There should almost be some sort of technological transfer to nearby empires, like cultural influence. If your neighbour is at 10000 tech points or whatever while you are at 1000, you should be able to leech some tech points from your neighbour to develop faster.
Transfer rate increases with the disparity between nations and decreases with distance.
So a super advanced empire on continent A will contribute to nations on continent A and B, but those on continent A get more of a bonus than those on B.
This aligns fairly well with reality as neighbouring countries would transfer students to universities all the time, less so the further the nations are apart.
If they don’t make any money they won’t bother with microtransactions at all.
So it’s either $0.01 for cosmetic items or they don’t make cosmetic items at all because You’ve already paid for the game, and making new things just costs them money.
I wouldn’t mind if it were priced to actually make sense.
Like why would anything cost more than $1? Or even $0.01? Just greed and stupidity.
Microtransactions for cosmetic items that cost 25% or more of the base game itself are just insane. A whole game, or 4 cosmetic items, that must have taken sooo much effort to design those items to cost so much.
The thing about older games and Minecraft being addictive is that it’s sort of fine, because they don’t benefit financially from it so obviously it was unintentional and just because of the entertainment.
It becomes a problem with these new games when they are subscription based or have lots of microtransactions because the more addictive the game, the more money the company makes.
In the case of Minecraft the issues you listed are pretty much present in almost anything entertaining, video games or not, including in-person events and social functions.
As with anything moderation is key and people just need to learn not to let it control them. Some people are incapable of that though.
There are definitely certain things that game companies need to avoid doing but multiple goals, a little bit of luck, and online cooperative play is not it.
I don’t know how they all manage to do it but EA, Ubisoft, and Rockstar are all my most hated companies of all time. They can make some good stuff, but I just absolutely hate how they all force people to jump through so much hoops just to play the games you pay them for.
They force you to make accounts with them and use their stupid launchers which never work properly and are just advertisements. There have been so many times I just wanted to play a game and then forgot my password to the account and got locked out or the launcher needed an update and I had to wait like 20 minutes.
Personally I spent over a hundred hours in TW3 and finished all the DLC whereas I couldn’t get past the first few intro missions to CP2077. Gave it up in under 20 hours or so. Can’t even remember why the game just never stuck out as special in any way to me.
New maps? I found that I always gravitated towards one map as I disliked all the rest. Mostly just wanted a big open space to go crazy, not obstacles that I had to design around.
Wish this was a game mode option as a standard part of the game.
Sort of sandbox but not.
I do like the games but one thing that really bugs me is that you lose because of “queen impatience”
Like, what? It’s just so petty and infuriating when you do lose because of it. That queen can hold on one more god damn season to get the last needed thing. She’d rather destroy an entire town though. Makes it difficult to want to complete the outposts for such a terrible ruler.
To me it sounds more like hitting f8 reload but being able to choose the f5 quicksave from any point in the game, not just the points that you remembered to save or your most recent f5?