Hey, it’s his company, so the Stardock head honcho can do whatever he wants. But he has dropped some tasty game design nuggets about his upcoming fantasy strategy game over at Quarter to Three.
Quick summary? Heavy emphasis on player development, simultaneous movement, big on magic and dragons will kill a lot of stuff.
Naturally, Wardell pops up in reference to yet another series of reminiscences about Master of Magic, the most sought after average Civ-clone in the history of gaming.
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I’ve been dabbling with Close Combat: Cross of Iron a little in the last few weeks. Not enough to do a complete review yet, but enough to raise some questions about the release of an updated version of a ten year old game.
While reading Bill Trotter’s eight page review at Wargamer, three things hit me. First, just because the Internet means you can have an infinite word count it doesn’t mean you should use it. Second, starting your review with an after action report is a risky thing. Third, just because a game was great once, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a smart buy now, especially at new game prices. Even with expanded mod capability.
Close Combat has all the things that Trotter praises. I agree with his general evaluation of the game and its mechanics. It helps that most of the maps are small, racheting up the tension. Close Combat was one of the best real time wargames for its time and its easy to see why it was roundly praised.
But if someone came up to me right now and asked if they should drop their forty bucks on it, I’d be lying if I said yes.
Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve been playing a lot of Company of Heroes and Combat Mission lately.
The lessons of Close Combat were learned by many of the games that followed it and they raised the bar for what World War II combat looked like. Combat Mission has morale (and the added advantage of not having your Russian conscripts walk through platoons of their own men to surrender to the Germans). Combat Mission has random scenario generation on top of the partially random starting troops that Close Combat has.
Company of Heroes is, of course, not a real wargame; it’s an RTS. But it captures the chaos of combat in a much more compelling way than Close Combat does. People who dismiss the importance of graphics have never seen their sniper nest explode unexpectedly.
Now, if you are interested in the history of wargaming and missed the Close Combat series, you really need to find it. This, plus the Sid Meier’s Civil War games, showed how real time wargaming could improve on the traditional turn-based model. And I am still enjoying the nostalgia fix that the Matrix re-release is giving me. This is still a good game, but in the way that Civilization II is still a good game.
More complete thoughts will come in a few weeks once I’ve played around with the campaigns.
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Full of the Spirit, that is.
Religion in gaming is a pet topic of mine, so I thought I’d link to this month’s Escapist. I’ll point to two articles in particular for your reading pleasure.
I love Nethack clones and loved to hate Ragnarok. So i enjoyed Christian McCrea’s article on that cursed game.
The strongest piece is, in my opinion, Lara Crigger’s think-piece on the problem of faith in games. Drawing on a (in my mind artificial) distinction between The Book of Job and the Apostolic tradition, Crigger writes about the place of doubt in faith and games. Though the title suggests that Christian games are impossible, at the end she implies that they are only very, very, very difficult.
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It looks like the Company of Heroes add on will be a stand alone title that focuses on the British in France and the Low Countries. Caen and Market Garden. Give Jon Shafer a cookie.
Fuller details are in this month’s Games for Windows magazine, though there is a teaser from Matt Leone at 1up.
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Sometimes ideas just don’t die.
The reborn Cinemaware is remaking ye olde Defender of the Crown, to be distributed through Stardock’s TotalGaming network.
The bargain price is about right, since I’m dubious that much can be added to the basic design to save it from itself. DotC was never a deep strategy game, even for its time, and there were too many minigames stuck to the thin strategy layer to hold my interest long.
Yet, here it is again.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that you either get absorbed in what the ProSim games try to do or you don’t because the games won’t let you. Pat Proctor and company have spent their energies developing very serious real time wargames, paying little attention to vagaries like UI or in game help, focusing instead on scenario design, terrain effects and unit response.
Even when they state that they intend to improve the UI, as they supposedly have for Air Assault Task Force, the result is not what you would expect from a UI rewrite. It’s more like they took all the commands that were in menus on top and turned them into buttons at the side instead. That’s not how it’s usually done, guys.
Now add that native unfriendliness to very punishing forms of warfare – airborne assaults and special ops. In an RTS, the airborne troops and commandos are the super guys who clean up the scrub units. Here, these brave men are told that because they are special, they get to fight in the crappiest locations. Jungle ambushes, mountain hideaways, urban death-traps. This combination of unfriendly interface and tough-guy scenario design should make AATF a frustrating failure.
You’ve read enough reviews to know by now that any time someone writes that, he/she’s setting you up for the “but it’s not.”
It’s not.
Like all the ProSim games, AATF is about flexible planning. Simply flying your guys to the location and shooting it out never works. (Except for the “Blackhawk Down” scenario, which I won in two minutes by doing just that.) You have to know your troops and their capabilities and recognize the importance (and limitations) of indirect artillery fire. Scouting can be difficult, firepower can be neutralized by terrain and Washington has only given you so many guys to work with. So you make a plan, watch it move forward and then pause to adjust once things get hairy.
One of my personal biases is towards smaller scenarios. Part of my love of Combat Mission, for example, is rooted in the fact that I can generate a small to mid-size battle and get the full effect of the game. Because of its subject matter, AATF is all small scenarios. You can fight, lose, re-fight, lose and then finally win a single scenario in relatively rapid succession. AATF isn’t really generous with the number of scenarios, even with the three settings (Vietnam, Somalia and Afghanistan) but there is very little repetition within them.
In a way, this makes AATF especially difficult. All gamers, including wargamers, like to find shortcut tactics that will work in a variety of situations. The ProSim games emphasize general combat doctrine over wargame tactics, so reading the manual and understanding what specific troops are for is paramount. It might be tempting to just put your Apaches in place banging up enemy trucks, but losing a single helicopter can make or break the entire mission. If you provide a tempting target, it will go down.
AATF is probably the tightest of the ProSim games, though I think I like Star and Crescent more. The MidEast War game had more scenarios, more elaborate (but not necessarily difficult) tactical problems and tanks. Never underestimate the appeal of tanks.
This is a very good game even without tanks, but it won’t make you like the ProSim games if you don’t already like them. In a way, they are the HPS of real time wargaming. If you sign on accepting the limitations, as I have, then you will find something to applaud. It is neither a pretty game, nor a friendly game. But the ProSim series is easily the number one modern wargame system on the market today. AATF is a pleasant reminder that warfare is an unpleasant business.
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