Not so long ago, I wrote my impressions of Gamer’s Quarter. It’s a very long, very text heavy and very interesting attempt to make a “new” gaming magazine. No reviews (at least as traditionally understood) and a little heavy on the first person side of writing. Is it New Games Journalism? Is it just traditional media criticism? Whatever it is, it made quite a few people sit up and take notice.

Now we have The Escapist. Also available on PDF, it is much easier to browse online. People who follow this sort of thing should have already heard of some of the writers (including Kieron Gillen, the “father of New Games Journalism”).

Each issue will address a specific topic in the gaming world and a publishing schedule is already available. They are accepting submissions for future issues.

My impressions from this first issue are mostly positive. There isn’t a lot here that hasn’t been said before in one form or another. The question of what being a gamer really means, the effects that the mainstreaming of gaming will have on the hobby/industry, and the Demuzio Law are all well trod paths. All are exceptionally well written, and this alone makes The Escapist worth a quick browse.

But making every issue a “theme issue” will probably separate The Escapist from the pack. If there are different contributors every month or so, the reader will be served by a variety of voices exploring different sides of the same issue. (We game bloggers will trying a variant of this in a Gaming Roundtable that is currently in the works.)

The thing about the Internet, of course, is that there is room for a lot of online zines, though probably not enough dollars to make more than a couple commercially successful ventures. At this point, neither The Escapist nor Gamer’s Quarter are ready to make that leap, and it’s not even clear if they would choose to.

It does mean that there are now multiple professional looking online magazines for people who prefer to have serious gaming criticism that has been edited. Even though I blog, and consider myself a fair to good writer, the importance of good editing cannot be overlooked in quality control.

I hope that both The Escapist and Gamer’s Quarter find consistent audiences.

Josh over at Cathode Tan has a great interview with Gamerdad himself, Andrew Bub.

If you’re not familiar with Gamerdad, it’s a website devoted to assessing the suitability of games and other entertainment for children. But this isn’t a bluestocking site. Andrew is one of the better freelance game reviewers out there, and really knows his stuff. But, as a father, he also has some idea of what is suitable for his children.

And he doesn’t just look at the big hits and tell you the obvious (Doom 3 is not for kids), he also looks at some of the stuff targeted to children and looks at how good it is. So Andrew provides a dual service – is this stuff any good, and how good is it for your children?

He’s not alone. He has a lot of good writers on staff and a very active forum. Gamerdad has become an essential site for me, even though I have no children of my own. Andrew provides an important service that complements the meagre efforts of the ESRB and the hysterics of the anti-gaming lobby. Gamerdad is a voice of reason and sanity in an environment with too little of both.

Despite another hopelessly bland title, Supreme Commander hopes to give strategy gamers a “spiritual successor” to much admired Total Annhilation. The recent Gamespy preview by Dave Kosak spends a lot of time talking about the scale of the units, a factor much in evidence in the screenshots provided. There is talk about some units dwarfing others and how some can only be grasped by zooming way out.

Visual scale in RTS games never bothered me all that much. Sure, the catapults in the original Age of Empires looked a little goofy because they were so huge. The houses were all tiny and could never fit a family of Age-sized citizens. None of this got in the way of the fun.

In the move towards greater technology, sharper resolution and better interfaces we’ve had a simultaneous push towards greater realism, a realism that often manifests itself in the sizes of the units that we are given. Take Rise of Nations, a game that gave wonders a wondrous scale compared to all the people that built them. Though you couldn’t really make out all the details from a distant zoom, you could tell who your light infantry were by little graphical details and every other unit scaled appropriately.

Supreme Commander will emphasize its scale through the production of huge super units, like the giant spider crawling around on the first page of the preview. The still distant Rise of Legends will take the steps of its predecessor even further, as the buildings seemed to have ballooned in size to meet the epic scale of the campaign. Even Age of Empires 3 has taken the size thing to heart. None of this stuff will make for a better game, in my opinion, but it might contribute to that ever elusive immersion thing that gaming pundits keep talking about without ever defining.

The other scaling train that Supreme Commander seems to be riding is a push to scale down the micromanagement. Where Empire Earth II gave you wood, gold, tin, food, oil, iron and God knows what else to harvest, Chris Taylor is going to run SC on just two resources – mass and energy. It sounds very ninth grade science, but by directing the player towards efficient paths, the plan is to make a lot out of a little.

Supreme Commander is not alone. Act of War had, in effect, one resource – money – that could be collected in a few ways. I suspect that it is easier to balance unit cost with fewer resources than it is with many. Balancing cost is the often undiscussed side of unit balance but is, in the long run, more important than attack/defense values. With a single resource, you can make unit power directly relate to cost and not have to worry about the relative availability of resource points.

I think RTS games have reached a point where they can’t have more resources added. The balancing becomes impossible to the point that min/maxing is inevitable and a lot of work goes for naught. Rise of Nations was pushing it with five or six resources, but mitigated the confusion through brilliant design and management tools. I think that any more than three can make the economic minigame a chore that deters casual players from getting up to speed.

I, like most strategy gamers, am looking forward to Supreme Commander. And for more than its scale. I have no idea what it means to be the “spiritual successor” to a game, but it has vaulted to near the top of my must-have list for 2006.

Planet Age of Mythology is reporting that Ensemble is looking for people who have experience in developing and servicing massively multiplayer games.

The MMO world is the next big frontier for strategy gamers. I fondly remember playing empire conquest type games on a BBS in college, but it was turn based and heavily weighted in favor of those who had been around the longest. Joining a game as a new country or empire generally meant that your survival depended on the willingness of the big dogs to let you live.

Planet AoM is reading the tea leaves, though, and coming away with the impression that this will not your typical Ensemble RTS. Why would a strategy game need specialists in bone animation? The implication is that this will be some sort of RPG/RTS hybrid.

With Stardock working on Society, it won’t be long before we see how developers plan to use the MMO world to expand the reach of strategy games. The trick is to keep a player’s empire an active entity even when the player is offline. If Bob’s Klingons are my big threat, I shouldn’t have to wait until he’s online before I take them out. And since, to this point, all strategy games have been PvP in the multiplayer environment, anyone who deigns to bring a MMO strategy game into the world will have to deal with all the baggage that that brings to the table.

Of course, to this point we have no evidence that Ensemble’s big gamble will be strategy at all. Blizzard made its name with RTS games and a very light hack-and-slash RPG. And now they are the king of the MMO mountain. The campaign game in Age of Empires 3 will center on a single family, so there may be a role-playing element here that hasn’t really been present in any of Ensemble’s other offerings. (Yes, Age of Mythology had a character based campaign, but it was more adventure than role playing, at least as traditionally understood.)

For the unfiltered word on the project (or lack thereof) check out the jobs section for Ensemble.

The fourth Carnival of Gamers is up at Cathode Tan. The holiday seems to have meant fewer submissions, but they are all pretty good. I especially recommend the two from The Game Chair, a site that is experimenting with “progressive reviews”.

Last night I decided to try my hand at designing historic battles using Rome: Total War‘s editor. After seeing all the neat historic battles on Time Commanders and noticing that the game files include reference to some of these battles, I am annoyed that, first, they didn’t include Pharsalus or Tigranocerta and, second, that the historic battles they did include are far from historic. (Trasimene was an ambush along a coast line and doing Raphia with the pharaonic Egyptian army is just crazy.)

For my experiment, I chose the Battle of Paraitacene (317 BCE). It had a lot to recommend it. There are a lot of troop types so there’s some variety, the battlefield itself is just a flat plain, and the ancient historian Diodorus gave a pretty good description of what happened. Also, the Great Battle of History Collector’s Edition included Paraitacene as one of their battles so I have a pretty decent order of battle to work with. Plus, one of Rome’s great sights is long lines of phalanxes coming to blows.

It is also attractive because the two generals are fascinating characters. Antigonus, Alexander’s viceroy in Phrgyia, led a Macedonian army against Eumenes, Alexander’s personal secretary. Eumenes was enforcing the right of Perdiccas to rise to Alexander’s throne, Antigonus was opposing that right. Eumenes proved to be a great general, and he was ably assisted by the veteran army he inherited, though some of the soldiers were likely well-over sixty years old.

The big problem I ran up against was the 20 unit limit that Rome imposes on each army. I wanted command and control, so using allied armies wasn’t going to cut it. Second, there is a max of 300 soldiers per unit, so there would be a lot of math involved in getting the scaling right. Eumenes (who I put in charge of a Seleucid army, since he had the Silver Shields in his service) had about 35,000 heavy infantry to the 28,000 Antigonus had. Antigonus had more light infantry and cavalry.

Then there’s the elephants. Rome has them, but not for the Macedonians (though you can use mercenaries) and they are grossly overpowered. Put in default units of 12 across the same frontage as Paraitacene would lead to havoc up and down the line.

The elephant problem was easy. Reduce the unit size to five and you get reasonably fragile but still menacing troops. Plus you can have the refused flank thing that both armies had.

The math was more difficult. I needed to cut the number of units plus find the right proportion for each one. I tried dividing historic standard unit numbers by ten, but then I ended up with Antigonus having too many men since he had more distinct units. Then I found that (naturally) there is quite a bit of confusion over how many men Eumenes actually had. (This link gives him ten thousand fewer than his opponent.)

I finished the battle, though, and gave it a spin. Not bad for a first try, I wager, and if you want to give it a try, drop me a line. The battle played out very well. The computer (Antigonus) actually skirmished for a while, using its archers, peltasts and archer-elephants to harass my troops. I replied in kind. The cavalry stayed out of things (good for me) and then the phalanxes started moving towards each other. The AI (as usual) moved one line too far out so I flanked it and slowly rolled up the whole line.

It does need some fine tuning, but I think that the editor is much better than I had initially given it credit for. It needs more options for armies, and the terrain editor is too unwieldy. But you can place troops quite easily and line up fairly historical options. I may do Eumene’s last stand at Gabiene next or I may move on to a Roman battle and give Pompey his due.