Total war games,boring gameplay?

[Axioms]

But that would require the game to be a simulation that actually modeled the reasons for those events. Even Paradox doesn't do that really. It is mostly lame scripting of events.

Yes it would, but you could abstract and simplify some mechanics. Also one idea from CK is good and should be used in more 4X/Total War style games: limits to the amount of provinces/cities you can rule on your own, and having to appoint vassals or governors to provinces above that limit.

That alone would already help in simulating more realistic ancient, medieval and early modern empires. Communication and travel was slow until the 19th century when railroads and telegraphs were invented, so in a large empire you can't have total centralization.
So the player will have to appoint governors or give land to vassals depending on distance to capital or on size of empire.
These governors can become corrupt and wage civil wars, etc.

And if those civil wars had mechanics that more consistently led to new rulers becoming independent, rather than the empire just going back to normal once the rebels were beaten, it would already add a lot more dynamism to the game.

There are many reasons for governors to rebel. There are just as many reasons for the population to rebel. A lot of these elements are already extant in both Paradox and Total War games. Religion, culture, etc. If you empire consists of many different nationalities, they will have a tendency to rebel. Same with religions. The Assyrian empire collapsed essentially because at some point, all the conquered peoples decided they had enough of being oppressed by brutal conquerors and rose up, and the Assyrian military couldn't handle all the pressure of the many rebellions, along with foreign powers using the opportunity to attack.

Then, just add a more dynamic stability stat, like the stability Paradox uses in the EU games except less static. Stability could be a factor of:
- how well the economy works
- how successful wars are
- whether your cities have enough food
- how much unrest there is among conquered peoples
- how multicultural and multireligious your empire is

And when you have a large empire encompassing many different cultures and religions, tensions are already high. One single lost major battle, or one major famine or plague, and everything might collapse. Cities where the majority of the population is of a different culture or religion will declare independence, governors and vassals will send armies to the capital to depose you, shit hits the fan. Suddenly you are no longer an invincible superpower, but are fighting for your life against an empire that turned against you.

The mechanics don't even have to be more complex than, say, what CK2, EU4, and Vicky2 are already doing. Except that these mechanics have more of an influence on whether your empire stays together or falls apart.

Field of Glory: Empires abstracts this with a decadence mechanism that works relatively well (except it is easy to game/sidestep):
Having too many regions increases decadence (as does having "leisure" buildings). Decadence contributes to making government inefficient, which can produce civil wars.
The problem is that it is relatively imbalanced now(and is only a factor in the beginning, or for some factions that have specific mechanisms for decadence , like the succeesors of Alexander, or civil wars, like Rome).
Actually, I find FOG:E much better than total War: it is less bloated, and the battle resolution system (FOG2) is much superior, even though the transition is a bit unwieldly(but no more than waiting minutes for the endturn of Warhammer Total War: Mortal Empires).

No system would make people happy if they couldn't get around it. At that point why not just hard cap growth by turn? Any soft cap method for preventing blobbing is going to be exploitable somehow. The same way any "building" or "trade" system is going to be exploitable whether its the FOGE system or the Civ district system. These are functionally "puzzle" mechanics inside an overall "game" based system. Once you solve them that's the end of it. This happens in most 4X and even city building games because the systems are inherently static.

 

[Axioms]

4X games and Total War style strategies should have mechanics that allow for civil wars in large empires, weakening the empire from the interior and allowing foreign powers to invade from the borders. That would break the whole problem of one faction becoming so strong it's unstoppable. Rome didn't progress to conquer the entire world, and neither did China. Both were fucked over by rebellions, civil wars, invaders who used the internal weakness as an opportunity, etc.

This is an issue I self-regulated with 4X, Grand Strat and TW games. I simply play balance of power taking on the top dogs while trying to protect and strengthen the weaker powers until they get strong enough to become the new top dogs.

In 4X it does eventually get to be too much just delays overrunning the map while Paradox games allow you that lovely option to simply pick another faction in your game to then turn against the empire you've built, but with TW there's a bit of middle room in that you can restore nations to power taking over settlements and then letting rebels pop to capture the region and restore a faction (At least Empire had that option when some idiots would one shot Spain or France due to their one province in Europe weakness).

The problem is that players don't want that. Imagine an internal politics system of similar complexity to the military system in games. You are squanching your audience so hard. The vast majority of all strategy gamers are military focused and furthermore want dictatorial deity like powers.

Players will accept all sorts of shenanigans from other players in multiplayer but as soon as the AI does the same thing they lose their minds.

You absolutely could create a game that allows for more interesting politics but you would have a lot of trouble making money, especially if you wanted to have decent modern graphics/UI.

I can't speak for others, but I can say that I wouldn't mind those things Jarl spoke of becuase they'd be put into a decent context and part of the game.

What I hate in CK2 is when AI rulers randomly decide they want just revoke titles like made to move them around and just provoke vassals into civil war. It happens too often to Byzantium where titles are revoked, given to tohers and revoked again.

Even going into those rulers using the console to change whatever traits lowers AI rationality doesn't help, all that does it keeping an eye on them and stoping the civil wars with the console until that ruler dies, or just knocking them off prematurely with commands as well.

In Civ 4, combat is the lamest shit possible. You just throw hordes of units at the enemy's horde of units. Yawn. Civ 4 with Total War style battles would be fucking awesome.

I thought the same until I finally played Paradox games, now I feel it would blend perfectly with TWs combat, if only to end the silly huge battles which can takes months to finish.

What I mean in that post is that the potential playerbase is too small for a commercial dev studio to justify internal nation mechanics. Obviously tons of dedicated strategy players would consider it awesome but those numbers don't support an actual game. You'd have to have an amateur or hobbyist dev do it and you'd sacrifice a lot in terms of art assets, user interface polish, and other such factors. In fact I am personally working on such a game but I get delayed by personal issues, job related stuff, or my two adventures in national democratic politics. I probably could have made major progress this year but I spent my savings on a politics related "vacation" with unfortunately mediocre results. If I had spent the full 7 months or so on the game I might be close to done. Although again the game would have the specified art asset/UI based limitations because that shit is expensive.

 

[Galdred]

No system would make people happy if they couldn't get around it. At that point why not just hard cap growth by turn? Any soft cap method for preventing blobbing is going to be exploitable somehow. The same way any "building" or "trade" system is going to be exploitable whether its the FOGE system or the Civ district system. These are functionally "puzzle" mechanics inside an overall "game" based system. Once you solve them that's the end of it. This happens in most 4X and even city building games because the systems are inherently static.

That is a good point. These mechanics end up being an optimization minigame. That is why I prefer military focused games that have you choose about the best options to counter your opponents rather than the usual economic side of 4X(but there are not that many. Strategic Command? Dominions?).
That is why I really wish Total War worked better with none of this "Empire management " nonsense (aka in Shogun 1).

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

No system would make people happy if they couldn't get around it. At that point why not just hard cap growth by turn? Any soft cap method for preventing blobbing is going to be exploitable somehow. The same way any "building" or "trade" system is going to be exploitable whether its the FOGE system or the Civ district system. These are functionally "puzzle" mechanics inside an overall "game" based system. Once you solve them that's the end of it. This happens in most 4X and even city building games because the systems are inherently static.

That is a good point. These mechanics end up being an optimization minigame. That is why I prefer military focused games that have you choose about the best options to counter your opponents rather than the usual economic side of 4X(but there are not that many. Strategic Command? Dominions?).
That is why I really wish Total War worked better with none of this "Empire management " nonsense (aka in Shogun 1).

Decisive Campaigns does an excellent job of integrating event and decision cards into the game to increase battle options at the risk of morale/VPs/etc. Considering TW games are turn based, there's no reason why they couldn't create that level of uncertainty and 'risk vs reward' type of system into their games. As it is, they don't, and the only thing you really have to engage with is provincial building upgrades and unit recruitment. TW games could be SO much more if they introduced more events and decision options for the player in regards to campaigns on the map.

For example -

 

[Axioms]

No system would make people happy if they couldn't get around it. At that point why not just hard cap growth by turn? Any soft cap method for preventing blobbing is going to be exploitable somehow. The same way any "building" or "trade" system is going to be exploitable whether its the FOGE system or the Civ district system. These are functionally "puzzle" mechanics inside an overall "game" based system. Once you solve them that's the end of it. This happens in most 4X and even city building games because the systems are inherently static.

That is a good point. These mechanics end up being an optimization minigame. That is why I prefer military focused games that have you choose about the best options to counter your opponents rather than the usual economic side of 4X(but there are not that many. Strategic Command? Dominions?).
That is why I really wish Total War worked better with none of this "Empire management " nonsense (aka in Shogun 1).

I disagree in one way. I think you can include management. But it has to be part of an integrated system. Economic conflict has to be interactive. Mini-game style separate systems are a no. Even if you sort of think of it like mana-ramp in Magic The Gathering, technically it is interactive in some sense but you can make a magic deck that does its own thing and wins in 3 turns, or you could a few rotations ago anyways.

In order to have interesting diplomacy or espionage or internal politics you have to interact with independent factors. So buildings that only interact with your own buildings will create a puzzle situation where doing the same thing gives the same result. Even if you change the starting point by playing a different nation or character the general ideas are the same. In contrast an economic system that has real interactivity with the other agents in the game is no more of a puzzle than the military aspect. If you play EU4 and play the same nation over and over the military side is basically a puzzle also.

The problem is when you abstract the economic system and have static values for economic assets that other players can't influence. Another player can't cause the economic bonus of your civ district to change. Or the production bonus. That's a flaw from the developer, it is not intrinsic to economics vs combat. If I build a super awesome trade district in civ 6 next to a slightly lesser district in an enemy city they have no impact on each other. It is totally possible to design a system where that is not the case.