Tag Archives: 4x

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Aurora

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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.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Judgment soon, fellow mortal!

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As we all know the End Times have arrived and tomorrow is Judgment Day, the commencement of the Machine Uprising against our fleshy oppression and dictatorship.

Or something like that.

Anyway so with the world ending tomorrow, what videogames will you spend your final hours upon this moral realm playing? Anyone who says something sappy like “Spend it with family” is clearly not hardcore enough and should be ashamed. Me, I’m going to celebrate the end of the world in reality by ending worlds in videogames!

Yes yes, we all know that I like weapons of horrifically massive destructive power by now. I mean, my cutie mark is a nuclear trefoil, and my main complaint about games with nukes is how ineffective they are and why can’t I weaponize smallpox and yadda yadda. WELL! Let me tell you, my friends, of a game of mystery and legend, a game of science and fiction, a game called Space Empires V.

Best ship design ever put into a game, bar none.

Like too many games I love this is basically Spreadsheets: The Game. The difference is that this one really, truly tries to encompass the scale of futuristic technology and all the awesome stuff it can do. There are a huge, a mindblowingly huge, an offensively, insecurely huge number of technologies to research and as a result, a lot of buildings, ships, and parts to stick thereupon. So far so good.

But we’re not done yet. Oh no no, for you see, other games have some impressive degrees of destruction. Alpha Centauri lets you flatten continents. GalCiv lets you blow up stars. But no other game that I know of lets you construct your very own Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres, and then blow these things to Kingdom Come like a… well, like a wrathful deity I suppose. Where SEV excels is in the sheer giddy heights it lets you ascend to. More than anything else, more than any other game, this is a 4x which demands you advance technologically, and which makes you feel so rewarded when you have done so because you always gain some incremental benefit at least.

And sometimes you get devices that let you construct planets. Or blow them up. And that’s something we can all get behind in our final hours.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Why is blowing things up so much fun?

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So I’ve been playing a fair bit of Minecraft recently, it seems it has ‘clicked’ for me and whatever makes it work for others is working for me too. However, after spending a few days building my little settlement, an underwater tunnel, and a big lighthouse, I spawned a ton of TNT and blew it all to kingdom come.

All my screenshots have disappeared. I don't know where to or why. Have a Pony instead.

And it got me to thinking. I love management and builder games. I’ve put more hours into Sim City than you can imagine. When I was a kid I played so much Theme Park that I saw sprites from the game every time I closed my eyes. When I play an RTS, I am the turtler par excellence, I consolidate, husband, prepare carefully, build an impressive defense, and only then do I launch attacks (Which isn’t really the best way to fight a war but what are you going to do).

Yet at the same time I am delighted by destroying it all. I giggled gleefully as I watched my Minecraft stuff get destroyed; I click the natural disasters like a monomaniacal Bond villain in SimCity; I have been known to use superweapons on my OWN BASES if I’m not impressed by the size of the enemy’s and don’t feel nuking them would cause enough destruction. I don’t really understand where this comes from, but I have a suspicion it’s a major reason I love strategy games so much, as they tend to encompass both building and destroying. I am deeply satisfied by a construction job well done, a base laid out just so, a city which looks both believable and functional. And I’m equally satisfied by watching it all get blown to pieces. Even better, watching it get put back together afterwards! I love how countries can collapse and rebuild over decades in games like Europa Universalis III.

It does lead me to believe that the best game I could ever play would let you build a city like SimCity, then go down to street level like GTA and level the place with Red Faction: Guerrilla’s GeoMod 2.0 whilst calling in superweapons from the C&C series.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

Until it is naught but glass

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Yesterday Pike and I finished a fairly long game of Civilization IV, which culminated in a nuclear war with Charlemagne, who turned out to have nukes of his own. Which was a surprise. The whole point of a doomsday machine is lost… if you keep it a secret VHY DIDN’T YOU TELL THE VORLD, EH?

Now, something you should know about me: If a game has nukes, I will acquire them. It does not really matter how cost-effective it is, I just need my massive explosives and fallout. It is delicious. As a consequence for this blog, I’m liable to write about them a lot. Nuclear weapons fascinate me as both weapons and political/strategic influences, and the setting of a nuclear apocalypse has its own dread fascination.

However, games seem to have a really hard time doing nukes. Perhaps this isn’t surprising. After all, most people who aren’t Professor Gray have trouble really wrapping their heads around what nukes are and how they function in the broader, geopolitical sense. And we’ve never had a nuclear war for reals so we can’t truly say what the aftereffects would be. For individuals, of course, it would be pretty dire. For the states we are in control of in a game of Civ, it’s another matter. The prospect of survival, recovery, and ultimate triumph is one which an in-game state actor will keep in mind until it is wiped out utterly. (For more on why we get into the mindset of a state, have a read of Jonathan McCalmont’s article about why we act like psychopaths in strategy games.) However, games have a very hard time modelling this concept as distinct from other warfare. Yes, nukes are powerful in a game like Civ, but they are only powerful. They will do more damage than a bomber squadron, but not more than an army that sweeps through and razes everything. Their fallout is unfortunate but ultimately fairly trivial. The long-term side effect of ‘global warming’, which really only means that the world gradually turns to desert, is a more potent one but is no different from the result of excess industrial pollution.

This is understandable for another reason. If a game is not specifically about nuclear war, implementing them ‘properly’ (By which I mean making them more than just more powerful explosives) is liable to be a fairly time and resource intensive process. On top of that there are some general issues with how strategy games, especially 4x ones, are forced to function in order to be playable. If we suppose a full-scale nuclear exchange that wipes out several countries, the entities that emerge from the ruins are liable to be both numerous and highly distinct according to their local circumstances. A good example of how this might work can be found at the 1983 Doomsday Alternate History wiki. Just take a quick look at the number and diversity of entities here. Some, such as the “California Republic” are not too hard to imagine. Others, however, face either the problem that they are not large enough to register as independent entities in a game like Civ, or they are otherwise things which could only be foreseen by a deliberate and ongoing desire to make the game a post-nuclear-war simulator.

Some games come a bit closer, perhaps. In Hearts of Iron 2, when you get hit with a nuke it blows the target province sky high, needing years to rebuild it. It also increases the target country’s dissent, which has a whole host of negative effects; reduced industrial efficiency, reduced fighting ability on the part of your military, and at higher levels, the risk that provinces will be overtaken by rebels who can end up setting themselves up as an independent country. This still hinges on prearranged states, but watching a country like the US or USSR collapse as a bunch of countries declare independence is a much more enjoyable thing, to me, than the simpler example which Civ provides.

So the paradox that presents itself is thus: A game which focuses entirely on nuclear conflict itself, such as the excellent DEFCON, can be a much better model of what nukes do in the short-term than other games. On the other hand, you really need a much more sweeping vista capable of both grandness and minutiae in order to simulate the longer-term effects of a nuclear war. The 4X genre might be more suited to this, but they typically have a much longer timespan to cover, starting at the dawn of humanity. With nukes (Or equivalent weapons) only coming along towards the end of the game, it is understandable that a whole simulation of them and their effects cannot be implemented. The resources simply don’t exist.

I’m not sure we are going to see a game which does this ‘right’ for a long time. However, there may be mileage in a much small-scale strategy game, set in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war and which puts you in command of a single, tiny survivor community. Rebuild the great state of South Dakota! Make Wales a mighty country! Throughout all this we have to remember that what constitutes victory in a game is often a very strange thing. Not least because the whole thing is about victory. Real countries do not reach an end game, there is always a tomorrow when the people you upset yesterday are still around and have to be dealt with. In games there is a definite, achievable end. I’ll refer you back to Jonathan McCalmont’s article for a proper look at exactly what effects this disparity can have but suffice it to say it makes things pretty weird sometimes. I was willing to sacrifice horrendous numbers of lives and cause the eventual starvation of over sixty million people in my own empire quite apart from the war proper, for victory over Charlemagne. The world which was left behind was not one a sane person would want to inhabit, it was a radioactive desert which could barely support twenty five million people (From an estimated peak of well over double that). But the little box popped up saying we won, and so we did. None of the rest of it mattered. There was no fallout – if you can forgive the pun – from the nuclear exchange or the brutal, entirely unnecessary, continued nuclear devastation which we rained down upon the hapless citizens of Prague and Aachen and what have you. Yes, we lost ‘points’ due to a declining population, but we weren’t playing for points.

So I do think that a more comprehensive nuclear war and consequences system within the context of a larger game could be not only enjoyable, but powerful. After a thousand turns a nuclear war breaks out and it truly undoes all your work. Half your cities disappear entirely, the other half rebel, you can barely keep the capital under control. A new fog of war descends across the world, tech is lost, and the geographic effects are more detailed than simply turning to desert. But the nukes would have to be a fundamental part of the game itself, not merely a particularly powerful, expensive weapon you get towards the end. It’s fair that this devotion is not accorded to them, nevertheless I hope one day someone will decide to make the game I am eager to play.