How many strategies do you know that are not fantasy autism, space autism, or historical autism? Why are there so few games about our times?
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How many strategies do you know that are not fantasy autism, space autism, or historical autism?
Can you form a viable world gov yet and build giant space ships?
Otherwise I'm not interested
Even managing something like a city state would be cool if you could be based
Too many actors with non-negligible power in our times. Making a game about it would be fiendishly hard.
terra invicta
>Not sci fi
>Not Fantasy
>Not historical
wtf do you want
Obviously a game that happens this very moment, no sooner, no later, but right now.
No, the period from 1950 to 2050 would be good
>playing games that were created by greedy corporations for the sake of profit
There's a 1946-2020 game coming out soon.
Here's hoping it's not too biased by the creator (he is Polish and those people practically worship America)
Atleast it's not ostalgie-tier idealization.
Plague inc
Red alert 2 and 3.
X-com series.
>inb4 alternate present doesn't count
>mentioning Red Alert instead of Tiberian Dawn which is as present-day technology as it could get
Yes why do people living in a dystopian cyberpunk future™ want to play a fantasy version of another time period for escapism?
Truly a mystery.
Cause the one guy who's doing it right now is shitting the bed so bad it scares everybody off. Yes. I am still mad that Eversim makes games that terrible.
>How many strategies do you know that are not fantasy autism, space autism, or historical autism?
Superpower 2 and Realpolitiks are both games with modern day scenarios, though in SP2's case the game is so old now that what you start with can be considered a historical scenario at this point.
>Why are there so few games about our times?
They're just boring. You either get an experience that's purely a sandbox in which your only real option to keep things interesting is to blob, or you might get some speculative sci-fi that just comes off as silly. I've tried getting into Superpower 2 before and found it to be really boring because nothing really happens event-wise to keep things interesting, though it's fun watching India and Pakistan blow each other up with nukes.
That answer only covers GSG's though, if you're more diverse with what /vst/ games you're into there are several RTS's about modern wars such as the recent civil war in Syria, all of them of varying quality. There's even an RTS about Russia invading Ukraine that came out in 2017, though I haven't played it so I can't tell you if it's good.
I heard they had a Focus-like situation where they fired all their proper devs and just had whatever remained dress the game up and shipped it as a barely functioning sequel. I've only ever consumed GPS through let's plays, but if you were a proper fan that actually played the games I'm sorry about what you're going through.
> even an RTS about Russia invading Ukraine that came out in 2017, though I haven't played it so I can't tell you if it's good.
Can't find it, do you have the name?
I think he meas Combat Mission: Black Sea
More of a tactical Wargame, than RTS.
SERBIA
Nobody want's to play as a cucked nation.
Better to play as Albania if you want a start in the Balkans.
Nobody want's to play as a bastard nation.
Better to play as Croatia if you want a start in the Balkans.
Because no one knows how modern geopolitics and global economy work. People say they do, but they don't.
>supposed to build colony ship
>doesn't even tell you the requirements
I hope they fix it.
>Why are there so few games about our times?
Because our world is pretty much bipolar at best and boring as hell in terms of geopolitics. We live in a post-blob world. Historical strategy games that PDX makes like CK3, EU4, or Vicky are set at turning points in history where regional balance of power is still in flux. Look at how many popular alt-history mods for these games further fragment major powers to make a more interesting sandbox experience.
spicy looking Slovakia
First, how exactly are you going to prevent a communist uprising at the studio? Just have them not read anything historical post-WW2? Second, how are you going to simulate modern warfare, guerilla warfare, economy, political interactions? Memes?
It certainly was Realpolitiks answer.
The scale is really fricked up. You’re talking about a game global in scale, say like Hoi4. But unlike Hoi4 you aren’t talking about warfare on the strategic level, where divisions make sense. Warfare is incredibly deep today, you’re talking about operations where the actions of individual companies, battalions and regiments are what decide wars like Iraq, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, African civil wars, etc. So the entire globe would have to be scaled for battalion-level units at the very least.
Nuclear warfare is also just not very compelling for a grand strategy game. It’’s by definition going to be something you only do once, and also the failure state of your game. So imagine building up an Arsenal just to not use it. To go back to Hoi4, imagine building an army and just not going to war.
Espionage is just really difficult to implement. As gameplay it’s incredibly passive and boring. I’ve only played two good espionage games, Sigma Theory and Terra Invicta, and I think Terra Invicta was at least heavily inspired by Sigma Theory. To make espionage fun you also have to scale time a lot. So, again, you find a problem where you ideally want to go hour-by-hour but some things won’t be fun at that time scale.
As much as people hate it I think Victoria 3’s combat system at least fixes a lot of these issues. Abstracting the entirety of warfare is kind of silly but it’s the only way a cold-war or modern game could be feasible.
>So, again, you find a problem where you ideally want to go hour-by-hour but some things won’t be fun at that time scale.
Easy solution: keep the player busy.
I mean yeah that’s how Terra Invicta does it, it gets away with modern geopolitical gameplay being boring by adding a huge space game around it.
So I guess the answer to how you make a modern grand strategy game is to make an entirely other game.
>Nuclear warfare is also just not very compelling for a grand strategy game. It’’s by definition going to be something you only do once, and also the failure state of your game.
You could make the breaking out of nuclear war your primary defeat condition.
Rather than losing if you lose a war or run out of resources, you lose if such a war breaks out. And the game is then all about trying to prevent it while maximizing otherother conditions your faction cares about, like staying a democracy or keeping the military dynasty in power.
It’s not just the defeat condition though. To make a war game or even a war-adjacent game in modern times, nukes and the choice to pursue them are going to represent really unsatisfying gameplay. Like, in a nuclear world China and America just can’t invade each other if nuclear war represents a fail state. Nukes will lower the likelihood of getting attacked for the player, so they’re incentivized entirely toward pursuing them, yet they also increase the risk of attacking another power. I just don’t see the nuclear deals and trade agreements we have in real life to disincentivize nuclear proliferation as being good enough to dissuade a player. It will essentially work the fun out.
I think it would be brave to actually continue the game after nuclear war with all the climate and population damage, but again you’re looking at a problem with scale. It would be hard to make a game that could compellingly simulate a global economy with 7 billion people, and an economy with the 3 billion we’d have after a global nuclear war. Even small nuclear exchanges will have a huge impact on the world. Terra Invicta, again, does this really well, but in order to do it it requires heavy abstraction of national economics and ultimately it only serves as a sideshow to the real game.
Too complex to represent properly, but not enough conflict to make it abstract.
Any game that takes place before the current date is by definition historical, and every one that lets you go past the current day is by definition fantasy (speculative fiction).
>Why are there so few games about our times?
What the frick would you even do in a present day strategy game?
Go to war with the middle east for 20 years and lose the monent you stop fully occupying the country? Start a war with a non-middle east country and have the entire world band against you making it very hard to move the borders? Choose an option to align with the wrong country and suddenly face a coup? Go against the wrong groups and get assassinated?
A modern strategy game is just the democracy series where the entire game is just changing sliders and choosing an option here and there.