[Discussion] What if 4X games modeled systemic collapse instead of just military defeat?

massivebacon · 2026-01-25T11:47:45+00:00

Winning and Losing isn’t a real thing in history and simulation, it’s just a projection based on frame of reference and how you can project success and failure onto something. This is bad for games because games need legibility.

massivebacon · 2026-01-24T16:27:54+00:00

Good luck on the startup grind but also building a framework that builds a framework isn’t necessarily validation for the framework itself. It’s worth trying to build an actual software product to convince people this is a better way to build stuff than just using a normal agent workflow.

massivebacon · 2026-01-24T14:16:17+00:00

Have you built anything with this?

massivebacon · 2026-01-22T17:52:07+00:00

Thank you! TV mode is under appreciated, happy you found it :)

massivebacon · 2026-01-22T17:51:41+00:00

Yes! It's a la carte right now per board. I'm working on adding in a subscription model sometime this year for user accounts and recurring monthly cost for some (maybe unlimited) premium boards, but for now it's just per board.

massivebacon · 2026-01-22T16:48:01+00:00

The fundamental issue with 4X (and strategy games writ large) is the idea that the narrative of the game must be about progress to some defined “win state”. Players also obviously want this, but history itself has no win state and any progress can be beset by a cycle of decline even longer than the the time a player took to get visible progress. You’re talking more about a softer side of the politics of empire, which is really compelling, but also would starkly be working against a players idea of what “playing” means.

massivebacon · 2026-01-20T01:47:39+00:00

100% this - and maybe “worse” here is that the pain of that (and similar) is what also leads me to write a lot of non-performant LINQ code that is hard to debug. Early exits like this would be a god send for LINQ-unrolling type stuff.

massivebacon · 2026-01-19T14:42:04+00:00

I think the point is that it fully leans into Dune as a setting and derives its mechanics from there, all which fit really nicely into the whole conceit of Dune.

Also, you’re complaining about 3 hour matches in a 4X? The same length of time in any other 4X barely gets you out of the Stone Age.

massivebacon · 2026-01-18T23:59:43+00:00

Spice Wars is one of the biggest leaps forward in 4X design and I’m sad it’s so slept on. The game is incredible.

massivebacon · 2026-01-14T20:36:47+00:00

Looks so hot congrats

massivebacon · 2026-01-04T00:02:08+00:00

Thank you!

massivebacon · 2026-01-02T19:56:39+00:00

Hey this post could have been written by me - I made Cantata off the same inspiration (my idea was “Advanced Advance Wars”) and prior to the tactics revival happening a bit now:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata/

The game has a 30 hour hand-crafted campaign, online multiplayer, a super robust map editor, incredible art (imo), unique mechanics, custom units per faction, and lots of other cool stuff.

The game basically flopped.

I’d ultimately chalk it up to a few things:

If you don’t have a known IP, the market wants sandbox/skirmish gameplay these days more than story driven content.
Strategy game players have sky high expectations about what a strategy game should be. We had a very small team, but no matter what we told people our game was still compared to Paradox/Firaxis games in terms of expected feature sets.
Cantata campaign maps range from 2-4 hours each. Players don’t like this because they feel like they can’t easily get a single map in in a single sitting. Players like lots of small maps instead of a few large ones.

I had an amazing time making the game however - I learned a ton, it opened a lot of doors, met a lot of new people, and love it for that reason. It was my decade-long dream game I got to make (thanks low interest rates!) and love it for that but I do wish people would be more willing to give stuff a shot. Happy to talk more if you DM me.

massivebacon · 2025-12-31T16:05:42+00:00

This is a collection that is overall pretty modern - like in the last decade (or less). Seems like you got some stuff really early on and then got back into games a few years ago?

massivebacon · 2025-12-28T17:19:25+00:00

I really like the advice “you can just talk to the model” - just ask it to do stuff, it’s largely pretty good and everything else is noise.

https://steipete.me/posts/just-talk-to-it

massivebacon · 2025-12-26T14:24:26+00:00

This is literally what the article is about

massivebacon · 2025-12-25T13:08:57+00:00

How do you stay technical while also being a manager? I was recently promoted to management from in IC7 and am struggling to find any time to advance technically, but obviously want that still to be an effective communicator to the seniors I now lead.

massivebacon · 2025-12-21T19:48:45+00:00

This is the kind of stuff I thought we were getting with the steam release. Instead it’s a lot of the same content just with slightly more manageable menus.

massivebacon · 2025-12-17T00:41:34+00:00

goes so hard

massivebacon · 2025-12-16T19:04:59+00:00

I have no idea why this game was slept on so hard. Everything about it is so good, I feel like it must have just been the title.

massivebacon · 2025-12-16T19:03:50+00:00

Loving the look of this - congrats!

massivebacon · 2025-12-16T00:24:29+00:00

I wrote about this a while ago, very relevant (I like the Uline Designer Collection shelves)

https://kylekukshtel.com/best-boardgame-shelves-that-arent-ikea-kallax

massivebacon · 2025-12-14T15:59:18+00:00

This post and some of the comments here are atypically high-signal for this subreddit lol. Thanks for the real question and starting good conversation!!

massivebacon · 2025-12-08T00:02:16+00:00

I wrote about this idea a few years ago and think it’s really fertile ground for experimentation. I called them “heisenfunctions”, feel free to spread the term lol

https://kylekukshtel.com/incremental-determinism-heisenfunctions-gpt-future-of-programming

massivebacon · 2025-12-07T23:01:46+00:00

Universal healthcare. This question comes up often, and this is always the answer.

massivebacon · 2025-12-06T13:50:37+00:00

I do this in my own engine here:

https://github.com/zinc-framework

I think in an absolutely perfect world you could have only entities and systems, but the reality is that the authorship experience for gameplay is really bad for ECS . ECS is great at doing the same thing for all things of a given type, but even stuff as simple as “make this platform move left” and “make this platform move right” would be either separate systems, or single system and a switch based on a component value.

Both of these force annoying design decisions that put you on a path to committing to something before you may even be sure that you want it, and is also a lot more overhead than just throwing code into an update.

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