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Ironclads: American Civil War Demo Comments

October 17th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Indie Games, Wargames

A demo is now available for Totem Games’ 19th century naval wargame. You can play either side of the war in a multiple ship battle.

My early impressions are not good, mostly because it doesn’t feel like naval combat. It’s turn based, which is fine, but you only face enemy fire on the enemy’s turn, which is not. When you move your ship into a position to fire, you can unleash hell and then run for the hills and get no counter battery in your direction. Fire your broadsides and run like hell; there’s only a small chance that you’ll be chased.

The result is that there isn’t a lot of risk/reward calculation in choosing your angle of approach, only in your direction of escape. If I can get close enough, I can fire my fore, aft and starboard guns and, if my ship is fleet enough, turn and get a couple of port shots off. Meanwhile, the enemy captain has to wait his turn.

This sort of design isn’t unique to Ironclads; I’m sure you’ve run across it in other wargames. But even older land wargames like Age of Rifles had opportunity fire that you had to be aware off. Yes, much of the time you could approach and fire without a shot against you. But part of the game’s design was to save some of those action points for firing at whatever came in range. This was why defensive positions were so tough to crack.

The game looks OK and has a very intuitive interface. It’s probably one of the most user friendly naval games to come along in a while. I’m still not sure whether I’ll pull the trigger on a purchase though.

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The biggest strategy map ever?

October 17th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Design, Paradox, Preview

Paradox is promising that their upcoming WW2 strategy sequel, Hearts of Iron 3, will have 10,000 provinces.

As a point of contrast, Hearts of Iron 2 had a little over 2600. So, almost a fourfold increase in territories. If my hometown Miramichi doesn’t get a separate territory, I will be a little sad.

Why so many? Andersson says:

This is something we really wanted, double the provinces means double the choices of where to attack and doubles the number of spots you have to think about defending. Giving players choices like this is always good; more choices like these means more strategic thought is required.

We also wanted to give combat a more blitzkrieg feeling. With more provinces there is more opportunities for you to carve out armoured breakthroughs and exploitation. Creating opportunities for encirclements or battles of manoeuvre were both sides. Mobile troops attack and counter attack. We are aiming to try and create a canvas were you can practice the operational art.

If you accept the dubious math that doubling provinces means doubling choices for the player, it’s worth remembering that this also means doubling the choices for multiple AI opponents in a series from a studio that is not exactly known for intelligent and effective computer controlled countries. Promoting encirclement and blitzing is great, only I fear that it will lead to lots of extended AI assault vectors that can be easily cut-off and surrounded by a smart player.

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Outside the Comfort Zone

October 16th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Me

I just returned from a quick trip to THQ headquarters in Southern California where I had a chance to see their new WWE pro wrestling game in action.

Yeah, I know.

But I was available, my editor needed someone there, so off I went at the expense of the publishers of Company of Heroes and Dawn of War.

Naturally, the talk was all about ladder matches and tag teams and heel turns. You know. The stuff that keeps West Virginia up at night.

Still, it was great, as a writer, to come face to face with a preview about a genre/series that I knew little about. I could focus on the technical presentation, the features advertised, the differences between platform interfaces, etc. without any pollution from high or low expectations. Media journalists can’t really promise to be impartial, only fair, and nothing is fairer than a blank slate.

I’ll let you know when the preview is finished and online.

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Starcraft II: A Trilogy

October 12th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Blizzard, Industry, RTS

I’ll be heading out on a short road trip to LA tomorrow morning, but I thought I should comment on the big RTS news of the week.

Blizzard is doing three long form campaigns for the upcoming Starcraft II, and each one will be packaged separately. So, if you want to play all three campaigns, you will need to buy the expansion packs. Some units will also be unique to the campaign settings, though otherwise, multiplayer will be fully functional in the initial release.

There has been a lot of complaining about this, and I understand why. There is a feeling that gamers are being asked to pay for something that they used to get for free. There’s probably also a sense that this is Blizzard, a company with more money than they know what to do with. Who do they think they are? If anyone can afford to put all this stuff in one box, it’s them.

This isn’t such a big deal for me. I generally don’t bother much with RTS campaigns unless it grabs me pretty quickly or I have to play through for work.

So if you are really invested in finding out if the Protoss space elves find their way home, then I get why you’d be annoyed that you will have to wait. But these will be three very long campaigns, and most games only have one of those. Company of Heroes didn’t ship with multiple campaigns. Age of Mythology didn’t, either. Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War (now available for free) had three modest sized campaigns. This will be a lot of content. Yes, it will be a fifty dollar purchase plus two expansions. But that’s not very unusual for a AAA RTS these days. The big difference is that you know how this is going to be months ahead of schedule.

I’m not going to tell you how to feel, of course. If this bugs you, it’s probably for a good reason. But, as bad as you think this is, it could be worse. Much worse.

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Colonization Review

October 9th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Firaxis, Gameshark, Review

My review of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization is now up at Gameshark.

There are some widely reported issues with the game, especially in how it handles Liberty Bells and education. The education one really doesn’t bother me that much since you don’t really need to educate that many people and most of the resource specialists can be found at native villages.

It’s still a very good game, if harder than I remember. I like how it opens itself to emergent narratives, I like how it lets you take advantage of poorly defended neighbors and I like how it still tempts you with wiping out the indigenous peoples but ensuring that you know this is not always a good idea.

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September Print Screen

October 9th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Crispy Gamer, Print Screen

It was a bit of a push, but I did get a Print Screen column up in September. It’s always nice when the author comments on your column and is polite, even if I didn’t really love the book all that much. Three cheers for civility on the internet.

In their link to the article, Game, Set, Watch notes that reviews of gaming books are few and far between. They suspect that traffic has something to do with it, and I have no idea how much people are really interested in my game/book/movie commentary at Crispy Gamer. Mr. Keefer could tell you better than me.

If I didn’t think that there was an audience for this sort of thing, I wouldn’t have pitched the column to begin with. Well, I may have; like all lapsed academics, I have the peculiar idea that what interests me should interest all people. But being given the room to try this sort of thing is one of the big pluses of writing for Crispy Gamer – the fact that nobody else is doing this when it seems pretty clear someone should is a mark in its favor there, not a strike against it.

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