the vitality of 4X TBS gaming forums

[bvanevery]

You're almost as valuable as you think.

Well, to the extent anyone cared about AARs.  Nowadays I have a good excuse to prevent me from making AARs.  I want to see what shelf life the current "big" one has, and what traffic it creates.  No reason to knock it out of its "top spot" various places until that more naturally occurs from something better coming along.  There's been a little bit of discussion at CFC.  The subject of "map generation" probably deserves some kind of final, highly polished summation once I feel I'm there.  Still haven't explored the continent proportion variables.

I've noticed that a lot of game review outlets have a substantial writeup of SMAC somewhere.  It might be worth collecting those up, repackaging them, and shamelessly plugging them.  Something like "six reviews of SMAC" of course aggregated here, with key quotes from the reviews themselves when making the pitch elsewhere.

[Buster's Uncle]

Give me links an I'll put having a look and considering and probably doing on my to-do list.  That's probably a great idea.

I actually meant your non-AAR contributions.  This and that  you posted in TOE, for instance, generated at least as much posting/response by others as the HARD work...

[Buster's Uncle]

BTW?  We're releasing Fusion power Is NOW! tomorrow - um, I'd really like it to stay topped all month at WPC, CFC and 'Poly if you can help it... :win:

[bvanevery]

By all means.  I'm not worried about being 2nd or 3rd place in a listing, I'm already slightly that far down on Reddit for instance.  I just don't want to be knocked out of visibility any time soon.

[Buster's Uncle]

You're in NO danger on the forums.

[bvanevery]

I'm a little confused... I think responding to your GotM post elevates it at CFC?  So I'm about to...

[Buster's Uncle]

Please sir.

There's three different petty stupid drama outbreaks going on at once tonight, more than one place, and I'm in a mood.  You being cool about it helps more than you know.

Thanks, pal.

[bvanevery]

I need a "drama wand".  Wave it and drama goes away.  All I've actually got is CBD oil.

[Buster's Uncle]

I have trouble believing that you need it as bad as I do - I live on the net.


Your bumping post was excellent - I actually wrote considerable autobiography in Roze's thoughts.  Mart gave me enough to have the inspiration, suddenly I was like, my favorite victory, Ascent to Transcendence = The Group Mind, my own arch-enemy...

HOLY CRAP could I ever pen a screed against groupthink and stupid herding.  I knocked out that short intro story at one sitting about this late a week ago -less than two hours- few words changed on the second pass Friday.

So, I'll wait as a bump opportunity to respond, if I'm still choosing to have anything to do with CFC by early afternoon and beyond.  (More than one 'tard thing going on, alas and alack...)

[bvanevery]

I have trouble believing that you need it as bad as I do - I live on the net.

I've got a family problem.  I went through a jar of CBD oil in a month that was supposed to be for my dog's arthritis.  So I ordered 2 jars this time.  I think the difficulty of "dramas" is whether you can walk away from them and never have to deal with them again.  In that case, they don't have any kind of permanent power over you.  If you hate some social situation, you abandon it, get rid of it, get the toxic people out of your life.  But when the situation is with people close to you, like family, or an important business partner, it's much more difficult.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yeah; I got bullcrap w/ important business partner, or I'd probably never gone back after the last time they screwed me over.

Too stupid to know what a 'tard mistake they're making if I can't fight my way through it.  Stupid, everybody-loses bullcrap.  -And I'd already be gone if it was just me, and not business.  &^%kers better learn some respect, quick.

I'm making another post, then off to bed, wrath being vulnerable to sleep.  Busy day, and went spectacularly pear-shaped around 8PM.

[RidleyN]

I don't know if this thread is too old or not, but since it's pinned and I have some useful input (I think) I'll jump in. I own and have played every game mentioned so far in this thread and several others; 4x and grand strategy are my games of choice. SMACX being an old game presents significant challenges re community building; it's a niche game that is more difficult in some ways to mod than more modern offerings. Stellaris, for example, is self consciously built to be easy to work with. SMACX isn't new or flashy and it's AI shows it's 20 years of age, but there is one thing that it has over most of the more recent strategy offerings in that it has really solid core gameplay and it has stability.
I enjoy playing Stellaris, EU4, GC3 and the others, but I never really know what I'm coming back too. Stellaris' core gameplay has changed in major, foundational ways twice in the last year, and it borders on infuriating for those of us who like to mod the game. A lot of the communities that surround other games are essentially beholden to whatever the developers decide they want to do to the game next, since games with multiple expansions and dlcs are becoming the norm in this genre. We don't have to deal with that here. SMACX is a classic and a known quantity. I've played it for a couple thousand hours, much more than any other strategy game and I know that I will be playing it another 20 years down the line; because no matter how many times I leave, when I come back it never fails to grab my attention, flaws and all, and give me a fun time. I don't know exactly how to go about it, but we have to capitalize on that.

[Trenacker]

Hard for me to say whether the game-forum culture has reached its terminal cliff or whether I am looking at these spaces through rose-tinted glasses, wrongly equating the Golden Age with the period of my own adolescence. Fortunately, I think, it is more of the latter than the former, although the communities have migrated, to be sure.

I can only speak to the ecosystems I know. I would point you, however, to two spaces in particular. Both are generic science fiction forums. Sufficient Velocity has an active community of people interested in things like this, and probably the most comprehensive suite of tools to aid the poster’s presentation. SpaceBattles, the parent community from which SV split, is also quite vibrant. Both sites have dedicated spaces for After Action Reports, a voter-driven writing activity called the Quest, and more “gamey” Grand Strategic Roleplay option.

You can find a similar community on the Alternate History message boards, but their focus is much narrower and their content more curated. Apolyton and the Paradox Games forums have a history of having hosted grand strategic test-based games, but those sections are moribund. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Paradox has an exhaustive After-Action Report section for games it publishes. The Paradox forums are also run by a company, not a person, so their focus is probably a lot narrower than you’re seeking for a game originally published by Firaxis. Reddit has a community called Century of Blood, quite vibrant, but tied specifically to A Song of Ice and Fire.

At this moment, in 2022, the iron is hottest for Paradox products, I think. Stellaris and Hearts of Iron-related content, like Kraiserreich, an alternate history in which various forms of Socialism dominate first Europe and then the world after a prolonged Great War in which Germany emerged victorious.

I’ve struggled with recruiting in these places and more. I have tried to lure new readers here more often than I have tried to go “out there,” but a months-long quest on Sufficient Velocity yielded probably an upper limit of about twenty active readers, while a similar attempt on SpaceBattles yielded only a half-dozen. Trying to recruit amongst various Discord communities is probably the wave of the future, but I usually come up snake-eyes there, too, since a lot of those servers are merely collaboration spaces for users active on other forums.

Some of the issue, I think, is that most people interested in this kind of stuff are idea entrepreneurs who are more prone to starting their own games than joining those created by somebody else. And the really successful folks seem, in my opinion, to develop minor cults of personality. Kind of like how an author, having produced their landmark work, is then able to garner attention for various minor projects that would not have otherwise been as attractive to readers.

[bvanevery]

I feel a real blast from the past finding out this thread got stickied.  I'm not sure what to say, 5 years later.  My SMACX AI Growth mod got done.  Looks like version 1.57 is stable and maybe "the end".  I actually play my own mod plenty, and don't play anything else.   I haven't really run into anything further that's broken or needs to be changed, that I can actually change with a .txt only mod.

AARs, I've wanted the ability to mirror a forum's content format offline, so that I can work without an internet connection, and without risking any disruption to the work if a connection is lost.  Also as a form of backup, because recent site disruptions have made me worried, about the large amount of content I previously produced here.  I see that it could all go <POOF>.

I've been using the Windows 11 screenshotting tools lately.  They're semi-convenient, but they result in rather big images, not turning any further knobs.  I submit those images for various purposes on this site, most recently for a few weird bug reports.  They kinda end up looking like tiny chicken scratch.  I can theoretically imagine a lot of ways that a text and screenshot content production process could be better.  My research of forum software hasn't exactly led me to implement it though.  The lack of an obviously receiving audience for that style of content, is a problem.

I can't even understand, on a personal level, why anyone bothers to watch anyone else play games on YouTube.  To me it's a completely and utterly boring complete waste of time.  I get impatient with people fiddling with their game UIs almost immediately.  I'm not even sure what it would take to design a "watchable" game.  Something that doesn't have a lot of little mouse movements, that's for sure.

The FPS genre, there's no UI funk to watch someone's video of that, generally speaking.  Or watch over someone's shoulder, which is the kind of observation I've actually done in real life.  But FPS is fundamentally repetitive, and not at all interesting to me to watch.  I'm not the one experiencing the jump scares as a matter of my hand-eye coordination going awry.

People at least write long essays about games and gaming on r/truegaming.  No pretty pictures though.  And only the most popular titles, have a cluster of essays about them.  Sometimes that becomes like a broken record and some subject gets banned for awhile.  Like Soulsbourne games and Elden Ring were in the penalty box for awhile.

[bvanevery]

Well it's time to necro a thread I started a long time ago!  It's been 21 months since the forum outage ended my ability to say much of anything.  Getting licks in now while things are working.

My thinking hasn't expanded much since 2023.  I still haven't played Elden Ring yet either lol.  That might be about to change, due to a Steam sale that ends on June 10th.  Galactic Civilizations IV is next in my queue.  I recently did a lot of Emperor of the Fading Suns Enhanced Edition.  Hanging out a bit on their Discord, and on the Will To Power Discord while coping with the loss of AC2, probably has given me some thought on the original thread subject.

My actual vitality has been maintained on r/4Xgaming.  It has grown, but it has not become very large by Reddit standards.  I recall that the website Explorminate went through some tough times.  4X still feels like a backwater, and SMAC a backwater within a backwater.  I wonder if I'm at peace with that?  The other possibility is I just don't get out and about enough.