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RTS Pro-Tips

April 13th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Gamers, RTS

Regular reader and commenter Natus has pointed me to RTS Professional, a site dedicated to teaching people how to improve their RTS game. The video player isn’t very clear, but the voice over narration helps a little.

It’s a good idea to have this sort of thing in one place. They have a “fundamentals” audio only guide that you can buy for 15 bucks, and I’m not sure that’s such a great value for information you can find pretty much anywhere; especially since video is really the value added here.

All the “pros” are experienced champions of RTS tourneys, so the advice you’re getting is probably better than anything I could churn out.

Especially since I’m not very good.

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IGN Strategy Column

April 12th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Media

Warplay is the new monthly strategy column from IGN’s Steve Butts.

I want to use this column to call out some of the more anticipated games, speculate about what I’d like to see in the future, and generally look for cool ways to highlight the games and pre-release builds I’m currently playing. Warplay will also give me an opportunity to champion some of my personal favorites that extend beyond where those games might fit within the overall editorial priorities of the site. That’s not say that I don’t cover those games other places on the site, but I want to have a forum to go into even greater depth for the titles I really find attractive.

The opening column spends two pages explaining what a strategy game is.

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Age of Empires (1997)

April 11th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Ancients, Ensemble, Feature:Anc, Retro, Review, RTS

It’s now one of the most established brands in strategy gaming, but it’s easy to forget what an oddball title Age of Empires was at the time. Bruce Shelley, Sid Meier’s partner in design for many years, left Microprose to form his own studio, Ensemble. With real time strategy games quickly becoming the most popular design in the genre, it made sense to go down that road. Bruce Shelley underlines that what made Ensemble’s choice unusual was that it would be an historical RTS.

We considered several ideas for our first game, but Tim Deen showed us the recently published Warcraft and said we should do something like it. It was really selling well and it was a strategy game. Tony Goodman, Rick Goodman, Brian Sullivan, and me were all fans of strategy games and interested in history. The original vision of AoE was to merge the RTS play of Warcraft and Command & Conquer with the economic elements and historical theme of Civilization. Our first idea was that our game would be about the rise of the first great civilizations on Earth. We thought that would be interesting, different, and manageable. We liked the idea immediately and there was no sense of having to sell it internally. Once we had it on screen looking cool, it was also easy to present it to prospective publishers. In retrospect, we were very smart, without knowing it, to take an historical theme when everyone else in the space was doing either fantasy or sci-fi in emulation of the predecessor games. By doing history we were immediately different; we stood out. We had to deliver on the promise of our cool screen shots and managed to do that. In 1997 CGW reported over 50 RTS games in development but we were the only one about history of any era, as I recall. It turned out that millions of gamers liked the historical theme.

To understand just how unique this was, take a look at Mobygames listing of real time strategy games in 1996-97. The closest you can get to an historical RTS is Lords of the Realm, an Impressions game that was turn based but had the battles play out in real time. (The more of these you remember, the less innovative Creative Assembly seems.) There were real time wargames like Sid Meier’s Gettysburg (1997). But the Blizzard/Westwood model of [Read more →]

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New Political Sim

April 9th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Preview

I’ve never heard of Commander in Chief, but it sounds sort of familiar.

In Commander In Chief, every country in the world is represented with its own unique data of over 400 key values (geographic, climatic, demographic, budgetary, environmental, etc.). Players are able to select the country of their choice and take on the role of the government’s leader. As the country’s leader, the players have a number of actions at their disposal. First, the player has to select a cabinet to oversee individual government services. In addition to specific decisions (changing tax rates, firing a minister, etc.), the player can also negotiate with labor groups, sign business or military contracts with partner countries, and participate in decision-making at international organizations. The game offers single player mode and a multiplayer “Wargame” mode.

So it’s somewhere between Supreme Ruler 2010 and Superpower, I guess.

IGS is based in Parkville, Maryland – about ninety minutes from me – but I’ve never heard of them. Which is a little surprising since they claim to be responsible for “Restaurant Empire, Baseball Mogul, Capitalism, Battlecry 3, and many other titles to date.”

Turns out that IGS is just a new name for Enlight Software, which I have heard of.

I’m always glad to see a new game in this genre since there are too few of them. A new Supreme Ruler will be out later this year but beyond that, modern geopolitics isn’t exactly a hot topic. Positech’s Democracy games are more about domestic policy experimentation, and are pretty good at that.

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Kingdoms Patch

April 9th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Creative Assembly, Patches

I loved the Kingdoms expansion for Medieval 2: Total War. It’s the model of what an expansion should be, I think. Now it has a patch.

Among the fixes:

– Dead wives no longer produce children in the Crusades campaign.

So no more zombie babies.

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Great Battles of History Series (1997-98)

April 8th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Ancients, Feature:Anc, Retro, Review, Wargames

Given the long history of portraying ancient battles in board games, it’s surprising that it took so long for historically faithful interpretations of the battles of Alexander, Hannibal and Caesar to hit the computer. Avalon Hill’s Alexander the Great portrayed the battle of Gaugamela way back in 1971. The same year saw SPI do a system for three battles in Phalanx. And given how much we “know” about troop dispositions for many of these battles (with the usual caveats via Theodore Ayrault Dodge and Hans Delbruck’s books) the move to the electronic tabletop makes eminent sense.

We are in some way blessed that GMT Games was the company that made the leap. GMT’s Great Battles series isn’t for amateurs; they had to release a “simplified” version after all. But there are few wargames that take education as seriously as entertainment; the Great Battles games do. And the PC translations of their titles gave us something quite unique in gaming history. The Great Battles series are games with an argument. Games with a thesis. Games with a point.

GMT and Interactive Magic released three games in quick succession Great Battles of Alexander, Great Battles of Hannibal and Great Battles of Caesar. Just as quickly, the three were bundled [Read more →]

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