Bay 12 Games Forum

So how do you guys feel about frozen planet classes being the only ones with high weights for minerals and engineering research? It seems like picking anything other than snow species is gonna suck

nah, it just means that non-snow species will have to either get lucky, or prioritize some way of getting on to snow planets (like robots, gene editing, or incorporation snow species into empire).

starting snow planets aren't likely to be much more mineral rich than non-snow starting planets.

Just read a backer Dev update. Lots of very interesting things in it!

To start, the geoscape map is going to work somewhat like the original X-Com but crossed with a 4X game. There will be hundreds of points of interest scattered around the globe and as you expand outwards from your base you will have the opportunity to explore these and interact with them. They could be havens (independent or part of another faction), scavenger sites, alien bases, and the like.

The overall map of the game is built at the start using a simulation of the factions and aliens expanding out into the world and competing, so there promises to be a lot of variation from game to game on what is where any why.

Weapon Ballistics is also getting a full overhaul and is going to be much more like the original X-Com with each individual shot being modeled out. A missed shot could still hit someone, and cover is going to be just that. Cover based on whether or not it gets in the way of the shot or not. You'll be able to see some stuff when firing to get an idea of the overall chance to hit as well as what cover is likely to get in the way.

Sounds like things are shaping up interestingly. Hopefully we'll get some more demo videos and the like soon so we can see what all of this looks like in-game.

what i took from the update

"we are adding back in all the good things that the dumb-downed firaxis reboot took out"

Watching a vid of that... I have to say, that game may have the most doggedly persistent base enemies I have ever seen, in a metroidvania at the absolute least. Those little zappy shits get around like holy crap. I don't think I've ever encountered this type of game where you could straight up run a train on literally dozens of enemies.

... basically, the game's initial enemy? It's faster than you. It's faster than you, it basically never comes alone, and it can climb walls. And ceilings, I think. Basically everything. Once they aggro, they do not appear to stop chasing until you kill them, do not care about your paltry room boundaries, and will happily pile thirty of 'em into the same room with you, more combat dropping from above as they do it.

It's kinda' amazing to watch. Less sure I'd want to actually play it, but it's a helluva thing to watch.

They do eventually stop chasing, and while they charge faster than you walk, they're pretty easy to outmaneuver using wall-jumps (and the standard double jump ability comes relatively early). But yeah, the game has taken a lot of flak because it doesn't have traditional metroidvania rooms/screens which means no pre-placed enemies; waves are spawned dynamically (with an audio cue). There are some challenge areas where the waves are continuous. People looking for something like Symphony of the Night or La-Mulana were pretty thrown. Especially when the enemies that float through all walls and terrain start coming...

The powering-up curve is much more dramatic and by the end of the game your mobility options are pretty extreme and you're required to use them well; boss fights are often several screens in the air. The key element is that hitting an enemy resets double-jumping, and you eventually gain additional in-air mobility options.

Ultimately the game is an interesting evolution of metroidvanias that throws out a lot of the standard rules and does its own thing.

p:. why would tax law be changing the game?  ill bite

In most European cultures for most game period times, there should be no such thing as passive tax income from your vassals. I'm not talking about your demesne's income, but the automatic transfer of a percentage of income every month up the feudal chain. With Conclave, we got feudal obligations that always include tax. Pre-Conclave, CK2 was actually closer to reality with the default law being feudal vassals paying no passive tax. In any case, passive tax, like a modern "income tax" didn't really exist.

Taxes - of specific types - were levied at specific times for specific purposes, and the specifics varied from culture to culture. Some of these are actually semi-in-game. For example, when you or your heir gets married, you get a choice between a money bonus or a prestige bonus. That's a prime example of a "feudal aid" - one of the few ways the king would actually extract money from his vassals. In-game this is just treated as imaginary money that appears out of nowhere, but in practice it was a major source of feudal revenue. In practice, it was a constant tug-of-war between kings trying to extract more aids and nobles resisting, often violently. One of the major elements of the Magna Carta was to restrict the occasions when the king could extract feudal aids. The generally accepted ones, which CK2 should use or at least be based off of: when the king needs to pay his own ransom; when his heir comes of age; when his eldest daughter is married; and maybe when he goes on Crusade.

And of course there were other types of "taxes." Feudal "incidents" and "reliefs" were a large source, at least in England: when a lord inherited a fief, his overlord would generally expect a payment to "confirm" the inheritance. Of course, the noble could sometimes get away with not paying it, if the king were weak or the noble was in a position to somehow avoid paying. The amount would generally depend on the size of the fiefdoms inherited. In some situations, the king or lord would be able to hold on to the land (and gain the income from it) until the inheritor paid the relief.

There are plenty of other interesting examples. Many countries and rulers collected a danegeld, which was a tax on all landholders to either pay off Viking invaders, or to pay for an army to fight them off. Again, in CK2 terms, this was an event-based tax that began very infrequently (the first English one being collected in 991, and the second in 1002, and again in 1011), but that rulers would often try to collect on more and more occasions, with increasing resistance from landholders.  By the 1050s Edward the Confessor tried to make it a permanent, regular tax, but was forced to discontinue by the nobles. (You can draw parallels to the later "scutage" tax as well, as it was based on land and levied for specific wars or campaigns, though there were attempts to convert it to a regular annual tax. By the 14th century the scutage was obsolete).

Judicial fines were also a huge source of royal revenue. In practice we already see this in CK2 via the sort-of indirect method of "well I can imprison this vassal for whatever reason, why don't I just do that and then ransom him." Also in some events where you demand a fine from a vassal.

These are of course all things that would also make peace time more interesting, since CK2 vassals are always dying and inheriting lands. AI traits would naturally affect how the AI would act in various taxable situations. Ultimately, if the game accurately represented many of the ways feudal lords collected revenue from vassals and tenants, it could eliminate the entirely abstracted "income taxes" that the game has now. This would also differ from culture to culture, including within Europe, and norms would differ as rulers established more regular tax practices, with increasing penalties for expanding them. Obviously the Iqta, Tribal, and Indian areas would need their own rules (and probably the ERE as well as it wasn't feudal).

(Now, that's not to say that by the 14th and 15th centuries, nobles and kigns didn't make a lot of money off of import duties and other commerce-based sources. But that should be a relatively late-breaking development that requires significantly larger and more profitable City buildings and merchant republics.)

This has been quite the de-rail. Perhaps take it elsewhere?

It's not remotely a derail. The proper way of portraying the historical setting of CK2 has always a topic. Especially when the game's time from extended back to Charlemagne without actually changing the mechanics for Western Europeans.

Even if you're calling serfs slaves (which is definitionally wrong; slaves are owned by people whereas serfs are owned by land)

so you see the IMPORTANT DISTINCTION as the legal niceties of *how* the people are owned as opposed to the fact that people can be owned at all.

and that's before we get into how unbelievably stupid it is to think of land as being able to own things.

Just another perspective here:

Generally speaking, if you've got enough money to spend on extra shit in video games, chances are you have a job. You're already deciding to play x hours when you buy the game if you want to see the story through and get distracted by side quests on occasion. You might not have the time to farm for legendary equipment, regardless of the difficulty of acquiring it, considering real life does tend to get in the way of gaming. Why shouldn't someone working hard be able to enjoy the sweet sick loot that the game can offer just because they're busy? It's not breaking the game as cheats tend to do (since cheats keep getting brought up for some reason), and it's not like you're being forced to pay for extra shit. Since it's single player, it's not like it becomes Pay to Win either. It's just Pay to Have Accelerated Loot. While I don't really approve of microtransactions in general, in this case especially it's not something to get as pissed off about as people seem to be getting.

Obviously it's not about the normal people who can live functional lives. It's about the kids stealing parents' credit cards and the compulsives who can't control themselves.