In a mostly grateful comment on my review of his Raging Tiger and Falklands War 1982, Curt Pangracs writes that I underrate the AI in those games when I refer to it as “lackluster”.

A few days later, veteran wargame reviewer Jim Cobb writes an editorial on Combat Sim that accuses developers of not spending enough time or energy on the development of competent computer opponents. (Full disclosure: I owe Mr. Cobb a review of Blitzkrieg II that I *promise* to get around to very soon.)

The “lackluster AI” criticism I levy at the ATF games is, I admit, wargamer boilerplate. Hell, I suspect that the word “lackluster” is found more often in game magazines than in any other press form. As I explain in my reply to Mr. Pangracs, my more general point was that the AI seemed well able to handle the expected and obvious, but not the creative. Cobb’s complaints about AI in are along similar lines, only he wants the AI to not just respond to creativity, but be capable of (or programmed to) surprise.

All of this raises the obvious question of what to expect in wargame AI. What makes an opponent believable?

There is one sector of wargaming opinion that holds that, since most real wargamers seek out human opponents, energy spent on the AI is wasted to begin with. To me, this puts the cart before the horse. If wargame AI was, in general, better, there would be less need or desire to seek out humans.

I have a more basic question, provoked by Pangracs’ reply to my review. Do we know good AI when we see it? And should we believe what we are told by developers?

Really bad AI is easy enough to recognize. It was very common in early sports management sims, where opposing GMs would never challenge you for big free agents. Early wargames had computer opponents that had a good sense of the mathematic value of objectives, but poor sense of geography. The latest offering from Paradox, Diplomacy, has multiple AI opponents, none of whom are sharp enough to cut soft cheese.

When a game brags about its AI, it’s never a good sign. The chaotically stupid Superpower games were promoted on their realism and “learning” opponent. Make a game complicated enough and it may appear that the AI is learning (people can convince themselves of anything) but even if the AI was good, the games are far too random to test how good.

But AI that ranges from OK to good is hard to detect. Most difficult computer opponents are just given more advantages. They “cheat” in order to provide a challenge. This is not greater intelligence, of course, so a challenging game is not a sign of a good AI.

Wargames AI seems easy to program. There are limited goals defined by the scenario. There are limited resources available and rarely a need to produce more (most “strategic wargames” like Grigsby’s World at War are strategy games to me, not wargames). Include a combat resolution table or a sense of depreciating supply assets through a mathematical thingamajig and voila.

Apparently not so easy. Even in a wargame as simplistic as Rome: Total War‘s battles, the computer opponent can be easily convinced to prioritize its General’s uber-power over the same unit’s importance for the preservation of the army. Result: suicidal generals who are easily destroyed.

So what do we expect? An opponent that plays by the historical rules is fine, even though, as Cobb notes, any human opponent who did things purely historically would be beaten because you’re not dumb enough to act historically when you attack him. A computer opponent who had more than one programmed opening and the good sense to know when stall an advance would work.

As I still struggle with Noble level in Civilization IV (I love games, but fear I’m not very good at them), I am reminded of one of the most enjoyable wargames I’ve ever played. Sid Meier’s Gettysburg. I won’t deny that it is more fun in multiplayer. Me and one of my MP arch-nemeses have many war stories to tell about the times he took a strong position on a hill or when I forced marched reinforcements through the woods to hit his rear. All great times.

But the computer opponent was more than acceptable. It seemed to know how to regroup, when to withdraw its guns and where to withdraw them to, could scout, would extend its line, would refuse its flanks in trouble…Sure, with practice I could beat it pretty soundly. But there was a lot of practice.

Does this mean that AI is not all that hard? Probably not. Meier probably had some tricks up his sleeves, or, like many gamers, I have chosen to believe something that is not exactly true.

So maybe we don’t really need better AI. We just need to be fooled better.

Paradox has just announced the third patch for their hit WWII grand strategy game Hearts of Iron 2. They persist in calling these things “enhancements” instead of patches, which makes my skin crawl, but once again the Swedish masters continue to support some of their games well after release. (Victoria seems to have fallen by the wayside.)

The patch has dozens of little tweaks. I’m not sure the game needed more minister portraits, but it looks like the AI has gotten seriously examined in many setups. There are even some new events and triggers.

Will it be enough to persuade me to reinstall HoI2? Maybe.

The HoI games have never had the appeal to me that their other games have. As intriguing a period as the Second World War is, the grand strategy portion of the game is constricted by the time frame and the limits of the historical setup. Where even the mostly confounding Victoria feels like an historical playground, Hearts of Iron feels like the same game every time you play it – never a good idea for a genre where replayability equals reputation.

But it has been a long time since I’ve played Hearts of Iron II. There are enough changes in this patch to make me curious as to how it all turns out. And I’ve never played as Canada, and I should just to keep my Canuck cred. So I’ll probably give it a spin sometime over Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, Crusader Kings is still stuck at 1.04a even though the new official patch was promised for the fall. And that’s a game I know I like.

There is much to be learned in a comparison between Age of Empires III and Civilization IV. Both are highly anticipated sequels to legendary series. Both have had overenthusiastic preview press. Both have been mentioned many times on this blog. And both have consumed most of my gaming time in the last month or so.

But the difference in quality between the two games is astounding. Both are very good games and well worth the purchase price, I think. But plyaing Civilization IV is like discovering Civ for the very first time. Playing AoE 3 is like playing AoK again.

The differences between good and bad games are obvious. Even the line between good and average is pretty clear. (Well, one magazine gave Empire Earth 2 a near perfect score.) Since so many games fall into the bad/average/good troika that it is often easy to forget that a truly great game is a totally different experience than a merely good one – or a very good one.

What makes a game great? I could say, “Elves”, but it’s not elves exactly. For all the talk about magic and game gods and x-factors there has to be some way to express what makes one game so much more enjoyable than another.

At a cursory glance, Civ IV is just as familiar and threadbare as AoE 3 is – if not more. It hasn’t been that long since Civ III Conquests came out and there have been other Civ-like games out there. The first Civ came out a very long time ago and the formula has been barely touched. The Age series at least has shifted in time and place. Civ is just the same stone age to space age thing repeated every few years.

And Civ III wasn’t “great” – it was very good. Age of Mythology on the other hand was a really wonderful experience with a great variety of gameplay challenges. So, Civ looked like it was getting stale while Ensemble seemed to be hitting its creative stride.

But for some reason, Civ IV never fails to entertain. Every game I lose is as much fun as the games I win. Except for the terribly slow PBEM experience I’m going through, every turn is full with the immediate promise of something interesting about to happen.

In AoE 3, even as I play it over and over again, I keep asking myself why they didn’t borrow more from other recent RTS games. Every spine-tingling moment of musket fire and cavalry charges is colored by the awareness that the subgenre has moved on and Ensemble hasn’t seemed to notice – despite their own innovations in Age of Mythology.

But it’s not just the issue of doing new stuff – which Civ IV has a lot of. As crazy as it sounds, I prefer both the look and sound of the turn based game to the glorious prettiness of Age 3. The triumph over simple art direction I guess. Better interface, better manual, better in game documentation…but this is all pretty mechanical stuff, isn’t it? Shouldn’t “fun” be something less easy to quantify?

It’s not just the Civ formula – Activision’s Call to Power series never quite did it for a lot of people even though it parroted a lot of the Civ stuff. I think most gamers have a soft spot for Meier and company – few other developers have so consistently satisfied our appetites. So maybe we subconsciously cut Firaxis a little slack. I doubt that’s the case though.

There is a difference between good and great. It’s the difference between Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate. Between Puresim Baseball and Out of the Park Baseball. Between F-19 Stealth Fighter and Red Baron. And it’s different from genre to genre, case to case.

And it’s the reason that I may not bother to buy another game this year.

Not so long ago, I posted about how game music was mostly wasted on me. A lot of people love game soundtracks, but I usually turn them down or off and put on some Sondheim instead.

But now there is this African tune stuck in my head to the extent that I even bop my head as I think about it. The song is the opening tune in Civ IV and further evidence that Firaxis is full of terrible little trolls who think little of my valuable time.

First, I can’t stop playing their game. Second, I can’t stop thinking about playing their game. Third, I am humming a tune from their game.

Damn you, Soren Johnson.

Last night we had dinner with the neighbors. A very nice couple of our parent’s generation. Both very accomplished, very gracious and, most importantly, very interesting.

And they find this whole computer gaming thing puzzling.

They’ve known that I had a little side income coming in from writing about this pastime, but tonight’s discussoin went into a little more detail about what form our household entertainment hours generally took.

And they were shocked.

Not that we played games – they’ve known about my little side business for a while. But they were surprised at the variety of games out there and how they have become my household’s primary form of entertainment.

There was some difficulty in explaining some of these games. Neverwinter Nights, with its combination of packaged software and user created content, is a mystery still I think. My description of historical strategy games and the possibilities they open up for creative game play intrigued them but certainly remains an abstraction for them in many ways.

There was none, however, of the knee-jerk doubting of games as legitimate pursuits for adults. My neighbors are the educated mainstream. And they ended the conversation by wondering if there was this little subculture side in their own children.

The conversation was, in a way, emblematic of the challenge facing gaming as a “mainstream” hobby. For those many thousands of people who were raised in a world without video gaming, the hobby is something they know next to nothing about. If we had said that we were into Korean cooking or coin collecting, there would have been much less to explain.

But the upside is that their questions were evidence of a sincere curiosity about gaming. I don’t expect them to be loading Civ 4 onto their hard drives any time soon, but I do expect to have more of this conversation with them in the future.

I’m a big advocate of adult gamers being “out”. The juvenalia that dominates the media on gaming (and sometimes the games themselves) can only be overcome by, to appropriate a religious term, “witnessing” about the power and possibility of gaming. I like to think that I made a little progress last night.

Great big issue this month with three reviews and one column by yours truly. Two of the reviews are bundled in the same spot, mostly because the two Armored Task Force wargames are pretty similar. The column is in the “Revisionist History” (now with PC games!) spot and waxes eloquently about the brief life of SimTex, the makers of the original Master of Orion. I’d like to thank my editor for some of that eloquence.

The big feature piece is on the union between board games and computer games. Bruce Geryk writes about how board games have made the transition to online play and Brett Todd contributes a companion piece on computer games that have found their way to cardboard and plastic. Well worth looking at.

There’s an interesting pre-review of Civilization IV – not final because the game wasn’t final when the piece went to press – but it describes how much Civ love I am feeling at the moment. It’s interesting because the review format is Steve Bauman and Tom Chick engaging in a dialogue about the game. You don’t just get a great sense of the game, you also get a very good idea about the subtle differences in these two gamers. Both come to the same conclusion – Civ IV is great – and mostly for the same features. But both also come through as people looking for different ways to love a great game.

It bears comparison with the “Bruce versus Tom” multiplayer reports in Computer Gaming World – reports that also serve as secondary reviews or even mini-strategy guides. (It may be the most consistently funny thing in the gaming press today – or at least the most consistently intentionally funny.)

Two voices on the same page actually works very well for conveying information and impressions, probably for the same reason that a well-run internet forum is more informative than a web review. For all its thumbnail sketches, Ebert and Roeper works as a movie show very well more because of the dialogue and enthusiasm than the thumbs and movie clips.

The original Gamesdomain is lamented for many reasons, but many people miss the “Second Opinions” pieces that some games would get. Dialogue and exchange is a natural part of evaluating any media product and I think that all of the major publishers and venues would be better served by doing it more often. PCGamer‘s podcast is an excellent example of gaming discussion done well. (I don’t have G4TV, but what I have seen hasn’t made its acquisition a high priority for me.)