60 this weekend on Twitch, I cracked and pre-ordered the game, even going for the $60 premium edition, which includes an expansion pass. Between having played the demo and seen the streams I felt that I knew enough about the game to be certain that I do want to play this on release.

What helped was my recent game of Victoria 3, which made me realize that even if a grand strategy game isn't terribly well balanced, it can be fun as a toy, to play around with all the different game systems and see what works and what doesn't. As long as I play single-player, I can just decide to *not* play the unbalanced and overpowered choice, I am not bound by the "meta game". For Millennia the toy approach might work well, choosing to play against an AI not set to a very high level: All AI in all 4X games cheats at high level, and in Millennia that results in the AI being faster than you in unlocking ages, which negates one of the Unique Selling Propositions of the game.

The main problem with being influenced to pre-order 10 days before release, is that I now need to wait for the game to actually release. I'll have to play something else in the meantime.

Saturday, March 16, 2024
 
Victoria 3 - No DLC

I finished my most successful run in Victoria 3 ever. I played Belgium for a full century, reaching great power status, the highest GDP per person in the world, the highest living standard, and with pretty much everybody in my lands being happy. And that in spite of playing as a colonialist, with a huge African empire reaching from the Congo to South Africa.

I also controlled Romania, which is actually a point of criticism. The latter part of the tech tree requires oil, and relatively few places in the world have oil. At one point I got so frustrated with that, that I decided to invade Romania, which had tons of possible oil rigs, but didn't build them. It was either that, or accept my GDP growth to stall completely.

Now currently Steam has their Spring Sale ongoing. And thus I considered whether I wanted to buy DLCs or an expansion pass for Victoria 3 at a nice discount. In the end I decided against it: None of the DLCs already released or announced, actually addresses my issues with the game. I can see me playing the game again, for example playing the USA (they do have oil). But not anytime soon, because right now the constant repetition of always the same events and the same economic and political problems, regardless of what country you are playing, would get on my nerves too much. The runs are too long, this last run took me 32 hours. I did have the impression that the patches improved the game compared to my previous 2 runs, but they didn't fix all the problems.

So instead I backed the crowdfunding for Gilded Destiny, in a faint hope that I'll get a similar Victorian Age grand strategy / economic game, with hopefully a bit better game flow. Which was cheaper than the discounted Victoria 3 expansion pass.

Thursday, March 14, 2024
 
Grand strategy toys

Strategy games have some fundamental game design rules to make them work: For example they should be balanced, so that the winner isn't already determined by choosing the starting side. And while some randomness can spice things up, in general the player should be able to make decisions that predictably move the game in his desired direction, albeit against obstacles in the way. I started to play Victoria 3 again, having heard good things about the latest patch 1.6, but all my previous games were problematic: Victoria 3 simply doesn't conform to the above basic game design rules. It is obvious that if you play as Belgium you will have a much smaller impact on the world than if you play the British Empire. And my previous games often got completely derailed by unpredictable random events, making me feel as if I wasn't in control at all.

After watching Victoria 3 videos from different sources, a realization finally hit me: Victoria 3 isn't supposed to be a game at all! If you play it "as a game", with some sort of optimization strategy, it will either end up in complete failure or in you breaking the game through exponential growth. What you are supposed to do is to play Victoria 3 as a toy: Choose a country, set yourself some goals, and enjoy the emergent storytelling caused by the random events. You can vary the difficulty and historical accuracy with your choices: The goal of taking over North America from coast to coast is easier and more historically accurate when playing the United States, but if you want you can do it as Mexico.

I can live with that. But it does require a degree of open-mindedness that is getting rare in this world. While that might be stunning and triggering news for the young generation, it turns out that the 19th century didn't exactly conform to 21st century progressive values. To play Victoria 3, you need to deal with unpleasant subjects like slavery, colonization, racism, child labor, worker exploitation, sexism, and many more. You can strive to make your country better than it started, or a paragon in comparison with the other countries, but you will have to deal with the events that reflect 19th century reality. If that makes you squirm, Victoria 3 is probably not a good choice for you. I think there are good opportunities for learning experiences in here, making you understand why the world got more progressive over time, but slowly.

If you are open to how the world was in the 19th century, and willing to entertain a degree of alternative history, there is some fun to be had in Victoria 3 as a toy, once you abandoned the idea of "winning the game". I am currently in a game where I play Belgium as a colonizer, but concentrate on South Africa rather than the Congo, in order to exploit the gold mines there. I had a lot of fun doing various exploration missions through Africa, like discovering the source of the Nile. And while random events made it impossible for me to pursue a secondary goal of forming the United Netherlands, I just decided to pursue other goals instead. In 1893 I reached "great power" status, which is some sort of a win in a game without a win condition.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024
 
D&D and the state of my tabletop gaming

Jean-François commented that he would like to see more D&D posts from me. Bad news: I am not currently playing Dungeons & Dragons anymore. A few years ago I had two groups: One fell apart during the pandemic and never recovered, the other moved from playing around a table to a virtual tabletop software called Roll20. Unfortunately the second group last year also fell apart, due to players not having the time anymore. And I haven't found a new group yet. I used to be part of a roleplaying club, but I moved and now live hours away from there, so that isn't a viable method to get back into D&D either. I would need somehow to find people to play with where I live now.

I started the year with the resolution to find new people and play. I started looking in the most obvious place: The largest local store selling role-playing games, board games, and card games. Like everywhere else, all the surviving shops of this kind lean heavily into collectible card gaming, and having played Magic the Gathering earlier in life I don't want to get back into that financial trap. The shop doesn't run any roleplaying game events. But once a week there is a board game night, and that is what I am now visiting nearly every week to sit around a table and play.

Technically most board games don't have a "Dungeon Master" role. At least not one that is described in the rulebook. But in practical terms, in order for something to happen at a board game night, somebody needs to bring a game (or at least know one of the games that are available there), set it up, and explain the rules to everybody else. And as I have a large board game collection without people to play with, it is often me who studies the game in advance, brings it to the board game night, and teaches it to the other players. Which ends up consuming about the same amount of time as preparing a D&D game as a DM. As this keeps me busy, I haven't looked further for an actual D&D table elsewhere.

In Fall of this year, "One D&D", the not quite next edition of Dungeons & Dragons comes out. Which then should be accompanied later, probably 2025, by "D&D Digital", an official virtual tabletop to play Dungeons & Dragon on. Now WotC is notoriously bad at releasing software, so I'm taking all this with a grain of salt. But theoretically there should be a huge new platform full of potential players somewhere in the digital future of D&D, and I am planning to participate. But this year is mostly going to be board games, not role-playing games.

Saturday, March 09, 2024
 
The electric car experience

My wife bought a fully electric car, and I wanted to write about our experience with it. Due to differences in national and regional conditions and regulations, not all of our experiences are relevant to other people. There are still a lot of first-world problems here that one might consider trivial in the global context. But there are also a bunch of more fundamental issues behind all this, which then translate to problems with the path towards general electric mobility as a significant piece of the puzzle towards climate neutrality.

The first issue here is price. A fully electric car is more expensive than the same car with the same options and an internal combustion engine. By how much? Now this is where the problem might become critical: The difference is huge for small cars, and small for big luxury cars. My wife bought a "supermini", which is a relatively small car, for €45,000. She could have gotten the same car with a combustion engine for around €10,000 less. And compared to her previous car the electric car was actually twice the price, with part of the motivation for getting a bigger car having to do with bigger cars having room for bigger batteries. She would have been fine with a smaller petrol car.

So, do you get that added initial investment back because the higher energy efficiency of an electric motor compared to an internal combustion engine? Not really, and it turns out that the cost of filling your electric car is a whole chapter of problems by itself. Where we live the cost of petrol for driving a small petrol car 100 km is around €10. So if you drive around 10,000 km per year, you end up paying €1,000 per year in cost of petrol. So even if you had access to free electricity, it would take 10 years to recover the €10,000 higher cost of the car.

Now on paper our new electric car consumes 14 kWh per 100 km. If you would charge it at home at the current electricity price here of € 0.12 per kWh, that is still a relatively cheap €1.68 per 100 km, a sixth of the price of petrol. However, the price changes significantly if you start charging it at a public charging station. Prices for electricity at charging stations are all over the place, depending on the charging speed and whether you have a subscription with a particular provider. If you roll up to a charging station in an unfamiliar location, you might pay over € 0.80 per kWh from a provider foreign to you at a fast charging point. Which would make the cost per 100 km actually *higher* than petrol. If you are able to look around for a cheaper alternative and a medium speed charging speed (which would take over 2 hours to fill up our car from empty to 80%) you still pay around half of the cost of petrol.

In practical terms, charging on the road is highly annoying. Adding a payment system that accepts bank cards and credit cards is highly expensive, so only around 5% of charging stations have that option. The majority of others need a specific different system: An RFID card of a "mobility provider". You pay by simply holding your card up to the reader in the charging station, and the mobility provider handles the financial transaction between you and the owner of the charging station. For a fee, of course. If you don't have such an RFID card, you simply can't charge your car in most places. We are still in the process of finding the best mobility provider, but for Europe a good option seems to be Chargemap, a French company. You can get RFID cards from companies you know for running petrol stations, but independent companies like Chargemap tend to have a much bigger network, due to having contracts with more different electricity providers. The other annoying part of charging on the road is that not every charging station provides a cable, you might have to bring your own (imagine a petrol station requiring you to bring your own hose). Which is related to the problem of different electric cars having different connectors.

The bigger issue related to charging your car is how far you can get with a full battery. That is expressed by a WLTP range, which stands for Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure. That is basically a scam committed by the electric automobile industry which got that passed by heavy lobbying. The range is determined in a laboratory under ideal conditions, and it is technically impossible for any electric vehicle to reach it on a real road. Problems with the test procedure include it being mostly performed at low speeds around 50 km/h, with electric vehicles using a lot more energy at highway speed. And the laboratory test is performed at 23°C, while actual temperatures in Europe during most of the year are lower. Lower temperatures lower range in two ways: Lower battery performance, and added electricity consumption from heating. While car electronics and lights also use some battery power, that is generally a lot less than the power needed for heating or air conditioning.

The overall result is that under ideal real conditions you are lucky to reach 80% of the WTLP range of your car. In an European winter your range might be just 50% of the WTLP. In our personal experience in February in Western Europe, we have a real range of 250 km (consumption of nearly 20 kWh/100km at 55 kWh battery size), compared to the 400 km WTLP sticker range. That got aggravated by electric cars being programmed to warn the owner of the potential problem of running out of power: We did one trip of 110 km, which used 40% of our battery, but when asking the GPS to calculate the way back, it told us that we wouldn't make it without charging. Of course we neither had the RFID card, nor the cable with us, so the way home was extremely stressful, even if the warning was overblown and we arrived with 19% left.

And that is where we are: We don't use the electric car for trips to places over 100 km away anymore, as we have a second car running on petrol for that. Our plans to one day eliminate the second car are currently on ice, until there are major developments in the availability, speed and ease of charging on the road. Of course we do a lot of small trips for shopping and the like, and for that the electric car is fine. We charge our electric car with excess electricity from our solar panels, which is probably the lowest cost you can have. But we probably won't ever recover the additional cost of the electric vehicle. That makes the electric car one of those things that rich people with a progressive conscience do, and not something which is really feasible for the general population. Which is why electric car sales are currently stalling globally. Solving global warming with electric vehicles seems still utopic.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024
 
Paradox spring offensive

It is easy to believe, albeit fanciful, that a company that mainly makes grand strategy titles does have some grand strategy in mind with their marketing and game releases. At least for Paradox Interactive it currently feels as if they are in the middle of launching a spring offensive. Between February 27 and March 6 new DLC with accompanying large patches are released for Age of Wonders 4 (Primal Fury), Crusader Kings 3 (Legends of the Dead), and Victoria 3 (Sphere of Influence). Where does one find the time?

I am currently playing the Primal Fury DLC for Age of Wonders 4, having bought the expansion pass. Age of Wonders 4 is definitely my favorite Paradox game, and the addition of a new culture with 7 sub-cultures is adding a lot of new variety to the game. I never bought Crusader Kings 3, but played it on PC Game Pass, and it is still available there, but obviously without any DLC. There is a sale on Steam, but buying CK3 with all DLC (including 2 upcoming ones) costs around $100; I simply didn't like the base game that much, and I have my doubts that the DLCs change that: My suspicion is that Crusader Kings 3 is in reality a weird dynastic role-playing game that only masquerades as a strategy game.

Victoria 3 I am still on the edge on. I bought the base game, but never the DLCs. Victoria 3 is a deeply flawed game, which is extremely frustrating because of a myriad of complicate interactions that often you can't see, or can't properly influence. What I find especially annoying is the system of revolutions, where it is easily possible that you get two competing interest groups radicalized, and both options of whether to enact a law or not will lead to revolution. And political unrest is always handled in the form of a civil war, where part of the country splits of to form a new country and wages war against the other half. That certainly represents a historical reality of the American Civil War, but the revolutions of 1848 in Europe didn't really work that way. [Sidebar: This is also why we should be careful with predictions of what will happen in the USA after the November elections: A "civil war" like the one from a century and a half ago is extremely unlikely, due to the opposing sides not being geographically well separated. Other forms of political violence, like the January 6 2020 insurrection are much more likely. The one thing that is unlikely is that the losing side, whichever one that might be, will just accept the democratic will of the majority.] Victoria 3 doesn't really do political unrest very well, which is a shame in a game where domestic policy is such a big part.

For both Victoria 3 and Crusader Kings 3 for me it might be more fun to watch other people play the game, especially if they bring some historical knowledge and/or roleplaying to the game. Playing these games myself is more likely to disappoint or frustrate me, although I will probably give Victoria 3 another go after the 1.6 patch.

Sunday, March 03, 2024
 
Is there an advantage to be large in the video game business?

In October 2023 a small board game company released a card game called Forest Shuffle (or "Mischwald" in German). This turned out to be a rather good game, and thus became rather popular. As a consequence, I can't buy an English language copy anywhere, and the original German language version is likewise sold out. Small company means small production runs, and even if the game is a hit, it takes quite a while to produce another batch. Even if an initial print run sells out fast, it doesn't make the small company directly rich, and so probably even a second print run will be limited in size and might sell out equally fast. There is little economy of scale here.

The video game business is very, very different. Video games aren't sold on disks anymore, and there is no limit to how many copies can be sold of a game online. Thus if a game like Palworld is unexpectedly popular, it can sell 19 million copies without running into print run or production problems. The only possible limitation is when a game like Helldivers 2 needs servers to run, and the game is so popular that the servers are full. But even that is a lot faster to solve than the production of a physical game.

A person walking into a board game store with the intention of buying Forest Shuffle is going to be told that the game won't be available for a while. So they might well end up buying a game that has the advantage of being available. And bigger companies can afford bigger print runs and have an advantage in the physical availability of their games in stores. Bigger video game companies don't have that advantage. 2024 is shaping up with games like Palworld and Helldivers 2 from small companies selling extremely well, while games that were much more expensive to produce like Suicide Squad or Skull and Bones sell rather badly and fail to break even.

Of course big companies have other advantages, but these advantages seem to be less prominent in the video game business. There seems to be some sort of inverse correlation between the size of a video game company and the quality of the games it produces. Smaller companies making passion projects appear to often do well. Large corporate entities under pressure from shareholders can make stupid mistakes under that pressure. That also affects longevity of game studios. Making a good and successful game can make a studio larger, and then end up producing much worse games: Just look at CD Projekt Red going from Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk 2077, or the perceived downfall of Blizzard. Embracer Group buying up 129 video game studios and trying to become a giant in the video game industry didn't exactly work out well.

In the movie industry the $100+ million movie has arguably taken over the market to the detriment of smaller companies and smaller budget movies, even if that model is also showing its problems. In the games industry it seems to be a lot harder for the $100+ million games to dominate the market.

Monday, February 26, 2024
 
Moving house in Nightingale

I followed the tutorial and main story in Nightingale, as it gives you a sense of purpose. So at one point you have to choose between a forest, desert, or swamp "abeyance" realm. Abeyance basically being the lowest difficulty level, having the lowest resource tier, and this is thus designated as the realm where you build your base in. You actually can't build a respite (home teleport) point anywhere but in an abeyance realm. So I built my base, and continued with the story, unlocking the next level of realms, the antiquarian ones. There I found the fae tower, where I got the item that allowed me to build my own realm portals.

With my own portal in my base, I started to experiment with realms and portals. You can make paper out of wood easily, and ink out of berries or mushrooms. So creating cards for realms is cheap. Now normally, every combination of two realm cards exists only once. If you made a forest antiquarian realm and then use another portal with the same forest antiquarian combination, you end up in the same place. Everything you built there will be there, and everything you collected there will be gone. However, you can specify that instead of reopening a portal to that forest antiquarian realm, you want to create a fresh one. That erases the previous version, including everything you built there, but gives you a fresh slate for exploring and looting points of interest again.

At this point in the game, you need a lot of T1 essences to upgrade your gear. And I had noticed that the fae tower gives a good amount of essences, plus the item you need to build a portal. So I decided to farm T1 essences by farming fae towers: From my home base and portal I reset the forest antiquarian realm, went to the fae tower in the fresh realm, looted everything there, teleported back home, and then started the same process over. So now I have hundreds of T1 essences, and materials to build half a dozen portals.

Then I became dissatisfied with my home base. The forest abeyance realm in which I had built it had the points of interest far from each other. And I had built too far from anything, and in a location that wasn't all that great. Demolishing everything and moving a few hundred meters away seemed a lot of work, until I realized that I could use my learnings from resetting realms. It was easier to make a fresh forest abeyance realm than to move in the one I already had.

The process still took some time: I created a nice forest antiquarian realm and built a bunch of storage crates right next to the portal there. Then I moves all my materials from my home base to that temporary storage. I demolished all my crafting stations and the house, and moved those materials as well. Then, from the forest antiquarian realm I used the portal to reset the forest abeyance realm, erasing my old home realm in the process. In the new forest abeyance realm I found a nice location close to the portal and built a new house there, now a lot bigger and with a slated roof. Then I built storage crates in the house, and moved all the materials from the temporary storage in the forest antiquarian base there using fast travel. Now I have a nice new home base in a better location and am well set up to continue exploring this game.

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