Be ready to reset your RSS feeder if you got it. If you’ve visited Portico in the last day or two, you probably noticted that it looked a little funny. I had switched it to a default template so I could archive the posts in a way that Pivot could understand.

Because, finally, I will be moving to my new domain within the week. The logo is ready, the server is ready and my ideas for how the site will be changing are percolating. When the time comes, I’ll leave this notice up, but it will simply redirect after a month or so.

So, no new posts until that’s all set.

Even though the score translates as average, so far, I’m the big, bad Hun when it comes to evaluating Haemimont/CDV’s Glory of the Roman Empire. I found it much too easy to be interesting, and too boring to be worth playing for longer than I had to. CDV says that it is targeting casual gamers with Glory, but I think their idea of casual gaming is quite a bit different from mine.

My wife calls historical city builders “ant farm games” and there is a lot to this. You want to see your citizens changing the landscape, go about their business and live almost – but not quite – independent from you. Glory tries to make a lot of this easier on you by not letting buildings degrade in status – only upward mobility – but also requiring you to scatter your city with altars, statues and temples which only push the real estate further up the chain. So you end up with a fishing oriented suburb full of villas. Which means that they will demand a bath. In short, your entire city ends up looking just like what Hollywood in the 50s thought Rome was all about; marble buildings as far as the eye can see.

My review makes a lot of how easy the game is, even in its supposed difficult settings, and there is nothing wrong with easy. For some gamers the entire point of city builders is the sandbox. Start with abundant money and resources and build the city of your dreams. But when the entire game is like that, it loses a lot of the purpose of city builders – to plan ahead, to measure your pace, to keep supply and demand in balance. Glory of the Roman Empire is all forward momentum.

The resource construction and economic model is very similar to Children of the Nile, one of the best city builders in recent memory. But where Tilted Mill’s game would let you taste the bitter tang of failure without pushing you over the edge into despair, Haemimont’s Rome is nothing but short term success after short success. There are no monuments or wonders to work towards, only small scale challenges based on how many people you have in your city.

Oh, and I’d like to thank the two Game Rankings readers who voted to give my Games Radar review a single star. I’m here to serve.

The great hope for Civ IV was that its open architecture would lead to a lot of creative and unusual mods, taking the basic design of the game in interesting directions. For the most part, Civ mods have still emphasized adding more historical units, people fitting in their own countries as major civilizations, or adding a little bit of chrome, like my personal favorite, the Great Person Mod. There is even a Total Realism mod, though I have no idea what realism even means in a game as abstract as Civilization.

Fall from Heaven is something special, though. It is a fantasy world adaptation with almost everything remade. New resources, new tech tree, new civs, new skills, new units…but the thing is, FFH has a driving mythology in which the whole thing works. The Civilopedia is a delight to read because the modmakers have taken this job so seriously.

It certainly has its problems. Like many user created adaptations, it errs on the side of too much. The tech tree is so made over that I had to go back to Chieftain level to find my bearings. Though the techs themselves make sense in their own hierarchy, it’s not obvious what Arcane Lore will give me. The new religions are a mixture of Tolkien tree-worship and other straight rip-offs from fantasy lit (there is a Cthulhu religion called “Octopus Overlords”).

But these adaptations never seem forced. It becomes conceivable that these fantasy societies would have different religions, religions that even shape the look of your cities. Since the modders aren’t bound to follow a particular author (though I’m sure there is a Middle Earth mod out there) or a certain established mythos, they take a bit from here and a bit from there, even creating elaborate justifications for the new wonders. Originality and creation and not necessarily the same thing.

The civics are also given some serious teeth. One religious civic offers huge benefits to your state faith, but penalizes you for every heretical religion in your city. Instead of the Civ 4 method of making each civic merely attractive in a different situation, the modders have given you the temptation to mold your civ to fit the needs of an upcoming development.

And it has dragons.

I think that this is what Firaxis had in mind when they said they wanted Civ IV to be mod friendly. This is a wonderful achievement, and I’m not one drawn to radical makeovers of my games. I have yet to finish a single Fall From Heaven game because there is so much I want to see that I get bogged down in the details. What does Mana do? How do I upgrade my Adepts? Why are Great Works worth so little in culture? Is that a hell hound?

Civilization IV was, of course, in no danger of disappearing from my hard drive. But more intriguing mods like this could mean that it never leaves.

Next Gen has an interesting story on what they see as the ten greatest years of gaming. I won’t spoil their story by listing the punchline here. You can click on your own. Warning: It’s been Slashdotted.

Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh proceeds chronologically, freeing him from the burden of ranking all these years in some sort of hierarchy. The story itself, however, is very console heavy, especially once we get past the 1970s. The PC isn’t absent but it’s a footnote. Lip service is paid to the shareware boom in the early nineties and the boom of 3D in the mid-nineties, but even here there is a concentration on the contribution of shooters to the industry. The story would be better sold as “ten years of platform wars”.

Mostly devoid of non-business commentary, Waugh cites the division between “technologists” and those who want games to be more culturally significant as being in 2001. This split is certainly older than 2001, so I wonder why that topic is raised at all, especially in that year.

There is a risk inherent in any list of this sort, especially if you focus on the games, like I would. Hall of Fame goaltender Ken Dryden once wrote that everyone’s golden age is when they were twelve, when things are fresh and new. The golden age of baseball for me is the mid-80s, for example (Schmidt, Ripken, Hershiser) and there’s something to that when I think of my best gaming years.

I think of 1990-91 when some of dorm mates got seriously into computer gaming and I discovered the glories of F-19 Stealth Fighter, Civilization and Wing Commander. A great year, to be sure, (I still think of years as determined by the school calendar) but primarily because it was my first deep introduction to the hobby.

I think of 1996 when I first had near complete control over a PC of my own, meaning I could game for as long as my new wife would let me. Also the year of Civilization II, by the way; a game that almost completely consumed me.

I think of 2000, when I began writing for a now defunct website (on a volunteer basis). People started sending me games – good and bad – but I thought it was just cool to have a small audience interested in my opinion. And here I am now blogging for (at most) a few dozen regulars and, more importantly, reaching a larger throng through Computer Games, Games Radar and Strategy Zone Online – all of whom pay. Imagine that. It’s also the year that I went out and bought Europa Universalis on release day.

Of course, with some research I could make an objective case for a lot of events with no personal connection. The founding of Electronic Arts. The bundling of game software with new PCs. The last wargame sold at EB. I could just point to a list of good games released in any given year, but this would be inevitably colored by the way that those games fit into my life at that time.

It’s been a good six months for strategy games. So good that I’ve had a hard time winnowing my list down to the top three of the year. I helped myself by excluding expansion packs from qualifying unless they introduced major new gameplay elements. This knocked both Hearts of Iron: Doomsday and Rome: Total War – Alexander off my list. Both are very good and highly recommended for fans of the originals.

I have also disqualified any game that I haven’t finished diagnosing yet, possibly knocking a credible European RTS from the list. OK, it was a long shot, but it’s not fair to include any game I haven’t played extensively. To that end, games I haven’t played at all don’t count either, same as before.

I’ve also decided to leave off board games I just happen to play online or on my computer, putting Caylus and Ticket to Ride (the CD-ROM edition) off the radar.

And that still leaves me with at least five games I want to reward. But this is all about the hard decisions. The two games that just missed the cut are Birth of America, an excellent wargame set in 18th century America, and Take Command: 2nd Manassas, the sequel to last year’s third place finisher.

Number 3: Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends (Big Huge Games/Microsoft) – I’ll admit to being a little disappointed that this wasn’t the runaway winner. RoL is the sequel to, in my opinion, the best designed RTS yet. And it took me a while to get over the disappointment that the game looked very little like the glorious screenshots. Now, there are a lot of criticisms that can be made about Rise of Legends. Its multiplayer is broken for some people, the end game takes on the swirling mass of crap look, the factions suffer from a cool imbalance with the Vinci being the kings of the neat-o units. But there is a lot going on here. The sides are very balanced in term of options, they are cleanly distinguised from each other in look and strategy and even if the end games all look fairly similar, there’s a myriad of ways to get there.

Number 2: Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords (Stardock) – A lot of observers were surprised by how well GC2 sold in the early going. This is your typical “long tail” game; releases to some buzz but continues to sell based on word of mouth. This isn’t a blockbuster title with a huge ad campaign, after all. I was not surprised. Not only was the community starving for a good 4x game in space, it knew where its next meal would come from. After the acclaim for the original GalCiv, the sequel could hardly be a surprise. No should people be surprised by the constant updates/patches/enhancements that have streamed from Stardock since the game’s release. Like Rise of Legends, there was a sense in the first couple of months that every game would end in the same general manner. Because it happens in space, there is less to distinguish one session from another than there is in Civ IV. But every update, every tweak, every addition makes GalCiv2 even closer to being the perfect turn-based game.

Number 1: Battle for Middle Earth II (New Line Cinema/Electronic Arts) – I feel a little dead inside putting a movie licensed game on the top here. But there is no denying that, aside from last year’s game of year, Civ 4, this is the game that I played the most. I played it the most in single player, I played it the most in multiplayer. I played all the factions. I played the freaking campaigns. The “War of the Ring” mode is the game’s single misstep; it’s a convoluted effort to integrate a turn-based campaign similar to the Rise of Nations campaign mechanic. BfME2 is not only beautiful, it is in your face with decision making at all times. What power do you burn those palantir points on? Is it worth building a tower in that pass to channel my enemy somewhere else? If I go for the ring, can I protect it long enough to summon my super-unit? How far into neutral territory do I build my economy? All of these are major decisions, all must be made quickly and many simultaneously.

This list is very different from last year’s six month check in. Last year we had a bunch of developers saving their energies for the last quarter, when a spurt of major titles were released. So my top three games had two indie titles and one obscure still underappreciated RTS. 2006 has one plucky indie TBS that is hardly obscure and two RTS publised by industry behemoths. This shows, I think, just how wide and varied the range of quality strategy games is. No other genre can boast as many good games made by marginal players as well as strong and serious attention from the giants.

Only a Game has released some of the results from a survey they took of gamers. The intent of many of these question is to establish whether gamers who prefer certain genres approach games in different ways. Judging from the results, strategy gamers tend to enjoy messing around in a game world, whether or not progress is being made (Question 3) and want to take care of a game character (Question 8 ). This latter finding is attributed to an “X-Com effect”, but sort of presumes that these gamers remember what X-Com is.

And that leap of logic is my big problem with this survey as it is presented. Even when coupled with data on the hardcore/casual distinction derived from the same data set, there is a lot we don’t know about these gamers. Even leaving aside that the sample size is only 319 gamers, split into a number of overlapping catergories, the deciding factor in what gamers look for in a game might be determined by more boring stuff than genre boxes.

How old are people who prefer progress to sandbox games? Are student gamers more or less sociable than adult gamers? Until this basic and obvious question is answered, you really can’t draw a lot of firm conclusions about what gamers are looking for. How long have they been gaming? How many games do they buy a year? Console or PC?

In fact the Demographic Game Design 1 survey used as the basis for this study doesn’t even track this sort of information, sort of missing one of the big parts of demography. Gender, education, etc. – these sorts of things determine who has the time to play certain types of games and the environment in which they do so.

But real insight into what types of experiences certain gamers prefer is clearly not the purpose of the study. The purpose of the DGD is to slot gamers into four archetypes of game players (Conqueror, Manager, Wanderer, Participant) so that designers can build around these archetypes. I’m a Wanderer (according the survey) but this is based entirely on the boxes I clicked in regards to what I look for in games.

Take a look at the DGD. It asks the respondent for three games they like and a single game that captures what they don’t like about gaming. (My responses were Civ 4, EU 2 and with Baldur’s Gate with Superpower 2 as my bad experience.) There is no way that this information can be used to generate the result unless the surveyor knows what I like and don’t like. After all, the design documents for Superpower 2 and Europa Universalis 2 are pretty similar. How can the computer survey slot me in as a Wanderer without asking me what separates these two broadly similar games?

The survey is too short to be useful in drawing any meaningful conclusions about gamers, especially by using mere percentages as your analytic tool. While I support and encourage the use of data collection and analysis by anyone interested in gaming, no one should make too much of the DGD.