My computer is a hulking six-year-old leviathan that is turning into more and more of an eldritch horror as the days go on. Recently it decided that it was no longer going to run my beloved Crusader Kings 2 without throwing a major fit. I’ve been going through several phases of emotions and actions since then, like a twisted grief cycle:
Denial
Trying the game four times in a row (each one resulting in a major crash)
Playing Sonic 2 while waiting for my computer to run fsck and dskchk
Reattempting Crusader Kings 2
Playing Sonic while I reinstall EVERYTHING because CK2 crashed again
Retrying CK2
Playing Victoria 2 when CK2 crashes again
Feeling dissatisfied with Vicky because it’s not The Sims Medieval CK2, and giving it another shot
Playing more Sonic while waiting for my computer to check itself again because it crashed again
And so forth. So… basically I never got past the denial stage.
Twilight: Me, Scootaloo: Anyone who knows me
Really, I think I just need a new computer. You know you’re having problems when a.) you can’t run a simple map-painting simulator game because it eats up all of your RAM, and b.) you can’t add more RAM because your computer throws a snitfit. Unfortunately getting a new computer is much easier said than done, especially when you’re busy saving for other things, so I’m trying to talk myself into playing other games while I wait.
…stay tuned for “Things Pike Does While Trying to Talk Herself Into Playing Games that Aren’t CK2.”
I never thought that a Paradox game, of all things, would touch my heart so much, but, well, it did.
See, in Crusader Kings 2, you play as a dynasty. If your character dies, you become the next character in your line, and so on and so forth. In my current game as the Holy Roman Empire, I started out as the Kaiser, and then became my firstborn son when the Kaiser died. At that point everything went down the tubes over the matter of a few in-game years as my jealous younger brother declared war on me, took most of the empire from me, defeated me soundly, and finally instilled me as a minor Duke of a couple of provinces. Then I died (rather mysteriously, I might add) and suddenly I found myself playing as my next heir– a four-year-old boy.
I was still sort of reeling from this whole development when a lone character approached me– my uncle, then in his late teens. His name was Prince Heinrich the V. He asked for a title and some land, so I gave him some so I wouldn’t have to micromanage all of mine. And at this point he became the one character in the game who was kind to me. He tutored me. He was on my court as my spymaster. I could always count on him for a favor. I imagined that my little boy character looked up to him as a sort of hero figure to latch on to, and even out-of-character I appreciated that this guy was one of the sons of the original Kaiser that I’d started out with and because of that I was attached to him.
Time went on and the boy grew up. Once he hit about 15 years old, I got this event:
Now one thing about Crusader Kings 2 for those of you who don’t play it: Every character gets several “traits”, both physical and personality-wise, and these effect different stats on your character. A gay character gets a hit to their fertility rate and it affects diplomacy a little, but mostly it’s just there for flavor.
And so I clicked the okay button, figuring it was just a random event of sorts, and then, a few in-game days later, I got another event:
So it wasn’t just random. My character had developed feelings for the one person in the game who was kind to him.
Put that last image on the right side of this one and you have basically my exact reaction.
Rather nervously I clicked the button. I wasn’t sure what would happen next in the game or if it would have an effect. As it turned out– it didn’t really. There were no more events about this particular storyline, although– tellingly– Prince Heinrich V remained kind to me.
My character grew up, married a woman (you can only marry the opposite gender in game), and had a couple of kids, some of whom I put into Prince Heinrich’s tutelage. At some point around here I was mysteriously killed and I found myself playing one of my daughters, who grew into an upstanding Duchess in part due to the fact that Prince Heinrich tutored me and whacked all of the negative traits out of me. In the little story in my mind, I could imagine him raising me like his own child as a favor to my dad.
Most of this stuff is long-past in my game, but that little storyline, spawned by a couple of events, has stuck with me. I never thought I’d get this many “feels” out of a Paradox grand strategy game, but I’m glad I was proven wrong.
Games by Paradox Interactive tend to attract a specific sort of person and you either are or aren’t that person. The games involve staring at maps and charts for hours at end and doing a bunch of micromanagement, and let’s face it, that either appeals to you or it doesn’t.
Well, yesterday, after spending about thirty minutes getting Crusader Kings 2 to run on my computer (You know your computer is bad when…) I spent a good several hours with the game, and while it’s probably too early for me to make some sort of definitive statement on the matter, I’m already getting the sense that this is, as I said in the title: A Paradox game for people who otherwise don’t play Paradox games.
Let me explain where I’m coming from here. Let’s take the other Paradox games. Victoria is about micromanaging pie charts, economy and government. Hearts of Iron is about micromanaging military forces and supplies. Europa Universalis goes for a more nuanced “just take over the world” approach and throws you right into this with no real explanation of what’s going on.
Crusader Kings, on the other hand, is about your family. The core mechanic of the game mostly revolves around who’s marrying who and who’s tutoring who and so on. For the average person, this is far more intuitive to pick up on than whether or not you need more supply convoys, or something.
Paradox continues to make the game accessible to newbies with the inclusion of comprehensive “hints” which explain every bit of the UI, a tech tree that mostly runs itself if you want it to, and military at the push of a button.
If you are the Holy Roman Empire, this is what happens when you press that button.
There is, of course, more to do for veterans or people who warm up to the game quickly. It’s a Paradox game, so there’s warfare, and you can also do fun and exciting things like assassinating people or throwing people into dungeons. But none of this stuff is exactly necessary if you’re just warming up to the game, and you can spend hours pouring over your family tree and selecting potential brides for your sons.
The result is that Crusader Kings 2 is a game that does a very good job of easing newbies into the Paradox family and introducing them to typical grand strategy concepts and UI features, while still maintaining a decent amount of complexity for those who want it. It used to be that I’d recommend a newcomer to the genre try Europa Universalis 3 as their first game, but I think I’m going to have to change that recommendation to Crusader Kings 2. This really is a solid, enjoyable game so far, and if any of you guys have been wanting to make the jump to grand strategy for a while but have been iffy on it, well, now is a great time to do it.
So it’s time for another Paradox post! I’m sorry, but they keep doing stuff and seeing as they’re one of my favorite developers (Against my better judgment!) I’m going to have to keep writing about them!
Today I got around to downloading the Crusader Kings 2 demo that was released recently and gave it a whirl. And I have to say, yet again, Pox are really knocking it out of the park of late. I’ve played CK1 a little but could never really get into it very well – not so here. I was riveted to my bloodline’s fortunes! I found a wife, then we had children, then we had twins! She was a good wife. Then I had to decide, for example, who the children were schooled under. I also really pissed off the Bishop because I removed him from my Cabinet, but some gold sorted that out. A corrupt man of the cloth?! Who’d have thought!
After repeated attempts to marry my son to my neighbor’s daughter I got fed up of his constant rejections and decided to just acquire her lands (He had died by this point) by force. I sent one of my cabinet out to forge claims, and after a few years he had done so! A war later and voila, my territory had doubled. I gave it to my second son, because I had changed to a succession law whereby my first son gets EVERYTHING, which understandably upset the rest of them. Especially wee Brebinn, my first-born. She was not happy. Not at all.
Sadly the game does not have immortal Pony princesses, nor can you banish anyone to the moon. Should be able to send them to Scotland though, I suppose.
And then the time limit ran out and that was that. But I think, despite a couple of bugs (Some of the events don’t seem to be properly written, especially) that I’ll be picked this one up in a couple of days when it comes out, because I clearly don’t yet have enough Paradox Sperg Games!
In technical terms Pox have carried on their wizardry from A House Divided. This thing runs incredibly quickly and smoothly, as well as looking gorgeous. Definitely give the demo a try if grand strategy games are your kind of thing! And if they’re not, well, this blog must bore the crap out of you!
Yesterday the latest offering from Paradox Interactive was released, the expansion for Victoria II known as A House Divided. As you may surmise from the name, the expansion’s centerpiece is the American Civil War (As a Brit all I can say is we had our Civil War before it was cool). So let’s get this out of the way immediately; the Civil War scenario entails a new starting date, which seems to be reasonably well put together, and just about nothing else. If you win as the CSA, there’s nothing much that makes them a unique nation. There are no events to, for example, remove the USA’s cores on your territory. So every few years they will take another swing at reabsorbing you.
It is strange that the expansion’s centerpiece would be its weakest element, but there it is. The scenario is anemic and underdeveloped, and doesn’t really add a great deal that you wouldn’t have in the normal starting point of 1836.
On the other hand, “Loads of Small but Great Improvements” wouldn’t make for a very snappy expansion title, now would it? But that’s what it contains. I played an entire game yesterday as Persia and it was the most fun I’ve had with Vicky 2 by a fair way. The new elements work extremely well. The new method for modernizing countries that don’t start out that way seems very arduous at first, but soon reveals itself to be a very well-judged mechanic that is a lot more involving than the previous system. Similarly the new way you generate Casus Belli before you’re allowed to declare war (most of the time) was something I was very wary of, but in practice it’s a really clever mechanic that not only helps you feel involved, but becomes something rather tense as you hope you manufacture a war goal without being detected. It also helps keep the AI on a sensible path. Their need to make CBs means they seem to be acting rather more sensibly than they did beforehand, which is good!
The economic changes are similarly positive, or at least they seem to be, because Vicky 2 is rather hard to wrap your head around in that regard. Money is definitely scarcer, and you need to make decisions about what you are funding and how much. No more can some podunk middle-rank power field a first-class army, navy, and civil service all at once!
The Persian Empire shall again rule!
The one other negative thing is China, or more properly China and the new Substates system. See, in vanilla Vicky 2 China was something you really wanted to get into your Sphere of Influence. They were huge in every way, and getting first dibs on their market was immense, it would single-handedly keep you on top in industrial terms. To counter this we’ve got the new Substates system, where China is divided into six or seven different entities who are locked together as unbreakable satellites. Ahistoric nonsense. And it’s not like the 19th century was a time of unconstrained positivity for China! Where is the Taiping Rebellion for example? It’s a lazy and strange way to work around the problem. That said, using the substates system for, perhaps, the Confederacy, might be a very interesting way of doing things!
So overall I would say that if you only care about the American Civil War, this expansion probably won’t prove to be very interesting. However, every other aspect of the expansion is pretty much golden, and I highly recommend you get a hold of it if you’re a Vicky 2 player! Oh, and it runs far more smoothly and never really seemed to slow down for me.
A blog called Critical Distance provides writing prompts for game bloggers, and I’ve decided to give this one a go (although I can’t promise how successful I’ll be). Here’s the prompt:
Being Other:
Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.
I imagine that a lot of responses are talking about gender or race. Which are very valid things to talk about as we approach games critically. However, I’m going to touch on something a little different. I’m going to provide a sequel to my earlier post “A Spreadsheet With a Soul” and talk about what it’s like to be the bad guy in a game. I’m not talking about picking the dark side path in a Bioware RPG. I’m not talking about roleplaying a jerk character in an MMO. Here, let me show you what I’m talking about.
I’ve been on a big Europa Universalis 3 kick lately. Currently I’m playing Portugal and taking over the Americas, just for giggles. Let me tell you how that went down: I sailed over to the new world and found some unclaimed land (denoted as gray on the ingame map.) Some of this land was inhabited by “natives”, which was no big deal, because my infantry could destroy them in a matter of seconds if they chose to fight. I slaughtered several thousands of these natives that way as I slowly began to turn the map from gray to green.
Then I encountered something else. Aside from the nameless “natives”, there were actual native nations on North America. Huron, Iroquois, Cherokee, Shawnee, and others all had little patches of color on the map denoting their territory. If I clicked on their territory I could see the names of their leaders. I could also see that they were eying me rather warily.
At first I decided to be nice. They weren’t bothering me and I was taking land that was rather far from theirs, so I gave them gifts of gold in order to befriend them and then I let them be.
For about, oh, fifty or sixty years or so.
Because that was when my lust for territory had taken me all the way down to them and their little blobs of color on the map were interfering with my lovely solid green. I checked the technology chart– they had nothing compared to me. I clicked on their territory to see what they thought of me. We weren’t friends, by any means, but they “trusted me implicitly”, probably due to decades of peace and the gifts I’d given them.
No matter. I declared war, stormed in, easily killed off their little armies and occupied all their territory. (The “casus belli”– cause for war– that I gave here in order to not take such a hit in various game attributes was that they “owned territory that was rightfully mine”.) They sent me peace treaty after peace treaty– first just begging me to stop and then offering to give up some of their land– and I turned them all down. I wanted nothing but full annexation. I wanted them gone from the map.
See that brown? It was bugging me.
It didn’t take long. First the Iroquois were gone. Then the Huron a few years later. I let Cherokee and Shawnee live for another decade or so (they were more out of my way), at which point they banded together and declared war on me and I retaliated by annexing them. Just as I’d wanted, these cultures were now gone from the map and it was all mine.
Now I know what some of you are probably thinking. That this is an absolutely awful and atrocious game and how could I play it in good conscience and how could anyone find this fun?
Well here, let me tell you something. By the time I quit WoW I had over ten thousand PvP kills on my main character alone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of NPCs that I’d killed, and I never batted an eye or thought about the implications of it.
I’ve killed hundreds of people in Skyrim and not blinked.
I’ve Planet Bustered away portions of entire continents in SMAC and giggled.
These were all clearly fiction. The enemies were not real. It was all abstract and didn’t matter.
EU3 is different. EU3 is making you recreate events that actually happened (or would have happened, in some crazy world where Portugal took over North America). EU3 has made me stop and think about myself. Sure, I can rationalize every day that I wouldn’t ever do something like this in real life. But you know what? I bet the monarchs back in Europe in the 17th century were seeing it exactly as I was. These other cultures were offending patches of the wrong color on their maps.
Maybe we weren’t so different after all. What a thing to chew on.
It’s just a game, sure. But it’s a game that lets you step into the shoes of history, for good or for ill, and because of that, it’s a very valuable experience.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana
My dear co-blogger and better half Pike and myself are currently playing a game of Civilization IV. It’s a tech race game, no wars or anything, and she very definitively has the advantage, she has more cities than more, better land, more tech, and more than double my score.
Clearly I need to do something to catch up. So why – in a game with no barbarians – did I build the Great Wall, a wonder whose primary purpose is to stop barbarians getting inside your borders? The secondary purpose, of course! Espionage. See, the Great Wall is one of the few wonders in the game which contributes to the creation of Great Spies, who don’t immediately seem as useful as say a Great Scientist (Who can one-shot a tech) or a Great Engineer (Who can one-shot a wonder), but who really massively boost your espionage. And that’s my plan here. She won’t be able to keep up with my espionage income once I get a GS or two, and then I shall be able to quite merrily run around her obscenely large Russian empire causing all sorts of trouble, like sabotaging buildings, stealing tech, and poisoning her cities.
Rarity only helps put paid to that dreadful Russian fashion, of course.
It shall be glorious. I have no idea whether she remembers that the Great Wall helps with spies, but I sincerely hope not because things are going to get trolly very soon. Also as long as she doesn’t read this post before one gets born. That would be unfortunate. Hubristic, even! But a risk I shall take for our beloved readers, as I leave you with this question;
Do you have any examples of games where you’ve come up with some cunning plan? Perhaps one that does not at first glance seem at all rational? How did they work out for you?
~~
IMPORTANT EDITORS’ NOTE FROM PIKE: Although I didn’t see this post until some time later, I saw what he was up to on the espionage graph and cranked my own espionage up to 80%, effectively foiling his plan. Yeah, it was pretty great.
It’s the motto of Dwarf Fortress: Losing is Fun. And it’s one you need to take to heart with that game, because until you get the hang of it (And even after you do) you’re going to lose, a lot. But that’s not quite what I’m aiming at here. In conventional games you may often die a lot as well, but you’ll come back at the last checkpoint or save and carry on.
What I am thinking of, however, is something fairly unique to strategy gaming, which is to say, losses that don’t end the game, but rather that are just a part of the game, a thing you endure, carry on from, and ultimately recover from.
But does that happen? See, in a ‘regular’ game like, say, Halo, when you die you just come back from it. You try again. You succeed, or not, and that’s that. In a game like DF you may lose a lot of work, but in these cases the loss is indeed part of the fun. It comes about because of a silly mistake, or because of hubris, or because you just got bored and wanted to watch the world burn. But in a strategy game losses are different.
Decisions, decisions
In the real world of course no country is in permanent ascendance. Not even Rome enjoyed uninterrupted growth, and Rome eventually fell, as all powers do. So a strategy game must surely account for this as well. Yet in my experience, when you lose a city in Civilization or are forced to cede provinces in Europa Universalis III, it doesn’t feel good. It does’t feel like it’s part of the proper flow of the game. In a strategy game you do expect to be in permanent ascendance, and to not be is irritating and may well turn one off playing. I recall reading an interview with Sid Meier years ago where he said his original intention with Civ had been for your civ to go through periods of contraction and decline, but he found it was far from enjoyable to have it work like that.
Partly I think this is a case of momentum. In a strategy game, when you gain something, that something goes towards helping your empire grow. Overextension and the like are rarely simulated, and almost never simulated well, and in fact when that is attempted (As in the Magna Mundi mod for EU3) it often comes off as very arbitrary and pointlessly constricting.
How about you? Am I alone here, or do others feel the same and dislike accepting losses? Are there examples of games which do this well, and don’t make it feel arbitrary or unfair?
Firaxis – that of Civilization fame – has just announced that they are remaking X-Com and that it’s going to be a turn-based strategy, like the original. Excuse me while I post my face:
And now, Mister Adequate and myself shall post our thoughts on this:
Pike’s Thoughts:
There’s a lot that could go wrong here but there’s also a lot that could go right. The easy way out would be to say to just make X-Com but give it a graphical and UI facelift, but we could even improve upon that. RPS discusses this at length in this article. Mostly what I think is vital to me is that they don’t lose any of that feeling of being terrified between turns as you hear noises and “hidden movement.” Like old Hitchcock movies, X-Com largely works not because what it shows you, but because of what it doesn’t show you. I hope that, in the whirlwind of fancy graphics and whatnot, Firaxis doesn’t lose sight of this.
This is definitely going to be an interesting one to watch– since we don’t have any major details yet, it’s definitely too early to say whether or not this is all going to work, but as it stands now I’m rather cautiously optimistic. Firaxis isn’t perfect by any means, but if we’re going to put X-Com in the hands of a major studio I’m glad they’re the ones getting it.
Mister Adequate’s Thoughts:
Given that we know very little about the thing at this point, Pike has already covered most of the major points that could be made right now, and I echo everything she said. What I will add is that I am also cautiously optimistic if for no other reason than the fact that XCOM – the shooter that is – is already on the way. There’s nothing to be gained by trying to capitalize on the action market, 2K would be competing against themselves, and a studio like Firaxis is never going to have an easy time going up against 2K Marin in the shooter domain, but the strategy side of things is, Xenonauts aside, wide open.
There is an enormous wealth of ideas about what a new XCOM ought to be floating around out there, and I hope Firaxis have been carefully and continue to carefully read and think about them, and take them on board where it seems appropriate. We’re a rabidly obsessed, hard to please fanbase, but give us what we want and we will reward you with kingly sums.
Another, and absolutely vital, aspect here is modding capability. People have done some impressive things with the original X-Com despite the thing not being remotely modder-friendly, but look at the mod scene for Civ IV and imagine that transposed into XCOM.
You know, I think I’ve identified another hook that strategy games tend to have for me. It’s something I’ve noticed I feel in such games for a long time but have never really connected it in a logical sense to a reason of appeal.
That is quite simply potential. Think about when you begin a game, especially a 4X like Civilization. Think about how you see almost nothing of the world, just your immediate surroundings, unblemished by human actions, and beyond that the dark mystery of the unknown. Your first, tiny, puny settlement, protected by a handful of clubmen. You send out a scout and begin gradually cranking out buildings and units, gradually expanding.
I don't have a relevant pic, so have this cat hugging this kitten.
It’s that exact moment right at the beginning, the moment of seeing the potential but not yet being able to achieve it, that I love. Or at least is the first half of what I love. You begin planning, mentally placing future settlements, looking at how to fight a defensive war, scouting out your neighbors, all that sort of thing. The entire game is before you and it is a quantum, Schroedinger-esque value at this moment. It is not yet a game, but the potential of a game. Over at Flash of Steel, a good while ago, Troy Goodfellow wrote an excellent piece that is related to this. As he says it’s not that things are complete unscripted, in fact a lot of things are constrained by various rules and/or in-game costs, but one of the core aspects of a good strategy game is that it is fundamentally a story, or a series or collection of stories. The story of how the Iroquois conquered the world, or when the Cold War went hot, or whatever it might be.
And that pregnant moment in the first few turns of a good 4x where so, so many stories are possible, and you get to wrestle with your rivals to write one – that moment is truly delicious. Much later you will look back across a cultivated, irrigated, networked empire that has left no tile untouched in the quest for dominance and efficiency, and the story of getting from A to B is there to see. Some things will be obvious, like the masses of farms and mines. Some a little more subtle, perhaps, like how all the cities in the southern end of your Persian empire have French names. But all there to be seen and remembered. The potential has been realized, and now you have a completed game, and the memories of playing it.
A core aspect of this is the ability to affect the world itself, which may be why strategy games (and management/sim games) seem to scratch this itch most effectively for me, as opposed to the more typically narrative-led genres. It’s not just the transfer of territory, but also the utilization of that same territory once you own it. Not just the achievement of a prize, but the use of the prize. It’s an inherent strength in strategy games I feel; until you achieve your ultimate victory you’re always looking for more efficiency, how to get more gold or credits or beakers or whatever, using your past conquests to become ever-stronger.
Also, when Troy Goodfellow said “No action game has ever made me want to be a writer. Some strategy games have.”, that could have been me saying it. In fact my book, which I am currently editing, was originally intended to just be an AAR of Space Empires V, but it rapidly blossomed far beyond that.
