In spite of my tragic turn towards real time games, I think play by email remains one of my favorite multiplayer modes. I have been fortunate to find a small group of people who are mostly steadfast in their turns, and who almost never quit because they “forget.” At the moment, I am heavily engaged in a Civil War scenario designed for the 19th century mod of Century of Warfare, the final edition of The Operational Art of War.

It’s been an odd little war, mostly because I keep forgetting all the house rules that the mod designer has asked us to follow. Headquarter units have to be nearby for any attack. Ships have to stop at some coastal forts for a turn so that the opponent gets an opportunity to shell them. Troop transport is simulated through the movement of what are, in effect, dummy units, to prevent you from moving thousands of men. The house rules are a kludgy way to simulate mid-nineteenth century warfare in a game designed for twentieth century battles.

I have been losing this scenario so far mostly because my game playing habits have not adapted to the shift in time. Moving your troops every turn proves to be a recipe for quick and easy destruction. The attrition rate in battles is grotesque in scale, especially for the attacker. I have more troops on the way to replace the poor boys who I killed with foolishness, but it’s going to be an uphill fight.

This game is, in fact, at a point where I could have just thrown in the towel. My opponent is firmly entrenched in a major supply area. Even if I take it back, it will cost me much of the army it has taken ten turns to amass. If this were a single player game, I would almost certainly have reloaded once Baltimore fell – I neglected to garrison it.

But multiplayer is a different animal. I tend to play it out even when things are getting miserable, because, chances are, my opponent is having a great time. If he/she offers surrender and I truly believe that the battle is hopeless, I will accept the end of the game. But history keeps going for the loser; so should the game. Besides, as a longtime Montreal Expos fan, I’ve oft suckled at the breast of misplaced optimism. Maybe things will turn around.

This “keep going anyway” attitude of mine makes the instability of most PBEM games surprising. I had two War!: Age of Imperialism games going once, and then both stopped about the same time. Victory was assured for the same guy in both games, I think, but there was no agreed on surrender – just no turn returned. I don’t nag people I barely know, so there was no point in poking people to complete their turn. But the poor state of PBEM etiquette is probably why so many people prefer LAN or Network games, even for turn based titles.

My doggedness, even in my failures, makes me want to try Civilization III in multiplayer. I haven’t yet, largely because Civ in multiplayer doesn’t seem right. The scale of the game is no more ridiculous than the uber-Civil War game I am in the middle of, and some of my favorite single player moments in Civ have been me leading my ragged bunch of halfwits to triumph after geography and the Mongols have beaten me down.

Civ IV promises muliplayer that isn’t cobbled on as an afterthought, but it remains to be seen how effective or popular it will be. In the meantime, email me or comment here if you want to try this MP Civ III experiment. I promise not to quit.

Strategyzone Online has an interesting article and discussion on the question of whether wargames on the computer have been left in the past as the gaming industry and hobby find new ways to exploit the power of computers in other genres. Don Maddox writes:

“It is abundantly clear that wargames have not kept pace with the impressive improvements seen over the last decade in other genres. One only has to glance at the difference between the original Sim City and Sim City 4, or the original Doom and Doom III, to see just how far PC gaming has come from its early days.”

This is undoubtedly true. The hex-based wargame still, for the most part, uses the force icons that we are all familiar with, and most of those that use graphical images for the armies don’t spend a lot of time on them. Look at the blurry soldiers in Dragoon (a hex-based game) or the “adequate from a distance” armies in Take Command: Bull Run. Maddox worries that the failure of computer wargame designers to offer something new and compelling is preventing the hobby from growing. New gamers have little interest in wargames because there is nothing bringing them to the table. It’s not that graphics are the most important thing, it’s that they are the first thing new gamers will notice.

The article gets really interesting when Maddox interviews wargame designers for their opinions. Dave O’Connor claims that wargaming leads the industry in AI. John Tiller defends wargames by saying that “I wouldn’t say that wargame designers are using outmoded ideas. A better way of saying it would be that they are using classical time-proven ideas.” There is a lot of disagreement on whether or not boardgames are still an influence on wargames.

I think that Patrick Proctor (ProSim Games) hits the nail on the head with his answer to the second question. The answer reads, in part:

“But some innovations just are not being accepted. There is no reason to play on hexes anymore. Hexes were an abstraction that allowed human beings to easily calculate move distances and facings. Modern computers (even not-so-modern computers) can crunch numbers so fast that this is no longer neccessary. Discrete turns are not really needed anymore, either. … Again, the power of computers allows a modern wargame to iterate several times per second, if the designer desires. As long as there is a facility to allow players to stop the action when things get hectic and consider AND implement orders (read: give orders while paused) during game play, why shouldn’t a player be able to intervene whenever he wants? “

Preach on, Proctor.

I look at the 1989 classic Harpoon and wonder why it didn’t lead a revolution in wargaming. It was derived from a tabletop boardgame, but didn’t mess with hexes or turns. It was completely real-time, allowed you to pause whenever necessary (it was often necessary) and was completely compelling without being overwhelming. But, in the last 16 years, real time strategy games have moved to simpler fare and wargames have, by and large, stuck to the tried and true.

Call it “classical time-proven ideas” all you want, I think that many wargame designers resort to the hex system because it is easy and familiar to them. It’s also easy and familiar for their audience, and this is to be encouraged. Wargaming can’t grow if it scares off the few missileheads who still love these games.

But, just like adventure games, wargames are dying because of their inability to adapt to a new technical reality. True, many wargamers love the niche. For some grognards, the small size of their cohort means they are an elite squad of afficianados. They fear, with some good reason, that opening up the genre might also mean dumbing it down.

There’s no reason this has to happen. There are wargames out there that have innovated and drawn audiences – Harpoon, Sid Meier’s Civil War games, Combat Mission. And there are good hex-based turn based games, too. But it may be time to leave the hex behind before all the wargamers are.

I guess it had to happen. Years of strategy gaming, in both turn-based and real-time settings and my paradigm has finally shifted. I now enter games expecting them to be real time – or at the very least simultaneous turns, like Combat Mission. Turn based games are not only rare, now. They are also not quite what I expect when I learn about a new game.

I’m not sure how or when this happened.

I think I finally noticed it last night when I opened a new game, started playing it and immediately asked myself why the developer didn’t go with real time. Real time is more realistic for a battle game, and a number of developers, like Battlegoat and Paradox, have shown that grand strategy is feasible in a real-time environment. Why wasn’t this game doing what I expected it to do? (Fortunately, the designer anticipated this critique and there were answers in the manual.)

Technology and history kept strategy games in the turn based world for so long that many people still expect their strategy games to be done this way. Every game forum has one or two people who lament the “end” of TBS. They never stop to think that games were done this way mostly because the board game origins of strategy and war games were all based on turns or that the tiny processors of the eighties and early nineties couldn’t handle a lot of stuff all at once. And, except for round based RPG combat or traditional board/card games, no other genre moves in turns.

I’ve never been one to look back on the Golden Age of my youth (except regarding baseball) and have embraced the real time strategy world with open arms. I surprised myself, though, when I started picking apart a game design because it looked like it should have been going faster. Real time games seem more alive, the AI isn’t always responding to things that you are doing, and your typical resource collecting RTS games give you enough time to do what you have to do.

Some games try to blend the two styles. The Total War series grafts its brilliant real time battles onto a strategy map that allots moves in turns. The whole “pause and give orders” thing in many RTS is about stopping to assess the situation like you would in a turn based environment.

And it’s not like I disdain the turn based world. The Civ series is my one huge weakness, and from what I’ve seen and heard of Civ IV, I may need better ergonomics for my office because there’s going to be a lot of marathon sessions. TB games also lend themselves to the sweet give and take of Play By Email – the inexact science of waiting for the next turn to arrive or wondering if your opponent is mad at you yet for making him wait.

But I have crossed that threshhold. And, when I play Shattered Union, I expect that I will wonder why it’s not in real-time, too. (I already know the answer in that case, though.) I have already decided that flight sims are too hard for me, and that today’s shooters make me dizzy. And now I have “real time” as my default setting for strategy games.

Battlefront has announced that it is publishing HistWar: Les Grognards, a Napoleonic battle game with 15 countries, 10 historical battles and over 50,000 soldiers on screen. It’s Imperial Glory but bigger – and hopefully better.

So, it looks like Napoleon is back on the hotlist for computer wargamers. For a few years now it’s been nothing but World War II and ancient warfare. This year we have had three middling games set in the years around the Little Corporal – Cossacks II, Crown of Glory, and the aforementioned Imperial Glory. Matrix Games has Black Powder Wars and the long awaited port of the boardgame classic Empires in Arms on the way. Shrapnel’s naval game Salvo will spend quite a bit of its energy on the classic battles of Nelson versus the Frenchies.

True, there are still many more “Panzer Blitz ’42” or “Age of Cvilized Nations on the Rise” type games out there, but for afficianadoes of the period, more than five games in a year is quite a major haul. Of the above listed games, only Cossacks II and Imperial Glory could really be said to target a general gaming audience, but most gamers never hear about most wargames.

What decides which subjects will get mass coverage in the game development offices? Who decided that Napoleon was cool? The return of World War II war movies (with Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers) ushered in crates of WW2 themed games, including a number of first person shooters – history was now safe for everyone and not just wargamers.

Iain McNeil, tabletop wargaming champion and Slitherine executive, once pointed out to me that games, like all media, tend to trail in the wake of something else in the popular culture. He explained the increase in ancients games as an echo of both technical advances in moviemaking (allowing the epic to be feasible) and the familarity of the troops involved, as well as riding the trend started by the Gladiator movie.

Well, Gladiator gave us the movie Alexander. And the game Alexander.

Napoleon though is an odd case. He is a perennial favorite of tabletop wargamers. His battles are well documented, usually pose interesting tactical challenges and you get some outsized personalities that make the battles a rewarding study. There have been no breakout Napoleon games to lead the way, like Age of Empires did, and the cultural hold that Nappy holds on the imagination is much weaker than the good-versus-evil narrative of World War II.

One obvious explanation is that wargamers are coming to terms with the computer. Instead of waiting for one of the big wargame houses (HPS or SSG or Norm Koger) to make a Napoleon game, the wargamers will do it. The computer has a lot of advantages over the cardboard map, and no wargamer can looks at those Histwar screenshots and not be impressed. And of the titles I mentioned, most are wargamish – only the two pseudo-mainstream titles are really outside the wargame category in any meaningful way.

This explanation is pretty weak, though. There is dearth of new American Civil War material for the PC, and that’s the archetypal bro-v-bro conflict here in the US. But, aside from Mad Minute’s excellent but very poorly named Bull Run game, there’s not a lot on my shelf. Thankfully, they have a new game on the way, but I don’t see any others. Shouldn’t wargame designers be working furiously on this subject matter too?

I do sense a trend, though. It may not last long. It may only be for the next year or so. The trend could just stick in the wargame camp, or like Ancients, it could filter down to MMOs (Gods and Heroes) and action games (God of War).

And for the record, I think Histwar is a terrible, terrible name.

Crown of Glory (reviewed here a few days ago) has been patched. You can get the patch from the downloads section of the game info on Matrix Games’s site. The patch description is not especially helpful (lots of general errors are mentioned) and there is a reference to an “occasional PBEM save issue” but nothing else related to the MP game.

That said, I will certainly try Crown of Glory again. As I mentioned in the review, this is a game targeted at me. As disappointed as I was in the execution, I am going to give it a lot of time before the inevitable uninstall – inevitable not because it is bad, but because there is too little room on my hard drive.

One of the great virtues of blogging is that I can update my review if necessary. My discussion of Paradox’s beta patching process served as a mini-review revisiting my original perception of the game. In print, reviewing games after every major patch would waste of time and space, not to mention readers’ patience. Even online, reviews are rarely re-examined in light of new material.

Of course, I won’t do this for every game and every patch. (Another great virtue of blogging is that no one can tell me what to write). But I will give Crown of Glory another serious play session once my schedule allows.

Grumpy Gamer Ron Gilbert has a beef to pick with NPD. Why are sales figures for games kept a secret from the public or the small developer? You’ll occasionally see a list of the top ten games of the week, or the month or the year but rarely with numbers attached. And there is never much of a clue whether these sales are typical or not. There is never much historical perspective beyond “PC Games are down. PS2 Games are up.”

Can anyone out there tell me how Age of Mythology did compared to Age of Kings? If you have a few grand to spend on this type of data, you’re probably also not allowed to tell me. Was Psychonauts a total failure? Where did it fail more? Are sales going up based on word of mouth? Think of all the interesting industry/audience analysis stuff that could be written about or discussed if gamers and bloggers and even tiny freelancers like me had access to sales data.

Gilbert’s point is developer focused. How will indie developers know what sells unless someone tells them? Marketers and publishers might have a different definition of “flop” than a developer does. He notes that box office figures are public knowledge. Box Office Mojo has a lot of the historic data for how well movies do at the box office. Games are different. Point of sale info is controlled by one company – a company that doesn’t count many online sales, and so may have limited reliability in any case. (It doesn’t count MMO subscriptions, either.)

There may be good business reasons for keeping this information closed off, but I doubt that there are many trade secrets involed in reporting how many copies of Cossacks II were sold in the US.