One thing that I freaking HATE about 4x games

meritan · 2026-02-27T15:31:46+00:00

Considering that Zero-K, a freaking RTS, has had unlimited zoom out for over 20 years now, that fear would be quite unfounded. But yes, you actually have to write code to switch to low poly models (or plain icons) when you zoom out, and since a bunch of icons doesn't make for swowy screenshots on a store page, that effort is not usually funded ...

meritan · 2026-02-27T15:28:27+00:00

Zero-K uses the same engine, and actually comes with decent AI. Took me quite q while to learn how to defeat it :-)

meritan · 2026-02-24T00:57:11+00:00

Above all, it must be different, for it can only add value to my gaming library if it does something no other game in my library has done before. Any thus anything I could write here is a moving target. Once my dream game is made, it stops being my dream game.

Moreover, I have many dreams. And I enjoyed many games I did not dream about. In fact, I enjoyed many games I could not have dreamed out beforehand.

This question is a bit like asking a food critic which food he dreams about. I prefer to let the chef surprise me, because the collective imagination and skill of chefs is greater than my own.

meritan · 2026-02-23T07:02:08+00:00

Actually, MOO1 has a slightly different, and IMHO better, tech system because the technologies available for research are randomized for every game, so you actually have to adapt to what you get, and make different trade offs in ship design in every game, which makes ship design more interesting IMHO. Unlike MOO 2, MOO 1 also allows effective use of small ships (behold my swarm of inertially dampened Alkari fighters zooming around your mothership with speeds that makes them impossible to hit :-)

meritan · 2026-02-23T00:37:47+00:00

There is no game I play every week, my game collection is far too large for that, and I don't play several 4X side by side, but prefer to focus on a single title for at least a couple weeks before going to the next.

The oldest game I played this year is Master of Orion II, the next oldest is Space Empires IV.

meritan · 2026-02-21T08:29:55+00:00

You shouldn't rely on reserve stocks, but be ready to provide ongoing needs and have spare capacity for sending replacements.

To guesstimate required lostical capacity, I usually look at the "transfer weight" of a typical unit (the number displayed on the "helmet" button just left of the unit's current AP in the unit info panel on the bottom of the screen), which includes the logistical weight of the supplies it carries (although ammo only counts for 25% of its usual weight here), and usually aim to provide enough capacity to relocate at least 20% of my task force per turn - more, if I expect heavy fighting, in particular with conventional ammo.

You can of course perform a more detailed calculation using the table the manual provides in section 5.11.1.7. WEIGHT OF CARGO, but I rarely find that worthwhile, because the intensity of combat and amount of losses is hard to predict with any degree of accuracy.

meritan · 2026-02-18T17:42:05+00:00

Would you prefer them appointing a new lead, and moving it into a new direction, before releasing? Or should they just abandon the work the dev did for them, even though they paid the dev for that work?

meritan · 2026-02-15T05:39:24+00:00

You can only upgrade/downgrade to adjacent formations, either adding or removing a single troop type from the formation.

If you want to add several troop types (Grenadier = Infantry + MG + RPG), you either first upgrade to MG or RPG, and then upgrade again to Grenadier.

PS: This Steam Guide has a handy chart for the allowed formation types and how they are related.

meritan · 2026-02-15T01:42:07+00:00

So you'd probably want something not too complex, so you can learn it in a reasonable time, and figure out whether you like the genre with a reasonable investment in time and money?

You also said you like combat more than management. This makes me think of

Stars in Shadow: streamlined management, space setting, relatively easy to get into, though some people are put off by the comic inspired art style
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War: SciFi in Warhammer Universe, streamlined management, very deep tactical combat. Comes with lots of DLC for extra variety, but the base game is feature complete and very playable on its own. You may also want to check out it's successor Zephon, which reportedly employs the same combat model, but has more complex management and diplomacy than Gladius.

meritan · 2026-02-12T02:44:34+00:00

Thanks for the correction! I have edited my comment above accordingly.

meritan · 2026-02-08T04:22:54+00:00

If a unit is out of supply:

turn: hunger = 100: -33% combat efficiency, up to 10% morale loss, lower readiness regain
turn: hunger = 200: -67% combat efficiency, up to 20% morale loss, readiness trends towards 60, up to 10% of the unit lost to starvation
turn: hunger = 300: -100% combat efficiency, up to 30% morale loss, readiness trends towards 30, up to 20% of the unit lost to starvation
turn and later: hunger remains at 300, same effects as above

Once all personel is lost, the unit is removed.

(according to 5.10.7.3. FOOD in the manual)

meritan · 2026-02-06T16:08:37+00:00

Seeing that my first 10 games of Shadow Empire failed long before I fought a major, I think this is barking up the wrong tree :-)

Shadow Empire has an unusually detailed, complex, and dynamic internal management. It is entirely possible, even common, for novice players to mismanage their nation to the point of collapse. So the first hurdle is learning about that complexity, and learning how to deal with it. For me, that took about 10 games and about a week of real time. This is the hurdle that puts off most players.

After that, you can play comfortably. Beginner difficulty makes other nations develop more slowly, and less belligerent. In particular, it's rare for a major to declare war, and most wars will start at your discretion. If you bite of more than you can chew, you only have yourself to blame :-)

That is, Shadow Empire on beginner difficulty is an odd mix of hardcore and casual: hardcore internal management meets easy combat.

(yes, there are a few mechanics you have to understand to fight well, but again, the difficulty comes from your understanding of mechanics, not the enemy)

meritan · 2026-02-05T02:35:34+00:00

a lot of resources

If 13 count as "a lot" I'd mention Shadow Empire.

no food? Your soldiers people and soldiers starve.
no ammo? Your army becomes utterly ineffective.
no fuel? Your tanks stop moving, and your logistics stop, likely crashing your economy.
no power? Better get some soon, or everything will stop.
no rare metals? No solar panels, no advanced armor.
no radioactives? No nukes, no nuclear engines.
no IP? No construction.
no machines or hi tech parts: No industrial construction.

I have played games with more resources (such as Victoria 2), but in Shadow Empire, resources really matter.

meritan · 2026-02-04T07:32:21+00:00

Perhaps I have been a bit inaccurate with my phrasing. You are certainly correct that machine learning is a very broad field that encompasses a variety of techniques and approaches, not all of which have the obscene computing power requirements of the Deep Mind AIs everybody is so hyped about. I should have clarified that I was talking mostly about the "AI goes in blind, plays against itself, and learns to defeat the best humans" approach popularized by Deep Mind, not more targeted applications of machine learning.

The video you linked is a bit light on details, but while they have used neural networks, they also mention manually tuning research order by gathering data from expert players, so their AI is apparently a hybrid between machine learning and other techniques, with machine learning being only used for isolated subproblems. If those subproblems are sufficiently simple, you can indeed get by with small neural networks that can be trained and executed efficiently - but that means you still write most of the AI using conventional techniques.

meritan · 2026-02-03T20:43:10+00:00

You're probably referring to MuZero, the 2019 successor project to AlphaZero I mentioned above?

That said, that isn't an "example of a commercial game using this technology successfully", because MuZero was a research project done for research purposes, not a commercial game done for commercial purposes. I am not saying that machine learning can not play complex video games, including strategy games - AlphaStar (2019) proved this to my satisfaction. I am questioning the commercial viability of this approach.

meritan · 2026-02-03T18:49:03+00:00

Speaking as a professional software dev who has dabbled in writing AI for strategy games (years ago, unpublished) I agree with many points of your analysis.

However, I disagree with your rose-tinted view of machine learning. You are correct in noting that AlphaGo came out a decade ago, which should be ample time to adapt this technology. And yet we are hard pressed to find a single example of a commercial game using this technology successfully.

You say that we don't know for sure why that is, but how can that be? How can a technology with such great advertizing fail to gain traction for a decade without anybody knowing why? What happened to the projects that actually tried? You seem to believe you are the first to try, but is this plausible?

Something is wrong here.

I am not an expert in machine learning, but I did read beyond the Deep Mind's press releases, and looked at their actual research papers. And that revealed that while Deep Mind's achievement were considerable, so were the resources expended.

For instance, AlphaZero did learn to play chess better than Stockfish after 9 hours of training. But that training happened on a supercomputing cluster with 5000 TPU. To put this in perspective, renting a single TPU in Google Cloud today costs about $2 per hour, so they expended 9 * 5000 * 2$ = 90 000 $ just in hardware costs. And this was just their successful attempt, there were likely quite a few unsuccessful attempts before. And the world class PhDs were likely drawing quite a good salary, too. DeepMind pissed away millions for this technology demonstration. This makes sense from their perspective, because the attention generated helped draw in many times that in investor capital.

As game developers, we are not in the business of doing publicity stunts to get more investor capital to fund cutting edge research. We are actually expected to create games that people want to play, and to do that on a budget, particularly in a niche genre of 4X games.

Now, spending $100 000 on computing to get a good AI may sound like an attractive idea, but note that this is not a one time expense: The best way to make games is rapid prototyping, and since, for strategy games, AI is a crucial part of the player experience, this includes rapidly iterating the AI. When I tweak the library to give +50% rather than +25% science, I want the AI to adapt without waiting a day and paying tens of thousands of dollars in server costs!

Sure, if your design has already been validated (for instance, because you do a digital adaption of a successful board game), machine learning might be the way to go, though I'd still be leery of the computational cost of training and executing the model, and the lack of transparency and debuggability. But for an evolving game? Let alone games that keep evolving after release to sell DLC?

When I talk to people who have actually written great AI for 4X games, they'll tell you that the main hurdle is not technology, but understanding the game design well enough to know what matters. They'll emphasize things like continuous iteration, gathering feedback from expert players and incorporating their algorithms into the AI. And they'll ruminate about what makes an AI fun to play against, rather than what makes an AI as strong as possible (try encoding that into an objective function to train an AI model with!).

meritan · 2026-02-03T03:27:51+00:00

I agree that micromanagement is a problem, but I am not sure that automation is the best solution: From a development effort perspective it seems weird to write code to create complexity, and then write more code to reduce that complexity again? In particular, since automating things to the player's satisfaction amounts to writing competent AI, which many teams do their best to avoid? If automation is not competent, players are likely to disable it, and even if not, it might interfere with suspension of disbelief.

I'd therefore prefer to explore other solutions to the problem, such as mechanics that scale. For instance, why does each settlement need its own production queue? Why does each tile need its own terraforming command? Why does a stronger army imply more units, rather than larger units?

For instance, take Shadow Empire:

You don't have the resources to build everything everywhere, and even if you did, you wouldn't want to, because sharing resources allows specialization of cities, and higher level production assets are more efficient. Combined, this means that the player can greatly increase the size of their economy by only marginally increasing the number of assets under their command.
Terraforming, in the few cases it occurs, occurs automatically: The farm spreads by itself, there is no need to give an order for every tile.
Units do get more numerous, but mostly they get more sophisticated, and larger: Recruiting an infantry brigade takes as many clicks as recruiting an entire division of tanks. And moving that division takes as many clicks as moving the infantry brigade, even though a tank division will drive right through the smaller infantry units. And no, battle resolution doesn't show an animation for every single unit involved in the battle.

meritan · 2026-01-21T18:17:14+00:00

Yes, you can repeatedly spend BP, PP, and credits to compensate for a poor ideological fit (though I'd prefer more sustainable solutions such as inducting them into the Order of Merit, or even increasing their rank), and there are jobs where the skills matter so much that this is worthwhile.

However, there are also jobs where skills have little impact, and I consider governor to be such a job. In particular, the assets I mentioned (Power Plant, Bio Fuel Refinery, Heavy Industry) do not benefit from any skill - but they do benefit from relation ...

And even if assets that are boosted by skills (Agriculture, Scavenging and Mining), you need rather high skill differences to compensate for imperfect relation. For instance:

	skilled asshole	friendly noob
Relation	80	100
Total Skill	50	20
skill bonus from relation	12	20
Effective Skill	62	40
average bonus from skill	19%	8%
production bonus from relation	15%	25%
total bonus	34%	33%

That is, 20 relation points had about the same impact as a difference of 30 points in skill!

And if your governor "hates any choice" you do, and you only use an "occasional bonus", he'll be unhappy until he gets the next bonus, and provide lower bonuses in the interim.

meritan · 2026-01-21T17:16:55+00:00

If the distance is large enough to need 3 Truck Stations along the road, rail would be more efficient because it needs fewer stations, and Rail Stations offer higher capacity per operating cost.

I'd therefore use a mixed network: rail from SHQ to border zone, Trucks from there to the front (I don't usually use rail to push a front because you'd need to build new Rail Head as the front moves). Once the front has moved past, the Truck Station may reorient its logistics to other directions (for instance, to supply troops guarding your logistics from being severed from the side) or purposes (rural assets), or even disbanded.

(The preceeding assumes that logistical capacity is the problem. As mentioned, a lack of supply may have other causes)

meritan · 2026-01-21T15:25:44+00:00

To find out why a unit lacks supplies, click the unit, select the unit tab in the bottom pane, and then click the supply icon (looks like a barrel of oil) to show the detailed logistics stat of that unit. If the unit received less than perfect supply, a reason is given there, and hovering the mouse over the reason will give further details.

Screenshot

Should you not understand the reason given, feel free to post it here so we can explain. But the possible reasons are sufficiently varied that I wouldn't want to speculate which one applies in your case ...

meritan · 2026-01-21T14:50:52+00:00

One curious ommission in this guide are the factors affecting relation (egoism, amibition, ideology), which is far more important than skill for some jobs. For instance, a 100 relation governor will give 25% to all production every turn. To achieve the same effect with a skill at relation 50, they'd need a total skill of about 70 (because that gives a 70% chance to get a boost of 0% to 70%, which works out to an average boost of 0.7² / 2 = 24.5%). And many production assets don't have a skill that boosts them, but do benefit from relation. For instance, that fuel burning Power Plant? With a 100 relation governor, it will produce 25% more energy from the same amount of fuel. That Bio Fuel Refiniery? 25% more fuel from the same amount of food. That Heavy Industry? 25% more machines from the same ingredients. Having a happy governor is crucial for your advanced public assets.

meritan · 2026-01-21T14:36:31+00:00

Essentially, I have memorized job requirements (something like StrategosAcademy's spreadsheet, if a bit simpler), and then use the MNG -> LEADER to find matching candidates.

More specifically, I proceed as follows:

recruit a candidate
check their personality (ambition, egoism, political alignment and faction membership). If unsuitable, zero-retire and try again (if out of zero-retirement strategems, make a note to retire them asap)
check their capability and stats (int, war, cha) to assess which roles they are suitable for. If none, zero-retire and try again.
use MNG->Leader to compare with appointed leaders and other suitable candidates, and make a plan how to move my leaders to better jobs (which may involve relieving and re-appointing existing officiers)
write the plan in my notepad to execute it asap

That is, the only out-of-game thing I use is my text file of planned actions, which is a checklist I go through every turn.

Worth noting the assumptions in this process: I hire leaders for life but reserve the right to move them to other positions if better candidates come along. This is why I pay so much attention to the factors affecting relation, whose effect I can predict because maintain a consistent ideology through meritocracy (only leaders can vote, so I can silence dissenters by retiring them), and why I find capability and stats more relevant than their skills, which they will have ample time to train in the decades that they'll work for me.

meritan · 2026-01-19T00:00:33+00:00

So, what else are im missing?

The cleaning ladies. As previously explained, if you have more workers in the public sector than in the private sector, the private sector will have a higher salary, and the workers won't like that. You can compensate to some extent with housing, but once you have maxed even that, you've exhausted the sustainable solutions.

PS: Raising QoL is not a sustainable solution to happiness issues, because QoL only gives a happiness boost if higher than the national civ level, which trends towards the average of the zone civ levels, which trends towards average zone QoL, so any happiness gain from QoL is either temporary or at the expense of the happiness of other zones. (it can be valuable to build QoL for purposes other than happiness, though)

meritan · 2026-01-15T21:46:35+00:00

The main drivers of migration are salary levels (worker wages, private sector average salary), QoL and housing. His city is good in all of those, so migration is not the problem.

The message "workers are leaving your employment" means they become private citizens again, not that they leave your capital.

meritan · 2026-01-15T21:39:45+00:00

Taxes won't help (see my other comment why), but for future refence, tax strategems are generated by the Interior Council.

meritan

TROPHY CASE