FORUM.TERMINAL_LEVY

https://terminallevy.net/entries/simpli ... -all-away/

In chopping off all the “busywork” and not leaving too much of substance to focus on instead, most 4X-lites end up abandoning the main reasons I go to turn-based strategy in the first place. Circling back to the summary I wrote at the top, I rarely boot up a 4X game because I want to see a victory screen in an hour. I'd much rather just navigate a web of decision-making, feeling around in that space of shaping potential. For me, making choices in 4X is less about the possibility of making the right one and more about what scenario a particular choice will lead to.

Breaking out of our hiatus with the first TL entry in a couple months. Where's the line between complexity and busywork? Are there any Aurora 4X-heads on the forum?

i find myself purely in the "nah i'm good" camp with 4x games, but i always find myself pouring so much time into them. i think you really hit the nail on the head with illustrating the moment you realize something like Civ isn't there to provide you for a good historical roleplay simulation. even still, i have a lot of fondness for Civ; even though i have never completed a single game of it (the closest i've gotten, by nature of its 3-act design, is Civ VII - a game i honestly feel is pretty misaligned)

but i feel very disconnected from the standard 4x enjoyer. because of the lack of nuance in games like Civ or Stellaris in how you interact with other civs, the game for me is largely over once I've finally cleared all the fog of war from the map. there's still a little futile magic for me in building up cities and making them work, but when it comes time to engage with the combat i almost always reload to an earlier autosave to make different choices or abandon the campaign entirely. truly i only enjoy the first 1.5 of the Xs. but i can lose so much time just starting a new save, building up some cities, walking a little guy around, and seeing who my neighbors are. i've never felt my money wasted even though that's basically all i ever want to do in these games.

i guess i'm just a drawing maps girlie. if gandhi wants my shit he can have it.

I just wound down a Civ III playthrough (Inca, monarch difficulty) where I kind of gradually lost interest in several steps:

1. at the end of the expansion/settling stage once the lines had been fully drawn - expansion in Civ 3 is very fun, the maps are huge and cool looking, but once you settle in you're like "well shit I guess it's war time now"
2. after monopolizing my starting continent - you truly feel like Alexander in that moment
3. after finding the other continent and realizing I didn't snowball enough in the early-mid game to reliably continue rolling over there, but also not enough that culture or science victories would be realistic, and even then...
4. realising a science victory would just be what, me micromanaging 40 workers for 200 more turns to maximize my yields? I dunno...

the earlygame exploration period also tends to be my favourite. A game that just expands that into its own thing sounds like a great time, I'd be surprised if nobody's tried to make one yet.

I realize this is a minor point in the argument of the article, but I was curious about the remark on the aesthetic appeal of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. I also remember some discussion in a stream (I also remember conversation on conventions for fog of war?). Would you be able to speak more about it?

I've been playing a bit of the first Age of Wonders lately and feeling a slight preference for it over the second entry and its expansion. At a purely visual level, there's a kind of toy-like quality to the first game that's diminished (although still present) when the sprites and environments are given more fidelity. I also find the look of HoMM3 compelling and it kind of merges the two approaches with the detailed renders but tilted perspective. I think a lot of the fun of a game might be wrapped up in manipulating a world that is visually responsive, even if it is work or strategically dull.

arbhor wrote: Tue Nov 18, 2025 1:09 am I realize this is a minor point in the argument of the article, but I was curious about the remark on the aesthetic appeal of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. I also remember some discussion in a stream (I also remember conversation on conventions for fog of war?). Would you be able to speak more about it?

It is just top-to-bottom gorgeous to me. The very physical material red-brown-gold UI, the dense and vibrant picturebook quality of the exploration map... resource sprites that remind me of being 3 years old and sucking on marbles... I really love the prerendered 3D of the cities, though the battle maps and prerendered 3D of the units is just "charming" (i.e. it doesn't actively make me happy to look at the way the exploration map does) but it all comes together into something that's, at a baseline, just very pleasant to look at. Age of Wonders 4 gets the closest a contemporary strategy game has gotten to that feeling to me, but it's working at a fundamental disadvantage or being a contemporary release that has to fit into certain visual constraints.

It's a little sad to me that the art director for HoMM3, Phelan Sykes, has just been doing digital slot machines for the last 15 years. Then again, I'm not sure any of the big names associated with that game did that much "notable" work after the 00s.

Great article Amos. Pardon me, I want to jump off from the discussion above (lynnedrum's post and homm art) to kinda write about my own thing which I think overlaps a lot:

There's this feeling I think of as "boardgameization" [deragatory] which aligns here; keeping the graph of possible moves and states really small means the player can kinda swallow the whole game as a set of abstract points-and-resources actions (with a similar appeal for the designer.) There are all of these reasons why that might be good (when you can become fully literate on the systems of the game, you can move on to focusing 100% on mindgames, simulating opponent moves, etc?) but for my brain in particular it is a gauranteed fun killer. Just not what I am looking for out of videogames at all. You can sorta draw a dividing line between 'boardgame style design' and 'simulation style design' based on how much it's possible to know the game state and predict outcomes.

I kinda obsess over this imaginary 'boardgame vs simulation' division.

4x is in a really really interesting space to me with regard to this line. If you were gonna taxonomize genres by whether they fall on the 'boardgame' or 'sim' side, 4x is a clear 'boardgame' genre. But something about the genre (perhaps it's 'eXplore'?) feels like it really really ought to be this exciting mysterious world where you are probing and tinkering and being surprised. I acknowledge that this categorization (and the distaste for 'boardgame' strategy games) exists exclusively inside of my brain, but I think something analogous may explain the appeal of Paradox map games, and particularly the appeal of watching content about paradox map games (since actual play is a little more 'solved' than the narratives it produces might imply.)

I wrote the above out right away, before reading the full article or looking at the footnotes. I see now you also use the 'boardgame' language. I don't think we're talking about *quite* the same thing, but I think the vectors are roughly parallel.

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I used to like 4x a lot as a younger kid, and I feel a little sadness that I can't get into that mindset again. I get an averse reaction to 4x games where emotionally it feels like I'm being cheated or lied to. The art and music doesn't help -- A good 4x typically *feels* like the game that I wish that it was.

I think "this is a big simulation of randomized things you can explore" (see also: roguelikes which emphasize discovery over combat) is one of the most emotionally appealing *themes* for videogames, but is a promise which is fundamentally impossible to deliver. This is a whole other post, but: I think there is something analogous to the way I react to 'exploring in a 4x' and the way I react to AI 'art' -- I can't help myself looking for the part that 'matters'. While visually a cool voxel minecraft cave might look like something I would find pleasure in exploring, it ladders up conceptually in my brain and I'm like, "I've seen ramped voronoi cells and perlin noise before" and I bristle at the scam.

PS: When I first started writing this post, I meant to go a bit of a different direction; what I do find exciting in strategy comes from context and contrast ('busywork' which validates 'real decisions') and from specificity and surprise (which gets into my 3d wargame obsession.) Now that I've reached the end of your article, I think that there's another parallel there. Perhaps I'll share some thoughts on that space if you write your 'granularity' article.

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amos wrote: Tue Nov 18, 2025 6:22 am It's a little sad to me that the art director for HoMM3, Phelan Sykes, has just been doing digital slot machines for the last 15 years.

I mean, re: my point about 'the scam' above, the way it feels emotionally to me is like... If you're already selling a little solved graph by making art and music which makes it feel magical why not skip the middleman.

Josephs wrote: Sat Nov 22, 2025 9:05 pm 4x is in a really really interesting space to me with regard to this line. If you were gonna taxonomize genres by whether they fall on the 'boardgame' or 'sim' side, 4x is a clear 'boardgame' genre. But something about the genre (perhaps it's 'eXplore'?) feels like it really really ought to be this exciting mysterious world where you are probing and tinkering and being surprised. I acknowledge that this categorization (and the distaste for 'boardgame' strategy games) exists exclusively inside of my brain, but I think something analogous may explain the appeal of Paradox map games, and particularly the appeal of watching content about paradox map games (since actual play is a little more 'solved' than the narratives it produces might imply.)

The "4X as a complex boardgame" thing is something I've been running into more as I've been seeking out more "insider" critique of 4X, it's interesting to consider, because yeah, the really explicit "rules"-y way that for example combat works in Civ III is something that would be really easy to just play out in a diceroll on the table (ignoring the fact that you'd need to do it 100 times for the unit sizes in Civ III). I'm really starting to wonder if 4X isn't, to some degree, a genre that's kind of a freezeframe of scope ambition vs technological limitation? I need to do more research before I could really qualify that, right now it feels like a hunch that could be way off.

Josephs wrote: Sat Nov 22, 2025 9:05 pm I think "this is a big simulation of randomized things you can explore" (see also: roguelikes which emphasize discovery over combat) is one of the most emotionally appealing *themes* for videogames, but is a promise which is fundamentally impossible to deliver. This is a whole other post, but: I think there is something analogous to the way I react to 'exploring in a 4x' and the way I react to AI 'art' -- I can't help myself looking for the part that 'matters'. While visually a cool voxel minecraft cave might look like something I would find pleasure in exploring, it ladders up conceptually in my brain and I'm like, "I've seen ramped voronoi cells and perlin noise before" and I bristle at the scam.

Yeah, I think probably everyone tires of 'uncurated' procgen after a certain point. The cool minecraft cave is only as cool as the adventure you end up having with your friends there, I can't really play that game solo anymore. Noctis IV is an interesting example here because the environments are "realistically" boring - thousands and thousands of no-atmosphere crater-pockmarked rock balls orbiting thousands of functionally identical stars - the part that makes it all compelling and sometimes moving is the mapping/naming system shared with everyone else who's ever played the game and uploaded their tags.

I think in a 4X CPU players are what's supposed to give the equivalent of that meaning-building on top of the meaningless terrain, but if you've already got the pathways in your brain that abstract things down to the base RNG, perlin noise that is fought over by a different resolution of perlin noise might understandably not be compelling at all.

Josephs wrote: Sat Nov 22, 2025 9:05 pm PS: When I first started writing this post, I meant to go a bit of a different direction; what I do find exciting in strategy comes from context and contrast ('busywork' which validates 'real decisions') and from specificity and surprise (which gets into my 3d wargame obsession.) Now that I've reached the end of your article, I think that there's another parallel there. Perhaps I'll share some thoughts on that space if you write your 'granularity' article.

I've got something about granularity and something about winning as offshoots of this article, I hope to get around to both of them soon. These are interesting ways to describe what you like in strategy games!