I’ve written previously about how strategy games give you a pretty weird angle compared to reality due to how they function, specifically that because they put you in charge of a state and they have a win condition, you become pretty psychopathic with regards to your state. It is only a means to your end.
I’m going to come at this from another angle today. I was thinking about it when I was playing GalCiv, because as I am playing as the Humans I’m sort-of-but-not-quite RPing them as they’re written in the backstory; canny traders, excellent diplomats, with an iron fist in the velvet glove. Now GalCiv has election events that are incredibly trivial. You choose a political party and have regular elections. If your party wins you keep their bonuses (Say, +20% to your influence). If they lose, the bonuses go away until you reclaim control. But if they lose you are still in control. Now from a gameplay perspective this makes perfect sense. Nobody wants to sit back and watch your civ get run into the ground by the AI over the next 30 turns or whatever. That doesn’t make it any more sensible or less jarring; ultimately in strategy games you are your state/country, and anything along the lines of elections, changing dynasties, or anything else is entirely secondary at best.
What’s weird isn’t that they do this, it’s that they try and pretend they don’t. I don’t mind being told “You are the overarching driving force behind the French Empire rather than any particular leader or government therein”. But then a game will turn around and I will be presented as being the particular leader or government, such as EU3 where every notification is addressed to “My Emir” or “My King” or what have you. But how can you address this?
The Tropico series has possibly the best approach. You are a tinpot dictator and one of the ways in which your score is evaluated is by how much money you have embezzled from your own country over the years. This is a brilliant little mechanic, because you are actively reducing your abilities in one field in order to bump up your endgame results elsewhere. You’re still just going for the nebulous “score” but it’s something. One idea I had was to essentially provide you with ostentatious monuments to build, of truly obscene scale (Think Bender when he becomes Pharaoh), and the larger you build it the better you are. Civ used to do something vaguely similar where a good performance would make your palace or throne room better, a nice sidebar to the main game, and there’s a mod for Civ IV where you really can lose control of your empire to the AI for a number of turns, an interesting if frustrating feature.
Do you have any examples of this issue being done well? How might a game merge leadership of an in-game actor like a country with being an individual leader? Thoughts and ideas!
Anyone else feel like humans don’t deserve the “diplomat” bonuses we keep giving ourselves in multi-species strategy games?
I was thinking about that one recently. It’s pretty common across sci-fi (e.g. Bab5, Star Trek) and I think it might have something to do with the fact that we tend to create fairly rigidly defined alien races – the warlike race, the pacifist religious race, the greedy trading race – and what’s left is for Humans to be somewhat more of a jack-of-all-trades with some diplomacy on top, presumably because we like to think of ourselves as a reasonably balanced and sane species (ha!).
I liked how Populous did it: you are their god.
Michael, I was just going to mention Populous.
I think where GalCiv and its kin mis-step is in allowing you to pick a political party at all. Instead of selecting a political party and gaining bonuses when it’s in power, allow each party to have its own bonuses and let the player nudge things toward one party or the other depending on what bonuses the player prefers and what the civilization needs.
(In fact, it might be more effective to remove bonuses and instead implement difficulty factors for changes to the civilization depending on the proclivities of the parties. A party with an liberal foreign policy, a conservative domestic policy, and a liberal financial policy might make it easier to fund the military and deregulate commerce, but more difficult to fund public works and welfare, for instance.)
I overlooked Populous, but it’s a good example of doing it rather well (especially Populous: The Beginning, when you are an actual in-game character and stuff as well).
I like your other ideas Noëlle, shades of Victoria 2 in there, and I think having the underlying political stuff like that have an effect which is a step removed from your own control of the civilization would be a big step in solving my issue with it.
Romance of Three Kingdoms series.
At last some of them. I play mostly IV-VIII. The old have to old interface and the newest are rather bad(in my opinion).
In this games you are a named character and you lead your faction. You can even diue and then you choose succesor. Having happy(and skilled) personel is important because they are key to winning(coz they do everthing and you cant do a thing without them). Any of genreals and governors are named character with some personality. So they can desert you or switch side if you fail.
In some of RotK games you can play as any of them(not only as faction leader) so you can start as wanderer and become a faction leader.
There’s another game I completely overlooked for this post! The inter-character interactions in RotTK are often a bit too shallow, but in principle yes, the way it does things is very good indeed!