Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
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Or Anno.
I have legitimately never heard of this game in my life. Thanks for the suggestion.
Weird. I always assumed everyone had at least heard of it. It’s far more of a classic series than Factorio. I’m not into the newer titles but i’ve played most of the older ones, starting all the way back in 1998 with this gem that still holds up for me today:
Although the easiest one for a newcomer to get into is probably 1404.
Anno was one of the classic city building/economy management games everyone was playing in Germany, along with the “Settlers” (“Die Siedler”) series. (There was also the Tropico series but i never got into that one.)
It’s funny how you can play these games for years as a child and only decades later realize that, problematic colonialism aside, what you were doing all along is designing planned economies. In hindsight, it is no wonder i became a communist, lol.
I remember playing a pirated version of an older Anno game way back in the day, I don’t remember if it was 1602 or 1701, probably the latter, and it was entirely in German. That didn’t stop me though, as back then I couldn’t quite figure out how to set it to english, and I just powered through it and played it in German. I owe what little German I understand to Anno, lol.
I love these kinds of stories. A lot of people learned English that way in Eastern Europe.
Similar in Latin America too. I know some Brazilians who learned English playing counter strike.
Playing a pirated game feels different. I remember I sunk so many hours into a pirated copy of Factorio. After I bought it (for the mods), I couldn’t play like I did before.
I think we’re talking about slightly different things, I was referring to back when we would share around actual CDs with sketchy copies of games burned onto them that you could install onto your computer. A lot less support on torrenting forums for us dumb kids back then if we didn’t understand something in the installation process. Nowadays with factorion and other digital only games, you can’t quite experience the same level of confusion, thankfully.
There are like a billion Anno games. Good luck!
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Nor Victoria 3 nor even Civ 6 Tokugawa
Why specifically Tokugawa?
Glad you asked! I should preface all this by saying you can’t really like “learn” any real socialist theory from Civ 6 but what I mean is that Tokugawa is probably the best civ in the game for beelining for the Communist government type and a Scientific or Cultural victory.
Bakuhan inflicts penalties on international trade whilst making domestic trade routes (which usually yield Food and Production but not much else) generate Culture, Science, and Gold equal to how many Districts are at the source (in addition to Food and Production). It also makes all your cities within 6 tiles of the capital permanently loyal and therefore immune to being conquered period.
Meiji Restoration makes Japan’s district adjacency bonuses way better as well which allows you to carefully build very tightly and efficiently where other civs would feel boxed in.
In Civ 6, Communism as a form of government focuses on production and defensive strength; adopting it automatically gives land units an extra +4 defensive strength, and makes your cities +15% more productive. Policy cards unlocked by the Class Struggle civic include Collectivization which makes domestic trade routes yield way more food, Defense of the Motherland which makes modern units cost 100% less production and reduces War Weariness, and Five Year Plan which makes Industrial Zone and Campus adjacency bonuses even MORE powerful.
So when you put it all together, Tokugawa is overwhelmingly the best pick for if you want to play a communist style game. He wants you to create a dense, tall civ that focuses on land management and production that can easily resist aggressive, imperialist civs. It’s kind of funny how he has little to do with socialism historically but turned out to be such an outright communist civ lol. If you’re going into a new game wanting to take full advantage of the Communist government type, he’s probably who you want to choose.
Thanks for reply, i have few good plays in Civ 6 but i never played Japan before, i mostly play either some ancient civ like Sumer or modded Lenin
It’s mostly like i like to play anyway
Well, it is at least better than in previous games. You see, i have a theory that Sid Meier do know at least that much of a historical materialism to know that any civilisation is based on production and the science/trade/military are just results of that. But only in Civ 6, never before, we get something resembling production focus route. And of course it means that communism is gonna be OP, as it should be.
Lol. On a side note, i still can’t get over Civ VII shooting its foot by copying civ change on epoch - worst feature of Humankind which is by itself rather crap game.
Yeah I’d highly recommend Tokugawa or Ba Trieu next time you play for an anti-imperialist experience, along with Sukritact’s mods for extra wonders and ocean resources.
I can’t get over it either! Civ 7 was free to play for a week recently (desperate much?) and I had basically the exact same experience the first time I tried it; I played for 3 or so hours and was so confused but also bored stiff that I just stopped playing. People are all like “erm Civ 6 wasn’t playable on release either just give it time 🤓” well I gave it 1.5 years and it’s still fundamentally broken and deeply unsatisfying even if it does have a couple of good ideas like navigable rivers. Civ 6 DID hook me from day 1 even if it took some time to get used to the mountain of new mechanics. I’m a massive Civ fan and it’s heartbreaking that the game is FR unplayable. It’s just so disjointed and like… unsatisfying?? Nothing clicks, at all. And the wonder building animations are SHOCKINGLY shitty compared to 6. What a disaster.
I think 7 will get better after 2 expansions, every Civ game before also did, and they recently made the civ change optional so its at least a step in right direction. Also Civ 6 was actually unplayable at launch because of the crazy barbarian spam which took them some week to fix, but otherwise yeah 6 was better than both 5 and 7.