As hard as it is to believe, there haven’t always been expansion packs. Every now and then a sports game would put out a stadium disk or roster patch, but the early 90s were largely bereft of such cash grabs. The first expansion I can remember being excited about was the Campaign Disk for SSI’s Age of Rifles (1996), and it only added some campaigns and some random combat options. Not exactly thrilling.

Now, it seems, every major strategy release gets an expansion pack. A lot of minor strategy titles get them, too. I’ve been heavily playing two new expansions over the weekend (stay tuned for comments at a later date) and have been mostly underwhelmed by both. They are aren’t bad games at all. In fact, if either was included as part of the original game they would have made it even better.

But it raises the question of what expansion packs are for. What makes one a success and one a failure? Note that by “failure” I am not judging the games by sales. Any Sims expansion will sell a million copies whether it is as good as Hot Date and Unleashed or as lame as Superstar or Making Magic. By “failure” I mostly mean “Was this worth my money? Has this changed the game for the better?” So by failure, I mostly mean “Did it fail me and my petty expectations?”

Hey, gaming is very personal.

A good comparison is the two expansions for the two best RTS of the last few years – Rise of Nations and Age of Mythology. RoN expanded with Thrones and Patriots. It gave the player six new civilizations, new wonders and four new campaign maps. It integrated seamlessly into the RoN game world. The campaigns were excellent and breathed new life into a game mode that was not very replayable after the third or fourth time.

Age of Mythology had the Titans expansion. Lots of new stuff here, too. A new (if short) campaign, a new superweapon, and a new faction (Atlantis) with new gods. This meant new god powers, some of which would regenerate over time. But the whole package was a lot less compelling than what RoN had to offer.

In many ways, AoM is a superior game. Ensemble had to balance not only four wildly different factions, but also 48 different deities. The rock/paper/scissors stuff was doubly cyclical since you not only had units and their counters, but the hero/myth/mortal dynamic as well. And it works. Regenerative god powers was a neat concept and the Titans looked cool.

I’m not alone in my opinions here, either. Though the Gamerankings differences are negligible (Thrones gets 88, Titans 85) , Gamespot, Computer Gaming World and Computer Games Magazine all had the Rise of Nations expansion ahead by a comfortable margin. Gamespot had different reviewers for each (Jason Ocampo for Thrones and Greg Kasavin for Titans) while CGW and CGM had the same guy cover both (Di Luo and Tom Chick, respectively).

Don’t get me wrong, Titans is not a bad expansion. It’s hard to imagine what a bad expansion even is, since where gaming is concerned, more is usually better. It is not, however, as good as Thrones.

Why not? Well, the Atlanteans are not a compelling race. Their gods are simply an older Greek pantheon and so lack added exoticism. Ensemble didn’t want to introduce gods that most players would be unfamiliar with (how many gamers know their Sumerian gods? Maybe Aztec? How about Chinese?) but the result was a feeling that these new people were just more extras from a sword and sandal movie. The titan superweapon meant that almost every game ended the same way and whoever got the titan out first would usually win. The Atlantean counter-unit specialists made the RPS concept more transparent, but the battles more annoying. In some ways, the expansion took some of the mystery and fun out of a game that I really, really like.

Rise of Nations integrated the new stuff perfectly. There was never a sense that you were playing against a race that hadn’t been planned from the beginning. The new racial powers were quite powerful but did nothing to overwhelm or diminish the assets that the orignial cultures brought the table. Though, empircally, Thrones added more stuff it did less to change the fundamental game. It expanded; it didn’t rebuild.

This can’t be seen as a hard and fast rule, though. Take the Conquests expansion for Civ III. The chilly reception that greeted the original game (at least in some quarters) was almost completely destroyed by the rapturous applause that resulted from Conquests. Some of this joy, undoubtedly, was spurred by bugged and disappointing Play the World expansion, but for many Conquests made Civ a whole new game. The Bioware RPGs have expansions that usually introduce new campaigns as long as the originals. The best of the Sim expansions do more than add new material, they add new worlds and life options for your dolls, sometimes radically changing the game (Hot Date and Sims 2 University did this.) Cossacks had two expansions, and neither added anything of note beyond a couple of new European armies.

So, as usual, no answers here. Feel free to fill the comments with reflections on the best and worst of expansion packs.

In case you haven’t checked it out, PC Gamer magazine (the US version) has a podcast now. It’s not bad, as far as these things go. Knowledgeable people talking knowledgeably about computer games and the like. Sure, they may review a game a month before it even goes gold, but you don’t get to be the number one computer gaming magazine in the country by knowing nothing.

The third edition of the podcast has the usual stuff talking about games, violence and Hot Coffee (aren’t we tired of this topic yet?). The best thing from my vantage point was the interview with Sid Meier. Not a lot of new information in the interview, but it does give a look at what Firaxis is trying to accomplish with Civilization IV. There is a little glimpse into the design process at Firaxis and further insight into the place of console gaming in Firaxis’s future. There’s a lot of discussion about the mod possibilities for Civ IV, something that is intended to be much easier for both the developers and consumers.

I think there should be more gaming podcasts. Video Game News has one, and Poweruser.TV has a general science/tech podcast that often deals with gaming. All three of these are now on my regular listening queue. It is actually surprising how well game discussion – dealing with a very visual and tactile medium – translates to aural and literal forms. Game reviews are always more words than pictures, so the move to radio broadcast isn’t as cumbersome as one would think.

One more reason to get excited about the imminent release of Diplomacy from Paradox. Anyone who preorders the game from their online shop has a chance at some pretty cool prizes.

First prize is a weekend in Stockholm hanging out with the development team. You get a behind the scenes look at how the kings of ambitious gaming produce their product and a night partying with Swedes. Plus a day to look around one of Europe’s great cities.

Second prize is a German hat; one of those spiked ones you see in all the old war movies. Third prize is a German sword with scabbard. (Why all the German stuff? Is this just easier to come by? Why not a Cossack hat?)

There will also be ten consolation prizes – Paradox medals. I’ve already got one of those.

If you were on the edge of pre-ordering Diplomacy, this could be your chance to wow your friends with talks about the beauty of Sweden or with your cool new headgear. Contest ends when Diplomacy hits shelves the first week of October.

Gamespy has a report on the multiplayer component of Civlization IV. Dave Kosak is writing about an event that I had the good fortune to attend. My reflections on MP Civ and the game in general should be in an upcoming issue of Computer Games Magazine.

Dave explains in pretty good detail the “culture bomb” strategy that we reporters were introduced to. You build an artistic wonder of the world, it generates a Great Artist, you walk the great master to a puny border city and put him to work there. All of a sudden, your tiny town gets thousands of points in culture and foreign cities are clamoring to join your enlightened empire. As Dave puts it, “It’s as if Michelangelo painted the roof of the Sistine Chapel in Podunk, New Jersey, and it became the hottest City in the Northeast.”

The instant I heard about this strategy I thought it was a little cheap. I like the idea of culture flipping since it’s a route to expansion that doesn’t involve a lot of guns or threats. It’s not clear if an opposing culture bomb can be dropped to bring the defecting cities back or if the AI will be able to deal with such a strategy. My time with the game was almost all in multiplayer (I started a few single player games in between sessions, but never got very far) and the game was still being tweaked anyway.

The more I think about the game though, the less concerned I am since the Great Person mechanic gives lots of ways to influence your enemies. Religion could be very powerful if you can convert a fontier town to your one true faith. There are lots more wonders now, so the culture wars can get intense even without Leonardo setting up in Nipissing. Until my preview is published, I can’t elaborate too much on this (there’s lots of other info online) but I can say that Civ IV could be the one of the best strategy games of the year. And I’m one of the people who wasn’t sure it should be made in the first place.

If culture bombs aren’t easily countered (everybody who reads Gamespy knows about them now) or aren’t tweaked (maybe a minimum size city limit?), the early game could be a Parthenon Rush. Every Civ game had ideal build orders, but if everyone starts the game by trying to get Phidias to Argos before your enemy can send Schiller to Munich, it might get a little annoying.

I spent most of today with a camera and production crew for the new Discovery Channel show Dr. Know. It’s sort of a medical version of Mythbusters. I was chosen to represent the typical heavy computer user; someone who spends a lot of time starting at a monitor, and who is known to play games for hours at a time without much rest. The idea was to find out if prolonged exposure to monitors (or televisions) could do harm to the human eye.

The crew and staff were very professional TV people, but I think I learned more about television production than I should have if I ever wanted to see the industry as some sort of magic.

First, they weren’t really that interested in capturing the real me. The science is the star of the show. I was just a prop. My responses weren’t scripted, but I was prodded to do things with and at my computer that I never would in real life. Any gamer who sees the episode (sometime in 2006) will notice them immediately. I put up a bit of a fight when they wanted to see me pretend to use the computer in the bathroom, but, they reminded me, they want to keep the show light and a little exaggeration makes the point better than me holding forth about my regular habits.

Second, television production is boring. It was to me at least. Take after take after take. Look here, don’t look there. We went to an opthamologist’s office and I spent most of the time sitting reading magazines, since I was only needed for a couple of brief shots.

In short, the whole day will be edited down to a few minutes. I knew this was likely. I’m no pollyanna. So why do it? I was asked to. My day was free. I haven’t been on TV since my high school quiz team a decade and a half ago. Mostly, I thought it would be interesting to see how these light science programs are made.

I’ll let you all know when the episode airs.

One of the challenges in this month’s gaming blog roundtable is to take a flawed game and suggest how it could be improved through melding with other genres. This is the challenge that I have taken up. [click on read more for the full deal]

Strategy games in general are genre crossers. Any flight or subsim with a dynamic campaign has a strategic componet – some very explicitly (Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe). Sports management sims are really business strategy games, and now many action sports titles have “franchise modes.” The Celtic Kings series from Haemimont tried to include role-playing elements, but the first was mostly an adventure game in its “campaign mode.” We even have an action-RTS on the way (Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War). Has any fantasy strategy game strayed very far from the D&D worldview?

Still, some titles try to ape a similar game and neglect the possibilities beyond their own stated genre. Take the so-flawed-it-hurts Pax Romana. This ancient world strategy game from Galilea by way of Dreamcatcher tried to be Europa Universalis with togas. A big map, lots of diplomatic options, different trade goods, abstracted battles – you could tell that the lead designer worked on the original version of the Paradox classic. The use of “stratagems” (think special power cards) was a minor innovation and has been carried on almost unchanged into Great Invasions.

It also had an excellent political minigame. You would lead a faction in the Republic (divided into anachronistic groups) and campaign for office. There was an effort to balance the prize of political triumph since repeated victories would send your successful candidates overseas to lead armies, depleting political strength at home.

There was never any real identification with your almost faceless horde of backbenchers. They had political and military skills, but you never really had much of an idea who these people were. They had names, of course, but little else. You would play a “wedding” stratagem to convert an enemy to a friend, but there was no real union between the two of you. The senators and equites you courted were little more than chits with different values attached. The factions had marginal differences between them (plutocrats got more money, for example) but there was never a sense that this political game had much connection to what was happening in Rome.

What Pax Romana needed was more role playing. Instead of a faction, you would play a family navigating the treacherous waters of the Forum. You wouldn’t necessarily be committed to a faction with set policy; your strength and weakness would depend on how well you and your successors could adapt to the changing demands of the people, the merchants and the army.

Would this work? Look at Crusader Kings. CK is really a role playing strategy game. You have real characters and real families. Greedy vassals hate you because you are honest. Bastard step-children plot against you and your heirs. Crazy relatives start killing people. Now take this role playing and make player success contingent on winning wars to boost popularity, or forging marriage links to ensure electoral success.

The great weakness of the political game in Pax Romana was the sameness of it all. Playing Caesar felt no different from playing Scipio. It didn’t matter who the faction leader was, especially since you could easily raise enough legions to trump any military weakness in your generals. Differences between orators and commanders melted away.

In my review of Knights of Honor (CGM July 2005, p.62) I wrote: “If game designers want to personalize decision making, they should give the decision makers personality.” Why bother naming the politicians at all if they turn into the same person after a while? The D&aD class system is an effort to draw stark lines between character types. In CK, a duke or king with a poor military rating will make the player more reluctant to send him into battle. In Supreme Ruler 2010, your ministers have ideologies that may make them skeptical of your decisions. In Rome: Total War, the piling on of retinue and attributes combine to create a three-dimensional image of a son known only as Lucius the Mad.

Would this be easy to do? No. The already kludgy grand strategy game might have to be further simplified. The entire game shift would be from the “conquer the world” mode to the “accumulate fame and prestige” mode. Considering how few people had anything kind to say about the strategy component of Pax Romana, this might not be a bad thing.

Would this have been enough to save Pax Romana from obscurity and disdain? Likely not. The interface was terrible, the documentation inadequate and the stability absent. Most of this was the result of a rushed release, but some was just poor design.

Would it make the game better? I think so. For many of us fascinated by ancient history, the general rise and fall of great powers is less interesting than the characters who made it so. Would anyone care about Carthage if it weren’t for the towering genius of Hannibal? The fall of the Republic is such a compelling time period because we feel we know Caesar and Pompey and Cicero and my old pal Cato Uticensis. By letting the player bend the Mediterranean to his/her will with realistic characters instead of generic chits, Pax Romana could have made this world come alive.

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