The forums at Heaven Games are reporting that the new Ensemble Studios game will be on the Age of Discovery, based on the story in this month’s PC Gamer. So the press breaks the exclusive story before Ensemble can announce it on its website.

The game will go from 1500 to 1850 and tell the story of the rise of American civilizations. Other details are leaking out as people read the PCGamer story and tell people what is in it. I hardly ever buy the magazine myself, but I may just do so to check this out.

Frankly, I’m a little surprised. I was expecting another ancient/medieval thing, since that is what they have proven great at. Still this is a mostly unexplored subject for a real time strategy 3H game. Sure, we have GSC’s American Conquest, but it’s really not that good of a game. Ensemble has the talent and the track record to make this work.

I find muskets and cannon less interesting than swords and spears, but I’ll almost certainly get AOE3 when it arrives.

I am now playing two simultaneous online sessions of War! Age of Imperialism, both hosted by a fellow game reviewer. In one of them, I am so far behind and stuck in southern Africa that I will likely end up waiting out the game. The other has just started, but I have a bad feeling.

If you haven’t played this now inexpensive gem, I recommend picking it up. I reviewed it for DIYGames last year, but only now is it getting the shelf space and word of mouth that are essential to sales.

My misgivings expressed in the review still stand, though. The board game system it is based on means that luck plays as big a role as skill. On the Risk vs Diplomacy axis, it is much, much closer to Risk. If you get bad rolls on the exploration phase (or are surrounded by 12 strength natives) you can’t get going early enough to make up the territory gap.

A savvy player can salvage this if he has a good plan and is not operating alone. But in a match versus equals or superiors (like the game I’m midway through), it can look like a lost cause. I’m not giving up – I never give up. Even when my friend Kevin is killing me in any of the many wargames we’ve tried.

Still, the revival of interest in WAOI means that there is now an easy to play MP experience that doesn’t have a lot of time intensive turns. Turns only take a few minutes, results are quick and intuitive and the rules are really simple. This is probably the best beer and pretzel TBS out now. Sure, Civ 3 is a better game, but who are these people who play it online? And does anyone really have the time to play Europa Universalis online? WAOI means you can get a lot of turns done in a night, and since it is easy to figure out, there is none of the “What was I going to do next?” problems if a player goes a week or two without a turn.

In casual online play, you want something closer to Risk and, so long as it is a little more sophisticated (I hate Risk) and avoids the “Battle of Karelia” problem that plagues Axis and Allies, I’ll jump at it.

This is a term that I will be using from time to time – I just used it in a post without explaining what it meant, though.

Risk and Diplomacy are both world conquest board games, but each has a different approach.

Risk is all about the dice rolls. There is not a lot that separates a great Risk player from a good Risk player. Some planning is necessary, of course, but more depends on fate and luck.

Diplomacy is all skill. There are no dice, no combat result tables, nothing but the player and his/her brain.

The Risk vs Diplomacy axis is the spectrum along which all strategy games lie. Some lean more towards luck, others towards skill. All are somewhere in the middle.

A thread on the Quarter To Three forum reminded me of Frog City’s classic Imperialism series, so, in a fit of nostalgia, I installed Imperialism 2. And promptly realized how hard this game was.

People talk about learning curves today and they usually mean that a game has a lot of menus and stuff that you never get all the way through on the first few goes. Imperialism 2 has a real learning curve, though, because even though it is always obvious what needs to be done and the order it needs to be done in, it is not always clear how to get from A to B in an efficient manner.

I was great at the original Imperialism game – it was easy to muster a medium sized army and take down a neighboring country, enabling you to expand your resource base quickly. You can’t do this as easily in Imperialism 2. Plus, your soldiers eat food in Imp2, so if you expand your army too quickly you will run short of the food you need to keep the labor.

It’s a delicately balanced game with a simple diplomatic model, and yet the entire series seems to get short shrift when people talk about great strategy games of the nineties. It was turn based, and the battle minigame wasn’t very good (even though the automated battle system was worse) but there was so much going on in this series economy and infrastructure wise that it’s a shame that they are overlooked.

Frog City followed the Imperialism series with the very average Trade Empires, a good looking but ultimately hollow exercise in profit making through history. Since then, they have also done Tropico 2, but have largely been missing in action. Their website is little more than a tech support and sales site at this point, with no announcements of upcoming games or anything. Which is really a shame. Frog City was one of the few strategy game developers with a woman (Rachel Bernstein) as a lead programmer, but even without that they deserve a little more credit for those two Imperialism games. Very difficult, but very elegant.

Suffice it to say, 2004 was a great year to be a PC Gamer. No matter what type of game you liked, there was a good chance that something released in the past year would sate your thirst. Well, adventure gamers had it hard, but they always have it hard. And single player RPGs were in very short supply. For the most part, though, gamers had it good.

Strategy gamers in particular had a lot to be thankful for. Rome: Total War and Sims 2 proved that reliable franchises do not have to just phone it in. The Thrones and Patriots expansion for Rise of Nations expanded that great game without breaking the precarious balance of cultures that makes it so much fun. Paradox looks like it has beaten the bloat disease by releasing a preciously simple game like Crusader Kings – the hardcore Victoria players hate it, but I can’t really see why.

There were some real sleeper titles too, like Sunflower’s Knights of Honor and the ever underappreciated Timegate’s Kohan 2 (What do these guys have to do to get some respect from the average gamer?). I’m hearing good things about Armies of Exigo, so I should probably check it out, too.

Disappointments? Axis and Allies proved that Timegate is mortal after all – it was an ill-conceived mess, IMO. And Golemlabs proved that they never learn from their own mistakes, because Superpower 2 was terrible.

The theme of the year was World War 2. I can’t count how many WW2 games were out this year – both strategy players and shooter afficianados had lots to choose from.

OK, so the Ensemble Studios updates were just a bunch of dates counting down all the momentus stuff before Ensemble was created and Age of Empires was made. They were not a clue as to the actual new game itself. Disappointing and a little anti-climactic.

Fall of Rome = big deal
“Rise of Rome” expansion = not so big