Conflict and Resolutions (Full Version)

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StormingKiwi -> Conflict and Resolutions (2/24/2021 4:07:43 AM)

I'm wondering about conflict and resolution in DW2. One major limitation of many strategy games I've played, and unfortunately Distant Worlds falls into this as well, is how militaristic everything is. Often, conflict is resolved through violence or disregard; rather than through different means that allow escalation of the conflict to occur.

e.g. someone settles a colony you had your eye on. You should be able to maneuver on different playing fields (diplomatic, political, social, economic) to bring it under your control. In a lot of strategy games, the two options you have are to forget you ever wanted to colonise that planet or warfare.

If the only way to exert your political influence and will is by building a fleet of ships that murder the other guy and take their stuff, then that's the way everyone will act. I think there should be more cooperative and competitive ways of interacting with other factions.



Jorgen_CAB -> RE: Conflict and Resolutions (2/24/2021 9:47:53 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: StormingKiwi

I'm wondering about conflict and resolution in DW2. One major limitation of many strategy games I've played, and unfortunately Distant Worlds falls into this as well, is how militaristic everything is. Often, conflict is resolved through violence or disregard; rather than through different means that allow escalation of the conflict to occur.

e.g. someone settles a colony you had your eye on. You should be able to maneuver on different playing fields (diplomatic, political, social, economic) to bring it under your control. In a lot of strategy games, the two options you have are to forget you ever wanted to colonise that planet or warfare.

If the only way to exert your political influence and will is by building a fleet of ships that murder the other guy and take their stuff, then that's the way everyone will act. I think there should be more cooperative and competitive ways of interacting with other factions.


I agree.. this is the lack of creative thinking in the strategy genre in general. I think it usually boils down to the fun factor. Blowing things up is more fun so that is what most stuff get concentrated on.

In reality conflict is an escalation of political and economical manoeuvring that finally ends up in some sort of conflict of arms. War is very rarely just something you declare out of the blue for no reason, this is VERY RARE!!

In games the agency that players wield also would be the wet drams of all authoritarian leaders ever born... this is another problem for how conflict is resolved in games. You need to give the player much less agency over what happens in an empire for conflicts to arise more natural. Either within or without the actual empire in question.

This is one reason why I like to play Aurora 4x which basically give the player almost full power to do whatever they want, even power to outright "cheat" whatever the like. It actually is more of a role-play platform so the player decide what are the limits and how politics ties into their game and build their story around this. It is almost impossible to make a game that only give the player the agency it "should" have and still be able to enjoy the game, 99.9% of the game would just play itself... ;)



zgrssd -> RE: Conflict and Resolutions (2/24/2021 7:26:16 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: StormingKiwi

I'm wondering about conflict and resolution in DW2. One major limitation of many strategy games I've played, and unfortunately Distant Worlds falls into this as well, is how militaristic everything is. Often, conflict is resolved through violence or disregard; rather than through different means that allow escalation of the conflict to occur.

e.g. someone settles a colony you had your eye on. You should be able to maneuver on different playing fields (diplomatic, political, social, economic) to bring it under your control. In a lot of strategy games, the two options you have are to forget you ever wanted to colonise that planet or warfare.

If the only way to exert your political influence and will is by building a fleet of ships that murder the other guy and take their stuff, then that's the way everyone will act. I think there should be more cooperative and competitive ways of interacting with other factions.

While that sounds wonderfull, there is one fundamental flaw with it: The AI can not play that game.

Game AI all have a fundamental weakness: They can not plan ahead. Not even a little. We are pretty good at faking it via Budgets, Economic Plans and similar tricks, but that is still no planning.
A surprising amount of things requires trivial amounts of planning skills:
- Not a issue for humans. We propably do it without realizing it.
- Totally impossible for the AI. I am pretty convinced we could make serioues Progress in AGI if we managed to pull planning off.



Vishniac -> RE: Conflict and Resolutions (3/1/2021 4:20:30 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

While that sounds wonderfull, there is one fundamental flaw with it: The AI can not play that game.

Game AI all have a fundamental weakness: They can not plan ahead. Not even a little.


Fine!
But there's no such thing as "the AI". It's not a person, a being or something else: the AI is just the result of programming developpers.
Would it be really that difficult to create a 'planning AI' for our kind of games? I don't know.
Maybe that should be the next objective instead of having always ten different weapons like lasers, phasers, cannons, area weapons, motor-destroying weapons,... To make a game where the other empires act a minima like people.
On the subject of diplomacy and plausability of actions, even Stellaris is horribly subpar.

I mean, it's 'only' using some IF...THEN lines, isn't it? [:D]
(Yeah, I'm no IT man!)



StormingKiwi -> RE: Conflict and Resolutions (5/2/2021 4:19:11 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

quote:

ORIGINAL: StormingKiwi

I'm wondering about conflict and resolution in DW2. One major limitation of many strategy games I've played, and unfortunately Distant Worlds falls into this as well, is how militaristic everything is. Often, conflict is resolved through violence or disregard; rather than through different means that allow escalation of the conflict to occur.

e.g. someone settles a colony you had your eye on. You should be able to maneuver on different playing fields (diplomatic, political, social, economic) to bring it under your control. In a lot of strategy games, the two options you have are to forget you ever wanted to colonise that planet or warfare.

If the only way to exert your political influence and will is by building a fleet of ships that murder the other guy and take their stuff, then that's the way everyone will act. I think there should be more cooperative and competitive ways of interacting with other factions.

While that sounds wonderfull, there is one fundamental flaw with it: The AI can not play that game.

Game AI all have a fundamental weakness: They can not plan ahead. Not even a little. We are pretty good at faking it via Budgets, Economic Plans and similar tricks, but that is still no planning.
A surprising amount of things requires trivial amounts of planning skills:
- Not a issue for humans. We propably do it without realizing it.
- Totally impossible for the AI. I am pretty convinced we could make serioues Progress in AGI if we managed to pull planning off.

This is a strawman argument in this thread. Waging war also takes planning, and a lot of games in the strategy genre assigns war waging as a task which the AI can perform and that the player can participate in with the AI.

It in no way addresses the fundamental critique - that there are more ways to compete than military warfare, and ways to cooperate are often ignored completely.



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