The last of the year’s Roman city builders is on its way. The demo is available at the Caesar IV homepage.

I’ll have fuller commentary on all three games once I’ve played the full version of Tilted Mill’s ant farm game. I’ve been misled by demos before. Who hasn’t? But the Caesar IV demo is amazing in its generosity. A few buildings and options are off limits. The Narbo scenario is a nice little sandbox world with iron, gold and fields as far as the eye can see. The map is small enough that fountain coverage isn’t a problem, but big enough that you can cram in lots of housing and industry.

None of the military stuff is available in the demo, which is fine with me since no city builder has really gotten that to fit well with the construction and trade management.

Caesar IV is tapped for a late September release.

Paradox has just added a new development diary for Europa Universalis III and I’m getting a little antsy.

First the positive. The game is looking much better and there will be extended political events that may put the player in a difficult position. The screenshot of a Succession War means that sometimes you will be forced into political unions by dynastic events. This is both historically appropriate and very cool.

Not so cool, to me at least, is the announcement that the game will more fully embrace the random event/alternate history model of Crusader Kings. I loved CK and how the history/event engine mixed up the tried and true “this is how it happened” model of the early decades of Victoria and the whole of Europa Universalis II.

But I think something important is lost in EU by throwing historical monarchs overboard. We are assured that the historical rulers are present for the appropriate starting years. If you start the game in 1588, Elizabeth I will be a war with Philip II. But once they die – and they will die at unpredictable points – the alternate history takes over. You won’t know how skilled your successor will be and you won’t know if the country will hold together.

The reasons for the change are perfectly acceptable. You can’t plan your game around the Timurid revolts or the accession of Charles V now, and those who lived the history at the time couldn’t either. The recognition of player precognition is an important element in sound game design and this, on paper, is sound game design.

Part of the charm of Europa Universalis, though, was that you were living history. The Reformation, the voyages of Columbus, the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus…all were an essential part of EU to me. There may be great design reasons for turfing much of this but the “textbook on the screen” nature of EU2 was core to the game’s flavor. I’m not going to condemn the new system outright, especially since it works so well in Crusader Kings. But I will mourn the end of those crossroads of history moments.

What of those historical events that tracked a nation’s rise and fall? They will now be tied to the core reasons for the events in the first place. So there will be a deeper historical understanding underneath EU3 in the place of the straight narrative approach of the earlier games. This too is appealing, if less colorful than a text box with the history of the Wars of the Roses.

There is also news that press preview builds are already being assembled. With the game still many months out, this seems early to be getting code into the hands of the media. This is a very promising sign.

A new era has opened in my efforts at self-promotion and punditry. Welcome to the new home of the rambling opinions of Troy Goodfellow (that’s me).

What new stuff is in store for the new home? Striving to make this place both more professional and more welcoming, I will be having three or four regular monthly features. The beginning of each week will have a scheduled post, including guest blogging once a month (assuming I can get enough people interested in helping out).

Please be patient while the site finds its footing.

Technorati Profile

One of 2005’s biggest disappointments for me was Crown of Glory from Western Civilization Software by way of Matrix. The ambitious Napoleonic Wars game had too much of everything except clear documentation and feedback. It has just been patched again, but I don’t have much of a desire to load it up and see what has been fixed.

But there was enough positive feedback from users that Western Civ and Matrix are teaming up again for another historical strategy game, Forge of Freedom: The American Civil War, 1861-1865. Allen Rausch has an early preview over on Gamespy.

At first glance, [Read more →]

Between finishing up an article and doing some much needed house cleaning, I found the time to learn three new board games. My friend and colleague Bruce Geryk is always introducing me to new stuff, either because he pities my mostly board game free existence or because he just likes finding new people to humiliate.

The titles of the games themselves are quite evocative: Lost Cities! Ra! Thurn und Taxis! Well, that last one isn’t very evocative since I’m not quite sure what it means. But Bruce told me it was about delivering the mail across Germany.

Only it wasn’t. Ra wasn’t about the Egyptian Sun God either. And Lost Cities was only peripherally connected to the exploration of uncharted lands for undiscovered civilizations. For all three, the mechanics of the game were only tangentially related to the themes surrounding them. Thurn und Taxis could have been about map making or road paving, since it was about tracing routes on a map. It didn’t have to be Germany, but it is a German game.

Brett Todd was playing a couple of the games with us, which is interesting since we’d recently engaged in correspondence about the recent Roman city builders Glory of the Roman Empire and CivCity: Rome. (You can find his reviews of both on Gamespot.) One of the central points we are both interested in for a city builder is whether it “feels” right. Is the historical ambience there? What connects the player to the setting?

No one has these sorts of expectations for a good board game. The very best board games (Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, even chess) are able to exist simply as rule sets with themes only loosely attached. There are exceptions, of course. Many of the greatest Avalon Hill games were perfect blends of theme, rules and playing pieces.

How many computer games have that luxury? If Stronghold didn’t focus your attention on the building of a castle, players would be miffed. Caylus, a game about a castle, can be won without building the castle at all.

It’s easy to say that this is natural because board gamers can’t process all the stuff that a computer can, but that’s putting the question backwards. Abstract design is discouraged and the setting of a computer game becomes the determinant of what goes in and what stays out. Developers seem to start with “let’s make a game about World War II” and then try to find a way to make WW2 happen on screen. I doubt anyone sat down and said “We need an Egyptian board game” and then decided that it should involve bidding on cards with point values.

One is not better than the other. And I’m not going to give Glory of the Roman Empire a do-over because it might have been trying to keep things light and abstracted. But it is intriguing that computer game designers clearly put the setting at the beginning of the design phase where many great board games do not.

Oh, and all three are very good games. Ra was being billed to me as “the best 3 person game ever” and pretty much lived up to that billing. It probably helped that I didn’t embarrass myself too much in any of them.