I still hold that Conquest of Elysium 3 is an ugly game, and not ugly in the way of traditional roguelikes. It is ugly in the manner of a good and dear friend that could do basic grooming but chooses not to – all the game’s charm, variety and literary wit would be better revealed with greater attention paid to being able to distinguish armies at a glance, revealing enemy/independent movements in line of sight, and making the greens less identical. This is a beautifully designed game that needs a nice haircut. This isn’t about photorealism – in strategy games it never is and Unity of Command is a beautiful game by any definition. This is about believing in your world enough to draw it better or draw it down; ASCII might be an improvement over how the mines look.
But I get past looks pretty quickly if there is something to grab me in a game, and Conquest of Elysium 3 has tons of things that grab me and many of them are tied to just how brutally and suddenly it can end, especially as you learning.
Take the Witch in the screenshot above. She draws her power from fungus that you harvest from towns and old forests. These powers are then used to summon reptiles and creatures of the fen or whatever to augment your armies.
I learned quickly that they are not a good way to replace your armies. Having lost my main force, a hastily summoned force of frogs and one crocodile proved a little bit worse than useless. The end.
This is part of why CoE3 is a strategy roguelike. There is some strategy for sure – you have to choose which tiles to conquer in which order, prioritize your commanders and resource expenses and (if you encounter your enemies) the order in which you will eliminate the ‘real threats’.
But it is mostly a roguelike because the ‘real threat’ to your survival is that fatal combo of bad luck and idiot level situation analysis, like thinking that magically summoned frogs were somehow magic frogs.
The one real common thread between roguelikes and strategy games is that pushing just a little bit too far – overextending yourself one more territory, or going into debt one more turn, or opening one more door – is more often than not the cause of human failure. It’s not that the game is not conspiring against you; random generators are hardly ever generous. It’s that the penalties for your overconfidence or your foolishness will be sudden and severe.
Conquest of Elysium 3 plays quickly because it buys heavily into the Ciceronian maxim “Make haste slowly”. You can’t wait to expand because you need resources to build anything resembling an army or to use those special powers that be amazingly game changing if you can keep your finger off the button long enough. But you also can’t wander with your Hero endlessly without finding a recruiting center because your army will wear down and few of the Heroes are equipped to just build an army from scratch. (The Necromancer can, the Baron can summon defensive forces for towns, the Enchanter can build golems – but most races need towers and citadels as centers.)
Going back to the argument-that-wasn’t from last week’s podcast, Conquest of Elysium stands on its own well outside the Dominions series. Yeah, you could argue that it has the same setting or even take Bruce Geryk’s imaginative idea that these are the adventures of one particular hero in that setting. But really this is a game about archetypes and classes more than Dominions is, which is a game about themes and balance.
In Dominions, each nation is rooted in some historico-mythic past with an original spin from Ilwinter. The armies and powers are themed on this alternate universe, but all is filtered through how you create your Pretender unit and how you plan to exploit the balance or imbalance between mystical forces.
Conquest of Elysium, even if it uses some of those nations, treats them less like themed empires since the hero units are ultimately of greater importance than the leaders in Dominions 3. Their special powers are what make or break a game of CoE especially in the early going. Though Pretender and Assistant magic is very powerful and important in Dominions, it is a mid to late game thing in most instances. You start by raising armies and taking things. In CoE3, you will be experimenting with your special powers within ten turns and this makes your Hero/Captain units central to your gameplan throughout. They become less ‘the Aztec dude’ or ‘the guy with the hammer’ and more ‘the guy that can summon powerful spirits’ and ‘golem maker’.
And because failure can come so quickly, those special powers sit there sometimes, burning a hole in your pocket as you wonder if it is worth it making the long trip to a friendly settlement to raise an army. What if you run into hostile forces? Shouldn’t I spend that blood/fungus/gold/iron/pile-of-hands now, just in case?
It’s that that great gaming feeling you get when you know that a single decision could either save you or destroy you. Most of the time it does neither, but CoE3 never lets you rest. Maybe if it were better looking and clearer in places, it would lose some of that sense of foreboding or the risks would take on a different character.
But I doubt it. This is bred in the bone game design, with randomness, class, cost and risk all neatly intertwined. It is a game I will keep playing for a long time.
Rob Zacny gets a well earned week off and lets the old people run the show as Troy welcomes Bruce Geryk and Tom Chick to talk about Illwinter’s new game Conquest of Elysium 3. It’s a strategy game, it’s a roguelike, it’s an adventure. Tom talks about how the developers can make the game more engaging, Troy is the only person who thinks it’s pretty ugly and Bruce demonstrates that only he has an ear for music.
But everyone agrees that they really like Conquest of Elysium 3.
Darius Kazemi and GameSpy Editor-in-Chief Dan Stapleton return to 3MA to discuss Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. Darius wants to know where the role-playing went, while Dan got heartily sick of the pause-and-go system in larger battles. Rob is going to murder whoever came up with the inventory system. All in all, they had an okay time.
One of my favourite moments as a games writer was when I was contracted by 2K Games to write some of the materials for their Civilization Chronicles collection. It was an easy gig – research and write about the history of the franchise, do some email interviews with major players in the series, and then a face to face interview with Sid Meier and Soren Johnson, both of whom I’d met before but not interviewed.
As we talked about the origins of the idea (Meier agreed that it was almost inevitable someone would have gotten around to it) and some of the core concepts of the game, Meier bolted out of the conference room and came back with one of those big Timeline of History books. You know the sort; dates and thumbnail descriptions, rudimentary attempts at covering everything but a little devoid of context. In this book he had highlighted those entries where something was discovered and what was going on around that discovery.
For Meier, Civilization would be the story of all those highlighted words and how humankind got from agriculture to space.
There may have been upgrades before Civilization, or at least better units you could buy, but there wasn’t really research.
It’s an important distinction, and one that we will be examining throughout this series. Before Sid Meier’s Civilization, the idea of research as a mechanic that a player had to invest in was entirely foreign. New units would be unlocked with time, or accomplishments, or according to scenario exigency. The idea that a player could advance or delay the appearance of a unit was pretty much unheard of.
In this way, Civilization is the first really scientific game, for all the liberties it takes with the scientific method, its understanding of progress, its evolving peculiarities connected to national character and resources, etc. Before Civilization, (strategy gaming’s BC) the gaming of scientific progress was not a real thing. The understanding that progress itself could be a game was unique in the gaming sphere.
But first some other history. Avalon Hill’s boardgame Civilization (and Advanced Civilization) included scientific progress as a major mechanic. It handled the discovery of coinage and agriculture, however, as items you purchased – one of the many ways you could spend your trade cards to give your Civ an edge over its rivals. (This “science†design is emulated by at least one game in this series.) So, despite the similarity in name, Meier and Microprose deserve credit for the innovation of a mechanic that was not really seen anywhere before.
In his Civilization, research was something you continually invested in. It was an infrastructure cost. Money not spent on research would be used to maintain buildings or rush units, so there was a tradeoff. Most of the time you would want to keep the research as maxed out as you could afford, but sometimes you would end up at 70 or 80% efficiency just to keep the empire running. Specialized buildings like libraries and universities would add beakers to the research line.
It’s an obvious idea, of course, and sometime during the 4X explosion of the early 1990s someone would have thought of it. It’s so obvious, in fact, that Civilization V pretty much disposes with the idea of the budget tradeoff and just assumes that your nation is always hard at work on science; you can only improve your science rate by adding people or buildings. If you go bankrupt, you science will take a hit, but otherwise it is going all out. I am assuming that this is Firaxis saying that the choice to research is not really an interesting one, so it was removed.
The larger legacy of Civilization‘s design is the tech tree. There were no tech trees before Civ, by which I mean no branching series of technologies, linked and dependent on each other. You might have had upgrade paths (more about that later in this series), but not a maze of tech and knowledge that are connected in interesting ways.
The first Civ basked in the way it made future techs dependent on things that aren’t necessarily intuitive, or even historically accurate. Microprose was so proud of the tech tree that the copy protection scheme for the game was a quiz on what you needed to know in order to research the next technology. They probably didn’t expect that the game would become so popular and addictive that it didn’t take many sessions to memorize the tech tree completely, or at least remember enough key combinations to get past Science Advisor Sid and His Super Easy Quiz.
The core conceit of the tech tree was the understanding that scientific progress is intimately linked with cultural and societal progress. Technology allows humans to try new things in their society and these changes in turn fuel more scientific progress. It’s sort of a Cliff’s Notes version of Guns, Germs and Steel, with the caveat that in Civilization everyone had a roughly equal chance of ending up on top instead of the globe stacking the deck against humanity in certain regions. So the printing press was connected to religion and to democracy. You couldn’t move forward in weapons unless you had discovered a bunch of other social or political stuff first.
There were other ways to advance, of course. Trading with your rivals was one of the fastest ways you could advance. If you focused on one specific branch and reached a second or third tier tech, you might be able to trade that knowledge with a neighbor in return for a bucket full of first tier techs. Savyy players would game this pretty heavily, but it was an important mechanic for judging the value of certain types of knowledge and getting an idea of how much your opponents liked you. Civ 5 removed this tech trading in favour of research agreements that pooled the talents of two empires to move further faster, but I think this change removes a very important and fun mechanic for something drier and less entertaining.
But you already know all this. So why bother repeating it? Because, as I’ve said before, this was one of the most fertile eras in PC strategy game design and these now commonly accepted ways of showing the movement of science and technology were entirely new. And it was so successful that certain ways of doing things became default settings for a lot of games that follow.
For example, science is teleological, in fact, because you, the player, get to choose how your society will advance in knowledge and what the immediate effect will be.
It’s not that this is never the case in real science; when people were making the atom bomb or the printing press, they had a pretty good idea what they building. “I want to make a giant explosive from the fabric of the universe.†“I want to stick these bits together so that I put ink on paper faster.†But Monotheism isn’t an invention, and its not like people sat around thinking “I can put off discovering currency for now, because I really need to figure out compasses.†Your puny empire can only focus on one discovery at a time and, there is little in the way of serendipity in the Civilization science model, and therefore little serendipity in many of the games that follow.
This really doesn’t matter. It is a useful abstraction, and in some ways it worked conceptually better in the early days of Civ than in the modern Civ games with social policies and Civics, each of which could easily have been something you research in the original model. What makes, Legalism, for example, different from Chivalry, scientifically speaking? The only real difference is that Chivalry more clearly leads to Knights so you have a military unit that comes with the discovery. This is another reminder that the science tree is really tied to the army until the game’s final moments.
It is clearly an open question about whether a more loose scientific progression would even fit the central conceit of Civilization as designed. It is a game about decisions and the clearer those decisions are, the stronger for the basic model. There is serendipitous discovery in Civ, but its all pre-baked into the idea that you would never get Banking without The Republic. Wherever history implies peculiar connections, Civ builds them in. And now every Civilization has a tech tree where your decisions about progress can be planned out centuries in advance. (My current favorite is to time Writing and the completion of the Great Library so I can discover Civil Service with the free technology, catapulting from spearmen to pikemen in many fewer turns than it should take me. Plus the Chichen Itza wonder for longer Golden Ages.)
As the series evolved, new ideas were introduced or borrowed. Simtex’s design innovation – that certain races were predisposed to certain characteristics – led to Civ eventually adopting the idea of scientific nations. The introduction of Great People and Golden Ages let you have amazing breakthroughs as you rushed through the tech tree. Civ 4 changed how citizens were assigned to the “scientist” specialist role.
The core scientific model never really changed though. Your empire would generate Science points, and these science points would determine how quickly you moved through a scientific history jumble that was setup in a very rough chronological order, even though it was very possible to break your brain wondering why you needed the Alphabet even though it hasn’t hurt the Chinese much.
As one of the first games with scientific research, it’s not surprising that it was also one of the first to have a “scientific victory” as the alternate to global domination. Even though the most obvious effect of your imperial research foundation was the development of new and terrible weapons, the scientific victory was about escaping the Earth – colonizing space in what could be a race between empires. You couldn’t get to the rocket stuff without developing some pretty awesome armies along the way, but knowledge as a victory condition is presented as an alternative to war, an alternative to politics, an alternative to cultural hegemony. But its victory also means turning your back on this planet and seeking out a new one to dominate – and that’s the Alpha Centauri story that has to be told.
Though it is arguable whether Civilization remains the strongest strategy franchise ever made, its central ideas so permeate game design over the last twenty years that some of the series that follows will explain why a certain game is not just Civ warmed over, at least not in its implications. We will see that immediately in Civ’s scifi successor, Master of Orion.
February 18th, 2012 by Troy Goodfellow · Design, Me, Paradox
Anyone that is not intimately familiar with failure is probably not anyone worth knowing. The failure need not be profound, but facing setbacks and the limitations of planning are part and parcel of the human experience. It’s not that tragedy is the measure of a man or that there are no atheists in foxholes, as much as it is that it never hurts to be reminded that no mortal is truly a master of the universe; those that think they are should be feared and not feted.
For the most part, games try to break us from this reality. No death is permanent, there is always a save state to return to and no unpleasantness really must be endured, unless you are in an online baseball league, in which case you suck it up because you’d be a heel to quit and leave your Bad News Bears to the next sucker in line.
Games that make failure palatable instead of simply frustrating, then, are special. Note that by failure, I don’t mean simply losing – losing is just the flipside of winning and in some games, losing is simply a matter of time (Tetris), lack of skill (for me, Rhythm Heaven) or the odds (roguelikes). In these games, mere endurance is the measure of success and even a cheap death by poison in Angband is tolerable either because it comes quickly or because it comes after having seen so much. There is little lost by starting over again immediately.
By failure, I mean the experience of seeing a plan undone, of coming upon an event or situation that forces you to face the fact that you may be losing, even though it’s not over yet. Having two or three major cities captured in Civilization. An economic death spiral in Imperialism or Caesar IV. Destruction of your entire main battle fleet in Victoria 2.
A great game lets you witness things come apart, and still go on because…well, the because is the thing. Why do some good strategy games push us to soldier on, while others push us to Load Game?
In the case of Crusader Kings II, the answer seems pretty clear.
(This isn’t a review, but given how new the game is, I must insert the disclaimer that Paradox Interactive is a business client, though CK2 is not. As a writer, CK2 is something that needs writing about.)
I’ve written before about turning points in games, and on the podcast we’ve talked about the problems of the snowball effect – in both instances, the conversation centers around a strategy game’s momentum. Most games, and strategy games are no different 90% of the time, have very clear victory conditions and you move towards them at an irregular rate. Sometimes there is stumbling block to overcome, but a good human player will eventually find a way to account for those and master the system. The game can still be challenging, but game sessions usually follow a similar dynamic where a moment comes and victory or defeat is assured. The narrative power of the game remains, but it is always a tale of triumph over the odds, or over the gods.
Crusader Kings 2, even more than its cousins in the Paradox Development Family, makes disappointment your constant companion. For the last week, my chat windows and social networks have been filled with friends and acquaintances telling me about what the king is doing tonight, and his usual activity is putting out fires or climbing out of an abyss or wondering how the hell he ended up in a matrilineal marriage. And (to my knowledge), except for one instance where a friend did not quite understand all the rules about Crusades, none reloaded to undo a problem even if it was brought about by confusion.
All suffered through, found solutions (or didn’t) and dealt with the aftermath. Certainly some of this was curiosity. The game is new, it has much to reveal and for a few people, this was their first Paradox grand strategy game.
Ironically, one of the reasons that CK2 makes failures and setbacks endurable is that, just like real life, there are so many ways the world can disappoint you. An insane spouse – too powerful to abandon – starts murdering courtiers, but this could be a relief after fighting a long civil war against recalcitrant barons. A homosexual king is a headache for your lands, but a heretic king is a disaster. In the real world, mental illness, civil unrest, bigoted families and religious uncertainty are all major stressess that we face, and in CK2 each is something that poses a new, but manageable, challenge to overcome or endure.
The flexibility of the goals is one of the big reasons that each of the many problems your fiefdom faces seems more human size. Yes, each of the Paradox games (and other grand strategy titles) has a core strength in letting you choose limited goals as you build your way forward. Unite France. Colonize West Africa. Dominate Central Europe. But often a major failure in a Victoria 2 or Europa Universalis 3 can undo or render irrelevant hours and hours of gameplay. Limited ambitions may not have limited costs if the world that surrounds you has a larger appetite. You can recover from disaster, but the context of the games – sustained forward momentum – can make the loss of half your country or a century of revolts or the utter destruction of an expensive fleet the sort of thing that makes you quit or reload.
I’ve spoken a few times about my current habit of only starting EU3 risky wars in January so I am always close to an autosave. This is cheating, I guess, and would be seen as scum saving in the roguelike world. But the way the game is built makes late and prolonged recovery only occasionally fun. So I’ve gotten used to keeping my ingame wayback machine ready to go.
Crusader Kings 2 is not entirely about continual forward momentum. It never pretends that your course will be easy. Even a great king could have a son that disappoints, an old friend that betrays or a degenerative illness. Since the game is putatively the narrative of a dynasty more than the history of a country, you find that you are more willing to sacrifice a little land to a brother or cousin if it sets things up for a son or grandson to have a better lot in life. It is not just a matter of delayed gratification; it is a matter of accepting some pain because ultimately it might be worth it. Maybe. Sort of.
You soldier on because the line is strong, there are other generations and maybe the next one will have it a little easier. Your goal for one generation may simply be to let the land heal, for another it could be to take advantage of a military genius, and another may be expanding the defenses. The traits of your family patriarchs or matriarchs become the guideposts for your ambitions and their reigns the bookmarks for your game’s progress.
Crusader Kings has always been my favorite of the Paradox series because it is so human sized in spite of the historic and geographic scale. Even some of the grandest schemes boil down to the personal struggles between characters, and when great and amazing things happen from characters you do not control at all, it becomes easier to face the fact that the world is conspiring against all of us, so you can prepare for winter, but not stop it.
Here’s an example from my current Scottish game. Weak king dies at 30, leaving his young son in the care of the Duke of Lothian as regent and guardian. Duke has three daughters, no sons, and the most land in the kingdom. New young king marries the eldest daughter, ten years his senior so that their joined lines will finally make House Dunkeld the master of its own kingdom. Turns out, she becomes a strong and assertive Duchess of Lothian and a great power in her own right. She adds to her lands, invades Ireland on her own manufactured claim, pushes claims against weaker Scottish lords and in less than a decade had prepared a beautiful harvest of wealth for the royal couple’s son and heir.
Or she would have if she had not switched her inheritance laws to Gavelkind meaning that, when she died at 44 after a lingering illness, all of her lands and power were divided equally among three minor boys, who now with titles of their own were under the control of regents and far from their father’s just and moderating influence.
Great power and potential, all undone because a mother wanted to evenly divided her greatness and now her sons, weak and divided in a decentralized monarchy, must face the vengeance of those from whom she took those lands and titles they now hold. One of these hated boys will soon be king.
I have a save point where not all of this happened, at least not yet. The Queen/Duchess still lives, is still mistress of a third of the kingdom and is still kicking ass. With more time, maybe her sons would be stronger and better able to face the whirlwind that history has not readied them to reap.
But then it could also go so much worse. At least no one has been excommunicated.
No, this is a bump in the road. It’s only barely the 12th century, England is too divided to be a threat right now and there will be other sons and other wives and other civil wars. This king might not get through this crisis, and the next king might end up deposed altogether (seriously, no one likes my son). But even with a single duchy and a legal claim on the Throne of Scone, the line continues and there will be a second chance for House Dunkeld.
Things don’t always get better, and it’s not simply about the journey making things worthwhile. No, the ending is not the story, but endings and failures are important and should be recognized not as growth experiences but as wounds we cope with. Many great failures come on the heels of amazing successes, the deepest sadness comes from the realization that some deep joys are now lost forever.
But like The Sims, Crusader Kings is a great strategy role playing game because it reminds us that every day is a victory on its own because you still breathe. You may not liberate Jerusalem for the Pope, but isn’t your daughter coming along nicely? The Mongols are coming and will not stop if you put up a brave front, but you have inherited a claim on a small Irish county far from war and maybe you can defend civilization there.
The comforting Christian saying is that God never gives us a cross greater than that we can bear; we are born to adversity but also born to a community and a faith that make these weights easier. I am not sure that this is really the case; I have known too many good and beautiful people brought low by a harsh and uncaring world, and sometimes by a harsh and uncaring community.
But Crusader Kings 2 is almost persuasive in its case that as bad as things are, this too will pass. If you keep your wits about you and your friends close by, then maybe you can make it through Mongols, Moors, Black Death, Waldensian heresies, grabby Emperors, syphilitic heirs, sterile wives and the Irish.
And if you can’t, then at least you have a damned fine story to tell.
PC Gamer’s Evan Lahti and game designer Darius Kazemi parachute into 3MA to liberate it from Rob and Bruce. Their only weapon is a frightening knowledge of Jagged Alliance 2, but that just might be enough to get the job done. Darius explains why it is his favorite game, and makes a good case for it being the coolest game ever. Evan sees Jagged Alliance 2 as a game the defines 1990s’ design, typifying the mix of ambition, quirkiness, and technical simplicity characteristic of the era’s best offerings. Rob loves its portrayal of guerrilla warfare, and how Jagged Alliance was willing to punish hubris. Listen to war stories, Easter eggs, and memories of the strange cast of characters that comprise Jagged Alliance 2.
