#QDN Episode 11, Twilight Wars Vs Async TI4

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

royal girder
lime fjord
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Never played on twilight wars so this was interesting

untold shoal
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Yeah, this certainly was great. @royal girder do you mind if I link this to reddit? I think it is a solid comparison between TW and Async that not many people have put into words.

royal girder
celest comet
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Oh ya they ravaged the AI version it was unhinged

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But def a “any publicity is good publicity?” Moment for me 😆

royal girder
thin pivot
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I know many people who when they first saw the automobile where like "not today satan".
Things change and folk adapt, or they don't.

Then I am reminded of the laser disc and wonder if this is selective confirmation bias or some such self deception.

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Great episode as always. Nice and professional, genuine and sensitive. I find its length perfect for a ride to work.
Also strangely contemporary.
Like reading history books about today.

royal girder
untold shoal
brave niche
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Super interesting! I had very little knowledge of twilight wars, other than hearing it existed, so this was a great overview.

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Also ending with the dread of: hope we don't all lose everything that's been built here... 😬💀

devout yoke
solemn cedar
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@royal girder since you gave a shout out, I have a couple IRL friends that like TW so I stay there. I also have a hard time keeping up with Async TI discord so I don’t venture into SCPT, but it’s nice to have an alternative view of the game.

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It was also interesting to see you doing discovery in real time on the TW discord. They do bring up an interesting point with progressive map disclosure.

royal girder
solemn cedar
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Yes

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I mean, I like seeing stats about fighters and infantry and miss that. But I get how it’s all overwhelming

royal girder
# solemn cedar I mean, I like seeing stats about fighters and infantry and miss that. But I get...

Wording wise it's hard to put, but basically I believe it's much more of a fatal design flaw to "not know that you don't know" rather than simply "not know". If you don't know something, you can ask questions about it, investigate it, and even if you don't care to do that, you at least have it on your radar as "potential puzzle piece for later problem solving". If you don't know you don't know, then you can't investigate because you don't know that there's anything to investigate.

So when it comes to the question of say, hiding info like an attachment behind a closer up view, that to me is a major design error, whereas overwhelming a user with info is only a minor error. Because being overwhelmed is a state that the user can recognize and adjust to, they can solve it themselves. Hiding info like attachments though runs a high risk of keeping the user in the dark regarding their ignorance. They may miss that they missed the attachment info, especially if they're in the distracted mindset that one often plays async in.

So I don't think I'd ever be on board with hiding game info like that, but I do agree that ideally, summary info like the gears and capacity indicators would be given when you hover over a tile, since then that would be more likely to only be an upside rather than the mixed bag it currently is. Problem is though that we're really entwined into discord at this point and I'm not sure investing more features into the website, which only a portion of the userbase uses and which appears unlikely to be something that we could switch over to wholesale ever, is a valid route to go down

solemn cedar
# royal girder Wording wise it's hard to put, but basically I believe it's much more of a fatal...

Been a busy weekend, but I appreciate the detailed thought here.

I agree with a lot of what's said here. Attachments is clearly the biggest miss because it needs to be something you can see at a glance to answer questions: How many attachments am I in range of? Can I get to 3/5 this turn? Same with tech skips.

There's definitely a priority order about things I need to see when I look at the map. Primary would likely be units, planet attributes and ownership. Attributes here includes resource/influence values, planet type, tech skips and attachments.

Secondary info would be unit quantities, production values and capacity values. Unit quantities may seem odd there, but it matches IRL games where you need to interrogate stacks of units and tokens.

(FWIW, I like seeing the fighter/infantry quantities. But I'll add that the actual numbers often don't matter often, because the important numbers are 0, 1, 2 and many. Because the question I'm answering is "how easily can someone take the planet".)

And a lot of this is form following function. The ability to interrogate the map in Discord is limited, at best. The website is great but, as you mentioned, not 100% use. This also bleeds into the need for tile numbers, because that's the easiest way to identify tiles for action, absent point and click.

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And fwiw, a TI board can be overwhelming in real life. Information processing is, for better or worse, part of the game. Being able to read board states and tricky things like wormholes or Nomad mechs or whatever other shenanigans. There are tournament games won and lost because people couldn't digest the full board state and missed some critical detail.

solemn cedar
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Final thought: I'm tempted to try TW again just to reconfirm my impression of it. I remember a few UI things that were definitively not friendly, and I actually got caught by the same sustain damage confusion you mentioned! Luckily is wasn't with NES/Duranium Barony

tranquil lantern
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I think I might have missed this as I listened to the episode a few days ago but the thing that immediately pushed me to asynch after playing twilight was like off the bat was the difference in drafting. Here we have lots of options and milty integration where as tw has almost no faction draft feature and forces you onto either a generic prebuilt map or a map build which has all the issues of a classic map build.

royal girder
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Hmmm that's trueeee. I'd qualify that under the content category I think. One advantage that BGA seems to have already over TW for this very thing is being able to add a map string into the game as the map

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But not sure there's enough tiles in base game to really Milty draft

tranquil lantern
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That was my last tw game

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Little rough lol 😂

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(I’m nekro)

solemn cedar
tranquil lantern
solemn cedar
royal girder
royal girder
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It's wild

solemn cedar
tranquil lantern
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Is a real possibility that asynch gets hit with a seas and desist after the bga release?

solemn cedar
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I'm trying to think of any other BGA implementations that bring in such a community deep cut like map strings. I know there are some that implement common community fixes, like Castles of Burgundy banning board 8. Map strings are entirely something developed outside the game framework though.

royal girder
royal girder
solemn cedar
royal girder
solemn cedar
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Fair, but I guess I just meant the ordering and format

royal girder