So, here’s a game I’ve not played for a couple of years, but my friend came over to my place today and we spent a couple of hours with it. Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI. We’ve played all of them from VII onwards, and the series is commendably varied in its approach. In some you control a single general and can give orders based on your position; in others you may have different levels of control. In XI you don’t control any one individual, but the entire faction you have chosen.
My benevolent kingdom of killing Wei Yan!
And it struck me today that it really is a remarkably deep, genuinely strategic affair, in a way that few other games I can call to mind are. Every city is an individual unit, with its own production, farming, income, etc., and this all gets influenced by how you develop them and stuff. But the interesting part is how everything is quite discrete and the interactions have to be done consciously, by you. If one city is starving and another has plenty, you need to set up a supply transport to move grain. If you build a ton of spears in a secure province, you need to have them shipped to the front in order to use them. Your units themselves need to set out with food in order to stay in the field. It’s not a civ or city building game by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, but it is a game about war and not just fighting. It is a game about logistics. You have to worry about supplies, recruiting troops, keeping your cities in good order, developing your cities, keeping your generals loyal, locating and recruiting generals, diplomatic dealing with other factions, providing weapons, research, and money. On top of the fighting.
It really is categorically commendable, because it’s one of far too few wargames that seems to really care about this sort of thing. In Han China, you most certainly would have supply problems unless you planned very well. And as many are fond of saying, logistics is the difference between victory and defeat.
No. No it does not. Especially when you’re me, and you love Civ and you really love robots. That’s probably why I’ve had a few people recently link a couple of articles to me.
Basically, some geeks (and I use that word with utmost respect, as I always do!) have taught an AI how to read. Not some programming language, but English. Then, to test their AI’s reading ability, they had it play Civilization II both before and after reading the game manual.
Before reading the game manual, the AI won a little less than half of the time.
After reading the game manual, the AI’s win percentage jumped up over thirty percentage points, to a nearly 80% win rate.
This is super exciting to me on a few levels. Firstly, I’m superhuge into the idea of robots and AI. I envision a future where intelligent creatures of all sorts and designs live together in harmony (I ain’t ‘fraid of no Skynet). I think it’s really exciting that an AI has been taught not just to read, but to learn from a human language.
On a slightly less scholarly level, I’d love to see something like this adapted to make better AI in games. I’ve talked before about how I’d like to see improvements to the AI in Civ; bring it on, Civ-playing robot!
So yeah. As I was saying, it really doesn’t get any better. Unless you get a robot playing SMAC. Then it could be better.
Although this would hurt the poor robot's feelings, I've no doubt. :(
Recently I downloaded a free game called Battle for Wesnoth. Now, normally here I’d launch into a lengthy monologue about my reactions to the game, however, my exact reaction can be summed up pretty much completely in image format, so here, have a picture I made:
What I Played: Battle for Wesnoth. What I expected: Final Fantasy Tactics. What I got: X-Com.
For the uninitiated among you, Battle for Wesnoth is a fantasy turn-based tactics game, and it is not easy. Let me rephrase that. I died on the tutorial level while fighting combat dummies. Then I died in the first campaign, on the “easy” difficulty setting. I died a couple of times, in fact, once because my main character got hit in the face a couple of times and promptly bit the dirt, and once because I ran out of turns (they’re limited!) before I could get to the checkpoint I had to get to.
Granted, it’s entirely possible that it’s just that hard because I’m still learning the game, and hence suck at it. But man, when was the last time I failed so spectacularly on a first attempt in a game? X-Com? Hearts of Iron II? Those are not exactly easy games.
Now the best part of this whole thing was probably my reactions to it. I was on voice chat with Mister Adequate as I played, and he was slightly nonplussed (just slightly, though– he knows me very well) and thoroughly amused to hear my squeals of delight as my butt was repeatedly demolished by the AI.* This game is difficult and I love it!
I haven’t had a chance to play as much as I’d like to yet due to less important things like work, but I very much look forward to digging into this game in earnest this weekend.
—
* I have it on good authority that Mister Adequate’s eyes glossed over and he stopped reading and started daydreaming upon seeing the words “butt”, “demolished”, and “AI” in the same sentence.
On the one hand, I would LOVE to see an update of, say, SMAC, with an engine and graphics akin to Civ IV with all the stuff that made the original game great kept intact.
On the other hand, when we get a new X-Com that is more like Mass Effect with the X-Com name pasted on it, I’m not sure what to think. Sure, the game looks interesting and might even be pretty good, but I have a difficult time believing it’s really X-Com without all the turn-based-tactics-want-to-smash-your-head-into-the-wall-it’s-so-hard action.
"Hidden Movement" is arguably the most terrifying phrase in video gaming.
But then I wonder if I’m just either being a crotchety old gamer telling the kids about how games were HARD back in my day, or simply refusing to take off the nostalgia goggles. Or both. Can it be that my knee-jerk “do not want” reactions aren’t justified, and are purely emotional?
Well, sure. But as a wise individual in a classic film once said, “Whoever said the human race was logical?” We are emotional creatures who get emotionally attached to things we care about– and if you’re like me, you care about your games. We care about our memories of them, and we want others’ first experiences with our favorite games to be like our own.
So yeah, I want an X-Com reboot to be just as maddeningly difficult and involve just as much tactics as the first. I want everyone who hasn’t played the game to experience it like this. I want to see the keys flying off of your keyboard when you smash your face into it in frustration. I want you to lean forward when the “HIDDEN MOVEMENT” screen comes up because you actually have to listen to the game sounds as a part of the experience and I want you to jump in your chair when you do hear something. I want you to see how terribly genius this game was and why it managed to enthrall me some fifteen years after it was first released. That’s what I want from an X-Com reboot. That’s why I’m not so sure about this new one.
…oh, and yes, I am a crotchety old gamer wearing nostalgia goggles. I have no shame.
I love all sorts of video games but I make no secret of the fact that strategy games are my favorite. RTS, TBS, 4X, Grand Strategy, Tactics– I’ll eat up just about anything that falls under the big strategy umbrella.
It may seem like a bit of an odd genre to someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time in it. You’re managing not just one unit or character, but several; oftentimes you’re managing whole bases or countries as well, and winning or losing frequently comes down to who can get the biggest and/or most advanced army first. Defeating an enemy isn’t something you do by way of pressing certain button combos, rather, it’s something you do by way of planning and math.
So I was wondering why I prefer these types of games so much, and I think aside from the standard “I just plain like the style of play” answer, a lot of it just comes down to the fact that every single game is completely different. If I were to play through an RPG, it would be pretty similar each playthrough– the storyline would be the same and the characters would all follow the same growth and would say the same things. You’d run into the same enemies. Sure, lately there has been a lot of experimentation with multiple endings, different choice paths for the hero, and etc., which is adding a lot of variety to a a genre that has traditionally been very linear, but in my own personal view, nothing really tops a strategy game when you’re looking to sit down for three or four hours and have a game with a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT OUTCOME than the last three or four hours you spent on the same game last time.
I don’t know if this is more evident anywhere than in Paradox games like Europa Universalis 3 or Hearts of Iron 2, where the possibilities for total global domination by Sweden or Inca or the Confederate States of America or something is entirely possible. Mister Adequate is the one to go to if you want hilarious stories like that.
And then there’s SMAC, where you might play one game where it’s all seven of the factions duking it out for domination the entire time and then this is followed immediately by a game where everyone dies in the beginning except for you and one other team.
Or maybe something like this happens:
Honestly I just wanted an excuse to upload this and show off.
I have only seen this happen once so far. I mean, I hope it happens again, because it’s pretty darn hilarious, but Miriam is usually willing to fight to the bitter end, so seeing this happen was new and seriously amusing.
SMAC does another great thing where each three or four hour game involves a self-contained story, which goes a bit differently depending on how you win, what order you tech things in, and et cetera. Every SMAC game plays differently. As does every Civ game, and every Hearts of Iron 2 game, and so forth. I love it, and that’s what continues to pull me back in and keep me playing even after I’ve dumped days of playtime into these games already.
Yup.
What are your favorite genres? Why do you love them so much?
So Pike and I have been playing a little game of Civ IV over the past couple of days. Standard enough settings; just she and I, Pangaea map, regular sized world, etc. Unfortunately for her, I didn’t play as she was expecting me to play.
See, normally we’re both turtles and techers. As I’ve said before on this blog I very much like to establish a solid defense, build up within it, establish a strong technological lead, and then strike once I am prepared and assured victory. But I knew this wouldn’t work with Pike, because she does the exact same thing, and it would be unlikely that I could establish a significant tech lead at any point for long enough to overrun her.
So I did something unorthodox, and this unorthodoxy proved successful. What I did was, I built an army. Not a vast 30-unit stack of doom, just a moderate sized stack, but enough that I could bring force to bear against any one city of my choosing and hopefully conquer it.
My I Legion. Out of... how many, I wonder?
Now, the eagle-eyed and Civ-informed among you might notice something from that picture. Nibru is a city of the Sumerians. Sumeria is led by Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is a Defensive leader. In fact, once I got eyes on the city, I discovered that she had very wisely been whipping archers out every turn, and even though it lacks a barracks, they all started with decent promotions anyway. Had I actually attacked, I’m not at all confident that I could have won. But Pike calculated that her own chances were poor, and was also fearful of a ship I had knocking around that she presumed had marine forces aboard (It was just an old unit I had sent out to explore and forgotten about entirely), so she capitulated to my demands, and several technologies were mine for free. More insidiously, her extra units both cost her population to create, thus significantly slowing her growth and causing unhappiness, and the increase in military units will also be a drain on her treasury.
I give no quarter. Talk about times you have been cruelly aggressive or trolly in multiplayer games!
Not in real life, of course, it’s way to slow there (Why am I not a robot yet?). But it’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile in 4X games, and the slower-paced RTSes (i.e. those which have parallels to 4Xs rather than to speedily-resolved conflicts such as those in Command & Conquer or StarCraft).
Here’s the thing I find happens all too often, from Age of Empires to Civilization to GalCiv: I research some shiny new tech, I crank out new units that make use of it, and then by the time they get to the front line… I’ve researched something better. And I hate to throw things into the fight when I can give them a better chance at victory, so I pull them back, upgrade, send them in – and the same thing happens.
Now partly this is my own fault. I identify, quite outside of videogames, technology as being perhaps the single most important factor of human civilization; naturally this attitude transfers into games when I play them, and given how most games which involve any kind of research can be thoroughly dependent on it if you want to win, the attitude is encouraged. Better units, better buildings, new wonders, more options in general.
You thought it started with Civ? Dune II maybe? Nope, this was the first vidya with a tech tree. Though the Civilization board game by Avalon Hill was first of all, a decade prior.
But in these games, things tend to come along too fast for you to keep up with it all. This isn’t terribly accurate to real life; we might suspend production of our appliances during a war or depression or something, but once those are past, the evidence is that the public explodes with eagerness for new technologies like the radio or TV. Technologies are interlinked, often in a hugely complicated way, and games don’t come close to handling this complexity in a satisfying way. At best you’ll get a research bonus to tech X if you’ve researched tech D first. I hope that someone can put together a broader and deeper sense of technological development, one where you don’t always have control (As with SMAC’s blind research), and one where you have enough time to make use of your things before new units surpass them. This would both make development more rewarding and would probably serve to equalize things slightly, as a big tech lead would be harder to get.
Do you guys know of any games that do tech advancement in interesting ways? Do you know of games which just have insanely huge tech trees?
One of my earliest posts was about Dwarf Fortress, wherein I also made mention of a game called Aurora. In the comments, Repaxan asked me to describe it, intrigued by my claims that it is significantly more complex than DF. Finally, I am bothered to do so!
Aurora is ultimately a 4X game. It is, however, to 4X games what Dwarf Fortress is to The Sims – vastly, impossibly, insanely more complex, more detailed, and more inscrutable. This is what it looks like:
It's like I'm really in 1985!
That’s the only game screen with graphics, really. Every other page, tab, screen – all the icons across the top lead to submenus and so forth – is basically an Excel page in one form or another. It is not an attractive game, indeed it is intimidatingly the opposite, even for a 4X grognard such as me.
HOWEVER! As with DF, it’s well worth struggling through the initial stages of confusion, because this game is… I don’t even know, holy crap, it’s insane. Sure, sure, lots of games let you design your ships these days, from the shiny and simplistic (GalCiv 2) to the detailed and consequential (Space Empires V), but this is on an entirely different plane. In Aurora, you research the basics needed for a component, then you design the component, then you research the component, and then you can assign it to a ship. In other games you research what amounts to ‘Shootier rooty-tooties’. In Aurora you decide on what kind of energy weapon you’re making, and then you dictate relevant factors such as the size of the laser lens you are using. THEN you research appropriate radar and firecons for your new weapons, and THEN – once you’ve also got engines, fuel, quarters, etc. etc., you stick it all on a ship.
Then you have a process nearly as complex for assigning commanders and giving orders. I’m STILL trying to figure out all the nuances of the latter, and my ships don’t always do what I’m wanting them to do. But, as with DF, the end result is astounding – a game that takes a lot of investment, but rewards it beyond your wildest dreams. Nothing else comes close, that I can think of anyway. Also, you can terraform planets however you want. I have indeed killed the Earth by stripping her entire atmosphere away, and poisoned other worlds by similar sabotages. Which is, you know. Hilarious.
The game is free, and can be picked up the forums. There’s also a Wiki but, unlike DF, I know of no equivalent of capnduck or 51ppycup making tutorials.
This is the culmination of a Civilization IV Let’s Play I’ve been doing; here are Part One and Part Two.
Where were we? Ah yes! Caesar had just declared war on me! Again!
So Caesar sends his stack at Coventry, which I’d retaken several turns prior. I’d moved most of my reinforcements out of there, due to years of peace and assuming I’d be good. Famous last words, I know. It was very quickly down to Caesar’s stack vs. one single Redcoat. Who put up a good fight, by the way, due to my huge tech advantage, but eventually Caesar nabbed it back. What happened next can probably best be described as a game of Coventry Yo-Yo, as I took it back, and then he took it back, and then I took it back again. That poor city. It’s like it’s really Poland or something!
MEANWHILE IN ARRETIUM, it’s Caesar’s trebuchets vs. a big pile of my machine guns, which I’d just finished teching and which I was now hurrying like fist of the North Star. Yeah, that didn’t go so well for him. I guess you can give him points for being plucky, or something.
So about this time everyone voted for me to be in charge of making votes and stuff. So obviously, I asked everyone if they wanted to declare war on Caesar and help a guy out. I mean, wartimes are funtimes, right? Right? …Bueller?
Chickens.
Okay, I’m alone on this one then. Which is okay, because I’ve got a little stack full of Redcoats and Artillery and Caesar is still using, like, swordsmen and stuff.
Notice he's still making trebuchets.
I’ve also got a Great General named El Cid, who apparently was a famous historical leader at some point and only moonlighted as a Final Fantasy character. Kay, sounds good.
I went and mopped up the Roman empire. Rome fell, some other cities that I can’t remember fell, and finally even my formerly peacenik fellows got in on the action and soon everyone was just eating poor Caesar up. While this was happening, I was nonchalantly building the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program on the side. You know, just for fun.
Anyways, Caesar quickly got down to having about, oh, one city left. Which is when this happened:
And you know, I felt bad. I really did. So I made peace with him. A couple of turns later, Sitting Bull took his last city and his entire civilization was destroyed. We’ll always remember your salad, bro.
Now that the war was over, it was time to focus on more important things, like building a spaceship. Despite having the Apollo Program finished in 1928, I wasn’t quite teched up enough to start building spaceship parts yet, so in the meantime I built dozens of ICBMs, just in case. Hey, the best offense is a good defense, right?
And so the decades went on. I was still waiting for enough tech to start building my spaceship. I was starting to get antsy about it, too, knowing that with the Time Victory option enabled, my time was limited. And then this popped up onto my screen:
I looked at it. I thought about it. Caesar was gone and all of the other civs LOVED me. All I had to do was press that button and I had a Diplomatic Victory in the bag. Game over. I win.
And I thought about it… and my cursor hovered over the button…
And so the game continued, mostly uneventfully other than having to stave off other civilizations’ frequent trade offers of clams or rocks for my uranium. Finally, though, I was able to start building spaceship parts, and I started to do so, but it was just about that time that an ominous little countdown appeared in the top right-hand corner of the screen:
100 TURNS LEFT.
And you know, for a game that was ending up remarkably peaceful now that Caesar was gone, this was possibly the most nerve-wracking part of the game yet. I had 100 turns to beat the clock, build a spaceship, launch it, and land safely on a faraway planet.
Bring
It
ON.
And so I built a spaceship, piece by piece. Times were good in the Glorious English Empire by this point; cities from other countries were seceding left and right so they could join up with me, I was exploding with culture to the point that I worried I might accidentally end up with a Culture Victory, we had tech, we had Wonders coming out our ears, we had so much money that I didn’t know what to do with it, we had a huge stockpile of nukes in case anyone decided to do something funny in the last second, we had Al Gore building the Internet for us in Warwick, and that Diplomatic Victory box kept popping up and I kept declining it.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, I launched that freaking spaceship.
There are a bunch of crazies aboard; I sure hope they don't split into different ideological factions and cause issues once we land.
And then, ten turns later…
Aww yeah, it feels good to be a gangsta.
Ahhh, what a great game. I had dominated in just about every fashion: scorewise, techwise, diplomacy-wise, culture-wise (I had two cities with Legendary Culture by the end, and four of the world’s top five cities were mine), and I got the spaceship. What sort of accolades would the score screen give me? Surely I had to be somewhere up toward the top with all those historical strategic greats…
...
…oooooor I can sit around at the bottom and be Warren G. Harding, I guess. Yup, looks like the game had the last laugh.
Now what about that spaceship, you may be asking? Did they reach Alpha Centauri safely? What happened to them? Well that, my friends, is a story for another day…
So where were we? Ah yes. I was building a nice stack of rooty-tooty-point-and-shooties and a couple of catapults thrown in for good measure (that part of my tech is apparently lagging woefully behind.) And it was here that the game decided to bestow a little present upon me– this quest:
So, let’s see here. They want me to build a bunch of musketmen, and also have the Taj Mahal and be operating under the Vassalage civic.
…guess who was in the middle of building a bunch of musketmen, had just recently finished building the Taj Mahal, and had switched to Vassalage for the war?
Needless to say this quest was finished very quickly, and although I was tempted to go with the mysterious Golden Age of Muskets as my reward, I opted to go for the free upgrades.
So... what, exactly, would a "Golden Age of Muskets" entail?
So things were getting pretty interesting here, let’s see if I can give you the long and short of it: Monty is still acting suspiciously nice, Sitting Bull still has a vendetta against the world (and keeps asking me to help him kill various people, which I keep politely declining), the English people are enjoying their cultured lifestyle as I tech music, theatre, and literature for them and build them all sorts of wonders– we even got Picasso as a Great Artist, and I promptly sent him to go dump a bunch of cubism on Warwick’s unsuspecting head– oh, and Caesar has called in the cavalry.
Cute little stack there, son.
He proceeds to attack York, which actually ends up being a very close battle– too close for my own comfort. It was time to retaliate. Quickly I rounded up my little stack and took out the rest of Caesar’s, and then made for his closest city: Arretium. I took it easily, but we did sustain some losses. Alright then, England, I know I’ve been giving you music and crap and preparing you for a future of top hats and monocles and tea, but it’s time to take a little time-out tech up for some ADVANCED rooty-tooties.
So I started teching up to Rifling. I figure that once we’ve got that, we’ve got everything in the bag. Meanwhile, I’ve got enough of my stack left to retake Coventry, which I’d lost some time ago. This was right about the time that Sitting Bull decided to give me a present. See, a little while back he’d randomly won the Apostolic Palace election somehow (seriously, how did he get those votes? He’s been at war with pretty much everyone), and now, he decided to use this power to initiate a vote to get everybody to declare war on Caesar, whether they wanted to or not.
"War on the Infidels" - sounds like a metal band or something.
So Monty is at war with Caesar, Sitting Bull is at war with Caesar for the second or third time this game already, and I’m on my way to retake Coventry with my little stack. Caesar’s no slouch, though: he’s got units and new armies running all over the place and sniping at my poor little musketmen from afar, picking them off one by one. Still, despite being a bit of a tough fight, we came out of it victorious.
Also, the veterans had promotions coming out their EARS.
Now that I had two towns from Caesar, I figured it was about time to call it good and bunker down a bit and get some upgrades going. See, this is about the period of time when England’s special units really come into play, with those Stock Exchanges acting like a bank on steroids, and with Rifling giving you access to Redcoats, which… well, aside from being an upgraded version of a Riflemen, have got some seriously sexy uniforms.
I'd hit it. And not even with a pitchfork!
So, Caesar and I made peace. It was pretty cool. There were some kerfuffles elsewhere on the world, between the other Civs, but I was content to sit around and build and tech and upgrade for a while and switch to the Emancipation civic just to make everyone mad (for those who are not aware, once someone in the game switches to Emancipation, ALL populaces in the game get angry about not having it until they have it, too. So if you’ve got it first, it’s unbelievably hilarious.)
