Real Estate Development / Attorney It's later than you think.
Portland, Oregon
Joined October 2009
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Why four ways to win: extermination, score, ascension, expansion. Different empires chase different wins. The catch with ascension: it's a construction project, and when a rival starts one, the galaxy hears about it. Tradeoff: a public project paints a target. On purpose.
Meaningless diplomacy. If the AI's only offers are 'give me your tech' and 'we're at war now,' diplomacy is a menu, not a mechanic. An offer should have terms, a deadline, and a reason the AI wants it. Most useless AI offer you've ever gotten?
I've spent this year building a space 4X where you design every warship yourself, then fight with it in real time. More on the 10th.
My rule: if you need it to decide something this turn, it goes on the map, not in a menu. Territory and sensor coverage are always on. Fuel range shows for the fleet you pick. Orbital rings count the bodies in unvisited systems. Tradeoff: clutter, so it fades as you zoom in.
The end turn slog. Big 4x games get slow late. Part of that is the computer thinking. A bigger part is me clicking through 20 popups to find the one that matters. The waiting I can optimize. The popups are a design problem. Which bugs you more?
What should a 4x map show you without a single click?
100%Territory
0%Fuel range
0%Sensor range
0%Orbital rings
3 votes • Final resultsI have, however, added a new design wizard for ship designs. So you don't HAVE to place every module by hand.
Why I make you place every module by hand. The ship designer is the part of a 4x I care about most, so you fit every module on a grid, and the arcs show where each gun can actually shoot. Tradeoff: the first hour is steep. That's what the undo and module search are for. xitter.gq/zer0sumGames/status/21…
Tech tree bloat. A tree with 400 techs where 300 of them are +5% something is not depth. It's a spreadsheet. I want research where I can't have everything, so picking something actually means giving something up. Best tech system you've played?
Happy Halloween. The scariest thing in a 4x isn't the end-game crisis. It's a stack of enemy ships at the edge of your sensors that wasn't there last turn. Second scariest is the save from 2 AM when you said one more turn.
Ship designers: which tool would you use the most?
67%Visible firing arcs
0%64-step undo
33%Module search
0%Three-channel paint
3 votes • Final results Daniel DiCicco retweeted
Another beautiful to Sir Patrick Steward tribute that I ran across on Reddit
If the creator of this would let me know, I am happy to flag it
Collection of scenes from Star Trek: The Next Generation
I'm not crying, you're crying!
Paying tribute to a great actor and a fine human being
Snowballing. In most 4x games you know who won by turn 100, and the next 200 turns are paperwork. I don't think the fix is rubber-banding. Punishing the leader feels cheap. I'd rather the other empires notice you and act like it. Thoughts?
The one I care about most is the last one: calling off a bad war. The AI runs a war as an operation: scout, stage, commit, invade, hold. If it's going badly, it stops. Tradeoff: you don't always get your big battle. But an AI that fights to the last ship is one you can farm. xitter.gq/zer0sumGames/status/21…
