Maybe someone can help explain grand strategy games and their appeal to me

What is it that makes people want to play them when you get screens that end up looking like an interactive clumped up spreadsheet (like first pic related)?

I tried playing one or two of them before, and I don't get the hype or why people buy into them.

I could play an RTS like Homeworld and get down all the major functions of the game in a single, cohesive tutorial while the deeper elements of the strategy would be gained later as I play and build up my units/fleet, not to mention a great single player campaign.

I could play a 4x game like Master of Magic, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Master of Orion 2, etc. for some fairly good strategy and variety that isn't just like playing another Civilization game.

What makes grand strategy so different? Like with the Hearts of Iron games for example, what would be the worth of playing those games if you couldn't potentially change the results or how World War II turned out by playing? It would seem like an extremely tedious effort to only see slight alterations for how some things in the war turned out with mostly the same end results, with things going so damn slow with all the micromanagement required for even small functions. At least in something like that board game Axis & Allies things would actually get finished at some point without a sure predetermined winner, despite not being as deep of a game as a number of computer games out there.

Oh, and the tutorials for these Paradox games aren't that good at all, to help me out with some I needed to look at some let's players playing it to figure out the game's functions better. For games that are supposed to be quite deep, their learning curve doesn't have a tutorial that'll give you enough know how so you can learn the rest by playing. Not to mention the tutorials are a complete bore, your tutorials better be good if you want me to play your shit over the competing 4x fare which isn't so complicated that I can't learn things by simply playing through the game with occasional tooltips if new to that game.

Learning what all of those numbers mean by trial and error, or by reading about them, and then working on improving it is highly appealing to some people.
Have you ever given an old broken toaster to a child and told it to go fix it? Some will just say that it is broken and they don't know how to fix it, some will take a look at it, take off the covers, see that one of the heating wires is cut and tell you that "that wire over there doesn't look like the others. I made it look like the others and now it works again.".
Learning by doing is highly appealing to many people, especially because it can be really rewarding, even if the game itself is shit.
The thought of leading an entire nation into war and hopefully out of it again a little stronger can also be appealing. Imagine what it feels like to lead an army of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands into battle. Some folks need to see the units themselves, others have the creativity to imagine the battles.
Hell, back when I used to play them I wrote little stories about the biggest and most important battles. Good times.

Because the detail-oriented gameplay appeals to my autism.

Because you get to roleplay as Hitler

The main thing that puts people of grand strategy is how complicated they look, but looks can be deceptive. Take HoI3 for instance, your production screen may be blasting numbers at you but your economy is really controlled by 5(it might be 6 I can't remember) sliders several of which you can lock in place for months at a time and not worry about.

The same is true for most systems in HoI3 and most paradox games in general: the game outputs tons of information at you but your inputs are really quite simple.

First off, Hearts of Iron aren't GSGs, they're wargames. The difference is subtle, but it exists. Now, with that out of the way:

Once you play one or two GSGs, you'll find the tutorials and tooltips sufficient. To give an example, when starting a GSG for the first time, you're like a kid who had never played any game before starting an RPG - it has no idea how one should move, interact, what an inventory is, what quests are, etc. But after it plays a few, it just sort of gets all these things and doesn't need any tutorials. GSGs just differ a lot from other games, which is where the "hard to learn" meme comes from when, in fact, they really are rather simple.

Deeper mechanics (in the better ones) that focus on other things than just war and colonisation, and depiction of detail. GSGs are also excellent for roleplaying a country - in Civilization, or example, it matters fuck all who you pick, save for a few passive boosts and perhaps a wonder or two. In GSGs, your starting position, size, religion, resources, etc. are already set at start, providing an unequal beginning, and are often accompanied by events and decisions specific for the country. In some games, there are even different mechanics for different countries (CK2, for example, with religions). This leads to excellent replayability, as every country plays differently and leads to an unique playthrough. Not to mention all the AI-controlled countries that act differently every game, meaning the experience is never the same.

But the whole point is that you CAN change anything. Your question is like "What would be the worth of playing DOOM if you couldn't shoot or attack?"

There is no predetermined winner in HoI3 (I saw someone conquer the entire world with Albania, for example), and the game ends at a set date. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Well, to me, a "clumped spreadsheet" like that, full of techs, excites me more than, say, seeing an armoury full of detailed, diverse guns in a shooter.

Because you aren't the target audience. GSGs are a niche genre, after all.

Two words
Sengoku Rance

namefag,play hoi4 :^)

Because strategy AI hasn't kept up well enough with me as I've aged to keep providing a challenge so instead I look for games that require more detail and a finer level of control to increase the challenge level.

It doesn't help that things like CK2s family/dynasty system is pretty unique compared to the alternatives and it's a lot of fun to rebuild the roman empire or claim western Europe as a tiny count from shitsberg, unknownia.

...

They're like total war for autistic smart people

Anyone have a backup?

They're fun.

Autists get to enact their alternate history revenge fantasies.

Some people just like high skill ceilings, losing themselves in the act of putting things in order, and seeing it grow.

Personally, I just do it for her.

...

Grand strategy games? You mean "turn based strategy games for the elderly"?

You get to do retarded shit like this.

it's all about the long game, man. choose an objective when you start your game and then slowly and carefully start making it happen.

for example, my first really rewarding game of crusader kings, i decided i wanted to see how powerful i could make an Irish kingdom. i spent the first probably five or six hours conquering all of the Irish island by hook or by crook, and by the time I was able to declare myself king the crusades were popping off in full force. you wait and see if any provinces will declare independence and fabricate claims, swoop in, and take them. you marry into power and make alliances that you either maintain or take advantage of. by the end of the game I controlled from southern England all the way down to Sicily, most of Spain, and a large swath of germany/poland. i was also declared the holy roman emperor somehow but I seem to remember that being something I never really aimed or even tried for and could have just been a bug, caused by the game flipping out because I had like two hundred thousand available manpower for my armies and had provinces joining or seceding from my empire every month.

tl;dr it's rewarding to maintain every facet of your empire, and to see that long con that you set up a hundred in-game years ago finally bear fruit

FUCK OFF

What's wrong, user?

Don't you like F U N?

We stop upholding “fun” as the universal, ultimate criterion for a game’s relevance. It’s a meaningless ideal at best and a poisonous priority at worst. Fun is a neurological trick. Plenty of categorically unhealthy things are “fun”. Let’s try for something more. Many of the alternatives will have similarly fuzzy definitions, but let’s aspire to qualities like “edifying”, “healing”, “pro-social”, or even “enlightening”. I encourage you to decide upon your own alternatives to “fun” in games (while avoiding terms like “cool” and “awesome” and any other word that simply caters to existing, unexamined biases).

go back to reddit.

Lurk moar post less faggot

Stellaris is really bringing out my inner Pol Pot.

FTFY

4X is garbage.

What the heck are you going on about?

Part of how you describe it seems more like a simulation game than a strategy game.

I guess some people like to roleplay as a grand leader
I know I dont

What is a Nation? In all seriousness, what is a nation? What is a nationality?
It is, for all intents and purposes a unique and individual culture where all people who belong to the nation will side with one another for the sake of survival while arguing against all the other nations that its way of life is the superior model.
Which effectively means what? When you take control of a nation, when you take control of a people, you are effectively stating that you side with that nation, with that people, and you will go out of your way to make it the BEST FUCKING THING POSSIBLE.
And what's the most notable thing about ruling a mass of people? Statistics, paperwork, spreadsheets, and attempting to manipulate them for the betterment of your people and, by proxy, the detriment of others.
The goal of every society ultimately is to reign supreme against all others, either through absorption through cultural exports and importing those who agree with your society or destruction and forced absorption through war.
And you get to control it. You get to push forward and progress your people however you see fit with whatever means you prefer. If your skill is beyond compare, you will see the world flying your glorious banner, all people of the world loyal to your reign.

My nigger.

As for OP, either roleplaying or autism. All other explanations are just fluff for those two things.

They're fun

Ignore every other post, here's the real reason people like GSGs: They are an RTS with no APM meme and because of this, actual strategy.

That's it, that's the actual reason when you get to the bottom of it. Both GSG have resource management, controlling large amounts of units, different layers of combat, preparation phases and all that jazz.

However, in your average RTS, you have an extra resource that's not immediately obvious: attention span. There's a limit to how many actions you can do, how many units you can control and how many layers you can keep track of. Theorically, you can raise it with more APM but that's hardly satisfying and never gets to the levels you get in GSG.

This is one of the reasons you get pop caps in RTS but not in 4X or GSG (other then performance reasons, of course), because you can't control 500 units as efficiently as 50 in real-time. Meanwhile, GSG lets you control thousands of units just as well since you have all the time you need to take a turn, letting you give them the exact orders you want, not the orders you can give in the allotted time you have for that.

You are also free to engage in land, naval and aerial warfare in even more detail than RTS with more unit types and even more different tactical layers since you have all the time you need to manage each of them, instead of rushing things on one side because you really need to focus on the other.


As an example, Starcraft 2 has the Protoss faction featuring the Dark Templar, a stealth unit that can be used in theory to move behind the enemy lines and take down hard-hitters from the enemy. However in practice, you have so many other things to do that pulling a strategy like that in the middle of the combat is quite complicated. The time you take giving him orders to complete his goal and the time you take monitoring him could be spend better microing your Zealots on the front line instead.
Most players end up prefering to spend the resources it takes to make a Dark Templar into just a few more Zealots, since they are easier to manage and just as effective.

All of this applies to 4X as well but it's the reason some people prefer them over regular RTS. Because they have all the time they need to manage all the elements in the game and therefore, not only are all elements available and used by them, the game can feature deeper and more complex elements as well.