There is a new patch for Dominions 3 available here.

My favorite fixes:

– Wands no longer gives Chest Wounds
– Blessing can affect sacred undead.
– Nethgul no longer tries to kill his wielder.
– Hog knight is now mounted.
– Stargazer no feet
– No more snowfall events under water.

In what other game would each and every one of these make perfect sense?

Ageod, the developers of the excellent Birth of America, have announced that they are working on a Civil War game. It will allow players to recruit regiments as include political and economic elements that were absent from the earlier Revolutionary War title. AMERICAN CIVIL WAR – Our Hearts were touched with Fire will obviously be a strategy game, not a wargame.

The interesting thing here is Ageod choosing to remain in the Western Hemisphere. Philippe Thibaut’s past is all European.

Is it the subject matter? Maybe. But I think it’s more a commercial impulse. Think about it. Though his board game Europa Universalis was eventually made into a monster PC strategy hit, Thibaut’s Euro-games have been failures. Pax Romana was ten great ideas that failed under publisher pressue and basic design confusion. Great Invasions had one or two interesting concepts but was too bloated and confusing to really work.

Then comes Birth of America. Almost out of nowhere. This is a very, very good game, primarily because of its simplicity. It also scratches an itch because it covers 18th century warfare in a frontier environment. While it’s hard to tell how big a hit it has been, it was picked up by Strategy First after strong critical reception and great word of mouth. All of a sudden, Ageod and Thibaut have an American audience.

And Americans love the Civil War. Brother versus brother, industrial might versus Southern “gentility”, freedom versus slavery. Most importantly, lots and lots of battles.

No news on a release date or development schedule. When I interviewed Thibaut last year, he said that he was working on a number of other games, but the only one that I knew about wasn’t a Civil War game. Has this been in development for a while? Will we see it soon?

I’ll try to get some answers. But for now, I have something else to look forward to in the new year.

I’ve become aware that my RSS feed has become mispointed or something, leading to some truly crazy Technorati numbers. So I’ve spent a couple of hours today trying to get things to work.

Any Word Press doctors would be greatly appreciated.

Though not the worst strategy game name ever, Bladestorm has to be up there. It sounds action packed and full of sword-hacking fun. Instead it is the newest Koei action/strategy game for the Playstation 3. First unveiled at last spring’s E3, new details are emerging about PS3: Total War.

You will play a mercenary captain in the Hundred Year’s War, accepting missions from either the French or the English depending on your whims. This “Free Mission” system is designed to give you great flexibility and replay value, plus the opportunity to see things from both sides of the battlefield. I guess the idea is that you are only fighting for yourself. Successful combat means more soldiers under your control, and, like in the Total War games, experienced troops more useful on the battlefield.

You will be able to experience battle beside or against Joan of Arc and Edward the Black Prince, even though the latter was dead for forty years before Joan was even born; almost sixty years separates their military careers. But Bladestorm will apparently also have elephants. I doubt that an accurate historical chronology is a prime concern. So far no giant crabs.

Screenshots to this point have focused on the battle screens, without much clue as to how the armies get assigned to battles. Missions, I assume, get assigned in some other interface. A campaign maybe? It’s being designed by the Dynasty Warriors 5 team, so maybe the combat is all there is. Gamespot describes it as a “brawler” though the description and images make it look more like a light role playing wargame.

So, I’m once again curious about the wargaming/strategy potential of the console.

It’s commonplace for longtime gamers like me to complain about the dearth of big, honking manuals like they made Back in The Day. The truth is, manuals as instruction booklets aren’t as important as they used to be since tutorials and easily accessible in-game documentation make them redundant. Three recent manuals have reignited some of my ancient fire about the death of books with games, largely because they either succeed or fail to do the job set out for them.

Company of Heroes, a shining success of a game has terrible documentation in game and out. The last ten of the thirty seven page pamphlet is given over to credits and ads for other games. Unit descriptions are accompanied by gigantic icons and huge text. There is no explanation of the Allied supply cost effect or the differences between the Axis and Ally build trees. None of this is in the tutorial either. The relative strengths of outposts, vehicles or Doctrine improvements is also nowhere to be found. It’s a good thing that the game is amazing enough to make you want to explore.

Space Empires V uses a good portion of its 77 page manual – almost a fifth of it, in fact – to reprint the instructions for the in-game tutorial, instructions you will see by simply playing the tutorial. The manual descriptions are plentiful, but mostly definitional (i.e., this is what the 20+ treaty elements entail.) There is no information on precisely how to invade a planet, limits on ship speed, descriptions of ship types or a tech tree. Some of this is in game, but much of it is not. SE5 is huge – one of the deepest and most baffling games of recent years. With practice, its quality becomes apparent, but you have to wrestle a little first.

Speaking of wrestling, Dominions 3: The Awakening, will pile-drive unprepared newbies. Infamously forbidding, the Dominions games have also had inadequate documentation. Not this time. I can think of few manuals in recent years that were as old-timey as Dominions 3. Like Space Empires V, it has a tutorial walkthrough but it’s not duplicating anything in game. It has intro strategy tips, primers for every nation, pointless backstory and more charts than I ever hoped to see in a manual . The last half of the manual is charts. Plus some humor. It goes some way to making Dominions 3 less intimidating, but you will still get your ass kicked in the early going. The print is tiny, too, so you know they were trying to keep it to under 300 pages. Which they barely did. (Full disclosure: The manual was written by friend of Flash of Steel and boardgaming ass-kicker in chief Bruce Geryk.)

Even this huge tome repeats some text you will find in game. It’s easier to find in print, though, which hearkens back to what people really miss about manuals – reading them away from the computer.

The Company of Heroes manual is the type of thing you will scan while the game installs. Then you will never touch it again. Space Empires V is better; the type of thing you would read on the subway trip back from the store or maybe while dinner was cooking. It prepares the palate for the game ahead, but isn’t something you will need to consult. Dominions 3‘s manual is the stereotypical bedtime book from the Good Old Days. You will go back to it for hints, suggestions as to which race to lose as next and charts you can use to create your own graphs to plan your strategies.

My other soft spot for the Dominions 3 manual is the foreword by Kristoffer Osterman on the origins of the game world. (A lot of this sort of thing also pops up in national descriptions.) I’ve written about the lack of good designer notes in games and this is a decent one. I was clamoring for more, though. I have so many questions now. (Note to self: arrange developer interview). Space Empires V has a paragraph talking about the franchise and Company of Heroes has nothing at all. Neither does current addiction Caesar IV.

I don’t want to get all curmudgeonly. Cost is a major factor here and I can appreciate not going all out for your manual. But why spend money on a manual that either wastes space repeating things in game or is just brief unit descriptions? If Company of Heroes had not come with a manual at all, I wouldn’t have noticed. Think of the money developers would save if they just stopped pretending to care about paper documentation. Only commit if you have something interesting, like long lists of details that both SE5 and Dominions 3 insist on putting in their manuals, or additional color and insight.

Oh, and while I’m on it, do we need instructions telling us to put the CD/DVD in the CD/DVD drive? Or that we can launch the game from the Start menu? Aren’t PC gamers supposed to be the smart ones?

Tocqueville called America a “classless society” and he was mostly right, at least in 19th century terms. People in 1830s America weren’t generally born to privilege and you could work your way into Congress or the Presidency from backwoods adventures and Indian fighting. Things have changed a little now, but this isn’t a political blog so I’ll leave my rants about inherited wealth and Congressional seats being passed down father to son/daughter for another time and place.

But the myth of the American Dream persists (and is even real for some people) and has permeated the city builder genre for a long time. Look at SimCity, or better SimCity 2000. The point of every game is [Read more →]