Whenever someone says that they don’t like a game, the title’s fans will almost always ask the same question: “How long did you play it?”. The questions takes many forms. “How far did you get?” “Do you have the x yet?” But the implications are the same. You cannot, apparently, have a valuable opinion on a game until you have played it to a certain point.

The question remains, where is this point? As a sometime game reviewer, I am duty bound to spend a lot more time playing some games I’m not enjoying than I would if it’s just some collection filler from Ebay. When I tell my casual gaming friends the hours I put into a title that I gave two stars, they think I’m insane.

But, as a strategy gamer, I have to confess that many of the great games in my pet genre require a little more time to find the magic. Take Europa Universalis and its sequel – a title which I think is a modern classic. I was sucked in right away. Others need to put in more hours to be enchanted, so I fall back into the tired old advice to keep at it and ask questions if they need help.

Of course, if EU had come with a better manual, more people would get into it faster. And, even after all the extra time, I can’t guarantee that everyone will like it.

I have two good casual gaming friends. In the last year or so, I’ve recommended three games to them in different contexts – Political Machine, Pirates!, and Rome: Total War. Both immediately got into the first two. They would come to lunch and we would talk about how tough Roosevelt was as an opponent or which Caribbean power had the hottest governors’ daughters.

Rome was a split decision though. One guy loved it. He would be up until the wee hours of the morning playing. He would IM me with questions about how to beat scythed chariots. The other guy didn’t. And the way he described it, he didn’t seem to have played very much of it. Both had borrowed my disks, so there was no financial obligation to find something to like, and he admitted that he could see why we enjoyed it. But I was not convinced that he had given it a fair shot.

It became clear that he had played through the tutorial, including the intro “Unite Italy” campaign. Though an excellent tutorial for demonstrating the interface and how the game plays, like many good strategy games, the tutorial is only an appetizer for the main course – the Imperial Campaign with lots of generals and barbarians and elephants.

I know people who almost quit playing Baldur’s Gate because it opened with lame FedEx and rat-killing quests. I’ve certainly quit playing some Euro-strategy games because I couldn’t make the economy work. Does that disqualify me from saying that I think Anno 1602 is overrated?

Games are a strange thing. We would rightly ridicule someone who formed an opinion on a movie without seeing it, but games require a greater time investment. Should someone have to finish a RPG before they can have a strong opinion on it? Do we condemn our fellow gamers to hours of misery in a game they are not enjoying just so they can talk about it? In today’s broadband world, should we require that our fellow gamers try out the multiplayer part of game in case they find that that is more their cup of tea?

So how long should we expect someone to play The Sims? Should a game grab you in the first two hours? What if it takes that long to figure out the relationships between items and units? Does it vary from genre to genre? Comment away.

As popular as the resource harvesting real time strategy game is, it’s a little surprising to see it so often maligned. The entire sub-genre is often written off as having little to do with strategy, derided as a “clickfest” and to many of the hardcore gaming audience the RTS world is full of clones and knock-offs with little to no originality.

Some of the disdain is undoubtedly rooted in the popularity of the RTS. Even though most RTS games aren’t very good, it is easy to blame the amazing success of the Warcrafts, Command and Conquers, and Ages of Empires for the flood of Cossacks, War Times, and Celtic Kings – and worse. But many of the complaints are borne out of the frustration that usually comes with the belief that you have seen it all before and that no one is making games for you.

Here is a brief defense of the real time harvesting strategy game.

There is no strategy in RTS: In fact, there is strategy in RTS, but it often is a similar strategy from game to game. Strategy implies long term planning, and few things typify long term (for a one hour game) like build orders, counter units and economic management. There is little in the way of tactics, to be sure. Once you have built your force, there is little need to manage it in combat beyond sending it in the right direction. (A few game break this mold – Kohan, Warcraft III, Act of War.)

It’s all the the same strategy – economic efficiency: This is true, but misleading. RTS are about economic efficiency, but in the same way that 4X games are about expansion and FPS are about shooting without getting shot. But you never hear hardcore gamers complaining that all the shooters are the same because you have to do similar things in them. Economic efficiency and getting the biggest bang for your buck have been the currency of the sub genre since the beginning.

This does not mean that all economic efficiencies are the same. Take Age of Mythology. Though recognized by most reviewers as a good game, it never achieved the success of Age of Empires, probably because it messed up the economic efficiency expectations of players. In the Multiplayer world of AoM, many players have favorite gods or nations since they know the min/max ratios down. In random play, though, there is a lot to consider. Each nation has different ways to achieve favor. Each nation has different needs in resources. Each nation has a different troop balance.

It’s all about who can click the fastest: Few genres emphasize hotkeys and mouse movement to the extent that RTS do. You have know what you need and when you can afford to build it. At the highest levels of MP action, the concept of build orders comes into play and can be frustrating for newer players. Most of us, though, have no real interest in becoming the best Warcraft player ever, so a basic understanding of build orders is all that’s needed. Most players figure this out pretty quickly.

And RTS games aren’t the only ones with build orders. All the Civ games encouraged a specific order in the early game. Sandbox games and city builders can be brutal if those first few dollars aren’t invested in the right way. But because of the MP competitive aspect of RTS games, they have been “tainted” as though the mere presence of a build order means that less skill is involved. And in MP, the need for excellent situational awareness and quick reaction times with the mouse and keys is common to all genres – there is nothing special about RTS.

They are all clones: There are a lot of clones out there. But each of the major titles and series have a lot to separate them. Warcraft II is a predecessor of Age of Mythology, but the two are as different as humans are from homo erectus. Both Warcraft III and AoM have heroes, but they serve very different purposes. The factions in Rise of Nations are as distinct as the factions in Command and Conquer, but in more different ways. Act of War has only one resource, only two ways to get it, and similar factions – but the result is an original combination that has been sadly underappreciated by gamers.

And, as popular as World War II is as a game setting, there are remakably few RTS that ask you build factories to churn out Shermans and Stukas. A sub-genre of the RTS has been developed to focus more on prebuilt armies and missions, or allow the player to buy units for skirmish play – see Desert Rats: Afrika Korps or Codename Panzer for examples of this new spin on the RTS. To throw these games in with the craptastic War Times or been-there/done-that of Cossacks misses the variety within the RTS fold.

Someone once told me that all you really need is Starcraft, It works for Korea, but not for me.

There are certainly legitimate reasons to dislike RTS games. They are often short play sessions, so if you are a builder type, the pressure to quickly go on the offensive will certainly offend. Though there are real time wargames, most of these are not wargames; if you were sucked in by Cossacks’ promises of grand 17th century battles or the deceptive Age of Empires screenshots that showed all these soldiers neatly lined up, welcome to the wonderful world of deceptive marketing. Though pathfinding has gotten better and formations are more common, many RTS still devolve into a lot of your pawns beating on the other guy’s pawns until somebody wins. The need for superweapons in a lot of the games is a sign that designers are still not sure how to deal with endgame stalemates.

But don’t dismiss the sub-genre completely. You are missing some really interesting games, and the next six months will see Age of Empires go to a world very familiar and Rise of Legends to one we’ve never seen before. You’d hate to be left out.

The thing about setting yourself up as an advocate is that people begin to call you on it. That’s what happened last week when I got an email from Bruce Geryk about a couple of games he’s really keen on that he thinks need more word of mouth. In short, he said “Advocate this!”

One of the games is Battlefront’s dogfighting card game Down in Flames, which I’ve played in demo. I’ll reserve further comment until I get my hands on the full package.

The other is Ticket 2 Ride, an award winning board game from Days of Wonder. There is a computer version online that allows you to play for free – you can join any game, but you can only host once you’ve paid up.

The post title really sums up what the game is about. You build railways across American or Europe and accumulate points based on completion of goals (“tickets”) and length of track built. It is a really easy game to learn since there are so few rules and very few pieces.

It’s certainly not heavy strategy. It’s a beer and pretzel game with probably less heavy thinking than Catan, but probably more than, say, Axis and Allies. (Of course, I hate Axis and Allies. ) It is a tiny, tight game that really shows the importance of good game design. All choices are important, you can’t do everything and you have to keep an eye on your own goals and not just react to your opponents.

The real beauty of it is that it plays very quickly. A two player game can be done in 15 minutes. Add a couple more, and you’re still looking at a game run through in under an hour. I will certainly put Ticket 2 Ride in my buy list and encourage all of you to try it out.

IGN is running a series of bits that give us some insight into the campaigns in Slitherine’s upcoming strategy title Legion: Arena. There have been three so far; Caudine Forks, Cannae and Zama. For some reason, they are in the RPGVault section of the site.

Considering that Legion: Arena will allow the player to develop his/her own army and allot experience to the troops, the role playing connection is clear. But the campaign diaries at IGN offer no hint of how that will work. In fact, the previews are little more than accounts of major historical battles, illustrated with screenshots from the game and the occasional picture from an Osprey book. The descriptions are certainly lively (even if today’s exaggerates the impact that Hannibal’s elephants had at Zama), but serve as little more than accounts of battles that are mostly well documented elsewhere.

How will these battles fit into the context of the game? Can the player enter these battles with the historic setup or will he/she have the opportunity to develop his/her own personal army to refight them? Where is the discussion of the command structure, which will allow the player to give limited commands to armies in the field based on experience and ability?

As interesting as these historic battles are, they don’t do a lot to generate enthusiasm about the game.

Compare this to Creative Assembly’s previews before Rome. The most significant were their Decisive Battles/Time Commander TV ventures. Time Commander is the superior show since it actually shows people playing the game. There were options beyond the historic outcomes. But in both, the key to the success of the programs was that they let interested gamers look at the game in action. And it look beautiful. Which worked because the 3D battles were the major selling point of the game. It turned out that the campaign was great, too, but screenshots and movies worked to show gamers how it would look since that’s what a lot of us were interested in.

We are not interested in how Legion: Arena looks. At least not primarily.

Don’t get me wrong. It looks just fine. It doesn’t have the sheen of Rome, but that’s not what these guys are about. This game is about army building and personal connection to your troops. Previews should show that. It’s not like you can jam a Legion: Arena preview with talk about different factions, because there aren’t that many. What previews there are out there mostly tell us stuff we already know.

The Carnival is back at AFK Gamer. Lots of great submissions, so go over there and get your fill of cotton candy goodness.

Just as I finish my reviews of the ATF games Raging Tiger and The Falklands War 1982, word comes that ProSIM is done with the engine. Their new games will use the Air Assault Task Force (AATF) engine. Their Arab-Israeli Wars game The Star and the Crescent uses a modified ATF, but their Afghanistan game will be remade to work with the new engine.

The ATF engine was good for what it was. It takes a while to learn, and I have less time to learn really complicated things these days, but once I got my head around it, the power of ATF was immediately obvious.

Like many engines, it tries to be all things to all people. By focusing on smaller engagements at a platoon level it can fool the eye better than, say, Norm Koger’s stuff, where every combat feels identical after a while. There aren’t really a lot of user created scenarios for the ATF games in spite of the editor, which is no more cumbersome than many other editors out there.

So, a fond farewell to the ATF. Here’s hoping that ProSIM keeps making hardcore wargames, but also that they find a way to make them more accessible to a wider audience.

There is a demo of Star and Crescent available at the Shrapnel site.