/4x/ Oriental Empires

It's on my list now but it will probably be months before i get around to it. And, no, I'm saying that guy's face is how I feel whenever traps get posted on Holla Forums.

How's the city-building and resource management?

explain

in this game you have armies stack that goes up to 12 units max I think
but not only that, you have army organization, you put units into lines and stances, for each unit
and since movement plays out simultaneously at the end of turn, you have literal tactical battles unfolding
the difference is where on TW you have real rts with formations and everything, in this game you mini battles that can't interfere directly
check OP's picture, all of those armies also engage simultaneously creating pretty much epic scale battles
the only problem with the system is that its quite complicated to understand whats going to happen beforehand
for example, you have units engaging when wouldn't expect them to, crossing rivers or doing stupid shit

also take a look at OP's pic, cities have a huge radius of influence, and they can physically bigger occupying all neighbor hexes
cities also only expand borders when actually building something on the tile, which can be annoying when trying to expand for a resource
BUT they also can work some tile that isn't on their border, for example you can clear forests pretty far away for anticipation to settling there

which brings me to my next point and grievance:
there is only one actual way to work the land, and that is through farms, the only usable resource,
farms -> food -> population which is basically the only resource/currency in game
there is also resource based trade and its a cool feature, but besides that you really only population

unlike civ where you would have production/research/health and other types of yields currency, in this game you have only food
so you the only things you can really build on maps are farms, clearing forests for farms, roads, and occasionally temple or mine on mountains
this is why I've mentioned before that the game is lacking, it makes perfect sense for the setting though

there are other details to pay attention to city management though, they are limited by size so you can't build everything you want
there a two types of civil unrest, noble or peasant, and have different ways of dealing with

What's unit variety like? Are there major factional differences at the strategic level?

>(((Iceberg))) Interactive

there is some variety,
militia/noble/military units
there are also some differences bonuses between factions though these seem rather arbitrary
there are two major factions types being farmers/herders which I don't know exactly how it plays out
and finally there seems to be a mongols faction that appear late game

What period of Chinese history is it set in?

based off their trailer 1500BC

Dag, well after the Sangoku/Three Kingdoms period.

>(((Coincidence)))
>Implying it wasn't the ice(((berg))) all along
Bump for interest

inderasting
I'll keep an eye on it

Reminder

FUCK
AAAAAAAHHHHHH

just took pic related after a couple of hours binging
playing on easy for starters, don't know what difference does it do, but AI still seems aggressive and expansive, but its more comfy
expanding alongside rivers and literally surrounded by mountains everywhere, feels good,
kept on the one more turn, but I got to fucking sleep

It looks a bit nicer than Civilization V.

Neat so it's like that really old game originally played by mail back before the second world war, Diplomacy.

it does look nicer, though, there isn't much desert/drylands and sometimes its hard discern some features, like where is passable or not
I wish it was less foggy though

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and here comes Holla Forums to ruin another thread

here I was, getting comfy and building empire
finally get to a point where cities are really bigger and getting some extra trade income
doesn't take long till other empires decide to war me again, still battles befuddles me

Hey Holla Forums how it's the cuck going?

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Hop some more IPs

amateurs

The ride never ends.
Sage for offtopic.

It's easier to assume that Jews did it, regardless of what it was, until proven otherwise.

I wanted to ask if anyone here had played Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII, and how it was after they released the big expansion.

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I like the way the combat works. The things I hate most about 4x games are when you have to waste resources to build military units that could have otherwise been spent on building your cities and when combat results in your units dying quickly. This game avoids both. Instead of having some gay production queue for units you can just conscript units whenever you want and send them back when you're done with them, but you still have to worry about upkeep costs and unrest and you sometimes might want to keep them around for their veterancy or if there's a long cooldown on recruiting them. Battles take several turns to kill units so it's not like you can just instantly lose everything.

It crashes sometimes before battles, but the RPG elements are pretty great and there's a lot of different playstyles available to you as far as character development.

yeah I like the system a lot, but it needs a lot of polishing to perfect, granted never done before
the combat can be annoying or even infuriating at times, I had battles where I had like 4 times the number of units and barely made a scratch
the AI has an annoying tendency to go with a bunch of scattered units, and since they rout very easily, they keep on grinding forever
another really annoying thing the AI does is forever wars, they literally will declare war just of having nothing better to do, so they send these short stacks halfway around the map without any luck of capturing cities, but still grinding you away
perhaps the is better flavored into having several smaller stack sweeping across, and only having garrison when you really need to
and the biggest problem indeed is since the game is not much known, there is barely any good discussion to get help with

pic related is my first settlement upgrade

well just found two guides on steam to counter my argument above:

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1171605015
the first one explains better battle plans for those who still didn't get it, but doens't provide real examples on they can be applied

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1156684266
the second one a massive autist guide seems to cover everything, dunno if gud or not

Maybe report it instead of giving it more attention?
Reminder that shitty poltical de-rails are against the rules and it's the duty of every Holla Forumsirgin to report them.

So how does that solve the issue of death stacks? I'm guessing from the pic that it went with "1 army per tile" like Civ5, but that wasn't a very popular idea.
What does this one do differently?

I get the idea that 4X never progressed very well from Hotspot\turn-based games onto multiplayer, where every player gets to act their turn at the same time and units move in it as well, leading to this shit where once a turn begins, you have to click faster than your oponent to attack him or save a unit.
Glad to see someone at least has the brains to figure out the easy solution to it.

Oh that's chinese alright.

YES! This is what I was waiting for! Sick and tired of having to delay the advancement of my cities just to make an army that I won't even need if it's big enough to scare people and does nothing but eat resources in upkeep unless I go the violent route.
It always feels like a waste unless you're being militaristic in nature.

Although, one of the best things in Civ was heavily investing in Gold and stockpiling thousands of it. The moment someone declared war on you for having no army, you Rush several units every single turn in every city and BOOM instant army with a target in-sight and no "war mongering" issues.

exactly this, the problem with civ style warfare was that first, with you put death stacks to protect your units, but no matter which units, when you face two stacks your stronger unit against stronger defender, killing and grinding until something settles
civ5 tried to solve this with 1upt, which turned more into a cluster fuck board game

there was another game that did planning really well, I think Pandora (or the game from the same dev that preceded it)
either way, in this game you actual form army composition and formation, like x archers in front, melee to clash and calvary to flank

not only that, there isn't a "build queue" in this game (well there is), but instead there are several things you can built simultaneously
for example you can build farms/roads/clear land and buildings all at once, the only things that cost money are buildings,
but building stuff occupies your population which could be either constructing something, farming for faster growth and getting taxed
its a pretty cool system, if a city has a big surplus of food eventually you get people doing nothing which can be used freely for constructions and reduces unrest
also I think recruiting soldiers also cost population, but I haven't noticed it because its pretty subtle effect

things…

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!

Welp, this is gonna take some time getting used to. It's quite different from pretty much every other 4X I've tried so far.
Not perfect at all, lots of issues actually, but very original and definetely unique.
The economy and combat seem to have a massive focus, culture and science are entirely background stuff, but overall I'm enjoying a lot of stuff they did.

Culture is just a counter you increase with some research and when you have 50 more than the second guy, you win. It also boosts trades with other dudes based on culture differences, which is pretty neat, but that's it.

Science has 4 trees, Power, Craft, Knowledge and Spirituality I think. Surpringly, you research all 4 trees at the same time in paralell, which 4 projects at the same time (I think I only ever saw Stelaris doing something like this) and some tech needs previous tech from other trees.
It's neat how it works since you don't have to sacrifice economical upgrades for military ones for instance, but military factions advance faster in the Power tree making them unlock more tech there.

Economy, I'm sure I haven't even seen all there is to it. But there's the standard trade routes between cities, both yours and oponents, buildings to boost them, roads and docks to connect them, etc. The value of trade comes from local products a settlement has, controlling resources is massively important for this very reason.
And since you need a truckload of money both to pay for new buildings and upkeep for troops, this is very important.

Towns are quite interesting in that peasants aren't allocated manually by you. Rather they default to producing food but you can give them some work like building roads, clearing woods or building something new and an amount of peasants will shift to work on that, up to the limit that there's still enough food being produced.
This means that a town doesn't have to always be building something new, whenever people aren't building they are increasing their population instead.
There's also limits to the number of buildings a town can have so no more Civ-style "build one of each on every town because why the fuck not?" Specializing your towns ends up being important.

Of especial note here is food since there are 2 ways to produce it. Farms for agriculture let peasants produce a nice stream of food dependant on the state of a tile while Herds let you produce far more food but 1 peasant can do the work of 2, although there may be problems with the herds I haven't found yet.

Battles are pretty great. They all engage at the same time according to their tactics so it ends up looking like an RTS instead but you have no input so ironically no gookclick for advantage.
Soldiers are also taken from a pool that builds up overtime with a limit based on the buildings it has.
You can spawn a large milita to defend a settlement out of nowhere and it only costs the upkeep, so you never have to have idle armies.

I still have issues with the HUD, like how it shows the bonus and malus for unrest and other stuff with the same color so it's not very clear, and it's taking a while getting used to the economical balance of this.
I'd also prefer if soldiers were taken directly from the population instead and consider that part of it's cost.

only lefties could have this kind of doublethink.

thanks I was away yesterday and now with a looming hangover
but I'll get back to it later

WISE FWOM YOUR GWABE!

Fuck off

Ahah, you're such a funny guy.

I'm getting a bit disapointed with the game though, I still have a few things I need to test.
You'll naturaly make "money making" and "troop producing" towns that you specialize them into using the buildings you can place in each one, but you can only replenish troops in towns that can produce them. While I get that it's better than making new ones since you get to keep veterancy, it makes for some terrible times when you just want to replenish troops you have defending towns that can't produce troops because they are your "money making" towns.

I'm inclined to believe that every town needs a Palace strictly for this reason, but then both the Palace and Walls seem to take slots in the building limit of every town.
I've also have not tried this yet, but perhaps retiring troops in a city adds them to the local recruitment pool, so even cities that can't produce a militia normally will have someone defending them, but I'm not sure that's what ends up happening.

I'm a bit confused as to how the combat in this game works at all to be honest. I know about the orders you can give your armies, but they seem more like suggestions really.

first off, shitposter doesn't even know what a gook is….

yeah, the city needs a pool with unit available of the same type, so for example you can replenish militia and nobles on pretty much any town (their pool is dependent on city size)
but like wise you would want to build some military hubs, the palace and walls don't take building slots so you can build them at leisure,
what would be ideal is having a central military hub (your capital probably) will all buildings there, and then smaller hubs on distance places to fill in

economy is very detailed too, trade can make up to half your income up till midgame, being even more important later on
thing is, cities will import whatever goods they don't produce, initially only from immediate neighbors, but later on you can build caravansary that also exports imported goods
thus increasing your trade network range, and naturally water borne trade can move much further, and rivers can be pretty big and expansive, usually having several cities along side it
there are other things too, some goods are produced by buildings, like pottery and silk, but can have significant bonuses with a resource present, others are resource dependent like copper or jade,
the building level of the corresponding good also affects overall price, and finally the more population you're exporting to, the bigger the profit
so naturally you would want to have each city producing a certain good and setting up the trade network so you have more consumers possible

regarding battles:
its quite hard to get the hang of it, its a really good concept for the game design, but needs ironing out and polish to perfect
right now it pays off having smaller groups rather than a big army with the exception of choke points
big battles can take several turns, and even when fighting off smaller skirmishes you may end up getting grind, so it pays off having smaller groups where one chases off the enemy while the other rests
you shouldn't disregard the readiness stat it can make or break battles, and it seems that when it reaches zero the unit will disband, other wise lasting to the very last man,
naturally, big numbers mean more in warfare, so it pays off still having a large militia, eventually centering off some elite armies to pierce and break enemy lines
sieges are insane and can take ages, unless you happen to stumble upon unprotected cities (can happen), otherwise you better bring up a ton of troops and siege equipment, and properly encircle the city

on a final note, combat seems to work better when each line has clearly defined battle plans, like a line for archers followed by melee, and the whole army be either offensive or defensive together, otherwise you might see situations where half your army is standing their ground while the other half is getting crushed just a few meters ahead

what in the fuck…

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you're doing it wrong.

ok for fuck sake, the game shows a ton of potential but they got to fix combat in this shit cause its somewhat broken atm
AI has some pretty funked behavior and pretty sure it somewhat cheating as its hard as fuck to get rid of their skirmishes
for example in one pic he was coming with an big army composed only of archers, another AI with an army solely of spears
in one example a single archer besieging my city with zero readiness
and not to mention the retardness of units dancing across the map, maybe they should have tried a statistics approach instead agent based ( aka something like Ck2 as opposed to TW)

Never let Canadians try to design things for war. They're good at the fighting, just not good at engineering.