Just a quick post with a few miscellaneous gaming items that you folks may be interested in, because Pike and I are busy being sickening!
But not too quick!
First, Crusader Kings 2 was released today. It is, of course, a Paradox game, with all that entails. But this is certainly the best release candidate I’ve ever seen from them, for any game; it runs smoothly on my machine (Not Pike’s old rig though! Pity her, she needs to upgrade!) and the bugs aren’t breaking the thing in half. It does need some polish but most of that is reasonable stuff like adding more events, traits, and so on.
Second, the new version of Dwarf Fortress was just released today as well! Obviously with a game this complex and such a small coding team (i.e. one guy) this is one that is likely to be pretty buggy while he patches it up, but if you’ve been keeping track of the things he has been adding this, like any DF update, is going to be a glorious thing indeed.
Third, we’re getting pretty close to the next release of Project Zomboid as well! They’ve got a countdown running and it’s down to six or so items left, so there should hopefully be a release within the next couple of weeks. They’re not telling us what these items are though so it could be six huge week-long projects, or six tiny tweaks and we’ll have it tomorrow morning! Who knows?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
