So as you may or may not know, GoG.com has decided that they’re not going to stand for this ‘Steam getting all the money’ shit, and have thus launched their own huge sale. Front and center of this is something that really stretches the definition of the word “sale”, because it is costs no pounds and no pennies, which means in foreign monopoly money they presumably have to GIVE you money when you download it.
Empire Earth was a pretty great game. It was essentially Age of Empires, only on a Civilization timescale, from prehistory to a cybernetic future with mechs and stuff. For free? You have NO excuse not to give it a shot, it’s a wonderful game that is probably even better these days thanks to the fact that modern computers should be able to handle obscene numbers of units and stuff.
At ten bucks, EEII is probably worth it for fans of the genre. Not as good as the first, but still a pretty solid and enjoyable game.
III is right out.
I’m leery of sounding too much like an advertiser for a website or anything, but it’s really difficult not to enthuse about GoG.com when they’re in the middle of a sale that means you can buy The Witcher for four ninety nine USD. Is there anything you’re hoping to snap up over the next few weeks to while away the long lazy Christmas evenings, all wrapped up in a blanket and stuff?
(Ed. note: Obligatory pony picture. It's Christmas related, and also Mister Adequate related, because he's a Brit so we Yanks can make fun of him. -Pike)
I recently acquired Space Empires IV thanks to Steam’s big recent sale. My logic upon making this purchase was “Oh boy! An old 4X game that I haven’t played yet! This should be good!” As it turns out I was not disappointed; the game is relatively easy to pick up and begin playing (although in true Old Strategy Game fashion, its learning curve is steep) and it’s already got me One-More-Turning as much as Civ does.
Let me tell you what really surprised me about this game, though. What really surprised me about it is its capacity for roleplay and how much it encourages the player to do so.
First, a word on the definition of roleplay. Although its popularity in MMOs and such has largely given it the connotation of being a multiplayer activity, it doesn’t necessarily have to be so. This is how Dictionary.com defines roleplay:
roleplay
[rohl-pley] verb (used with object)
1. to assume the attitudes, actions, and discourse of (another), especially in a make-believe situation in an effort to understand a differing point of view or social interaction.
2. to experiment with or experience (a situation or viewpoint) by playing a role: trainees role-playing management positions.
Notice that the definition doesn’t say anything about requiring other people to be involved; obviously they are, in many situations, but it’s just as valid to “assume a role” by yourself.
Rarity knows a little about roleplaying, too.
Space Empires IV wants you to do this. When you start a game, you customize a race entirely from scratch, and there are big empty text fields given to you where you can input details on your race’s history, general physical description, and attitudes. These aren’t just there “for fun”, you’re expected to fill these out because any other race you encounter will have them filled out and if you don’t, there will be big glaring empty boxes next to your own race’s description in-game, and how embarrassing would that be!
You’re encouraged to continue roleplaying in the actual game, too. Not only do you design and customize every single ship you build, but you get to name the class of ship and then name the individual ships themselves. You can also rename planets, if you so choose. Now, certainly, plenty of other strategy games allow you to rename your bases/troops/etc. But none of the others that I’ve played actively encourage you to do so the way that Space Empires IV does. The result is that you feel personally invested into your little empire in a way that you rarely do with other games. It’s one thing when a generic “Scout Rover” is killed by an enemy, but it’s another thing entirely when FSS Nemo, Ensign of Exploration Class ship of the Fenolan Alliance, is killed. It’s something I personally invested time, thought, and personality into, and as such it hurts just a little bit more when something happens to it. It’s really a brilliantly done feature of the game.
Oh, one more thing about Space Empires IV. I invented a race of master engineer T-Rexes. I think I should win some sort of award for that.
Here’s a thing we’ve all experience! Something that shows just how wonderful games can be, as rare with games as a real pageturner with books, and the mark of a classic. One More Turn!
A couple of nights ago my co-host Pike had gone to bed early and I found myself not yet tired enough to do the same. “I know” I thought “I shall play a little Hearts of Iron for half an hour or so.” Two and a half hours later I noticed the same, and also the sunrise, and finally crawled into bed. The thing with a lot of games which have this appeal is that they have some really tangible sense of progression. I think that’s why we generally it call “One more turn” – it came from playing Civ until the wee hours.
Twilight just can't decide. Operation Sealion, or Operation Barbarossa?
With strategy games, good ones at least, you’ve always got something really tangible dangling in front of you. You’re always about to build a wonder, or conquer a city, or research a technology, or otherwise get some sort of reward. (Incidentally I think this is the major area where Civ V falls down; you get punished for many things, compared to Civ IV’s model where at worst you’ve lost due to opportunity cost. You might build unwisely but you still get something from it.) For me on Tuesday it was the conquest of Ethiopia, then of Egypt, then I had to fight Hashemite Arabia and Persia. After that I took on the Ottomans and their allies in Libya, Armenia, and Crete. Then I was ready to grab the remains of National French Africa. Throughout this I was researching new units and building new units and factories to improve my industry. See how it always cascades and there’s always something new to look towards? It’s admittedly a real-time game, but it functions similarly enough to turn-based for this to still work.
Compare to other games with more discrete levels. You do a level, great! Maybe you got a new toy in it. But now the level is over, there’s little that keeps you immediately hooked, the game might be superb but the immediacy matters a great deal in hooking you and keeping you hooked. I was playing some Skyrim and had a great time in this little dungeon, it was fun to explore, lots of fights, all that stuff. But once it was done, it was, well, done. I still want to play Skyrim but there was nothing keeping me there right at that moment.
Which games have the strongest One More Turn effect for you guys? We all know that Pike’s answer is SMAC, but what about our dear readers?
In my recent overdose of space 4x fun I’ve been given the chance to compare one of the aspects that isn’t an X, but is very much a standby of the genre and which few space 4xes, at least, seem to do without these days. Even the most indie, one-man-team of them have the ability to design your own ships.
This is awesome, because designing your own stuff is half the fun of these games, and I thought I’d take a minute to look at some different ones to see how they operate and which I like the most.
One of those likely to be better-known, simply because the game itself is a relative success by 4X standards, is GalCiv 2’s ship design. GC2 is a pretty damned solid game all-around, so it may be surprising to hear that I think the Shipyard is the weakest aspect of it. This isn’t because the thing itself is lacking but rather more fundamental design decisions; you have three weapon-armor pairs; Mass Drivers-Armor; Missiles-Point Defense; Beams-Shields; so each armor is strong against its paired weapon but much less so against the others. The problem is that there is little distinction in each thing itself. A gun works pretty much the same as a laser, and though it’s certainly pretty gripping to try and second-guess the AI and figure out what you need to research, and there is certainly a fair amount of needing to trade between weapons, armor, engines, and support structures, I can never help but feel that GC2’s shipyard is very thin in terms of grognardy ship design, though it’s absolutely peerless in visual terms.
Star Ruler, which I’ve not yet spent too much time with unfortunately, has an interesting little system. Visually you seem to be able to change almost nothing at all, but you place all your desired components into a circle and the ship is built based on what you’ve included. One of the interesting things is that there is no upper limit to ship size. You can quite literally build something the size of a galaxy if you have the time and resources. Within that you choose component sizes which automatically scale to your ship’s size, so a size 2 Railgun on a size 12 ship will be the same as a size 1 Railgun on a size 24 ship. It’s a little unwieldy at first, but actually rather intuitive once you get the hang of it, and it definitely gives a sense that you are designing something of your own where your choices have a significant impact.
This is far from the most complex example of ship design. Remember Aurora?
Somewhat similar to Star Ruler is the ‘list’ system used in games like Space Empires IV and Distant Worlds. You don’t place components on a visual representation of a ship, but simply choose them from a list and they get added to the list of what is currently aboard your ship. This system tends to really let you customize things to a high degree, and you can make some pretty specialized ships with a long long list of components to choose from. But best of all, I think, is the Space Empires V ship design.
Now, in reality SEV is another addition to the “list” model. Your choices, aside from the ship hull itself and little graphical effects from weapons and shielding and such, have no impact in any visual sense. What you choose affects the ships stats and you are basically making a list of components that a given ship is equipped with. However, it’s presented in a very clear manner where almost everything you want to know is obvious, and because it gives a visual representation (however crude) rather than only a list of stuff, it’s a lot easier to get your head around and to make sense of it all. And that, in turn, helps you feel connected to your ships, stations, and so on. It’s taking the best of the list model in extensive customization and adding to it just a dash of the visualization for flavor. Star Ruler does likewise, but I feel SEV does it best.
Fortunately, organic ship design is the same as normal ships.
What other examples can you guys think of when it comes to designing your own units? Has anything ever topped Warzone 2100?
I was recently reading this preview for an upcoming game by Paradox, Crusader Kings II. Here’s the final paragraph of the review:
Of course there are problems in a game of this scope, when the mechanics become obscure and events make no sense. When he was five Harold invaded Scotland, forcing the Duke of Lothian to surrender his claim on Northumberland, but a month into the ceasefire he managed to usurp it back and even Harold’s babysitter doesn’t know how. So once again, the only way to really work out the game’s nuances is by sticking with it and putting in the hard graft. The hard graft though, is that much more enjoyable than in the rest of Paradox’s strategy games. We’ll see if it can still be as engaging in the long run when it’s released in February, but the preview does leave a distinct impression: it’s still a spreadsheet, but it’s a spreadsheet with a soul.
The preview’s implication, if you read the whole thing, is that this game adds a personal touch to what would otherwise be another Paradox game by focusing on people and families more than countries. This, the article states, gives the game a “soul”.
It’s an intriguing idea, and it sort of got me to wondering what gives a game this mythical quality of “soul”. Can this soul be found in other games– even games that are widely considered “spreadsheets”?
I'd play a pony spreadsheet game, for the record.
I’ve been playing Hearts of Iron 2 pretty solidly over the past few days inbetween working on my NaNoWriMo. I’ve been playing as Canada, which I find really fun to play for some reason. My main goal of the game was to turn Canada into a surprise industrial powerhouse while also providing some backup for my brothers in arms across the Atlantic.
One of the benefits you have as a player in a video game based on a historic event– in this case, World War II– is that you know when things are going to start happening and you can prepare accordingly. In this case, I was able to shuttle some troops across to France and line them all up along the Maginot Line. My hope was that maybe, if I could provide enough help, we could thwart Germany’s advance into France entirely and mess with history a bit– isn’t that the point of Paradox games, after all?
This didn’t happen. We put up quite a nasty fight but in the end the Nazis overran us. My forces retreated into one lone province, and I remember watching quite helplessly as they put up a last stand there against the Germans. And you know, for one fleeting minute there, I felt that I had failed. Not as a player. Not as a strategist. But as a leader. Suddenly, for a few brief seconds, I could see in my minds’ eye the desperate last fight of a group of soldiers facing the numberless hordes of the enemy. I thought about how a few in-game years prior I had made them say goodbye to their families and friends and sent them across the ocean to a foreign country. I wondered what they must be thinking, there in their little province surrounded by Nazis. I wondered if they thought this was the beginning of the end of the world. I wondered if someone made a stirring, spur-of-the-moment speech, inspiring them not to go down without a fight. I wondered what their last thoughts were.
I wondered all of this and then seconds later they were gone.
They weren’t “real”, per se. They were bits of computer data represented by a couple of pixels on my monitor. But they represented real events and real emotions that have happened before and will happen again, and because of that, for those few brief seconds, I found the soul in the spreadsheet.
And that is one of the many reasons why I will always love this medium.
My current job involves a good deal of multitasking and being the leader of a group of, well… underlings. I get to tell people what to do and when to do it, I get to solve problems, and I have to bring all of this together in a way that accomplishes what we need to get done in the most efficient way we can. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of this job, but I do have to rather begrudgingly admit that I’m good at it. Which is probably why I inevitably end up in similar leadership roles at whatever job I’m in.
So I amused myself the other day when I realized that there were similarities between work and my beloved strategy games. Both involve being the leader, making decisions on what to do and when to do it, and wrangling a bunch of units exactly where you want them to go. It made me wonder if maybe there was a correlation between my affinity for strategy games and the fact that, somehow, an otherwise very shy, quiet, and passive girl happens to be good at ordering people around at work amidst the daily chaos.
Fluttershy approved.
If there is a correlation, I find myself wondering if I enjoy strategy games because I’m naturally good at leadership, or if it’s the other way around and I’m good at leadership because of years of practice with games. Or maybe it’s a little bit of both. An interesting topic either way. Do any of you guys feel as though there is some overlap between your in-game skills and your real-life skills?
I’ve written previously about how strategy games give you a pretty weird angle compared to reality due to how they function, specifically that because they put you in charge of a state and they have a win condition, you become pretty psychopathic with regards to your state. It is only a means to your end.
I’m going to come at this from another angle today. I was thinking about it when I was playing GalCiv, because as I am playing as the Humans I’m sort-of-but-not-quite RPing them as they’re written in the backstory; canny traders, excellent diplomats, with an iron fist in the velvet glove. Now GalCiv has election events that are incredibly trivial. You choose a political party and have regular elections. If your party wins you keep their bonuses (Say, +20% to your influence). If they lose, the bonuses go away until you reclaim control. But if they lose you are still in control. Now from a gameplay perspective this makes perfect sense. Nobody wants to sit back and watch your civ get run into the ground by the AI over the next 30 turns or whatever. That doesn’t make it any more sensible or less jarring; ultimately in strategy games you are your state/country, and anything along the lines of elections, changing dynasties, or anything else is entirely secondary at best.
What’s weird isn’t that they do this, it’s that they try and pretend they don’t. I don’t mind being told “You are the overarching driving force behind the French Empire rather than any particular leader or government therein”. But then a game will turn around and I will be presented as being the particular leader or government, such as EU3 where every notification is addressed to “My Emir” or “My King” or what have you. But how can you address this?
Of course the problem is lessened if you're an immortal Goddess-Queen
The Tropico series has possibly the best approach. You are a tinpot dictator and one of the ways in which your score is evaluated is by how much money you have embezzled from your own country over the years. This is a brilliant little mechanic, because you are actively reducing your abilities in one field in order to bump up your endgame results elsewhere. You’re still just going for the nebulous “score” but it’s something. One idea I had was to essentially provide you with ostentatious monuments to build, of truly obscene scale (Think Bender when he becomes Pharaoh), and the larger you build it the better you are. Civ used to do something vaguely similar where a good performance would make your palace or throne room better, a nice sidebar to the main game, and there’s a mod for Civ IV where you really can lose control of your empire to the AI for a number of turns, an interesting if frustrating feature.
Do you have any examples of this issue being done well? How might a game merge leadership of an in-game actor like a country with being an individual leader? Thoughts and ideas!
I’ve been playing a bit of GalCiv 2 lately (mostly when I want a quick break from BGT) and in the process I’m messing around with some of the component stats and techs to make it more fun for me. I’m trying to maintain the balance of course, and I’m running test games to see how it plays out. But that’s just the preface to why I was playing GalCiv 2; the real point of this post is what happened when I played GC2.
See, Stardock, who make the GalCiv games, are kind of trolls. They’re on record as saying that the percentage bonuses you are shown on-screen aren’t necessarily accurate; they don’t think such perfect knowledge is something the players should have. I don’t know exactly how large the variables are but it means that if you see something that gives you +5% morale, you might only really be getting +3%, or you might get +7%, and so on.
The other, even bigger trolly thing that they do in GC2 is with random events. Like most Strategy games there are random events of various kinds that are intended to shake things up a bit. Unlike those in, say, Civ, where you get a free promotion or one building in one city becomes more useful, the GC2 “Mega Events” can change the face of the entire galaxy. And Stardock have set it up specifically so that events will fire that cause the galaxy to descend into batshit insane chaos. Two big alliances at peace? Random event causes war. Everyone’s peaceful and not paying much attention to military? Dread Lords show up. Huge, draining war breaks out? Income is doubled. Or halved. Either way it’s pretty huge. These aren’t your daddy’s random events. For instance, last night whilst I was trying desperately to catch up with the Altarians, this happened:
Let me put a Class 28 planet in context. Earth is a class 8. Risa, from the Star Trek series, the pleasure planet? That would be about a 15. The Fantasy Planet in Futurama, where everyone’s wildest dreams come true? Maybe 18. If you go to Church every Sunday and serve God’s will in all you do, you’ll go to a Class 23 when you die. I’d never seen a Class 28. Until now.
Class 46. How did this happen? And the astute may notice it’s surrounded by other, habitable worlds. It’s rare for so many to be so clustered. What happened? What happened was the same insane random event happened twice. This event improves the Class of every uninhabited world by 12 within a certain radius. It happened twice, in two adjacent sectors. The first time it happened I was agog and immediately switched to Full Colony Mode to grab the 20-odd worlds that just went from Class 0 (Uninhabitable) to Class 12/13-ish (I was running with some very strong Planet Quality bonuses as well, which compounded all this further). It also boosted already-habitable worlds, so a Class 9 that had been of moderate priority jumped up to Class 21. And because so many of the worlds remained unsettled between the two firings of the event, a lot of worlds went from Class 0 to Class 12, then to Class 23 or so.
But that world, the Class 46, Nesro III? Well you can see it’s “Uninhabitable” and has a little symbol beside it. You need a particular tech – in this case Barren World Colonization – to actually settle it. These techs are research intensive, but the worlds tend to be of particular quality. This here world, Nesro III, must have been about a Class 22 or so to begin with. Very much worth pursuing under most circumstances, and potentially worth teching towards all by itself. Nobody could claim it because the tech was still some time away. The event fired twice, and it got up to this.
And that, fillies and gentlecolts, is how you do random events. Take note other strategy game designers! And readers, tell us about your experiences where stuff like this resulted in, shall we say, extreme outcomes!
I don’t really have a proper topic today, because insomnia is a lot of fun and has left my brain quite mushy and useless today! So I’m just going keep moving from topic to topic though it won’t be one long incredibly unbroken sentence and hopefully something will stick!
Let’s see then.
I finished Dead Island yesterday. My verdict remains much the same: It’s a buggy game from a developer who clearly has no idea what they are doing (The most recent patch broke the game entirely and they had to roll it back before fixing it; I don’t really know how you miss the “Nobody can play your game because it doesn’t even start” bug but there you go.) and it is a ridiculous amount of fun. You go to three major places in the game; the Resort, the City of Moresby, and the Jungle. Weirdly it’s Morseby which is the most hectic, tense, and meaty part; the Jungle was a quick and pleasant jaunt in comparison. Also as someone on SA said, the presence of an honest-to-god sewer level in a game in 2011 is personally offensive to me.
Mowen? More like BRO-en!
My efforts to give HoI3 another shot have failed because I keep playing Victoria 2 and EU3 all day. It’s not my fault, PDM keeps getting updated and I must also bring the Light of Islam to the world as a unified Arabia! I’ll try and play some HoI3 soon though.
I picked up MoO2 on GoG.com recently (I know, it’s shocking that it took me this long) and I can already tell it’s very much worthy of the praise it receives. That said I’ve more been messing around with GalCiv 2 lately, largely because MoO2 doesn’t seem to play nice in a window.
Oh, and if you’re playing any Gears 3 lately, make sure you give the mutators a try in Horde mode. Super Reload is amazingly fun.
Finally, I’ve come across a freeware RPG called Exit Fate, which apparently hews to the Suikoden school of game design. Will give it a try and report back on how true this is and so on.
So, as you’ve no doubt gathered if you’ve been reading this blog for a length of time, I’m a fairly big fan of Paradox’s grand strategy games such as Europa Universalis. My favorite however is probably Hearts of Iron II: something about it just really, really appeals to me, and I’ve had weeks where I play nothing but that game or one of its innumerate mods.
All kinds of hilarity
So you’d have thought Hearts of Iron III would be a pretty big thing for me, right? So did I. Then I played it.
I really can’t put my finger on what it is. It’s not a bad game, though it had the usual panoply of Paradox bugs on release. It does a lot of interesting things and objectively looks like an improvement over its predecessor. I don’t want to be some kind of old stick-in-the-mud but at the base of it, it’s not enough like II for my tastes. It took a long time to get into II, and now that I’ve got it all figured out I’m somewhat reluctant to move on.
But I can see the appeal of III. So I’m giving it another try! This time I’ve said screw the base game though, I’m going to dive straight into a mod that does stuff I like, so I’m rolling with the Historical Plausibility Project, which seeks to allow plausible in-game outcomes based on what happens without being either too sandboxy or hewing too closely to reality. Exactly how I like my Paradox.
What I REALLY want is Silent Hunter with Admiral Rarity, though there is an Equestria mod for Vicky 2
So let’s see how this goes! Have you guys ever had a game which you know you should like, but don’t? Have there been games which you’ve had to try several times before you get into them? Are there some you’ve just given up on, and retreated to a preferred predecessor?
