Easy Mode / 4X Strategy Games

Welcome to a new and hopefully recurring thing I'll be doing, where I look at genres of games I enjoy playing but consider myself to be terrible at. As the first port of call, the ever popular 4X genre.

The what now? / XXXX games?!

As a starting point, let's explain what the genre is. Because 4X doesn't really paint a helpful picture if you're not familiar with the term. 4X games are strategy games that pull back the scope about as far back as possible, putting you not just in charge of an army or company, but rather of a civilisation (and, in fact, the Civilization series of games is a notable example of the genre).
So, what's with the name? Once you get past the fact that it's a dumb acronym it actually describes the genre surprisingly well, because it refers to four X-words (or rather, EX-words):

• Explore
• Expand
• Exploit
• Exterminate

These are the four stages each run in a 4X game will go through. Some will focus more on different EXes, some will interpret them differently, but this is the core of what it's all about. So let's go a step deeper and explain every step. This will be brief, it's not figurative rocket science.

1. Explore

You start out somewhere on the map, sometimes entirely randomly, sometimes in a balanced or convenient location. This location can be on a map of a planet somewhere like the Civilization games (will probably abbreviate that to Civ at times) where space faring isn't really a big part of things or you can start with your very own planet like the pile of space 4X games out there.

There might be a new things to explore at the edge of how far you can see, but overall it'd be a pretty subdued opening moment.

Once you get your bearings and made a few opening choices (e.g. what your research team should be doing, a tax rate for your people, what construction projects to focus on) it's time to see what is out there. Most 4X games push players in this direction by having them start with not just a first base of operations (a city, a planet, a Settler that can found a city / colonise a planet) but also a dedicated scout or low-level military unit.

Players are expected to move out immediately, see what's out there for them to acquire.

2. Expand

Once you have a basic idea of your bearings you'll start to notice that there is stuff around you that would be useful to you. A gold mine, an ore-rich asteroid, an inviting and slightly larger planet. All just out of reach. So you build a settler caravan or a coloniser ship and send it off to the edge of your realm to push that border out and increase your reach, your domain.

3. Exploit

All these newly acquired things need work for them to be useful. So you build the infrastructure to exploit the newly acquired resources. Mining stations, farms, fishing fleets, processing plants. No matter what you claim, will add to your coffers so you can expand more and exploit more.
Your growth really consists of these three waves, corresponding with the first three EXes.

The first wave is your knowledge, what is out there, the second is your expanding influence, usually directional towards the (known) things you want to acquire most and then finally the wave of exploiting those acquisitions.

The final EX is there to throw a spanner in the works though, because you're not the only one out there.

4. Exterminate

As much fun as it could be to explore and occupy an unknown space without organised opposition, there tends to always be some parallel to the player out there trying to achieve the same thing.
They roughly follow the same rules as you, start out the way you do, and have the same goal as you, to be at the top of the pyramid once the dust clears.

There will generally be peaceful ways of interacting with your opponents, even some levels of cooperation where you band together to exchange resources, increase trade or boost research. But, the main way you will generally interact is through war and conflict.

This means that on top of growth (preferably to the point where you control everything) you have to balance this with the ability to defend what you have acquired and potentially taking things by force from your opponents.

What's hard about all that? / Just "Git Gud"!

A fair question! Tricky to answer for me though, since it's not as if a game loss really comes with a recap of where you messed up (actually, that'd help SO much! I'll leave that to the recommendations section though).

In general I think I'm too cautious and too pacifistic of a player? I dislike starting wars with opponents, I don't push constant expansion. I'm not aggressive, instead I tend to just sort of do my own thing.

It also doesn't help that I'm far from an optimal player. If I get 200 Gold per turn / minute (most of these are turn based, but a good chunk of them aren't) but am already at my storage maximum of 8000 Gold then I'm wasting that 200 Gold income.
And even if I'm not close to hitting that maximum (or if there is no maximum) it's still inefficient for it to just be in my storage like that. Having funds to deal with a contingency is one thing, not having a plan for your funds is another. (...wait, that's a problem I have in real life as well...)
The idea is to immediately spend all resources you can spare in the furnace that is the four EXes, every step has to help you along on your path to conquest, lest one of your opponents overtakes and defeats you.

Maybe they're just not for you? / You don't have to play these...

An unhelpful question! There are definitely game genres that aren't for me (twitchy shooters, military shooters, realistic racing games, to name a few), but there is a lot to like in 4X games that I'd really like to be able to enjoy.

Because there is a beauty in building something from humble beginnings. Beauty in the organic storytelling that comes from a semi-random world (or galaxy) where you shape a society. Beauty in the design where different factions can have wildly different strategies, options and mindsets.

It is a genre of complex interlocking systems yet also of crafting your own story, this should totally be up my alley and just because I'm bad at them doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to play them.

What would help? / Is there no hope?!

The best question! And one that I choose to interpret as how game design can be improved to allow for dumb, suboptimal play. It would probably also be possible for me to learn and be better at each individual game, but I don't really play games to challenge myself, I just want to relax and succeed.

What's been done already:

Quite a few games already have excellent ideas implemented to make them more approachable to less hardcore players, the ones that spring to mind now:

• MANY difficulty settings: I've never seen a 4X game that didn't have at least 4 levels of difficulty, the easiest one is often not quite as much of a cakewalk as it is portrayed as though. Civilization V is an excellent exception, with its 8 difficulty settings even I can't really lose on the very lowest one.
• Modular generation settings: Space pirates are a mainstay of sci-fi 4X games, they can be a fun challenge or an absolute pain in the ass. So it's nice to have a toggle at the start of a game whether you want any. And this is just one example how a toggle like this can make the game more fun. Resource abundance, player spawn balance, starting resources, starting era, planetary distance, general research speed. All things that are nice to be able to tweak.
• Head Starts: Speaking of things to tweak, the previous bullet point was all about changing how the playing field is set up and how each player is treated. There's nothing wrong with options to give specific players a head start though. Being able to start with an extra city and double the money can really help compensate for inefficient play. An option for per-player income modifiers is also very welcome (and can lead to fun scenarios! E.g. playing against two opponents, one with super fast research and slow troop training and one with barely any research and super fast troop training).
• Fixed teams: Being assigned a team at the start of a game not only makes the political aspect of the game easier, it also allows you to just make unbalanced teams. A 2v2 where your ally happens to be 3x as strong than your opponents? Sure! A 3v2 where you are just the extra player in an otherwise balanced fight? Also good! I don't actually make use of this option very often when it's offered, feeling that it undermines the feeling of accomplishment in a way that a ridiculous head start does not. But it's a nice to have.
• UNLIMITED POWER: Star Ruler does this, and I don't know of any other 4X examples (not even Star Ruler 2), where it just doesn't limit how far you can research things. Meaning that, assuming a head start (or proficient economic play), you can overwhelm and outclass your opponents regardless of how bad of a strategist you are.
• Modular Faction options: This is something I've mostly seen in Stellaris and Endless Space, where some factions actually have sections of the game locked off to them. Don't feel like bothering with all the politics? Play as fanatical purifiers and always be at war with everybody. Don't care about food and farming? Play as robots. Don't want to deal with civil unrest? Pick the hive mind. It's logical that some factions will focus on aspects more than others (e.g. a faction that is great at naval combat or at researching things), but entirely eliminating game features is a great way to make for a simplified and more focused experience. (And, on the flip side, again gives you more options in what type of enemies you'll face)
• Custom Faction Builder: I don't see this as much as I'd like, but there are examples out there. Endless Space lets you do it, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is a fantasy one that also allows it (though it's mostly concerned with a hero character). This way you get to play as a robotic hive mind that knows only war, even if the game only provided these options separately. Or you can be anything else you want! These systems usually give you a set number of points to assign to various (and often mutually exclusive) traits for your empire as well as some negative traits that give you points when you take them.

That's already quite a list of features that make my life (and these games) easier, and if every 4X game from now on would implement all of these I'd already be super happy to finally be able to enjoy all of these games. That doesn't mean we can't do better though, and I've thought of a few.

What I'd like to see:

These are ALL, without exception, intended to be toggled options. They are not things all players will want, they are not things I will always want. But they would help in some situations where the game is too hard for me.

• Rubber banding: In Mario Kart (and other mascot racers like it) the drop rate of items is tied to your position in the race. So if you're further back you're more likely to get a Star or Blue Shell to give you a shot and make you feel relevant in determining the winner respectively (if you're dead last then nuking the person in first place isn't going to help you, it's weirdly designed). Having the option for rubber banding (perhaps even directional-only rubber banding, where you can have it be balanced, only favour you when you're behind or only favour your opponents when you're way ahead) in a 4X game could mean getting better random events or your opponent suddenly collapsing into civil war and fracturing into factions you might still be able to beat (Stellaris actually does this, though to my knowledge not as an act of mercy). It could also be impacting more covert things like base income rates, but I feel like in this case it's not just the fact that you're getting a boost but also the knowledge that you're getting a boost that helps the player stay motivated.
• Lower caps for opposing factions: Catching up to an opponent that has been outpacing you for hours is a rewarding feeling. This is something that could be enforceable by giving the player the option to set limits per faction in the game. Never giving your opponents FTL travel could mean you'll eventually outpace them, or never having opposing nations grow beyond the medieval era. It doesn't have to be a technological cap though. Limiting the number of cities / planets / military units a faction can have is also a great way to limit how far your opponents might go. (In fact, I guess the Single City mode in later Civ games is a balanced example of such a cap).
• UNLIMITED Custom Faction Builder: Remember that custom faction builder from the last section? The one that works on a points basis? Those could be uncapped. By which I both mean that the two stage perk where your society gets faster scientific progress (+20% science for 1 point or +40% science for 3 points) will just have as many levels as you might have points. And on top of that allow for societies with negative points to be played (probably just in single player), meaning factions where players have bought more than the intended amount of perks. I'll gladly take a popup explaining "intended experience" and "disabled leader boards" I just want to be able to tweak my faction to play the game I want to play.
• Explaining losses: I already referred to it earlier, but losing a game (which can feel like a waste of several hours) would feel less frustrating if the game then tried to use this as a teaching moment. This is something some Roguelikes do, where dying is a more common occurrence, they look at how you died and explained how you could have gotten out of this. The decision tree for a 4X system feedback system like this would have to be complex (after all, a poorly working implementation would be horrendously frustrating), but it could really help to get feedback like "You didn't push for a third city/planet as fast as your AI opponents" or something.

An Unrelated Detail / Because not everything can be on topic

I want to briefly dive into the game that is in the title picture, Sword of the Stars. It's not a very well-known game in the genre (and also by no means spectacularly good), but it does something I really enjoy. This is less something that makes the game easier, and more of an example of the types of things unique to this genre that can really elevate the game experience.

There are 7 races: space humans, space lizardmen, space insects, space dolphins, space monkeys and space birds. These aren't their names (and the monkeys are actually marsupials), but that's not what's important. What's important is how their ships move. A lot of the details in how these factions control are the same, except for this one. And it organically shapes a lot of the gameplay decisions players of each faction make. To illustrate, I'll go through each of their propulsion techniques in turn, but before that to quickly give you some context:

The main map of Sword of the Stars is a field of stars, depending on (the oh so critical) game generation settings this might even be a 3D field, making for a cluttered and confusing affair where you're constantly rotating the camera to make sense of what you're seeing and relative distances. Ships travel from planet to planet in a straight line, requiring fuel. If they meet opposition the perspective switches to a separate battle map (like the in the title screenshot) where the two fleets duke it out.

Now, FTL propulsion systems!

• Lizardmen: They have the simplest technology. Their ships proceed as normal through space and can be ordered to move directly from any planet to any other planet.
• Humans: They are more restricted, only being able to travel between nodes which are a type of tunnel between most (but not all) neighbouring systems. To travel long distances they navigate this web, jumping from planet to planet. If no node exists, they can opt to travel using sublight speeds, but it will take a while.
• Monkeys: Basically the same as humans, but their node system (which is completely separate from the humans') starts out nonexistent. They have dedicated ships that tunnel connections where the player needs it, which slowly degrade and destabilise over time (unless revisited by a tunneller every now and then).
• Dolphins: Their engines work better out in deep space, meaning they will speed up during long jumps but will need more time than you'd expect for shorter jumps (of course the game does accurately inform you how much time each jump will take).
• Birds: Their ships flock together to speed up FTL travel, single ships or small fleets move slowly, large groups move at terrifying speeds.
• Insects: Have absolutely no form of FTL travel. They do have teleporters though, which connect deployed gate ships for (literally) instantaneous travel. The gate ships have to get to other planets using sublight travel though.

It should be pretty easy to see how these different methods of propulsion direct the way each faction is played. Humans are predictable compared to Lizardmen. Monkeys aggressively rush places. Dolphins spread thin. Birds swarm and overwhelm with a few massive fleets. Insects slowly expand but are quick and brutal to defend their gate network.
This is gorgeous narrative through design, and makes players gravitate towards different factions just based on how well they work together with their preferences.

Wrapping Up / And setting up a new Civ game...

Alright, I think that about does it for this new experiment. I've already got an idea for the genre to cover in the next of these too, it's... very different compared to this, but I'm still terrible at it!

And that should be okay too.