A shitty game for you perhaps. The EU series is hands down brilliant. Steep learning curve but I doubt anyone on the SDMB would’ve described it any other way.
Okay, so, I get where you’re coming from here and I often would agree with you. But in this particular case I think you’re doing yourself a disservice by not putting some time aside to learn the game.
Because the thing is, CK2 is absolutely unplayable without spending a good hour or so learning how to play it, but once you’ve got it down it also happens to be a really, really, really good game. Same for EU4.
The tutorials by this guy are what I used. They’re long, but in my opinion the game is worth the entry fee.
I agree the game seemed like something I would enjoy. I did in fact spend more than hour trying to figure out, oh, anything about the game. I literally could not figure out how to do just about anything. The game lacks any kind of stripped down gameplay; you seem to start with everything unlocked, so to speak, so there’s no learning curve built into the game at all. My time is valuable and I doubt this game is worth more than $100, which is what I already have invested in it if I include what I charge for my time to clients.
Compare this to Civ 5, which I have over 450 hours played (thanks Steam for that feature!) but that took about 2 minutes to learn to play using the in-game tutorial.
Or to Age of Empires, which took about 2 minutes to learn with the tutorial and gave me years of fun.
If a game company can’t be bothered to make their game learnable without attending a seminar or something, it’s prolly a shitty game made by a shitty company.
However, because CK2 did look so fucking cool when I bought it, I’ll say thank you for the link and promise to give it another shot; I’m perfectly willing to be proven wrong about this.
Yeah, I found the in-game tutorials to be completely useless. For me, the YouTube tutorials were mandatory.
I think the key is that, contrary to what the difficulty meter says, starting out with a “hard” character is considerably easier for beginners to manage. Either being someone’s vassal count or an independent count somewhere nobody cares about (i.e. Ireland) makes things a lot easier since you’ve got a less to manage than an “easy” character who’s got a zillion vassals of their own like the Holy Roman Emperor.
Another thing is that unlike most grand strategy type games, it’s still fairly enjoyable to play poorly and is generally forgiving of early mistakes. It’s pretty hard to actually lose outright, and getting knocked down to the vassal count of Lower Bumfuckarnigia doesn’t stop you from clawing your way back to the top in a couple of generations or so.
I’ve been liking EUIV a lot too, but it’s definitely harder and definitely has more of the “make a mistake now, pay for it 200 years down the line” issues of most games in the genre. I doubt I’ll end up putting in anywhere close to the ridiculous number of hours I’ve put into CK2.
GoG?
This seems to be turtles all the way down…
GOG = gog.com
They used to be called “Good Old Games” as they primarily carried legacy titles that were ready to run on modern machines so you didn’t have to screw with trying to make Starflight work on your 3.2GHz quad-core machine. Since they they’ve also put a lot of newer indie titles into their catalog as well so they rebranded to just GOG since they’re not just ‘old games’ these days.
Also their games are DRM free, not that that has anything to do with the GOG name.
The thing with CK2 is that there’s a lot of obfuscated simplicity. 98% of the time you’ll be taking roughly the same actions. Hell, I’ve not only played but watched many hours of CK2 and there are court adviser options I’ve literally never seen anyone use. (Sow dissent is one that I think I used maybe once for the novelty).
Really, half of the buttons in the game might as well not even be there, or else they need to add more buttons for “do these actions for all people with status <x> that hate me”. It’s telling that a lot of updates have had improvements of the form “there’s now a default selections for <x> so you don’t have to do it yourself” (default educators for kids) or “there’s now a button you can press so this happens automatically” (e.g. inviting people to plots). A lot of actions could realistically be accomplished by a simple script. Obviously human decision making does come into play in a big way, but there is a hell of a lot of complexity in there that could easily be condensed into simpler forms without losing much.
Also, start in Ireland if you’re new. The community calls it “tutorial Ireland” because you’re surrounded by water, and the only people who are realistically going to get a claim on you are all punching at roughly the same weight class.
Yeah, and with most the DOS-era stuff they have, the way they get it to run on newer computers is by bundling it with a version of Dosbox that has all the performance options already optimized to run that game. You don’t even notice Dosbox is running because it just automatically launches into the game.
In theory, instead of buying the game from them you could dust off the floppy disks (or grab it from an abandonware site) and load it into Dosbox yourself, but having them do it for you is definitely easier. I’ve also run into some games where I could just never get them to run quite right trying to tweak Dosbox myself, but the GOG version worked fine.
Unfortunately, doesn’t look like they have Civ 2.
Yes, and the 1066 start year is better than the 866 start. In 1066, the Vikings will be mostly gone, while in the 866 start you’ll get mauled by raiders every few years. Ireland is basically a tutorial; all of the complexities of running a big empire are gone, so many of those obnoxious unexplained things aren’t relevant.
I used to have a copy of Civ 2 that was clearly hacked; it was just a bunch of files in a folder and an executable file, with no disks, installation, or anything like that. Damned if I can remember where I got it from, though. That’s what the OP needs, though I don’t know what happened to my copy, nor would it be within board policy to link to it.
This is dusting the cobwebs out of the ol’ noggin, but I seem to recall with Civ 2 you could play it without the disc but the movies wouldn’t work (including the aforementioned hawt FMV foreign adviser.) So you wouldn’t really need to “hack” anything, you could just move the game directory around from computer to computer and it would work.
You can make the despotic route work; it’s just tricky to get established. If you use “Military Coup” as your rise to power, it should be substantially easier. Get an army base and a ministry built very early on. The army base will help keep your soldiers and generals happy enough to keep the threat of a coup low (you may have to pay them extra, too). I didn’t notice at first, but the ministry building has different work modes; one of them is “junta”, which reduces the chance of unhappy Tropicans becoming rebels. After that, build some tenements and maybe a childhood museum. As long has you keep the people housed and fed, you shouldn’t have too many rebels. Never allow even one election, because that will hurt your standing with the loyalist faction.
Keep your eyes peeled for easy “quests”. They can give your a permanent boost to your standing with a faction or foreign power for minimal effort.
Update; FreeCiv ain’t bad, although it takes a little getting used to.