Starting a Retro Japanese RPG series.

Hi, Everyone I am gonna start doing some videos about some good old JRPGs, waiting in for Final Fantasy 15 really got my brain surging on all of my years of experience of RPGs and especially JRGPs.
 I wrote my master thesis about rpgs (which you cant find on my portfolio website) published papers on it, I worked as a game designer at Nectar Studios where we of course developed a RPG and so on. I am playing Pokemon Moon (always bought the dark color) while writing this. Anyway I have dedicted a lot of my life for my love of RPGS.

 RPGs are so good as it can both be an amazing story far superior to books or w.e if you ask me, while they can also really challenge you on an intellectual level and really reward you on a emotionell level.

I want to simple talk about some of the games I think everyone should play in this genre, if 1 person get this game and experience the joy the bring I am happy:)

Here are my first 2 videos in this series, the first one just covers some of my thought about single player games future, I had a similar ideas when it comes to save/checkpoints in my action game research back in 2010, I dont mention that in the video but its actually something I been analysering and observing for quite some time.

The second video is my start of talking about games that I think people have missed and should check out, in this case Soul Nomad and the World Eaters

Quality Maniac:Civilization VI Part 2: AI

So as I mentioned in my last article I have found huge numer of bugs in Civ 6, but the game is still really, really addictive so I don't feel I have time to talk about them:)

The game is really, the way the map now works with units having "half movement" or w.e you wanna call it (which is that they have to pay more movement to cross rivers/enter forest/jungle) makes the strategic element more interesting, supports units is a great addition to the war.

The district parts are amazing, it just gives the game so much more depth, I can easily sit 10+ min per city just to decide where to place my districts. Usually I plan out all of them but its often built around the first one so if e.g campus is to the left of a mountain the industrial zone likely will be next to this campus etc. This very far planing is really fun and really rewarding, you sat up your next city close just to get al the districts close to each other, or do you go far away to get an extra luxury etc. Japan is a big favorite of mine as I love build everything condensed. The only real gameplay problem (Except the bugs) is how it does not feel balanced at all, military civ in general feels way stronger even on higher difficultly its quite easy to demolish 1 close civ + take a 1 or more city states with any early military civ such as Sumerian, Scythia or Aztec. Several Civ feels very meh on their abilities. I am probably gonna write/do a video about how I feel each civ plays.


Anyway now I have to again talk about the AI. I want to try and skip to go over the general AI issues as much as possible as its so obvious but after playing a recent game its behavior yet again surprised me how bad it is.


 There is a general issue in how the AI is very binary, e.g have a religion. Meet Kongo, he will instantly hate you if you dont give him your religion, when this was first talked about it sounder interesting and great but its just no depth to it.

So if you are on the other side of the world he will complain, already this is annoying as you just met him and its like 100+ tiles to him....so yeah thanks for never trading with me.

But I actually found it even more annoying and how evidently binary it is when you found a religion.
 I was playing a game as Tomyris(Scythia) and I have meet everyone on my continent which included Kongo, which was on the far eastern coast while I was on the west coast. I build Stonehenge and am the first to found a religion. BAM instantly hated for the rest of the game by Kongo. This is frankly just stupid, the very next turn after I founded my religion he hated me. There i literally 0% chance for the player to give anyone even the closest civ the religion the turn they found it let alone the civ which is the furthest away.

The AI needs to have way more len way in how it reacts, it took me like 200 turns to give him my religion, could I have speed that up, yes probably could give him it in under 50 or so, but that is still very long time for him to refuse to have any trade with me etc. And after I gave it to him he still was on bad terms so...

 This is the basic issue of the Civs, build 1 wonder and China Qin hates you. Have 1 city ally and Germany Barbarosa hates you and so on.
 It should be more like, have 3-4 city allies depending on map and number of city states he and you are close to and depending if he aims to conquer them, not just a very strict border. Well even if it was just a border that needs to be set way higher, as in Kongos case he cannot instantly hate anyone with a religion should give them at least the number of turns  to walk between your capitals or something similar.


But I think most are aware of this, now what really pissed me of was this:

This image clearly dont say much without context

So what happened here is that I was on very friendly terms with Tomyris, we where not just friends but even allied.

Already at this stage of declared friend the AI is really stupid, it still will refuse fair trade deals like I talked about in my article before this, which just makes no sense, now Alliance is the next step higher, the highest step in the game of cooperation between 2 Civs.

Here the AI still acts like they hate you...whatever one can just guess that issue will remain.

But this image is after Joint War so Tomyris has asked me, Yes SHE asked me. If I wanted to join in  war versus Peter of Russia. Please note again that SHE wanted this and asked me even payed for me to join her war with gold and luxuries.
 Clearly then this next action of her makes zero sense. I was really pissed of at this, the thing is that its hard to even get some deals with the AI and as we where were close friends the whole game and she was in lead tied with we had a lot of deals back and forth. Now after I attacked Russia with her...for her she is angry at me is just wtf.
 This is truly brain dead. So I just my ally for the last 2000 years because I did what she wanted. Its one thing that the other Civs got pissed at me and her for being warmongers, as we allied to attack 1 other civ but she should be even more happy with me.

This would be a horrible AI actions from any civ. BUT, its also important to note that this is Tomyris, which is why I was even more shocked when this happened. They all have their basic personality + 1 random e.g she was this game into people with high science, so she liked me from that as I was aiming for very science at start. That trait is sometimes a little less binary then their primary one but also much static like their base persona.
 And her basic trait is that she is very, very loyal. As we had declared friendship a few times than later having 2 alliance and then during the second alliance I followed her into war. She really should be extremely binary in favour of me as we have had super, really super loyal friendship.

But no apparently warmongering trumps their otherwise strict binary personality. SO really how are you supposed to figure out how to please them. I get that other AI civ will hate me regardless becasue of warmongering (note that I never even conquered a single city this game, they all including her instantly hated me the next turn after I joint her war), but as I joined her she should have 0 hate towards me war and in actually I should get massive bonus in our relationship both from simply joining her, from having a new deal with her(Joint war + luxury trading etc) and lastly a major bonus as its specifically with Tomyris.
 If this was another grand strategy game I would expect a marriage proposal after joining her war, here instead she completely flipped flopped on our extremely long loyal relationship which every AI should like you for but Tomyris should extremely like you for this. I never built any citys next to her etc always did what she wanted,  which is the one reason I joined this war to please her and she just instantly hated me for it the next turn and then permanently for the rest of the game.

This was the most irrational illogical decision I have seen in Civ 6 so far and that says a lot becasue the AI does a lot of crazy stuff all the time. The last thing one should not forget here too is that this was also in no way beneficial for her. Pretty much no other civ in the game liked me or her even before this war so after it they all hated us, so they wont trade with her, while I got like 5-6 luxuries that I can trade for her 4-5 abundance of luxuries, the effect is that we both just lose a lot of amenity (happiness). Its simply illogical on all fronts and it goes extremely against her persona. IF Ghandi did it or something it would at least makes kinda sense that he hates you because he got bribe you into a war or something. But She is for the first obsessed with loyalty, secondly she is a warmonger and does not normally become angry for this until you take a lot of cities, thirdly, she was the beneficiary of me going to war as I just helped her troops and sank Russian units, fourth she than had a huge abundance of resources that no one wanted to accept from her and she refused to trade to me...

The 3-4 I can kinda ignore as just bad AI overall. But 1-2 really, really annoys me as that as I said several times goes against her core personality. So yeah please fix.. I have no idea how the AI is gonna act after 120 hours of game time.

Quality Maniac:Civilization VI

So I have been a Civilization fan for years, I even played Civ 1, got 1000 hours logged for 5. I have already played Civ 6 for over 100 hours and yeah.....

its the most bugged Civilization game so far. The most obvious issue is that the AI is crazy bad when it comes to doing fair trades, but I wont go into that because I feel its so obvious that I think everyone knows about it right away.


I will say 2 things about it, first of all, it makes no sense that the AI is so against fair trades when they are even allied with you, e.g Tea for Diamonds, but are luxuries with no extra benefit, its understandable if the specific AI hate you for some reason that they dont want a fair trade but when you are good friends,,,why is it not fair to do X for X type of deals.

Secondly, why cannot it find an even gold deal. Its really weird how it works right now, so for example let say that I have the special amenity resource Jeans, from a great person. And I want to trade it away, I ask for 100 gold they refuse, here then in the other games I could say, well what is fair than, and the AI would say like 55 gold or something.

 But in the 6th game, they say like FUUU Give me Jeans + 300 gold. Is really just wtf moment, why would I ever give them gold to take my luxury. Here the AI should just determine from different factors, such as friendship, size of country, how much they need the amenity etc. And then say well I could pay X value, which is 25 less then your Y value is that fair.
 Instead they just go completely high wire on some weird pricing, The thing is that if you keep asking for a new price by lowering some increment each time, you will find this value. So if you first ask for 100 where they actually can give up to 355, you have to sit there and try and find the value. E.g I first ask for 500, they refuse, then I ask for 300, that is fine, then I ask for 400, they refuse, etc until I can find the actual value. So there is a determined value they have the AI just cannot find it them self.

 I think most are well aware of the trade issues so I will go into some random bugs I have found so far, I just want to note again that the weird part with the trade is that they do have a Cap price just like in 5th game, they clearly calculate it by a lot of hidden factors however they just cannot find automatically tell you the price.

Here¨s(I am sitting on a Japanese keyboard and cannot find the apostrophe button lol) a simple UI bug, these are usually my kind of favoritte bugs to find in a game as how just simplicity it is. The bug here is that the pop up text when hovering over Theocracy is clearly in ALL CAPS. No other text for government systems are displayed like that. ( I checked all)
 The charm with this kind of issue is that its clearly a bug, no discussion needed.

Because a lot of other times you run into this wired issues, or states where you are like, maaaaybe this is intentional and you have to go and talk to a producer etc to actually figure out what the intentional behavior of the game should be. My favorite bugs are those that are super complicated to actually find and they crash the game or like remove the games memory file or something so even if they are hard to trigger if anyone ever would they would not be happy, so even if its an edge case it has to be fixed. But my second fav is these kind of super simple, well this is a bug, bam done.

For example compare it to this

Me and a friend discovered  that you can play as the same civilization and even the same leader, see I would not mind if you can play Gorgo and Pericles, they both ruled 2 different city states in Greece so they could share the basic civilization abilities from a shared culture etc but have different leader aspects, which is of course what they currently have but I mean that they are in the same game actually is not wrong, its actually kind of interesting.
 However, the game does not seem to randomize that by itself, which I actually think is a mistake I think it should be able to random leader picks for player or the AI of different leaders like that, where its a clear shared culture of a civilization both different places of the leader. Now only Greece have 2 leaders, but if we had e.g Washington and Roosevelt that would feel weird to have 2 american empire civilization when it feels like they are clearly on the same team.

See I could not figure out if this was a real bug or not until I found that the game actually have an achievement that requires you to play with a the same leader as you are and win with a cultural victory.
 So it has to be international to be able to play as 2 of the same leader, but then I would argue that its a bug that the game cannot randomize both Gorgo and Pericles for a game, well maybe it can I have just not seen it but I have seen all other 2x combos of leaders. (I am checking the game settings when writing this feels like it should be an option for that but I cannot find it). You can set this up manually which I found really boring, yeah I would say that is a bug.

As a last point for this double leadership questions I would like to point this out which I just think makes no sense:

You can play all leaders as the same person,,,they just feels so wrong, ok its more balanced if everyone can play the same leader and civilization but Civ really is not about min/max balancing the different leaders. Of course you want each leader to be equally good, but each leader has their own way to win, the game has several different clear wining conditions etc. So a game with everyone being the same leader just means everyone is likely trying the exact same wining strategy which is very boring and actually kinda makes it the game extremely imbalanced, becasue for example here with Cleopatra is a good wonder builder. And tries to get a lot of wonders, well if everyone has the exact same bonus to build wonders, the game actually becomes luck based, having the best start position or general good city placements for the first few cities will make 1-2 Cleopatras beat the other ones each time  for the same wonder, so this would just end up having a few number them doing the actual game plan for her leader prioritizing and the rest trying to make war or something and not playing into the abilities.
 Basically I don¨t it makes much sense, seems like the only value is to play all as the same war based nation and just fight, still then start position would make a few of clearly be stronger and it would be to much luck based, well it the end some massive collection of the same leader could be a fun game to test to play, but it really feels like something I would do once and never again :)