Having just finished my review of Act of War: Direct Action, it strikes me that this is as good a time as any to throw out some thoughts on the place of politics in strategy games.

Except for games about politics itself (Political Machine, Hidden Agenda, etc.), most gamers see little red-meat politics in their games. Sure the player gets to control politics. All good grand strategy games (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis) and some of the bad ones (Superpower) allow the player to tweak their ideology or domestic policies to one end or another. But political control for the player is not the same as having the politics of the designer in your face. Even the political sims, like Political Machine, are generally value neutral even if its developer is outspoken about his/her personal politics.

Act of War posits a near future in which high oil prices are manipulated by evil foreign corporations in bed with terrorists. Eco-terrorists are referred to as if they pose a real threat to American security and the bad guys are armed with Russian and French weaponry. These bad guys strike at the civilian heart of America and are actively working to bring the US to its knees.

I don’t want to give away the rest of the plot, because it is actually pretty good for a real time strategy campaign. It’s certainly not the first game to craft a “proud to be an American” campaign, but it does it with such skill (and forbids you to play the campaign from the other side) that certain elements are worth noting.

One early campaign scenario has heavily armed terrorists blend in seamlessly with anti-oil, anti-corporate protestors at a global summit. Are we to assume that they are linked somehow? The campaign begins with the capture of an Arab terrorist leader before quickly transitioning to the main plot. Is there a connection between the one and the other? The installation process features a mini-debate between a European energy exec and an American executive with the US rep accusing his rival of a conspiracy to keep oil prices high so he can make money off of alternative energy options. Since the American exec quickly becomes a target of the terrorists, what are we to make of his charges?

Some of this stuff is made clearer as you make your way through the campaign. But the fact is that the plot makes you wonder whether there is a political motivation behind the design of the campaign. Since the best part of the game is the campaign, and more energy was apparently put into it than into the skirmish game, it is reasonable to infer that the campaign is, in many ways, the point of Act of War.

Whether or not you agree with the game’s politics (or possible politics), it is refreshing to find a game that makes you think that the developers might have point of view on something beyond game design. Alpha Centauri had a political perspective (the planet was alive and sensitive to exploitation) and SimEarth was a textbook on the Gaia Hypothesis and other environmental theories. We never ask if business or building sims have a political opinion, though they tend to endorse traditional ideas of economic growth and development.

Act of War may be something different. The politics may seem clear on the surface, or there may be more going on beneath its B-movie beauty. Either way, Act of War has engaged parts of my brain that most strategy games never touch.

GSC Game World has announced that it has sold 200,000 copies of Alexander outside the former Soviet Union. This is for a game that has a 54.9 score at Gamerankings. The notable outliers are a 77 from PCGamer (US) and a 7 from IGN (which is like a 5 when the exchange rate is taken into consideration.)

The complete and total failure of the Oliver Stone movie it is based on would lead one to believe that there is no way that the movie could have driven sales. It did make a profit, thanks to worldwide sales, however. Could the vast foreign markets for Hollywood films (and Hasselhof albums) also make a bad game a hit?

You have to remember that GSC also developed Cossacks – the huge hit in Europe that made a minor splash over here. They have an audience of loyal followers, many of whom likely heard that Alexander would premiere the new Cossacks II engine.

Is 200,000 a lot of people? It’s ten times smaller than the Cossacks sales, but is a lot of people. I’m not sure if they were given the rights or if they had to buy them from Stone and company. Since the engine was already underdevelopment, all that was really needed was some skinning and making some campaigns, so the development costs should not have been sky-high.

I haven’t met anyone yet who thinks that the game was good, let alone great. But a lot of people (presumably the GSC core Euro-audience) bought it. Which leads to me to believe that a lot of the non-English language gaming press might have been nicer to it; they could hardly have been more cruel. Since I know that there are Europeans reading this blog, I wonder if they can help solve the mystery of a bad strategy game based on a bad movie garnering more than respectable sales.

Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars has gone gold. The first Cossacks series sold over two million copies, according to CDV. This is an amazing number for any strategy game, let alone a game series that is about formations, musket fire and little else.

But almost all those sales were in Europe. Cossacks barely made a dent in the American sales charts. I was one of those benighted colonials who never quite got the appeal of the first series and I’m not exactly excited about the prospects for a sequel. (Though American Conquest is better seen as the first sequel to the Cossacks games.) There were a lot of reasons for my disappointment, but more on those when I get my hands on the new version.

The new game, like the old, is selling itself with screenshots that are crammed with soldiers, all in tidy little rows. But as much as I played Cossacks I could never get my screen to look like theirs. Formations were confusing to make and the AI would often just send a trickle of troops into your empire where it would get overwhelmed even by undisciplined masses.

Cossacks II has a “conquer Europe” type game that looks vaguely like the one in use in Rise of Nations – still the best history themed RTS on the market. It works in RoN because of the way the basic RTS is integrated with the overlaid strategy game. Resources, wonders, ages, and all that are stuck on top pretty seamlessly. It remains to be seen how Cossacks II will do that.

My fear is that it will be a lukewarm Medieval: Total War type thing. You build up provinces and then fight with armies when you move from one to another. That didn’t make Medieval fun (it was the other stuff), so they need to do more than that to make me enjoy the sequel to an overrated RTS.

A new interview with Ingo Horn of IMC is over at Computer Games Magazine’s website. Though the interview is still in fractured English, it’s the most we’ve heard about this game so far. And what have we learned about Sparta: Ancient Wars?

Not much.

Horn still won’t divulge who the developer is, though Torsten Hess of Settlers fame is confirmed. Horn constantly assures John Callhan, the interviewer, that the game will have an emphasis on historical reality. In a not so subtle dig at his perceived competition, Horn states that most ancient themed RTS games to date are “not even correct games in terms of game play, historic time line or playability.”

This devotion to realism can be admirable, but I want to see what he means by real. The game will focus on an historical campaign, probably surrounding the Spartans. There are two unannounced factions, but a reasonable guess would be Persians and “other Greeks”. If this means no magic, I’m fine with it. If it means no elephants running like Panzers through the front rows of a phalanx, I’m really down with it.

But I wonder if Horn is putting the cart before the horse. Realism, though a worthy goal in a wargame, works less perfectly in RTS – a genre with established conventions that can only be replaced by reimagining the gameplay. There are next to no hints as to how the game will play, though we are promised well-animated farmers and a connected campaign, whatever that means.

What is the average strategy gamer to make of a statement like this?:

“And for a game with a historical background it is very important to spend much time for correcting the pre programming stage – otherwise every gamer will laugh about the story of a game, that has nothing to do with history he leant in school!”

The grognards wouldn’t be happy if Leonidas himself designed the shields and cloaks, but saying that every gamer would be upset if the game’s story didn’t match history is simple madness. Do people even learn about Sparta in school anymore? If they do, it’s not about the Messenian War, the Helot Revolt or the revolution of Cleomenes. At least not until they get to university.

More worrisome is his apparent surprise at being told that there are a lot of other ancient themed games out there. Since the beginning of 2004:

Not all RTS to be sure. But look on the horizon – Legion Arena, Rise and Fall, Strength and Honour…surely Horn must have played most of the released games if he is so enchanted with the ancient world. Only World War II has been a more constant theme for historical games in the last few years.

Many of these games are probably being lumped into his “not even correct games in terms of game play, historic time line or playability“catch-all, though I have no idea what he means by correct game play or playability. Children of the Nile doesn’t really fit any of his criticisms, but, of course, it’s a city builder and not a war-heavy game.

Of course, my confusion is being filtered through Horn’s poor command of the English language. A lot of what he has said is no more puzzling than the PR double-speak that some American firms put out when a game is at the early stages. But it is puzzling to see a developer give an interview with a major magazine this close to E3 with nothing to show or reveal beyond “We are building an ancient game that will be very realistic.”