TBS Snowballing, Map Painting, Blobbing: Solutions

[MoLAoS]

http://axiomsofdominion.blogspot.com/2015/03/snowballing-map-painting-blobbing.html

I wrote a post on my new blog about strategy game design principles, its rather general, at least for my writing, but of course I was thinking about these things due to my current 4x/TBS project which I am finally getting some real work done on. I had been making some reddit posts in r/gamedesign but certain things weren't ideal for that sub and I wanted to have a blog anyways since lots of stuff gets lost on reddit, even in such a relatively inactive sub.

I'm probably gonna rewrite some of my reddit posts for the blog in a more formatted and thought out way.

I do have one issue which is that most of my posts involve obscenely intertwined and relatively novel mechanics making them hard to explain well. I posted this post here first since it works better in isolation than my game mechanic ones.

 

[sovijus]

Actual "physical" presence of a player character in a game world would solve this problem far more elegantly. Together with other characters or some sort of mechanic simulating organizational structure of various facets of an empire (army, administrative aparatus etc.). Add to that non-instant execution of orders through simulating how much time it will take to accomplish certain tasks, plus simulating communication appropriate to technological advancement. Sort of combining Mount & Blade: Warband and Crusader Kings and expanding considerably on that.

Though the scope is probably beyond your capabilities.

 

[spectre]

Leadership is about getting people to do shit involving quite a bit of people skills and charisma, something your typical neckbear armchair general would most likely be incapable of.
Hence, we have strategy games which are a glorified mental equivalent of blow up sex doll.

You can paint me as one of the 80% you were talking about, but it seems you're looking for solutions nobody really wants to problems nobody really has.
I am specifically referring to the problem about asking online for solutions, the player having lots of time to think about solutions and save scumming.
A single player strategy game is your personal, intellectual fleshlight, what you do with it is nobody's business and usually nobody wants to know.

Those who want a true battle of wits have long settled for human opponents and multiplayer.
Which incidentally solves most of the problems you posit.

I'm not going to lie, the rest of the stuff you are talking would be at least interesting to see, but allow me to call pretentious bullshit until you bring something to show. It's the law.

 

[MoLAoS]

Actual "physical" presence of a player character in a game world would solve this problem far more elegantly. Together with other characters or some sort of mechanic simulating organizational structure of various facets of an empire (army, administrative aparatus etc.). Add to that non-instant execution of orders through simulating how much time it will take to accomplish certain tasks, plus simulating communication appropriate to technological advancement. Sort of combining Mount & Blade: Warband and Crusader Kings and expanding considerably on that.

Though the scope is probably beyond your capabilities.

Is that last part like an insult or do you mean individual game developers in general?

If the player is localized, what's left is basically just AI control since the player couldn't give anything but the most general commands due to the time scales. Then you are stuck with how most AI are shit at strategy. Although this is a separate issue from the one I address. Still it would be interesting to design a game around player locality, I did some work on an RTS previously that did some stuff with that concept.

 

[MoLAoS]

Leadership is about getting people to do shit involving quite a bit of people skills and charisma, something your typical neckbear armchair general would most likely be incapable of.
Hence, we have strategy games which are a glorified mental equivalent of blow up sex doll.

You can paint me as one of the 80% you were talking about, but it seems you're looking for solutions nobody really wants to problems nobody really has.
I am specifically referring to the problem about asking online for solutions, the player having lots of time to think about solutions and save scumming.
A single player strategy game is your personal, intellectual fleshlight, what you do with it is nobody's business and usually nobody wants to know.

Those who want a true battle of wits have long settled for human opponents and multiplayer.
Which incidentally solves most of the problems you posit.

I'm not going to lie, the rest of the stuff you are talking would be at least interesting to see, but allow me to call pretentious bullshit until you bring something to show. It's the law.

Well actually in a lot of cases leadership has nothing to do with people skills and charisma. Charismatic leadership is a rare and special subtype of leadership. Also, using a sex metaphor and crowdsourcing solutions, single player strategy is more like a giant fucking orgy than using a fleshlight.

Human opponents and multiplayer are basically impossible for certain kinds of games. Sure people play PBEM Dominions game and EU4 has semi-functional multiplayer, but personally, playing 10 hours of a game over the course of a week doesn't sound like a fun experience to me at all. And that's what you are stuck with unless you have half a dozen real life friends who love complex niche strategy games and are also smart enough to be good at them. Also multiplayer is terrible for certain things, even with extensive house rules. Also, in what world can the average person run a game that has a map like 10x as large as the EU4 map and play multiplayer easily with that? Paradox can't even get the networking for EU4 to avoid a lot of crashes and I'm not a multimillion dollar company so my chance of having viable multiplayer is even more garbage.

Mentioning EU4 and Dominions, there is tons of bitching about the lack of challenge. The point of my post related to that is this:
Of course you curbstomp the AI because you are fucking cheating in like 1001 different ways.

Similarly, the fact that Paradox games cannot simulate certain instances of historical conquest well without the player just continuously snowballing is a constant refrain on the subreddit and the forums and fan forums. There is a lot of database space taken up with posts about this. Most people may hate my solution, but the problem is totally real.


As far as the other stuff I talked about, what other stuff? That whole post was entirely about Ironman+per turn time cap+strategy crowdsourcing. There may have been some slight discussion of gameplay there but not enough for your comment to make sense. Did you find some of my reddit posts or something?

 

[mondblut]

Strategy games are about the player steamrolling the world because AI does not purchase games.

 

[MoLAoS]

Strategy games are about the player steamrolling the world because AI does not purchase games.

Lots of people like to do stuff besides paint the map.

 

[DakaSha]

I'm always amused by people who lack the ability to envision the possibility of mechanically different systems to solve problems, and instead try to force whats known into some unworkable mess

 

[MoLAoS]

I'm always amused by people who lack the ability to envision the possibility of mechanically different systems to solve problems, and instead try to force whats known into some unworkable mess

I assume this is meant as an insult. I can envision many potential solutions, but none of them are as feasible as time capping your turns in a TBS and not having one static map like EU4. I did intend to employ solid automation for instance, and many other things. But there is no reasonable counter to infinite and/or crowdsourced planning that works this well. And that's aside from the fact that its based on the real life limitations of imperialist rulers.

Compared to stupid shit like overextension in EU4 and happiness corruption in Civ, I vastly prefer my method. Feel free to contribute a superior solution.

 

[DakaSha]

Youre an idiot

 

[MoLAoS]

Youre an idiot

You forgot the apostrophe.

Also the whole point of my post was that the problems with strategy games are meta problems, so changing interior game mechanics is pointless.

Also, you'd think the codex could get a better insult than saying I'm an idiot. -4/9.

I am disappointed.

 

[mondblut]

Strategy games are about the player steamrolling the world because AI does not purchase games.

Lots of people like to do stuff besides paint the map.

Too bad games lack said stuff.

 

[Norfleet]

Human opponents and multiplayer are basically impossible for certain kinds of games. Sure people play PBEM Dominions game

Dominions is pretty much the only strategy/4X -esque game I've ever seen WORK as a multiplayer game. Every other game essentially has unplayable multiplayer, because it compounds the availability problem with the number of players: If a given player is available to play at a given time with probability P of the time, the probability that N players can get a game going at any given time is P^N, and as such, average length of any such session is P^N * 24 hours. For VERY generous values like P=0.5, if the number of players N typical for a full-sized 4X experience, is say, 8, your probability of being able to play the game at any point in time is 0.39%, so your average game session length is under 6 minutes: Someone likely drops before the game even finishes loading. Dominions sidesteps this problem by not requiring that all players be simultaneously available: The complexity of organizating a Dominions game is simply linear rather than exponential, and play time is constant.

This is intended to simulate the way that superior rulers in real life quickly forged great empires which quickly collapsed after their deaths.

Actually, that isn't what is being simulated. Real-time games aren't so much simulating anything specific as they are simply being-real-time. Their view is that reality is real-time, therefore, the game is real-time. Even so, you can usually pause the game so you can fight with the clumsy UI. The "forging great empires which quickly collapsed after their deaths" is never simulated because the PLAYER NEVER ACTUALLY DIES. If you want to see "forging great empires which quickly collapsed after their deaths", you pretty much have to play those "succession" games where the player plays for a limited term, perhaps keyed to the life of an in-game ruler avatar, and then hands the game over to another player when his term expires. It is obvious that history would have blobbed and map-painted as well if empires were directed by an immortal overmind. But they aren't. They're directed by squabbling, ephemeral individuals. Some can build mighty empires, but they die. Alexander and Genghis Khan were not immortal. Can you imagine how things would have been different if they had been immortal? Because that's how games are. When you play a typical Civ-level strategy game, you're simply not a being of the world, you're an overmind. This is, well, something that simply isn't very historical, although such a thing could exist in the future. Simulating historical behavior given such a perspective, though, is basically unlikely to impossible. In the future where things might very well become ruled by an immortal computer overmind, though, such a thing might make sense and fit. That's probably why Sci-fi makes a better setting for this kind of thing than historical settings, because all of the conventions that make a strategy game playable as a strategy game at all can be considered to actually be things that logically exist in-universe.

I assume this is meant as an insult. I can envision many potential solutions, but none of them are as feasible as time capping your turns in a TBS and not having one static map like EU4.

Well, time-capping turns in a TBS doesn't really make a lot of sense. After all, if turns are a year long...the player would realistically have a year to contemplate these things. If your game is real-time, then pieces in the game should be capable of more than simply standing there dumbly waiting for the player to micromanage them. Anything else turns it into a game of wrestling with the crappy user interface, not actually playing the GAME.

I did intend to employ solid automation for instance, and many other things.

Solid automation should really be considered less a luxury and more a MUST. If you can't automate every aspect of the game and achieve tolerable results, what this means is that your AI is stupid, and if the AI is stupid, of course the player will paint, blob, and snowball.

Of course, maybe that crowd-sourced thinking can be something that works for the AI, too, if people are going to keep insisting on that stupid always-online requirement for even single-player games. Make being online link your game and computer into a distributed network of computers. that plans to murder you. Maybe this will have interesting real-world repercussions as a result. Shall we play a game?

But there is no reasonable counter to infinite and/or crowdsourced planning that works this well.

Maybe crowdsourced planning should be a thing people should be doing in real life...the technology clearly exists for it now. But if your game is set in a time period before such things could even exist, obviously, you're going to have issues.

 

[MoLAoS]

Human opponents and multiplayer are basically impossible for certain kinds of games. Sure people play PBEM Dominions game

Dominions is pretty much the only strategy/4X -esque game I've ever seen WORK as a multiplayer game. Every other game essentially has unplayable multiplayer, because it compounds the availability problem with the number of players: If a given player is available to play at a given time with probability P of the time, the probability that N players can get a game going at any given time is P^N, and as such, average length of any such session is P^N * 24 hours. For VERY generous values like P=0.5, if the number of players N typical for a full-sized 4X experience, is say, 8, your probability of being able to play the game at any point in time is 0.39%, so your average game session length is under 6 minutes: Someone likely drops before the game even finishes loading. Dominions sidesteps this problem by not requiring that all players be simultaneously available: The complexity of organizating a Dominions game is simply linear rather than exponential, and play time is constant.
Well generally people schedule a few hours on the weekend with strangers and everyone commits, real life friends with similar schedules make things easier.

This is intended to simulate the way that superior rulers in real life quickly forged great empires which quickly collapsed after their deaths.

Actually, that isn't what is being simulated. Real-time games aren't so much simulating anything specific as they are simply being-real-time. Their view is that reality is real-time, therefore, the game is real-time. Even so, you can usually pause the game so you can fight with the clumsy UI. The "forging great empires which quickly collapsed after their deaths" is never simulated because the PLAYER NEVER ACTUALLY DIES. If you want to see "forging great empires which quickly collapsed after their deaths", you pretty much have to play those "succession" games where the player plays for a limited term, perhaps keyed to the life of an in-game ruler avatar, and then hands the game over to another player when his term expires. It is obvious that history would have blobbed and map-painted as well if empires were directed by an immortal overmind. But they aren't. They're directed by squabbling, ephemeral individuals. Some can build mighty empires, but they die. Alexander and Genghis Khan were not immortal. Can you imagine how things would have been different if they had been immortal? Because that's how games are. When you play a typical Civ-level strategy game, you're simply not a being of the world, you're an overmind. This is, well, something that simply isn't very historical, although such a thing could exist in the future. Simulating historical behavior given such a perspective, though, is basically unlikely to impossible. In the future where things might very well become ruled by an immortal computer overmind, though, such a thing might make sense and fit. That's probably why Sci-fi makes a better setting for this kind of thing than historical settings, because all of the conventions that make a strategy game playable as a strategy game at all can be considered to actually be things that logically exist in-universe.
This is exactly what I mean, in fact Im sure part of my blog post mentioned that. what you quoted is referring to the difficulty of the time cap, so you can expand like a historical ruler in game but only if your raw intelligence is good enough, or you are playing a static scenario I guess. So your expansion is limited by your personal capability like a real life ruler. The immortality specifically is something I am working on. I have some potential methods but the current post isn't about that, and none of the solutions are perfect since you can only manage the player being immortal and not control it, outside of succession games as you suggest. Perhaps I shall do another post on this soon. I'm not sure its worth it though, on reddit in 2 subs and this site you are the only one who made any sort of worthwhile post.

I assume this is meant as an insult. I can envision many potential solutions, but none of them are as feasible as time capping your turns in a TBS and not having one static map like EU4.

Well, time-capping turns in a TBS doesn't really make a lot of sense. After all, if turns are a year long...the player would realistically have a year to contemplate these things. If your game is real-time, then pieces in the game should be capable of more than simply standing there dumbly waiting for the player to micromanage them. Anything else turns it into a game of wrestling with the crappy user interface, not actually playing the GAME.
The time limit would ideally be set as an amount of time squeezed to the same degree as game actions are squeezed. People on Reddit whine about a 10 minute cap being too long, although it took DDR jake 660 hours to conquer the world as Ryukyu the first time in EU4.

I did intend to employ solid automation for instance, and many other things.

Solid automation should really be considered less a luxury and more a MUST. If you can't automate every aspect of the game and achieve tolerable results, what this means is that your AI is stupid, and if the AI is stupid, of course the player will paint, blob, and snowball.
As I have argued tirelessly in times passed and been totally ignored. Yes, automation that works would imply and require solid AI, which no game has ever had in my opinion because developers don't know how to make good AI. Although machine learning algorithms would probably work, the time needed to run them is a lot and you face the problem of the AI being TOO good. Eventually a well made machine AI algorithm would correctly conclude that wiping out the player first is the ideal move and further it would be able to figure out who the player is by their actions.
Of course, maybe that crowd-sourced thinking can be something that works for the AI, too, if people are going to keep insisting on that stupid always-online requirement for even single-player games. Make being online link your game and computer into a distributed network of computers. that plans to murder you. Maybe this will have interesting real-world repercussions as a result. Shall we play a game?

But there is no reasonable counter to infinite and/or crowdsourced planning that works this well.

Maybe crowdsourced planning should be a thing people should be doing in real life...the technology clearly exists for it now. But if your game is set in a time period before such things could even exist, obviously, you're going to have issues.

Real life lacks the need to solve the same almost identical problem over and over again with redos if you mess up. Games are somewhat unique here. One real life example might be doing your math homework? But nothing really productive. Well I suppose some scientists did crowdsource protein folding but thats a bit of a different kind of crowdsourcing I think.

 

[Norfleet]

Real life lacks the need to solve the same almost identical problem over and over again with redos if you mess up. Games are somewhat unique here. One real life example might be doing your math homework? But nothing really productive. Well I suppose some scientists did crowdsource protein folding but thats a bit of a different kind of crowdsourcing I think.

That's not true at all. Real life is very much filled with the same identical problem over and over again. It's just that people come up with half-assed non-solutions for these problems, then decide that actually SOLVING those problems is insane. I know this because I have come up with solutions(generally involving fire), to these problems, which I have used (and subsequently never had to deal with again). However, when I share these solutions with people, they tend to decide that I am insane or trolling them. But that's the thing with problems in real life: All solutions to real life problems are insane. This is because if those solutions were sane, they would have been done already, and the very fact that the problem persists proves those solutions did not work.

In a game, of course, people quite readily accept insane solutions, precisely because there is not a huge crowd of billions of people stuck in their rut saying NO THAT'S INSANE. Then again, some things don't change in other ways. When my in-game solutions(generally involving NOT-FIRE) are intended to solve problems pertaining to other players, they tend not to like this and call me a cheater.

So I guess that's the difference between a video game and real life. If you solve your problems with fire in real life, you're called a lunatic, and if you solve your problems in video games without using fire, you're called a cheater and hacker.

 

[MoLAoS]

Real life lacks the need to solve the same almost identical problem over and over again with redos if you mess up. Games are somewhat unique here. One real life example might be doing your math homework? But nothing really productive. Well I suppose some scientists did crowdsource protein folding but thats a bit of a different kind of crowdsourcing I think.

That's not true at all. Real life is very much filled with the same identical problem over and over again. It's just that people come up with half-assed non-solutions for these problems, then decide that actually SOLVING those problems is insane. I know this because I have come up with solutions(generally involving fire), to these problems, which I have used (and subsequently never had to deal with again). However, when I share these solutions with people, they tend to decide that I am insane or trolling them. But that's the thing with problems in real life: All solutions to real life problems are insane. This is because if those solutions were sane, they would have been done already, and the very fact that the problem persists proves those solutions did not work.

In a game, of course, people quite readily accept insane solutions, precisely because there is not a huge crowd of billions of people stuck in their rut saying NO THAT'S INSANE. Then again, some things don't change in other ways. When my in-game solutions(generally involving NOT-FIRE) are intended to solve problems pertaining to other players, they tend not to like this and call me a cheater.

So I guess that's the difference between a video game and real life. If you solve your problems with fire in real life, you're called a lunatic, and if you solve your problems in video games without using fire, you're called a cheater and hacker.

I don't want to brofist all your posts but I can't help myself. I love you. The way I love myself, not romantically or platonically. Yes, all the best solutions appear insane to normal people. Some of them of course are not insane in concept but in implementation. People always rage that I read so fast and thus have to do less work than them. I suggest the simple solution of reading scifi/fantasy for fun over the course of many years reading hundreds of books, hundreds because I have low expectations of others, and this solution is regarded as both conceptually insane and insane in execution. And yet in my mind its far more sane than other things I do. Exploiting, minmaxing, and generally rules lawyering are my greats joys in both real and fake life.

 

[Malakal]

Just whatever the real life uses to contain blobs. Coalitions against the aggressor, internal issues and mainly administrative difficulties coming from administrating empires - civil wars, rising costs of army and administration upkeep, occasional insane ruler.

 

[Norfleet]

And yet in my mind its far more sane than other things I do. Exploiting, minmaxing, and generally rules lawyering are my greats joys in both real and fake life.

Preach it, bro. Those are the best parts of games. Especially when they enable me to grind the filthy unwashed heathens beneath my shiny black boot. Especially if they involve math. You should see how mad people got at me for daring to use MATH on a SLIDE RULE in their precious artillery game, enabling me to snipe them with flawlessly aimed shots from across the map while they still thought shooting up the terrain for no apparently useful reason was the height of gameplay, so while they thought kill ratios like 6:1 and win streaks like 100 were something impressive, I was racking up 80:1 and 1000+ win streaks (mostly broken up not by the actions of any opponent, but by lagging out). I tended to rebut their complaints with this.

Just whatever the real life uses to contain blobs. Coalitions against the aggressor, internal issues and mainly administrative difficulties coming from administrating empires - civil wars, rising costs of army and administration upkeep, occasional insane ruler.

Actually, many games do this. The problem is, this often exacerbates blobbing. Take the traditional behavior where the game starts to gang up on the human. AI empires start spontaneously declaring war on me. I shrug and grind them beneath my boot, spared the drawbacks of declaring war on them because they declared war on me. In fact, I've conquered the entire world in games WITHOUT EVER DECLARING A SINGLE WAR. This is, in fact, quite common, that I secure military conquest-related victories in games without ever, not once, being the aggressor in a conflict. I'm sure many have encountered the same. Besides, blobs happen in real life, too. It's just that they don't tend to last because blobs are composed of individual actors who eventually die and are replaced by incompetent successors, whereas the player never dies and simply gets better at what he does. Throwing more difficulties at the player, paradoxically, doesn't contain him at all, it actually makes the player more pernicious through a form of artificial selection, much in the same way trying to kill all the bacteria gives us MRSA. Of course, the game experience tends to become a lot less interesting when all the fluff gets forcibly pared away by such things and you're stuck executing a single well-honed strategy designed to work around the annoyances.

 

[Malakal]

Thats because the game has badly represented economy/military aspects, no nation can wage eternal war. Coalitions are a good solution.

So either Revolutionary France - coalitions, or Roman Empire - internal issues - to contain blobs.

 

[MoLAoS]

Just whatever the real life uses to contain blobs. Coalitions against the aggressor, internal issues and mainly administrative difficulties coming from administrating empires - civil wars, rising costs of army and administration upkeep, occasional insane ruler.

Most strategy games including Paradox have little or no interesting diplomacy or internal politics. Even Vicky mostly had just the economic stuff which could move you slower but couldn't tear you down. Rome suffered from poor rulers, from slow expansion due to internal issues, and not just war but diplomatic intrigue, lack of wealth to fund wars and so forth. All Paradox has is badboy or w/e almost identical mechanic they add in each new game.

 

[MoLAoS]

And yet in my mind its far more sane than other things I do. Exploiting, minmaxing, and generally rules lawyering are my greats joys in both real and fake life.

Preach it, bro. Those are the best parts of games. Especially when they enable me to grind the filthy unwashed heathens beneath my shiny black boot. Especially if they involve math. You should see how mad people got at me for daring to use MATH on a SLIDE RULE in their precious artillery game, enabling me to snipe them with flawlessly aimed shots from across the map while they still thought shooting up the terrain for no apparently useful reason was the height of gameplay, so while they thought kill ratios like 6:1 and win streaks like 100 were something impressive, I was racking up 80:1 and 1000+ win streaks (mostly broken up not by the actions of any opponent, but by lagging out). I tended to rebut their complaints with this.

Just whatever the real life uses to contain blobs. Coalitions against the aggressor, internal issues and mainly administrative difficulties coming from administrating empires - civil wars, rising costs of army and administration upkeep, occasional insane ruler.

Actually, many games do this. The problem is, this often exacerbates blobbing. Take the traditional behavior where the game starts to gang up on the human. AI empires start spontaneously declaring war on me. I shrug and grind them beneath my boot, spared the drawbacks of declaring war on them because they declared war on me. In fact, I've conquered the entire world in games WITHOUT EVER DECLARING A SINGLE WAR. This is, in fact, quite common, that I secure military conquest-related victories in games without ever, not once, being the aggressor in a conflict. I'm sure many have encountered the same. Besides, blobs happen in real life, too. It's just that they don't tend to last because blobs are composed of individual actors who eventually die and are replaced by incompetent successors, whereas the player never dies and simply gets better at what he does. Throwing more difficulties at the player, paradoxically, doesn't contain him at all, it actually makes the player more pernicious through a form of artificial selection, much in the same way trying to kill all the bacteria gives us MRSA. Of course, the game experience tends to become a lot less interesting when all the fluff gets forcibly pared away by such things and you're stuck executing a single well-honed strategy designed to work around the annoyances.

That image is magical. And your explanation of how to blob even when devs try to unblob you is accurate to the letter. Well I also do declare war myself a lot because all there is is war. In the grim dark fake historical past of a Paradox game there is only war.

 

[Norfleet]

Thats because the game has badly represented economy/military aspects, no nation can wage eternal war. Coalitions are a good solution.

Correction: No nation that is run by a human being that has a limited lifespan and personal aganda, waging war against a human nation of equivalent parity, can wage eternal war. But that's not what you are in a video game. In a video game, you're a nation led by an immortal vampire lord pitted against a world of retards. The reason no nation can wage eternal war is because wars involve the costly mobilization of large numbers of people who then die faster than you can get new ones. However, this dynamic is not necessarily true of a video game, in which the player often can and does achieve kill ratios bordering on the absurd, using levels and numbers of troops that can be sustained by his economy without having to turn to an unsustainable war-level output. It is entirely possible for the player to fight a war without mobilizing or constructing any new units or raising any new taxes...and win. Why? Because the AI is retarded.

So either Revolutionary France - coalitions, or Roman Empire - internal issues - to contain blobs.

But all these issues are issues that the player will necessarily solve. That's the nature of a game: That the player must solve issues, otherwise he loses the game. All these mechanisms, therefore, ultimately fail. Honestly, this would probably happen in real life, also, if the country was ruled by an immortal overmind, which may very well become a reality in our lifetimes, and we will indeed see worldwide blobbing.

In short, blobs and other ahistorical outcomes happen because the player doesn't so much represent a human being as he does an immortal overmind. A good player is coldly rational, and treats all the pieces in the game as pawns. The player never neglects his empire because he wants to simply get drunk and pick up chicks. The player never dies. Even if the player's ruler character is a drunken idiot, the player won't be...well, maybe he will be, but he'll be the same drunken idiot. In short, blobs happen because the nations of the game are not run by humans, but by gods. Therefore, only games where the players are represented as gods and other immortal beings, are going to achieve results that match. Of course, these are not scenarios which are realistic...yet...

 

[MoLAoS]

Thats because the game has badly represented economy/military aspects, no nation can wage eternal war. Coalitions are a good solution.

Correction: No nation that is run by a human being that has a limited lifespan and personal aganda, waging war against a human nation of equivalent parity, can wage eternal war. But that's not what you are in a video game. In a video game, you're a nation led by an immortal vampire lord pitted against a world of retards. The reason no nation can wage eternal war is because wars involve the costly mobilization of large numbers of people who then die faster than you can get new ones. However, this dynamic is not necessarily true of a video game, in which the player often can and does achieve kill ratios bordering on the absurd, using levels and numbers of troops that can be sustained by his economy without having to turn to an unsustainable war-level output. It is entirely possible for the player to fight a war without mobilizing or constructing any new units or raising any new taxes...and win. Why? Because the AI is retarded.

So either Revolutionary France - coalitions, or Roman Empire - internal issues - to contain blobs.

But all these issues are issues that the player will necessarily solve. That's the nature of a game: That the player must solve issues, otherwise he loses the game. All these mechanisms, therefore, ultimately fail. Honestly, this would probably happen in real life, also, if the country was ruled by an immortal overmind, which may very well become a reality in our lifetimes, and we will indeed see worldwide blobbing.

In short, blobs and other ahistorical outcomes happen because the player doesn't so much represent a human being as he does an immortal overmind. A good player is coldly rational, and treats all the pieces in the game as pawns. The player never neglects his empire because he wants to simply get drunk and pick up chicks. The player never dies. Even if the player's ruler character is a drunken idiot, the player won't be...well, maybe he will be, but he'll be the same drunken idiot. In short, blobs happen because the nations of the game are not run by humans, but by gods. Therefore, only games where the players are represented as gods and other immortal beings, are going to achieve results that match. Of course, these are not scenarios which are realistic...yet...

I'd like to note that solving the immortality problem is necessary but, not sufficient, to solve the blobbing issue in games. You need immortality, near omniscience, imagine playing Paradox games without the ledger, time freezing, a league of other gods, and infinite redos. Removing each bonus will somewhat but not totally give the AIs more of a chance. If the player is merely immortal that is not ideal but is vastly better to current systems. An immortal human can make mistakes or fall to the crime of hubris. Being immortal would not help a human if they had 10 seconds to move and the AIs each did as well, scale the time up to a good number and try not to have a shit automation system. Changing the player's game capabilities helps as well, although some randomness might make players rage about luck. If your empire relies on godly stats, and you lose them, and you have a time cap, adapting your playstyle to account for new stats within the time limit may not be possible and you would bleed land to rebellions or wars.

If a system leaves me immortal but increases my duration of fun per game match without being stupidly arbitrary like overextension having a 100% cutoff for all nations and rebels scaling to nation size and shit, that is a hell of a lot better than not changing anything.

 

[Norfleet]

I'd like to note that solving the immortality problem is necessary but, not sufficient, to solve the blobbing issue in games. You need immortality, near omniscience, imagine playing Paradox games without the ledger, time freezing, a league of other gods, and infinite redos.

You can't "solve" the immortality problem, though, since solving this would involve killing the player. The only way you can really resolve this is to make this a core aspect of the game: Instead of "history, as directed by humans", "history, as directed if the King were actually an immortal vampire lord".

Removing each bonus will somewhat but not totally give the AIs more of a chance.

But that's not the problem. The AI has all those bonuses, too. The AI is also immortal. The AI also knows everything, probably more so than the human does. The problem is that the AI is stupid.

Being immortal would not help a human if they had 10 seconds to move and the AIs each did as well, scale the time up to a good number and try not to have a shit automation system.

The shit automation is an important part of blobbing. The automation is shit because the AI is shit!

Changing the player's game capabilities helps as well, although some randomness might make players rage about luck. If your empire relies on godly stats, and you lose them, and you have a time cap, adapting your playstyle to account for new stats within the time limit may not be possible and you would bleed land to rebellions or wars.

That pretty much just eliminates all of those things as viable elements of the game. If you can't depend on them, they aren't worth anything. And yet we blob anyway.

Why? Because ultimately, blobbing is the entire point of the game. Do you really think anyone plays the game for the sake of remaining exactly as they were when the game started? To precisely walk through the motions of real history exactly as things actually happened. That is not why we play these games. Sending things off the rails is the entire point. Blobbing isn't actually the problem at all. The problem is really more basic: The fact that the AI cannot keep up with the late game, because the AI is terrible at the game. Stacking super-bonii onto the AI does not make it less terrible, it just delays the blobbing while making the early game a frustrating annoyance because at that stage in the game, you don't have any pieces to play with anyway. And so the player resorts to various cheese tactics, as he must in order to survive against an opponent that is cheating as outlandishly as it does...and in the end, you still hit the blobbing stage, where the AI's advantage has now been overcome and no longer has the ability to oppose you as you paint the map.

It's all a single root cause: Shit AI.

 

[mondblut]

Why? Because ultimately, blobbing is the entire point of the game. Do you really think anyone plays the game for the sake of remaining exactly as they were when the game started? To precisely walk through the motions of real history exactly as things actually happened. That is not why we play these games. Sending things off the rails is the entire point. Blobbing isn't actually the problem at all. The problem is really more basic: The fact that the AI cannot keep up with the late game, because the AI is terrible at the game. Stacking super-bonii onto the AI does not make it less terrible, it just delays the blobbing while making the early game a frustrating annoyance because at that stage in the game, you don't have any pieces to play with anyway. And so the player resorts to various cheese tactics, as he must in order to survive against an opponent that is cheating as outlandishly as it does...and in the end, you still hit the blobbing stage, where the AI's advantage has now been overcome and no longer has the ability to oppose you as you paint the map.

Here here.

It's all a single root cause: Shit AI.

A non-shit AI's behavior past a certain point in blobbing would be begging to be annexed peacefully rather than wasting time on pointless resistance, lol.

But what ultimately matters is that AI does not buy the game. AI does not derive enjoyment from winning it or something. AI is only there to entertain the player. It is there to lose. And the whole point of an AI programming is to make it so that it loses gracefully and gives the gamer an excuse to pat himself on the back over being so smart and gud player over overcoming a "challenge" (which wasn't really there to begin with).