Part of it, I think, comes down to how most of these strategy games ultimately become perfect information games. Sure, they might have some amount of fog of war or other obfuscating details of other states, but you know and can manage down to the most intricate granularity any detail of your empire that you want. You know exact population numbers, revolt risk, growth statistics, economic power, corruption. If necessary you can communicate policy changes instantly.
A chunk of the cause of blobbing in strategy games is this absolute control. The reason why no state ever rose to such heights is because they couldn't, because the bureaucratic apparatus necessary to run such a conglomerate would be so slow and so prone to corruption that it would not be able to react to events as they happen, or even properly communicate these things up so that they could be reacted to at all. The only way these things could be handled was either through ruling over large but little (either large swathes of sparsely-inhabited land or... well, making them that by slaughtering those there) or through decentralizing the state to the point of automatous local rule. The problem with that approach, however, is that this problem is recursive. Additionally, the more power is given to individual components of a state, the less likely those states will act jointly in scenarios where concerns mostly lie with some other state. That is to say, having a mega-state of 1000 smaller entities is unlikely to do much of anything if a new threat only concerns 1 or 2 of them. This inability to jointly organize ultimately leads to collapse from either external forces or internal infighting.
The mega-blobs of so many strategy games don't exist in practice because they would collapse under their own weight. Either they are too centralized and information winds up delayed and diluted to the point where the ruler is effectively blind and living in the distant past, or too decentralized to the point where the state itself effectively ceases to exist in favor of local interests.
Part of it, I think, comes down to how most of these strategy games ultimately become perfect information games. Sure, they might have some amount of fog of war or other obfuscating details of other states, but you know and can manage down to the most intricate granularity any detail of your empire that you want. You know exact population numbers, revolt risk, growth statistics, economic power, corruption. If necessary you can communicate policy changes instantly.
Yeah pretty much. In my project I tried to design a fun imperfect information system. Aside from mechanical challenges you always have to consider whether players of traditional strategy/war games would enjoy it.One thing it's good to remember sometimes, is that you don't necessarily have to care if players of traditional strategy/war games would enjoy it, especially from the perspective of coming from said games.
Communication and reconnaissance is an under-explored element of historical warfare and statebuilding. The recent Highfleet incorporated a slick radio system into the basic gameplay loop that serves to moderate incoming information, a sort of mini-game that reflects the world's lore. So, a 4x that incorporated messengers and fog of war to an EXTREME degree, such that you know very little beyond what a few trusted sources are telling you. So intensely that you might only hear about battles occuring months or years after... and sending orders not in the immediate moment but in the hopes that, a few weeks down the line, your predictions will come true. sounds kind of boring but done correctly, with a proper meaty 4x behind the fog... it could be good.
One thing it's good to remember sometimes, is that you don't necessarily have to care if players of traditional strategy/war games would enjoy it, especially from the perspective of coming from said games.
First and foremost, plenty of folks that indulge in that kind of thing would be perfectly fine with some degree (even a lot) of innovation or different takes. Some of us just really want something other than modern military or mundane medieval cruft, ferex. Beyond that, there's more players out there than of traditional strategy/war games (rather a lot more, from what I understand of the proverbial market, even). Don't worry too much about stepping on stodgy, hidebound toes, just worry about making something that works.
Most states in strategy games appear to act like "hive-minds" where everyone acts in lock-step with perfect information. Modeling individual actors would help alleviate the issue, like the Crusader Kings series or even the Tropico series, but not remove it entirely.
Tropico (https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/tropico) might be closest to a "traditional" strategy game that is able to stop "blob-like" behavior. It's a city builder where war is merely a small part of it, and you already start off controlling the entire island, so if you're fighting a war against rebels or against the superpowers...you must have messed up somehow and now you're fighting for your survival, not for the right to conquer another island. Tropico also allows you to embezzle money from the government and stuff it in a Swiss Bank Account - it's an action only benefits you and harms your country utterly. Tropico also have the benefit of being a very small island, so you could simulate everyone living on said island effectively.
For a strategy game that is really good at replicating a non-blob ecosystem, look at the 1983 game Dictator (https://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/dictator) on the ZX Spectrum. It does so by having the following:
- A point system that rewards longevity, the amount of money you steal from the treasury, and whether you live or die in the inevitable uprising against you. The point system incentivizes caring about yourself, not the state that you run, so you are tempted to run the state inefficiently...because if you do run it efficiently, that state infrastructure might later be turned against you.
I'd argue as an indy developer, you have to target a niche market. Compete against EA and lose.
Above all else, it MUST be interesting. I'd advise towards easy to access/play. Not easy to WIN, but easy to get started and do stuff.
Those games sitting in development hell typically are there because they're difficult to do "basic" things. You want a good and simple foundation.
Blobbing is FUN, don't let anyone tell you different.
It usually is the result of having Total Control of the State, rather than playing as the Actor at The Top. It is also NOT a bad thing, necessarily.
Typically, difficulty in Blobbing games comes from Not Blobbing Fast Enough. I like Crusader King's Vassal system, where if the player is at risk of destruction by another Blob, they can just swear fealty and plot rebellion later. All games should have that. Most have a flawed vassal system where its almost impossible to declare independence again (usually it involved cheating the system and outgrowing your sovereign due their AI stupidity).
Victoria staked an interesting middle ground here, by having political parties that would vie for power, and which one was in power would impact what choices the player could/couldn't make. Since the player made a number of choices that impacted popularity of the parties, while not having perfect control over them, it never felt too heavy-handed to me, while allowing for the complexion/"feel" of a country to change over time.For a strategy game that is really good at replicating a non-blob ecosystem, look at the 1983 game Dictator (https://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/dictator) on the ZX Spectrum. It does so by having the following:
- A point system that rewards longevity, the amount of money you steal from the treasury, and whether you live or die in the inevitable uprising against you. The point system incentivizes caring about yourself, not the state that you run, so you are tempted to run the state inefficiently...because if you do run it efficiently, that state infrastructure might later be turned against you.
I think that explicitly giving you a goal to sort of separate you from the state is a pretty interesting idea for sure although it is pretty heavy handed in a way. I am attempting a somewhat more organic version of that strategy, a way of distracting the player from raw success with the rule of cool, as discussed in my latest substack post, which is about strategy games in general with some digressions about my personal solutions as an aside. Kinda shocked that a more modern for of Dictator hasn't been made. You could probably do it as an indie and it would be pretty refreshing to people burned out by map painters.
Good points above about control (and power to control...).
I think as a developer the question to ask should be 'why would players want to blob?' Clearly if the aim of the game, the win condition if you like, is world domination then blobbing it the simplest and most straight-forward strategy/approach. But then that does not have to be the desired end-state of the game. (Think of the common possibility of diplomatic victory... or more real world, cultural hegemony... albeit this is just domination on another level.)
As to 'how to stop blob' the first thing that comes to mind is a mechanism where the larger the blob becomes the more likely it is to fracture into parts, only one of which -at best- the player would control. Then the optimal state -thinking along the conventional power/control lines of most 4x- would be a civ of the size where the ability to influence the world has the best ratio to risk of rebellion (and the consequent falling back to a lesser power, now with additional enemies). So rather than just making the empire more difficult to manage - one way or another - actually increase in the risk of the dissipation of the blob.
One game interesting to look at in this regard would be Field of Glory: Empires where the final score is 'glory' accumulated by the empire and it is possible to win the game after having been completely eliminated (assuming your empire was glorious in its day) a long time before the end of the game. That game has some jankiness in its implementation of the mechanic but the conceptual underpinnings are very solid. Of course this is merely one other possible approach to the 'win' condition that drives players in a certain (different) direction.
Victoria staked an interesting middle ground here, by having political parties that would vie for power, and which one was in power would impact what choices the player could/couldn't make. Since the player made a number of choices that impacted popularity of the parties, while not having perfect control over them, it never felt too heavy-handed to me, while allowing for the complexion/"feel" of a country to change over time.For a strategy game that is really good at replicating a non-blob ecosystem, look at the 1983 game Dictator (https://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/dictator) on the ZX Spectrum. It does so by having the following:
- A point system that rewards longevity, the amount of money you steal from the treasury, and whether you live or die in the inevitable uprising against you. The point system incentivizes caring about yourself, not the state that you run, so you are tempted to run the state inefficiently...because if you do run it efficiently, that state infrastructure might later be turned against you.
I think that explicitly giving you a goal to sort of separate you from the state is a pretty interesting idea for sure although it is pretty heavy handed in a way. I am attempting a somewhat more organic version of that strategy, a way of distracting the player from raw success with the rule of cool, as discussed in my latest substack post, which is about strategy games in general with some digressions about my personal solutions as an aside. Kinda shocked that a more modern for of Dictator hasn't been made. You could probably do it as an indie and it would be pretty refreshing to people burned out by map painters.
Having said that, I do think the CK3 implementation of stress, where acting in accord with your personality is easy and acting contrary to your personality is hard, felt more RP-y than heavy-handed to me, and is the sort of feature I'd include in most of my simulations.
I suppose a more 4x-y analogue in a POP-like system would involve the POPs having opinions on all of your decisions... you can do whatever you want, but some portion of your population dislikes every decision you make, so insisting upon a path may increase unrest in a particular part of the population... and if that population has a large population in one place, will likely revolt.
I think another factor people haven't mentioned about blobbing is that population control/conversion is absurdly fast and/or easy in most 4X games. It's a process that should be generational... and even then, intra-cultural unrest is almost never really implemented. Space 4Xs tend to assume that if you start sending your primary culture in as colonists in your new conquest, stability goes up, and chances of unrest go down, and I think history suggests the experience is far less rosy. I think there's a fantasy mod for EUIV that is one of the only ones I've ever seen that has you set governmental policies around cultural/species minorities. (Which raises the point that, when you're talking species, where there's no possibility of reproductive assimilation, the process only gets harder.)
Along similar lines, the economic result of conquest in the majority of 4X games isn't just net-positive, but it is often either immediately or near-immediately net positive.
As a result of the above, conquering territory in most strategy games does not have an ongoing cost greater than the near-immediate value of the conquest, so there is rarely more than a short pause before the steamrolling continues, and even if the game doesn't have goals that drive the player to conquest, there's almost never a negative to conquest. (Paradox, mostly in CK, has implemented its notion of badboy reputation such that you at least have to slow down your conquest to not get stomped, but they also give a number of systems to mitigate that problem that... push credulity. :-) Plus, once you've reached a certain size, even getting ganged up on won't stop you.)
Incidentally Song of the Eons is actually being made by a former modder of EU4 who worked on trying to do things like represent communication inefficiencies and whatnot.
Though there were plenty of other people working on similar things; can't say it was all Demian despite them getting a good chunk of the credit. Which might explain their glacial development pace of their own game, but that's a story for another time.
I want to paint the map my color, and it's the traditional goal of a strategy game, so why would blobbing be bad?
If you want an alternate route, Axioms already has a very easy solution to the question of "how do I make this big empire less powerful than a group of small kingdoms that add together into a similar size," with your attention points. Not only resource inefficiencies and corruption, but with unrest events. The farmers are unhappy from a small drought. The kings might meet with them personally to shuffle food around, while the emperor might have to rely on the local military commanders' best judgements for dealing with the unrest. I'm sure that'll work out fine!
A good way to combat my desire to blob is to make it worthwhile for me to ally with AIs. Make them more efficient with the land than I'd be (easy for Axioms), and make them trustworthy enough to share technology with. My favorite example is Alpha Centauri's surrendered states. If you're winning a war hard enough, they'll try to surrender, with a permanent* alliance, give you all their tech every time you talk to them, and occasionally donate units to help out. Even if you then let them get stronger than you, they'll stay your vassal. And so I always treated them well, reciprocated by giving them all my tech back, and donated shiny new planes to help them defend themselves. I often even gave them back most of their cities.
*They still don't like major atrocities.
Obviously, that's still blobbing. But get me an AI ally that's worth conquering the world next to, and is trustworthy, and I'll share the conquered lands with them.
Perhaps there's room for a better long-term reputation system than Paradox's system of "They've answered the call to arms every time we've gone to war. We Trust them, but they're badboys and need to stop."
You could have them remember how much war score we've contributed to difficult wars. I saved them in a defensive war that would have ended them, and together we conquered parts of the rival that did it, so they have much more tolerance before they'll feel threatened by my rising badboy score.
You could give them long-term goals, and give us some sort of bargaining table. The AI wants all of Africa, but I want trading ports on the coast. If I give 10% war contribution to conquering the area, they'll let me have 10 counties and there won't be a relationship penalty for holding lands they want. Maybe I then give 70% war score for the area, and start and win a few wars for them, which I can use to buy off their interest in Australia and claim it all for myself. Or maybe they're strong enough that they think they can easily win the area alone, and don't want my help in claiming the area. Maybe they want me to do something with trade, or set up spy rings to bring down a rival, and 30 years later, after they conquer them, they'll give me the trading post counties without me having to send troops down at all.
Axioms might not be the best game for such a system, if your kings are people, and might change their long-term goals every time they die, but perhaps they're likely to continue their father's ambition if it's going well. Or perhaps they don't change that easily, since my own goals don't change just because my king dies.
The more I think about it, the more I want this diplomacy system.
On a different topic, have you heard of Song of the Eons? (https://demiansky.itch.io/songs-of-the-eons) I wanted to post about it back when you were asking for such games, but decided to wait until the first properly playable update, which was supposed to be last month. It got delayed, so I'll share now. It's a Paradox-style 4x grand strategy, in a fantasy world, across varied tech and development levels. It is a beautifully over-detailed simulation that puts Victoria to shame.
The Agents system (https://sote.miraheze.org/wiki/Agents) for population especially reminds me of Axioms.
While I'm talking about it, the write-up on their plans for the dwarves (https://sote.miraheze.org/wiki/Dwarves) looks very promising and should amuse fans of Dwarf Fortress and 4x games.