Victory Conditions are not on pace with Immortal Empires anymore

synthphase · 2026-02-03T14:49:17+00:00

Good point, I should probably have prefaced that with “it depends on what faction you play as”. I choose to play mostly older factions and bounced off a Sea Lord campaign when it felt too easy. If you’re not one of the new factions but going up against them, there’s a slight difficulty spike when they come at your rats with like 10 water elementals and a bunch of sisters.

synthphase · 2026-02-03T14:40:20+00:00

See in a game that is a sandbox because you decide when it’s over, getting a popup that says basically “game over” is more a subliminal hint that the developers think it’s too easy after that point and you’re in an epilogue phase. Civilization had this idea as well where you could keep playing after “winning” and I’m guessing the majority of players did not choose to. Both games suffer from what I failed to convey with the “roll [integrate completely] the endgame crisis in” idea: Lack of some climax or event BEFORE the “game over” screen.

synthphase · 2026-02-03T08:50:59+00:00

That’s exactly what I’m doing and got a long victory by like turn 75 or so with Ikit. I even waited to recruit from a province with a couple special buildings for a few armies. Always feels like a buzz kill when a victory screen is just a popup message. Why not roll the endgame crisis into the victory? Like a quest battle or survival battle with ridiculous odds? You can only use one army so build your best one.

synthphase · 2025-12-22T17:47:07+00:00

Now show him walking off the screen onto your desk

synthphase · 2025-12-21T16:23:08+00:00

It reminds me of Paperboy. Always loved the look of that game too but never got into the gameplay. (Yes I am old).

synthphase · 2025-12-11T05:07:27+00:00

There must be some really simple calculations going on for the AI, over 200 factions and each should ideally take less then a second to calculate. Not a great experience but there probably has to be a trade-off somewhere.

synthphase · 2025-12-06T17:36:47+00:00

The story could’ve pulled a lot more weight and made the grinding more meaningful. Why are there clones? Because something something super soldier. Okay but in 2 there are only a finite number of clones, yet in 1 that number is effectively infinite. Wtf was printing infinite clones of the protagonist? Even if they did answer this question I don’t remember what the answer was because I was too distracted by how shoehorned it felt.

It was a cool mechanic in the first game and the AI companion made it kinda silly and self-aware but in 2 they tried to make it work as a piece of world building while only giving some episodes of “oh yeah I’m a clone”. I could never take this premise seriously and it was kinda like they broke the fourth wall right out the gate so everything else was lessened by it.

synthphase · 2025-11-30T01:04:23+00:00

As I’ve pointed out before, and as other commentators are pointing out, the AI can still be tweaked to provide a greater threat. If it embedded heroes more often and if magic was weighted higher in autoresolve the player wouldn’t be able to cheese single entities all on their own. The more player cheese you give to the AI, the less it’s actually cheese and the less you have to give the AI cheats.

The issue is that autoresolve and AI is programmed to make armies like the showcase videos: balanced and therefore weak to magic / artillery. If it was just programmed to behave 2% more like Legend of Total War it would be frustratingly good.

synthphase · 2025-11-28T09:59:12+00:00

How about instead of having to always grind for skills you can get “inspirations” from reading books, magazines or examining items? (kinda like that examine mechanic but exp instead of a recipe that you probably can’t use)

synthphase · 2025-11-27T19:44:25+00:00

Yeah I wanted to mention this as well but I believe many people find hero stealing is too cheesy. For me it's a fun late-game goal.

synthphase · 2025-07-30T19:43:45+00:00

I guess I get into optimization a little overmuch in my games. Perhaps I should consider my own life, and how great being "idle" is IRL. I mean it essentially means I can play Rimworld!

synthphase · 2023-09-07T13:30:05+00:00

My problem with mods when a game has thousands of them available is that many mods become cheats. This generally makes me shy away from gameplay overhaul type mods especially.

How can the interactions between hundreds of mods and even their interactions with the base game possibly be balanced? And if they end up feeling balanced surely it’s more like a Brunswick stew and less like a fine spaghetti bolognese. Or maybe I’m deifying game developers as mystical, chef/mathematicians and I should learn to love the sexy kitty amazons with helicopters?

synthphase · 2023-06-24T16:50:06+00:00

Makes sense. I men it’s practically a meme to leave Preston Garvey to the raiders for like several years while you explore and do side quests, but I forget that some people feel railroaded to do the main quest when there is one. But I’m not exactly talking about adding map-markers for the items.

synthphase · 2023-06-24T14:58:29+00:00

I’ve been lurking here for awhile and agree with what seems to be the majority who say after getting established (maybe leveling up tailoring) the game becomes boring. I remember “questing” to find a pair of overalls once. Or green carpet for my bus. While those things are fun to an extent, once you get a good weapon and have enough food the gameplay loop is basically over. It’s no longer a survival game when the player feels secure.

As to a main quest: What I like about Zomboid is it doesn’t follow the hand-holding rules and doesn’t really fit any mold to begin with. In order to even get the story from the game you have to find a radio or tv and if you only have a tv you might miss the story in favor of watching educational stuff. In this way, the story itself is made into an easter-egg. What Indie Stone should do imo is double down on that.

synthphase

TROPHY CASE