Flash of Steel header image 1

Under the Hood

August 27th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Ancients, Design, Imperium

Michael Akinde, developer of the still not finished Imperium – Rise of Rome, has started blogging about some of the design details of the combat model in his game. The starter post can be found here, and his thoughts on how to reflect troop types and tactics here.

From the second post:

The scouting factor is the final piece in the force model. It is used to determine which of two sides in a conflict have the better intelligence. If one side “outscouts” the other by a significant margin, it will be able to attempt an ambush of their opponent. How much of a margin is required depends on the terrain; thus Romans campaigning in Spain and facing Scutarii and Caetratii units with high scouting factors will have to be extraordinarily careful in their operations. Light infantry and cavalry units will typically have a high scouting factor; while units made up of heavy infantry will struggle.

→ 1 CommentTags:

Mark Noseworthy Points Out the Obvious

August 27th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Consoles, Design, RTS

PC real time strategy games don’t work so well when ported to console platforms.

So don’t expect to see Company of Heroes on your 360 any time soon.

But Dawn of War II isn’t a traditional RTS, so it might work.

→ 3 CommentsTags:

Flash of Steel Social Networking – UPDATE

August 27th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Me

Apropos of nothing, I created a Facebook group for Flash of Steel.

Why? Mostly to see what I could do with it. But it will also, hopefully, help my few readers find connections between each other. Plus, the viral nature of social networking might mean friends of readers checking this place out. And more readers means more people to tell me how to do my job better.

EDIT: I’ve been prompted to use the new Blog Networking Application, linked at the top of the right sidebar. Feel free to jump in.

→ 4 CommentsTags:

Space Siege Review

August 27th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Crispy Gamer, Gas Powered Games, Review, RPGs

When I saw Space Siege at E3, it looked like a nice, light Action-RPG. I had no idea how light the complete version would be.

To even call it an RPG is a bit of a stretch. You do have a character that improves over time, but it’s more of a Progress Quest type thing. Stats improve and there’s little debate over what to improve. Your character will be maxed out by the time he (only a he, by the way) finishes the game.

You can envision Space Siege coming from a small indie publisher. It has no ambition and little color. The skill trees are pointless exercises in who-gives-a-damn. The land mine threat becomes meaningless once you can make grenades by the bucket. And your robot sidekick has infinite lives. When you first find him, your character needs to do minor repairs to make him active; from thereon in he can get blown to bits a hundred times and all you need to do is find a robot vending machine.

But, as the review makes clear, it’s the whole bait and switch about the cybernetics that really gets to me. Half-human, fully-robot, pure human…it isn’t really a moral quandary. You never interact with enough people to see if anybody cares that you change from Steven Seagal to Tin Man over the course of the game. There’s not even a good monologue that pretends that the choices matter. The only real decision comes at the end of the game and boils down to “Join Dark Side? Yes or No?”

None of which would matter if it weren’t for how big this factor was in the preview coverage and throughout the game. There’s a PCGamer cover from September 2007 that has the face of GPG boss Chris Taylor portrayed as half Borg. A more accurate picture would have shown Taylor collecting spare parts from employees he has fragged.

I liked the writing, if not the plot. And some of the art design was good. But Space Siege is a disappointment.

I still have high hopes for Demigod, though.

→ 1 CommentTags:

Vae Victis

August 27th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Paradox, Preview

It’s will be a few months late, but it look like EU: Rome will finally be getting the interactive depths that make Europa Universalis 3 and Crusader Kings so captivating. The Vae Victis expansion pack will be only $9.99, a very reasonable price considering that they will not be extending the game’s timeline and the core game, even with the 1.3 patch, is still kind of lame.

One worry from the Press Release:

The dynamics of the characters that live in the Republic will come to life as the men and women have their own personal goals and agendas, which are often in conflict with each other. Will you be able to manage these willful personalities?

This is all well and good, but a successful game can lead to you having hundreds of characters. Managing all these ambitious Romans or Carthaginians could be like herding cats. Part of the current game’s problem is that you have to put people in charge of tiny parcels of land and they end up bleeding into the same generic, medicore person; they are numbers more than they are people. By mid game, you don’t even care that much about their numbers.

Now imagine that these dozens of Roman governors, plus the people still not decent enough to leave Rome, start bugging you with stuff. Build me a temple. Conquer Germany. Pass this law. Assassinate Antiochus.

It would help if governing characters managed regions made up of smaller provinces. Take the four or five Macedonian provinces and make them part of a Province of Macedonia. Like in CK, you could create provinces for people to rule once you had a minimum number. Certain character demands could be triggered only by the Governor characteristic or by presence in specific regions. That would mean fewer demands related to ruling the provinces and maybe more related to general management of the Senate or Empire.

Republics still need more turnover in the top job for these types of character dynamics to really work. There are too many Consuls for Life in Rome, and if you are going to have ambitious characters then you need to find ways to satisfy their ambitions. The offices you can dole out are tied directly to the research pace, so, unlike CK where you might replace a 10 chancellor with an 8 chancellor to keep the new character content, you’d be daft to do that in Rome where research unlocks new buildings and options.

So how does an ambitious royal or Republican get satisfied if there is no place to put them?

Johan Andersson is smarter than I am, so he’s probably worked some of this out. But considering what a mediocre experience Rome still is, I’m very cautious about how much Vae Victis can really help.

→ 1 CommentTags:

Soren Johnson’s Board Game Buying Guide

August 26th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Board Games

Prepare for some heresy.

On Puerto Rico: “To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I don’t want to play Puerto Rico with anyone else who wants to play Puerto Rico.”

On Caylus: “To me, it feels like slow-motion arm wrestling.”

Other games come off much better.

→ 6 CommentsTags: