BoM/TWS Message Forum

Only recently I noticed there's a version for the Switch. But then again, I'm liking the pace of the Wizardry 1 remake - after a while, it's basically fulfilling its purpose of being a dungeon crawler, and the quality of life changes make the grind less of a drudge - so it may be some time before I get a copy of it. (That, and the backlog is just immense - I *still* need to finish Knights of the Old Republic, then see if I'll choose to go for the second, or maybe go for Jedi Academy 1 & 2, or The Force Unleashed, or KotOR 2 - and that's without saying I still need to actually finish The Witcher 3, and actually attempt Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment, and maybe find a 64 GB card so I can play Batman: the Arkham Collection and the other two games in the GTA 3 Definitive Edition trilogy, and there's also Star Ocean 2: Second Story remake and Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song and Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven and Etrian Odyssey Origins...)

As for your suggestion... I'm not sure if it'll be "fun" for everyone to see how they need to hit the collapse button just to progress. When you do so in games like SimCity, you do it for the fun of seeing things blow, but if the collapse is too much that you can't recover from it, you just reload a previous save. Of course, you gain nothing from destroying your city, which is another malus, but the idea is that you don't have to commit to it.

Seeing it from a mechanics perspective, the fact that other civilizations could end up easily destroying yours when entering this crisis can be an issue. As it stands, the idea is that you get diminishing returns from what should be natural progression, which forces a "reset" after reaching stagnation, and then you have a period of recovery not so different than when you incite a revolution when attempting to change government (old gov't --> Anarchy --> new gov't). When that happens, some of your resources seem affected, but the recovery is much, much faster, especially when the new policies apply. In your suggestion, the destruction is far, far more encompassing, and at some point it may feel like you'll never recover as, while you still have three-quarters of your resources to essentially start again, you'll be at the mercy of other civs who haven't pressed the button, who may just prolong theirs by ravaging what's left of yours.

That said - as an alternative difficulty option, it works wonders. More than an innovation, this feels like a challenge run - will you be able to destroy your carefully-constructed civilization or let it stagnate? And will you see the opportunity of ravaging a civilization going through an existential change to prolong your own, or use that to protect yourself from suffering the same fate? I'll only say that it depends on whether you can trust the game developers to make a good interpretation of that idea.