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Place an “Undo” button in each strategy game
Old World is the best new strategy game of 2021. It borrows the most radical mechanics from Microsoft Word. You can undo any operation by pressing Ctrl-Z.
Usually, this is a feature reserved for spelling errors, but the developer Mohawk Games allowed us to reverse time on the front lines of war, urban areas, and rural ranches. Have you sent a spear barracks to the wrong department and wasted your neighbor bonus? Undo. Have you misread the defensive integer and accidentally sacrificed the settlers in an extremely stupid way? Undo. Have you decided that your heir wants to study philosophy, but if you think about it, maybe he is more suitable to be a mathematician? Undo. Literally, every action in the old world can be rolled back immediately without any consequences. The game will not call you nincompoop because of your tactical mistakes, and will not deduct any points for accumulated Ctrl-Z at the end of the era. In the old world, everyone makes mistakes.
I can’t tell you how revolutionary it feels. I am a long-term civilized player and many things have happened. I absently dispatched a worker to an empty farm, but was shocked by a terrible thought: no no! I want him to build a mine! What am I doing! too late. That farmer is trapped in the cultivated land, reducing the overall efficiency of your game plan to an imperceptible degree.
We’ve all been there: the disciple was trapped between the border and the barbarians with nowhere to go, the naval offensive went wrong because the walls of Augustus were destroying your humble three battleships, and the merchants wandered in the sanctuary because of you Misunderstand it as a commercial area. Sid Meier’s theory is punitive. Players are punished for lack of concentration; to be a good leader, you must always pay attention to details. But the old world makes this attitude look outdated. History cannot be changed, but in the fantastic fantasy of 4X, shouldn’t we be able to correct some unsightly marginal negligence?
Firaxis is likely to be working hard for Civilization 7, and I pray that we can see the “Undo” function there, so that we won’t misplace traders anymore. Ideally, this new dawn will also spread in countless other strategy games. Can I reset the position of my gunner in XCOM? I really think this wall provides more coverage than it does. (This leads to the problem of undoing after 95% of the sniper’s misses-this is one of the classic and painful frustrations in all turn-based games-although perhaps it is time to eliminate the injustice in another way.) Paradox should still be taken notes. Maybe I accidentally inserted some failed idiots into my spy master slot, and would prefer to exchange them with more capable vassals without triggering a rebellion in the kingdom?
The Old World is not the first strategy game with an undo button, although it is a recent rare example. The Panzer Corps series have them, and Panzer Corps 2 allows you to customize how it works in the settings so that you can change whether to allow recovery after an enemy is found. Another example is Invisible, Inc., which is built around a limited number of resets.
Perhaps in some cases, this is a blasphemy, and players should be forced to endure all mistakes forever. But seriously, what is more fun to play? A sickly empire, exuding the stench of negligence and potholes, stumbled towards a tragic victory? Or is it a master who works well with countless failures on the road to glory? We all know the answer, deep down.
This proposal has some obvious type restrictions.No one can “undo” headshots in Call of Duty or drop combinations in Mortal Kombat. As lively as imagined, no one should be allowed to “undo” a real one, real It is not good for SnowRunner to turn left because that is not in line with the spirit of those games. But the turn-based strategy is increasingly beginning to present all its tactical information on the surface. Roll dice without dice, for example, Into The Breach, Endless Legend, or Old World. From the moment you press the button, you know exactly what will happen. On that stage, the glory of Ctrl-Z should always exist. Microsoft Word figured it all out from the beginning.