So, I’ve basically beaten WAXF now.  I’m at what I’ll hereafter refer to as the “abandonment point” of the game, or the point of the game where I most frequently abandon what I’m playing so it doesn’t end.  This is the point right before the final series of “end game” battles at the end of an RPG that I seem to perpetually stop at.

I fully intend to finish this, mind you, but I usually end up just stopping and never resuming.

Beat it.

Wild ARMs XF Clear Data

Anyway, back to the review.  I’m a Wild ARMs Fanboy, basically.  Well, of the games that I’ve played until now.  I love the setting, WA1 was the first ‘standard console RPG’ I had played (mostly due to the fact that I rarely played RPGs until then, and the ones I did play were StratRPGs).  I’m going to start throwing reviews of games up here; I should probably include pictures, but I’m lazy.  Maybe if people actually started reading this.  :)

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I like Strategy RPGs. If you did not know this before, hi, I’m aetherspoon, a pleasure to meet you, you must be one of the three people that read my site that don’t know me personally. :)

I’m just finishing up a run through of Wild ARMs XF (yeah, I know, it came out over three years ago, but I’m slow in getting through my backlog) and, once more, I find all sorts of issues with the game that could have been fixed with a small amount of effort. Just a little more and it could have been an awesome game. It just committed too many Cardinal Sins.

One day, I’d like to make my own StratRPG. I’ve had tons of ideas in mind for several years now (since before I went to college even!), but I know I have little coding ‘skillz’ in order to make such a thing (really, the graphics are the problem; I suck at coding GUIs) and definitely do not have the artistic skills. Similar to the previous post on strategy gaming, that means criticizing someone else’s work and claiming that I can do better.

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tl;dr version: Anyone have any TBStrategy games that don’t fall into common AI tropes?

I’m a big fan of turn-based strategy games, typically referred to as 4X-style games. I’m also kind of good at them (like a world champion body builder is “kind of good” at lifting things).

I’ve played a lot of them, and sunk a very large number of hours into them, and while I love playing them, the AI is, shall we say, disappointing. It isn’t capable of figuring out when to hold them and when to fold them, as the case may be. It isn’t capable of realizing that certain strategies are good at different times in the game and not so good at other times. To borrow from chess, you have a beginning game, mid game, and end game. Using a beginning game strategy end-game doesn’t work.

This saddens me. It also makes me wonder if I can do better. Sadly, I’m not much of a coder and I’ve never tried making an AI (well, more like a decision algorithm), so I have no idea if I could do better or not. However, I can be an armchair developer/designer and pick at AI foibles.

Problem #1: Deciding when to attack. Read More →